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Mark and Joe are thrilled to welcome Catherine Fitzsimmons to the show. Catherine is the founder of Brain Lag, an acclaimed Canadian science fiction and fantasy press that has now published fifty books!

Catherine is also a writer, with six novels under her belt, and an artist in other ways. She explains how the press came to be and the role it plays in Canadian publishing.

She’s the first guest to discuss early-to-mid-nineties Nintendo-style games. She really loved Final Fantasy VI (1994) and Chrono Trigger (1995), which were both two-dimensional role-playing games. In Chrono Trigger, a time travel story that features an eldritch horror, you can play six different characters, or seven depending on your choices.

Catherine says the game’s design and music is truly affecting. In one part the player has to confront a villain, and you can fight the villain – or you can refuse to fight and get them to join you. This kind of interaction makes video games a truly different form of storytelling, because the player has so much influence on the narrative.

The three discuss the differences between video games, fiction and other narratives such as television. This leads into how Catherine got into music and other forms of art, and how it feeds everything she does.