Geek Sites: Orange Lounge Radio

What is Orange Lounge Radio, and why is it newsworthy? Orange Lounge Radio is an Internet radio show and podcast dedicated to what gamers really want to know. Apart from that tag line, what else is there to know? Well, as a host of the show, I owe it to the readers to dish out a little more info.

Orange Lounge Radio rose during the final days of Under Sedation LIVE!!, a popular podcast encompassing a broad spectrum of pop culture topics. Rob Roberts and I were on the BART coming back from San Francisco when we decided to name our then-Bemani-related podcast idea in honor of one of the bands featured in Beatmania IIDX, Orange Lounge. The first show was recorded in Rob’s living room to an amazing number of listeners (hint: under 15), but we kept going. We had friends providing commentary, and one such friend, Loki, came so regularly that we made him our third host relatively early on.

With the advent of podcasting, we decided to try our hand at it by doing an Orange Lounge Radio: To Go! edition. It turned out to be fairly popular and started extended much longer than we initially wanted it to be. After a series of decisions, the three of us put the station through a number of transformations that resulted in our current format: a two-part podcast recorded live that encompasses the run of video game news in general, our discussions about how they affect the gaming community, a little politics, a lot of food, and abounding in-jokes. In short, we talk like gamers talk because we are gamers.

To rewind a little bit, we used to broadcast through a service called Live365. They paid our royalty and licensing fees for the music we played so no one would sue us. It got expensive after a while, and their policies were not, in our opinion, worth what we were paying them. We have since aligned with AllGames.com and have found a happy home there along with other good podcasters, including the amazing Bobby Blackwolf.

What about those royalty and licensing fees, you might ask? Well, when that went away, we stopped playing full songs on air (which meant that my own little show, Pump Up the Volume, went off the air since I played whatever was in my MP3 collection). It also meant a feature of our show, the Cage Match, couldn’t be recorded for replay. This has since spawned what we call “The Afterbirth”. During that time, we do a few things that aren’t safe for recording, such as the aforementioned Cage Match where we pit songs against each other and have our IRC chatroom vote on a winner, Secret Club, a few other bits of random talk, and our Fortune Cookie.

There you have it. That is the not-so-secret origin and evolution of Orange Lounge Radio in a larger-than-intended nutshell. If you haven’t listened yet, you really should. Perhaps I’m biased, but I think we’re pretty good against the corporate-sponsored podcasts. We don’t have to tote a line handed to us; we unravel and rewrite our own lines as we go. Tune into allgames.com Sunday nights at 6PM PST / 9PM EST to join us for a live show, and if you are unable to tune in live, our show is presented via Audio RSS (podcasting), which you can learn more about on our podcast page. Segments include talking about what we’re playing, long discussion items, Classic Game of the Week, Mailbag, FUs of the Week, and the occasional Match Game.

The OLRmy wants YOU!

About Jamie

Jamie DeVriend is a multi-format geek. She loves video games new and old, pinball, Marvel comics, Asian Ball-Jointed Dolls, obscure things, Doctor Who, Supernatural, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. An Alabama native, she now lives with her equally geeky husband and sizeable cat, and goes to college while doing occasional freelance design work.

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