History N' Games

History N' Games begins with a game and ends in the ancient sources behind it. Meghan Sullivan presents the show as a celebration of what video games can teach, and her stated range is wide: Pac-Man, Super Mario Brothers, The Legend of Zelda, Assassin's Creed. One world keeps drawing her back, though. Ancient Greece. Hades and Hades II lead into Greek religion and the underworld, and Final Fantasy VII turns out to draw on both Greek and Norse myth. Guests do much of the heavy lifting. Professor Sarah Iles Johnston, a professor of religion at Ohio State University who has written on ancient Greek religion and the underworld, talks about Hades and admits she is learning to play it from her grandchildren. Author M.J. Gallagher is a returning guest who discusses his books on the Greek and Norse myths behind Final Fantasy VII, including the idea that the names, weapons and buildings around Nibelheim, Cloud Strife's hometown, were chosen by design. The episode 'Why Did People Worship Bronze Age Jerks? Barry Strauss Interview' follows Themistocles from hero in Herodotus to a man under suspicion in Thucydides, then to outlawry and finally the Persian Empire, and cites coins bearing his name as archaeological evidence. Dr. Kira Jones describes a current project on how Destiny 2, a game set in space rather than the ancient world, uses art history to build its cultures, and the talk turns to making a career outside the professor route. Past guests mentioned on air widen the range further. Professor Josiah Ober of Stanford University discussed the origins of Western democracy and whether democracy is in danger around the world, and Dr. Alyssa Sepinwall discussed the Haitian Revolution, a subject Sullivan says she had never covered before. Sullivan asks her questions as a fan. How did you get hooked? What are you working on now? What was hardest? Gallagher's answer to that last one is revealing: conflicting versions of a myth sometimes helped his argument, and the bigger problem was the sheer volume of mythology, with each thread leading to another. Not every episode has a guest. The first part of a Medea story, tied to Hades II and billed as the show's spookiest yet, is told as a tale rather than a lecture. Medea and Jason reach Circe's home and cling silently to her hearth, the gesture a murderer in ancient Greece used to ask for ritual cleansing. Bound by the laws of Theoxenia to take them in, Circe purifies them, and Medea gives her an account that leaves out the killing of her brother. The episode ends by promising a second part on other versions of the tale and on archaeological and epigraphical evidence that may clear Medea of one or two of her crimes. Sullivan says no one needs to have played Hades II to follow it. The show also runs as video, with books held up to the camera. The payoff is the backstory a game rarely spells out: where a name, a town or a sorceress actually came from.