Alex Goldman loves challenging games like The Binding of Isaac, but the former Reply All cohost may have been defeated by Hollow Knight: Silksong: ‘I spend six hours on a boss and I’m like what is life?’

Alex Goldman’s earliest PC gaming memory is battling through the original Prince of Persia, but his first encounter with gaming itself came much earlier on the Apple II.

“The ecosystem of games on the Apple II was, basically, anybody who was smart enough to get around the copy protection on games would just make a million copies of them … so I remember games like Karateka, which preceded prince of Persia, and then ports of like Burger Time and Frogger and Spy Hunter,” he says. “There was a game called Boulder Dash, which I was obsessed with, and a game called Montezuma’s Revenge, which I only found out much later in life meant diarrhoea.”

A reporter and radio producer, Goldman’s career began in 2010 as a producer for WYNC Radio. In 2014, Goldman became cohost of the popular tech podcast Reply All, investigating stories like Team Fortress 2’s battle against bots, and battling listeners’ technical gremlins in a segment called Super Tech Support.

Goldman left Reply All in 2022, and in 2024 founded Hyperfixed, a new podcast that riffs on Super Tech Support, expanding its premise beyond the world of technology: “Hyperfixed is a show in which listeners write in with problems and we try and solve them,” he says. “This week’s episode is about a woman who had an Amiga when she was growing up … and one of the games was a text adventure called I Was a Cannibal for the FBI, and she got so fixated on it that she has actually started making her own sequel to it.”

Goldman took a break from hyper-fixing people’s problems to show me around the ever-shifting basement of his PC, a journey that took us from the golden age of side-scrolling shooters to the cutting edge of the modern roguelike.

What game are you currently playing?

I am in the process of playing—and then getting extremely frustrated with—Silksong. I have gotten to the point in my life where my reflexes aren’t what they used to be. And that’s very bad for Silksong. I constantly get to the point where I’m like “Oh wow, I unlocked a new area. It’s beautiful. The music is haunting. The atmosphere is amazing.” And then I spend six hours on a boss and I’m like “What is life? What am I doing?”

This game feels significantly harder to me. There were frustrating moments in Hollow Knight, but I feel like I could figure them out. In Silksong, I’m finding myself reaching for videos on how to beat bosses way more often than I did in the last. The end of Act One really destroyed me. I spent days on The Last Judge, and then I found out that there was an alternate route, and I was like “I’m out of here. I’m not even gonna fight this.”

It does feel like a bit of a reckoning. Platforming and punishingly difficult games really are games I’ve always loved, and now I’m playing this, I’m like “Oh, maybe that time of my life is over.”

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

I was on Arc Raiders for a while. It is still installed. One of the things that I like about that game—and this feels new-ish in videogames—it doesn’t feel like something that I have a ton of experience with, but maybe it’s just because I am ancient. It’s just how slow and difficult to control the characters are make the game more interesting to me. Just how easy it is to die from fall damage and all that stuff.

So when I watch people parkouring on TikTok or YouTube reels or whatever in that game, I’m just massively impressed with what they’re capable of. I’m usually just fumbling around and then falling off the side of a building and dying.

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

That would have to be Metal Slug 2 and 3. They came out in the early-to-mid ’90s.

I just always loved the Metal Slug series as a kid. They were the first games that had that really deep animated pixel art that is so gorgeous, and I think is the template for a lot of other stuff. And now that I’m not playing it in the arcade, and I don’t have to pump quarters into it, that’s a better proposition to play the game.

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

OK, so I have to qualify this, as this is probably my favourite game, and I also tend to leave it on in the background, so this amount of playtime does not reflect the actual amount of playtime I have in the game, because I leave it open for days. But The Binding of Isaac, which is probably my favourite game ever made, Steam does say that I have 9,000 hours.

Like I said, no way I’ve played 9,000 hours of it. But it’s a game where I can—you know how with some people, they’re like “I’m gonna do 15 minutes of work, and then I’m gonna go take a 10-minute walk.” I’m like “I’m gonna do 15 minutes of work, and then I’m gonna play 10 minutes of Isaac.”

I remember first playing it as a Flash game on Newgrounds. It was a game that I’ve left and come back to many times, because every time they make a significant update, the meta of the game changes dramatically in terms of how difficult it becomes, and what sort of tasks need to be completed. But they’ve pretty much done updating it, I think, aside from quality-of-life stuff. So I’m very familiar with it at this point.

It’s completely different, and again, I can’t say if this is because I’m old and my reflexes are slowing down, but the version that was just before the most recent version—Repentance—I thought was perfect to my skill level, and I had a pretty regular progression. And it was only this most recent one where I was like “Oh, this is actually incredibly hard.”

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

It’s probably Team Fortress 2, even though I don’t find myself playing it much these days, because it’s full of bots and it’s ancient. But I feel like that game really opened up for me the possibilities of team play and cooperation. What that would look like felt different [from] anything else that came before it in such a unique and exciting way.

Granted, I never played Team Fortress Classic, maybe that was exactly the same. But I just have such a strong—my affection is not just for the gameplay, it’s also for the design. It’s a really unique and beautiful game.

What’s a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn’t live without?

Probably Ableton, which is music making software. I mean, Pro Tools, obviously I couldn’t live without because that’s what I use to make radio. But Ableton I couldn’t live without in a much more emotional way, because I actually enjoy using it in a way that I don’t enjoy using Pro Tools.

It’s just a very instinctual and incredibly multifaceted music production program that you can use both as a music production program and you can use as a live music performance program. So I just find it to be infinitely entertaining, and an incredible excuse to not do my work when I’m like “Oh, well I have to write a song for this particular moment.”

The thing that I think Ableton excels at, actually, is it’s very easy to create loops in the program that you can then build upon. So when I’m trying to write a song I will have a chord progression in mind, and I will get that down as a loop … I’ve found that, much like writing, the song that you make rarely resembles the immutable perfect thing in your head, and you have to do some trial and error and make some ugly sounds for a while until something pretty comes out.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

It’s bad. It’s really bad. Let me open up desktop and see how many things are on it. I have 199 items on my desktop right now. And it’s one of those things that I’m like “Well, I’ll definitely take care of this eventually.” But then I’m like “I don’t actually have to. There’s no reason for me to, because my computer’s working fine. I don’t need it.”

I’ve got tons of PDFs that are like invoices and things on there. I’ve got music on there, shortcuts to stuff that I don’t use. MP3s of stuff, like scratch versions of episodes. There’s all kinds of lunacy on there.