The cast will be a day or two late this week, as Nick and I are out of town, so why not catch up on our surprisingly existent PAX coverage? In retrospect, we should have spaced it out more -- from what we can tell, many of our readers were overwhelmed by so much Thumb in such a short span of time.

We did three audio interviews at the show, first speaking at longest length with adventure game legend Ron Gilbert (The Secret of Monkey Island, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, Humongous' substantial catalogue, etc.), mainly about his upcoming RPG/adventure hybrid DeathSpank but also about the classic Monkey Island games.

Next up was Valve writer Chet Faliszek, currently working on Left 4 Dead 2 and also known as one of the Old Man Murray guys, the other one being fellow Valve writer Erik Wolpaw. We talked about Left 4 Dead 2 as well as, of course, football and Civilization IV.

Finally, we chatted with BioWare's Mac Walters, lead writer on the upcoming Mass Effect 2 and a senior writer on the original Mass Effect, in our briefest (and probably most on-topic) show of the three.

Each is available in the archives, as well as through RSS and iTunes.

If you actually read this blog, you've probably already seen the PAX meet write-up, but just in case you haven't, you should! We've added a few new photographs from an attendee.

Finally, as a few of you know but most probably don't, Idle Thumbs originally began as a feature- and news-driven site comprised entirely of words and images, way back in the misty bygone era of 2004 or so. One of our first interviews consisted of Jake and me sitting in a Bay Area coffee shop with Ron Gilbert for three hours, talking about video games into a tape recorder. The proceedings were laboriously transcribed into three parts over several months.

Because they are now somewhat topical again, but simultaneously against my better judgment and professional self-interest, I am linking to them here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 (the pagination links within each article work, but the internal links to the various parts do not under the current site).

These transcripts are painful for me to read, as Jake and I come off as unprepared and amateurish beyond belief, but I am so surprised that Idle Thumbs ended up interviewing Ron Gilbert again five years later that I have persuaded myself to let them be experienced once again.

One of my favorite written interviews I've published in a long time is The Man Who Won Tetris, a conversation with Henk Rogers, the man who successfully licensed Tetris to Nintendo in the late 80s and still manages the franchise along with creator Alexey Pajitnov.

If you haven't read about the fascinating events involved in that original licensing operation, I suggest you do so. There's a timeline here, but I would recommend securing Game Over by David Sheff. It seems to be out of print now, but I imagine the internet could fairly easily facilitate the purchase of a new or used copy.

Since those days, Rogers has apparently become quite wealthy, which comes as little surprise given the enduring popularity and marketability of Tetris. Aside from games, he is an active entrepreneur, philanthropist, and spokesperson in areas such as conservation, energy, and space colonization.

He ends up looking forward to such a degree, however, that discussions about these topics can end up being somewhat amusingly jarring. So, while I do hope you'll read the full interview, I wanted to isolate a few passages that kind of blew my mind as I was reviewing the transcript for publication: