PastMaster: Reshaping History

Harvard University, late October 2003. Mark Zuckerberg is a sophomore in Kirkland House, a week away from building FaceMash, and Chris Dillon is back to stop him for a second time. Last time Chris arrived after FaceMash, when Zuckerberg already had the wind in his sails. This time he's going in earlier with a plan that has nothing to do with code: find Zuck a girlfriend, turn him into a normal person, and maybe social media never happens at all. The Game Master has other ideas. It won't even allow meeting the real Zuck and instead sets up an encounter with Zack Muckberg. The brief: Chris, travelling under a fake name, has to get his name on a signed, dated stake in whatever Muckberg builds next, before a pair of senior twins already shopping for a coder get there first. So the man who came to strangle Facebook in its crib now has to become its first investor, armed with $340 in period-correct cash, a visitor ID that survives a glance but not a phone call, no room and no friends. The real FaceMash went live from Kirkland House on 28 October 2003, a hot-or-not site built from photos pulled off Harvard's online house "facebooks". It drew around 450 visitors and 22,000 photo views in its first four hours before the university shut it down and hauled Zuckerberg in front of the Administrative Board. Within weeks he'd agreed to build HarvardConnection for the Winklevoss twins and Divya Narendra, then launched TheFacebook instead on 4 February 2004, a decision that ended in a $65m settlement and a Hollywood film. Two decades on, Facebook has more than 3bn monthly users. History needed someone to talk a 19-year-old out of it, and it got a Brit with $340 and a matchmaking plan. Era: Modern | 2003 CE | Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA Featuring: Chris Dillon Contains: Strong language. EPISODE LINKS Follow Chris's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Chris's first attempt 👉 S4E2, The Social Network Stealer: Founding Facebook First Play PastMaster yourself 👉 https://play.pastmasterpod.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pompeii, 21 August 79 AD. Three days before Mount Vesuvius buries the town in ash, comedian Sallyann Fellowes is back for a Death Wish Speed Run, where the real goal is to lose the game as fast as humanly possible. The Game Master hands her a job anyway. A banker in the forum has just watched her total his wax tablets faster than his own clerk, and he needs her to find 8,000 sesterces that vanished from a dead wine merchant's estate auction before he has to pay the heirs in front of a magistrate. Sallyann's declared talents are reading a liar at a glance and counting money very, very quickly. Will she die a quick and stylish death? Will she discover the thief before Versuvius erupts? Will Game Master on Hard Mode accept any of her cunning plans? In 79 AD Pompeii was a prosperous Roman town of around 11,000 people on the Bay of Naples in Campania, rich on wine, wool and garum, its walls covered in graffiti, and still patching up the damage from the earthquake of 62 AD that nobody read as a warning. When Vesuvius erupted it buried Pompeii and neighbouring Herculaneum under pumice, ash and pyroclastic surges, and killed Pliny the Elder, who had sailed the Roman fleet out from Misenum to help, while his nephew Pliny the Younger watched from across the bay and wrote the only eyewitness account that survives. His letters give the date as 24 August, though a charcoal inscription found in 2018 has archaeologists arguing for October. Either way, hardly anyone in the forum that summer thought of the mountain as a volcano, apart from one comedian with a death wish and three days to use it. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Ancient | 79 CE | Pompeii, Italy Featuring: Sallyann Fellowes — comedian (Leicester Square New Comedian of the Year, co-host of the Weird Biscuit podcast) Contains: Strong language and some bloody Roman violence. EPISODE LINKS Follow Sallyann's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Sallyann Fellowes: Instagram 👉 @sallyanncomedy Play PastMaster yourself 👉 https://play.pastmasterpod.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Battle of Hastings turns 960 this week. On 14 October 1066, one afternoon on a Sussex hillside ended Anglo-Saxon England, kicked off the Norman Conquest and handed the crown to William the Conqueror. To mark the anniversary, we're revisiting our Season 4 episode where Keon went back to stop it, armed with a red leather jacket, a single sparkling glove and an unshakeable faith in the moonwalk. Keon has two objectives: keep King Harold alive, and get himself stitched into the Bayeux Tapestry. It's one of the most pivotal days in history. The day that changed the course of English history forever. And Keon is about to put himself front and center. The real Harold had just marched his army the length of England to beat Harald Hardrada's Viking invasion at Stamford Bridge, then turned straight round to face William less than three weeks later. He fell on Senlac Hill, and the arrow-in-the-eye legend owes a lot to the Bayeux Tapestry, a 70-metre embroidery that's now at the British Museum, back in Britain for the first time in almost 1,000 years. If Agent M's plan worked, there should be a moonwalking man in one sparkly glove somewhere in the middle of it. Good luck getting a ticket to check. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

