After taking a week off, Matt Barton is back with the second episode of his interview with Winston Douglas Wood. The episode begins with some additional questions about the original Phantasie, covering topics such as the game's unusual experience system (which allowed players to choose how to distribute experience points to each member of their party) and the challenges Winston faced implementing its in-game narrative text scrolls on 1980s hardware. Winston initially had problems finding a publisher for Phantasie, but was eventually picked up by SSI who were looking to follow up on the success of Questron. Despite the fact that the Phantasie games were among SSI's best-selling titles before the Gold Box era, he never actually met anybody from there until years later.


The episode ends with a brief discussion of Phantasie II, which many critics at the time complained was too similar to the first game (although it's thought to have had a stronger story). Winston sought to address these concerns in the third game, which is the topic of next week's episode.