There are a lot of odd “holidays” now — no offense to anyone celebrating Extra Virgin Olive Oil Day — we sure are a fan of International Podcast Day! Like I did last year, I wanted to highlight some highlights from our three podcasts over the last twelve months for International Podcast Day 2025. Think of it as a chance to catch some episodes you may have missed, re-listen to favorites, or, our favorite thing, link people to this page as a handy way to showcase RPGFan’s three podcasts and bring some friends into the RPGFan Podcast fold.
As always, you can also find all of our shows on our Podcasts page, and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your podcast platform of choice. And if you have some of your own favorites from the last year, let us know below!
Retro Encounter
Since last year’s International Podcast Day, Retro Encounter, RPGFan’s weekly podcast of many topics, surpassed the 450 (and 460) episode mark! In additional to monthly game journal episodes on classic RPGs, Retro Encounter also features several other standalone topics in between. For only the second time in Retro Encounter history, this time period saw a host transition as showrunner Michael Sollosi bade farewell to hosting duties, but welcomed the venerable Zach Wilkerson in his stead. Also we talked about some games!
Retro Encounter 466 – RPG Confessional IV
The long-awaited fourth entry of panelists exposing their shame of unplayed games from their backlogs.
Retro Encounter 450 – Thank You, Good Night, and Good Luck
Our first episode of 2025 was bittersweet, as longtime host Michael Sollosi passed the hosting baton to Zach after many years at the helm. Thank YOU, Sollosi!
Retro Encounter 451 – Final Fantasy IX Part I
Zach started his first game journal with a bang, celebrating Final Fantasy IX‘s 25th anniversary. We still love you, FFIX, even if that remake has yet to be proven real. Part II is here, too.
Retro Encounter 439 – Kingdom Hearts II Part I
After years of requests and “it’s better than the first one” assurances, we all got our wish for Sollosi to finally play Kingdom Hearts II. Find out what he thought in episode, and in Part II.
Random Encounter
Our bi-weekly RPG podcast highlighting new releases, classic games, and features and reviews on RPGFan. The last twelve months featured a new Random Book Club episode, a special on Canadian-developed games, and episodes on the many incredible releases in that time, to say nothing of yesterday’s episode about Hades II!
Random Encounter 330 – Random Book Club – 50 Indie Games that Changed the World
It has been awhile since our last Random Book Club episode, but Bitmap Books’ excellent new release was the perfect time to hit the books again.
Random Encounter 316 – Canadian Encounter
A precursor to our summer CANADAFan feature, this episode of Canadian panelists focused on the huge number of excellent Canadian-made games we cover at RPGFan.
Random Encounter 309 – New Horizons with the Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake!
With Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake coming next month, it’s the perfect time to play the excellent Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake, and listen to last fall’s Random Encounter while you’re at it!
Random Encounter 323 – Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Spoilercast
September spoiled us with many major releases, but let’s not forget the tour de force of one of the year’s best RPGs, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Needless to say, don’t listen to this one if you haven’t finished the game!
Rhythm Encounter
Rhythm Encounter also hit a milestone since International Podcast Day 2024, as we celebrated episode 150 with an episode that had the most production time and setup of any episode thus far. We also debuted a new type of show that posts every season, highlighting recent new music!
Rhythm Encounter 154 – Music of the Year 2024: Part I
While our written Music of the Year 2024 feature came much later, our Rhythm Encounter episode was on time! 2024 was so full of excellent music, we did this one in two parts, so listen to Part I and Part II.
Rhythm Encounter 153 – Build Your Own RPG Soundtrack: Hard Mode
A twist on our first “BYO” episode, this time our panelists built a soundtrack from other RPGs but with a difficult twist.
Rhythm Encounter 163 – Princes, Expeditions, Dating, the 1980s, and More
This year we debuted our quarterly “new music” episodes to highlight new releases that otherwise don’t make it into our themed episodes. This was our spring episode, but we also did one for Winter 2025 and one highlighting music from the end of 2024.
Rhythm Encounter 150 – Name that (RPG) Tune
We celebrated our 150th episode with one of my favorite that we have ever done. Drawing inspiration from (and with support of) Retro Encounter’s Michael Sollosi, we built a music quiz show to challenge two of our most knowledge teammates!
Thank you for joining us on our podcast journeys, not only on International Podcast Day, but over the years! As of today, we have released 975 episodes across our three shows, and if we didn’t have the listener base we do, that wouldn’t be possible. We appreciate you listening, sharing with others, and sending in ideas. Well before this time next year, we will hit a milestone 1000 episodes, so please look forward to it!
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.