The Unreleased Projects: Never Have I Ever... Podcast (Patreon)

Back in the summer of  2019 we sent out a questionnaire asking if you'd seen 2001: A Space Odyssey.

You might still be wondering what that was about.

Well, it was for a podcast series we never ended up making. It was going to be titled Never Have I Ever..., and the idea was simple: each week, we'd watch, play, or read something one of the three of us had never before experienced. 

We'd get the person who was experiencing it for the first time to write down some predictions beforehand and see how they fared. We wanted to capture that person's initial experience of a hugely influential movie, book or game, and see how they react to it.

We started with Stanley's Kubrick's seminal and frequently obtuse masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. Powers had never seen it, and at the time, the BFI here in London was screening the 70mm print – the restoration of which was overseen by Christopher Nolan – as part of its Kubrick season. 

We saw the film together, and recorded this pilot the next day. The questionnaire we sent out was to include your perspectives alongside hearing Rory's reactions.

We had fun recording it, but we never ended up making more or developing it into a show for a few reasons. 

While entertaining enough, it perhaps doesn't flow as well as we wanted, and we were worried about how scalable it was as a series. How many times can you hear two people explain why they love something to a third? Maybe, we thought, it's better if all of you share the same enthusiasm and can have that conversation at the same level. Perhaps it's something that would've worked with guests.

We also made a list of potential episodes – each centred on a different game, TV show, or movie that only one of us had never seen. We were left a list that didn't really excite us. (We've seen a lot of stuff.)

So we shelved the project. But that's no bad thing. One of the great advantages of being a creator supported by your audience is the ability to try out new things without feeling the pressure to publish. 

Your direct support means we don't have 'content quotas' or a number of impressions we need to meet in order to satisfy sponsors. Instead we can confidently make decisions to not release something simply because we're not 100% happy with it. As it should be. 

It gives us the freedom to experiment. It also means that when new projects finally make their way to you, you know it's something we really love and are proud of.

We hope you've enjoyed the Producer exclusives for this month. We've wanted to share these unreleased projects for a while now, and think they make sense to offer on the Producer tier.

RKG x