London, around 470 CE. Uther Pendragon, future father of King Arthur, is holding a war feast in the smoking ruin of a Roman basilica, and he keeps sending his cup down the table to the Duke of Cornwall's wife. The Duke has noticed. Nick Horseman is back for another Death Wish Speed Run, and this time all three of us take turns at the same job: walk in as a nobody and get the lords of Britain to swear on Uther's dragon standard before Cornwall storms out and half the hall follows him. Before each turn, a single six-sided die decides how many lords need to swear. Between the three of us we bring an encyclopaedic knowledge of card games, a very quick hand with a Rubik's Cube, a stare that bores into the soul and one extremely niche party trick, none of it built for early medieval coalition politics. The Game Master is back on hard mode, the benches are full of armed men who have been drinking since the rain started, and Merlin is somewhere in the smoke, quietly aware that none of us belong. Uther Pendragon belongs to the foggiest stretch of British history, the sub-Roman Dark Ages. Rome stopped defending Britain around 410 CE, Saxon settlers were carving out the east within a couple of generations, and Gildas, the nearest thing to a contemporary chronicler, never mentions a Pendragon at all. The Arthurian legend really gets going with Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae around 1136: a royal feast in London, a king who can't stop staring at Igraine, a furious Gorlois riding home to Cornwall, and Merlin at Tintagel making sure that nine months later there is a King Arthur. History needed a statesman in that hall and got three blokes from the 21st century with a six-sided die. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Medieval | ~470 CE | Londinium (London), England Featuring: Nick Horseman,comedian and rapper (The Rhyme Scheme, Edinburgh Fringe 2019) Contains: Strong language and some bloody early medieval violence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ajaccio, Corsica, August 1790. Napoleon Bonaparte is twenty-one, broke, borrowing money from his mother, and home on suspiciously long leave while the island argues at knifepoint about whether it is French. Comedian Bennet Kavanagh arrives by boat as Pierre, a chevalier travelling with a mule, a mainland trading pass that marks him as a foreigner, and a wheel of Comté that has survived the crossing rather better than he has. The mission: get Pasquale Paoli to look kindly on the Bonaparte family before September's consulta decides which names on Corsica still matter. Pierre's declared skills, in order: a love of cheese, a way with horses, a fierce charisma, and the ability to hold a drink. This is a man who has looked at the birth of the Napoleonic era and concluded that it is, fundamentally, a hospitality problem. The plan runs on Comté, wine, and the confidence of someone who has never once been asked to leave anywhere. Corsica in 1790 was a wound that had not closed: France bought the island from the Republic of Genoa in 1768, broke the Corsican Republic at Ponte Novu the following year, and Napoleone di Buonaparte was born in Ajaccio that August a French subject by barely twelve months. Pasquale Paoli, the father of Corsican independence, had spent twenty years exiled in London and sailed home in July 1790 to a hero's welcome, which made the autumn consulta at Orezza the only room on the island worth standing in. The Buonapartes were minor nobility with a French education, no money, and a reputation for being French when it suited them. History records that Paoli came to loathe them and eventually ran them off the island altogether — but not for another three years, and not before somebody had to get through August. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Modern | 1790 CE | Ajaccio, Corsica, France Featuring: Bennet Kavanagh — musical comedian (Crank Up the Volume to a Reasonable Level, Edinburgh Fringe debut) Contains: Mild language. EPISODE LINKS Follow Bennet's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Bennet Kavanagh: Instagram 👉 @bennetkav Bennet Kavanagh 👉 https://bennetkav.com Play PastMaster yourself 👉 https://play.pastmasterpod.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices