Doom and Danish brains

Doom and Danish brains

Max Pearson presents a collection of this week’s Witness History episodes from the BBC World Service.

We hear about two of the most influential computer games of the 1990s with their creators. John Romero was one of the developers of Doom and talks about the concept of a martian military base populated by zombie soldiers. Coder Jan Tian describes how his devotion to working on the football game FIFA 94 landed him in hospital. Our guest, The Guardian newspaper's video games editor Keza MacDonald, looks back on games which had a global impact.

Also how in 1945, 10,000 brains were collected from dead psychiatric patients in Denmark. It is now thought to be the world’s largest brain bank. We also find out how a group of right-wing army officers seized power in Greece in 1967 to stop the election of a social democratic government led by veteran politician George Papandreou.

And 30 years on since the cult French film La Haine was released, its director Mathieu Kassovitz describes how it caught the attention of high profile politicians with its criticism of policing in France.

Contributors: John Romero – Doom developer Jan Tian – FIFA 94 coder Keza MacDonald – video games editor, The Guardian Martin Wirenfeldt Nielsen – pathologist George Papandreou Jnr – former Greek Prime Minister Mathieu Kassovitz – film director

(Photo: Brains stored in plastic buckets at the University of Southern Denmark. Credit: BBC)

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May 1968 Paris Riots

May 1968 Paris Riots

A French riot policeman's view of the violence that swept through France in May 1968; plus the man who led a team that made safe two nuclear weapons that had crashed to ground in the US. Also, the origins of Montessori education, one of the airmen on the Dambusters' raid and actor Jane Asher remembers John Osborne's radical 1950s play, Look Back in Anger.Photo: Protesters face police in front of the Joseph Gibert bookstore, Boulevard Saint Michel in May 1968. (Credit: Jacques Marie/AFP/Getty Images)

19 Maj 201851min

The Last King of Bulgaria

The Last King of Bulgaria

From child king in the Second World War to post-communist prime minister, the story of Bulgaria's King Simeon II; the first ever surgery performed on a foetus in the womb, an American family selling secrets to the Soviets in the 1980s, plus the 1963 attempt to form a United States of Africa, and the earliest diagnosis of autism.Photo: King Simeon II 1943 (credit: Bulgarian Royal Family)

12 Maj 201850min

When Margaret Thatcher Came to Power

When Margaret Thatcher Came to Power

Working for Britain's first female PM, the rare story of prisoners on the high seas in WW2, plus the Children's Crusade for civil right in 60s Alabama, the origin of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the story behind the Japanese TV hit, Takeshi's Castle. Photo: British Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, with husband Denis on May 4th 1979. (Credit: John Minihan/Evening Standard/Getty Images)

5 Maj 201849min

The Oslo Peace Talks

The Oslo Peace Talks

The story behind the secret Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in Oslo in 1993, the woman who swam from the USA to the Soviet Union, plus remembering Pablo Picasso, how art transformed notorious Scottish prisoners, and one of the most famous figures of World War One, the Red Baron. Photo: Yitzhak Rabin, Bill Clinton and Yasser Arafat at the signing ceremony for the Oslo Accord, September 13,1993. Credit: AFP/Getty Images

28 Apr 201849min

Earth Day

Earth Day

The birth of the modern environmental movement, Germany's 1918 Spring Offensive, the discovery of the concentration camp horrors of Bergen-Belsen plus the rebuilding of the World Trade Centre site; and the last occupiers of Europe's most westerly lighthouse.Photo credit: Robert Sabo-Pool/Getty Images

21 Apr 201850min

The Zimbabwe Massacres

The Zimbabwe Massacres

In this week's episode, Robert Mugabe's brutal crack down on the opposition in the 1980s, a mass expulsion of Soviet spies from Britain in the 1970's and the working class film revolution of the 1960's. Plus the first frozen embryo and the death of a German student leader that sparked huge demonstrations. (Photo: Robert Mugabe. Getty Images)

14 Apr 201850min

The Good Friday Agreement

The Good Friday Agreement

In 1998, the political parties in Northern Ireland reached a peace agreement that ended decades of war. We hear from Paul Murphy, the junior minister for Northern Ireland at the time. Plus, a cross-community choir in Bosnia and women pioneers from the worlds of finance and oceanography.PHOTO: Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern (L) and British Prime Minister Tony Blair (R) pose with the mediator

31 Mars 201850min

The Battle of the Airwaves in Latin America

The Battle of the Airwaves in Latin America

Why the BBC started broadcasting to South and Central America, plus the My Lai Massacre, Brazil's careful transition to democracy, and Moscow's show trials in the 1930s.Photo: Members of the BBC's Brazil service rehearsing in a London studio in 1943. Credit: BBC.

17 Mars 201850min

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