Keza Macdonald is a Scottish journalist and editor who has spent more than two decades chronicling the culture and business of video games. She started early, as a junior staff writer for GamesTM while she was still a teenager. Then, after earning a degree in German and Japanese from the University of Edinburgh—including a year studying in Japan—she became UK Games Editor at IGN, helping shape the site’s global editorial strategy.

She then launched and led Kotaku UK, where her team won multiple industry awards. Since 2018 she has been Games Editor at The Guardian, where she writes the widely read “Pushing Buttons” newsletter and appears regularly on television and radio as an expert on the medium. She is the co-author of You Died: The Dark Souls Companion, and her new book, Super Nintendo: How One Japanese Company Helped the World Have Fun, explores the cultural impact of one of gaming’s most influential companies.

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My guest today is a video game executive whose career spans the medium’s earliest home computers to the rise of the modern console business. He created his first games for the Atari 800 in the early 1980s, before joining Microsoft in 1986, where he spent a decade as an early developer on Excel and Word.

In 1996, he left the Office team to pursue his passion for games, founding Microsoft Game Studios and laying the groundwork for the company’s entry into interactive entertainment. Over the next eight years, he grew the division from fifty people to more than twelve hundred, publishing over a hundred games—including more than a dozen million-sellers—and co-founding the original Xbox project.

Since retiring from Microsoft in 2004, he has worked as an advisor, board member, and investor, and in 2019 helped launch 1Up Ventures, a fund dedicated to supporting independent game developers around the world.

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Prokop Jirsa is a Czech game designer whose work has helped redefine what historical realism can look like in a modern role-playing game. After completing his Master’s degree at the Prague University of Economics and Business, he joined Warhorse Studios as a designer on Kingdom Come: Deliverance.

There, he helped shape the game’s uncompromising approach to first-person immersion, historically grounded combat, and player choice rooted in consequence rather than power fantasy. Following the success of the first game, he continued that work as Lead Designer on its sequel—expanding its systems, scope, and narrative ambition while holding fast to the studio’s commitment to authenticity and player agency.

Across his career, his design philosophy has consistently favoured trust in the player, an approach that has earned Warhorse a devoted audience and a distinctive place in contemporary RPG design.

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