Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of many, many Nokia phones. I'm your friend David Pierce, and today on the show, we're playing a game. This is a thing I've actually been wanting to do for a while. One of my great aspirations on the Vergecast is to make Nilay play a lot of TikTok games. Like, I want him to blind rank things and I want to do the fast money games. There's just so many silly fun things you can do that we're going to start playing more of on this show. And today we have our first one. Travis Larchuk, our producer, has put together a whole game. I don't know a ton about it, but I know it has to do with gadgets. I know it has to do with history. I know I am in big trouble and I'm pretty excited about it. Before we get into it, if you have ideas, if you've like seen a TikTok where they're playing a fun game and you want to send it to me because you think it would be fun to watch or hear us be terrible at it on the Vergecast, send them all my way. vergecast.com is the email. 86611 is the hotline. More games on the Vergecast is my goal for the future and I want to hear all of your ideas. Our game is coming up in just a second, but first here's everything else happening on The Verge today.
I'm David Pierce and this is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Monday, August 24th, 2026. Amazon's first-party products just got a big price bump, up to 60%. The cheapest products in the lineup were hit the hardest, with the Echo Dot smart speaker jumping from $49.99 to $79.99. The Fire TV Stick 4K Max rose by 40% to $84.99. And the base-level Kindle now comes in at $149.99. In a statement to The Verge, a communications manager blamed memory and storage component costs for the price hike. Like everyone else, Apple also recently increased its competing HomePod Mini to $129.99 from $99.99. Though Google's smart home speaker is holding stable at $99.99 for now. Today, The New York Times reported that Netflix has discussed making Peacock and Fox 1 available through the Netflix app. Other services like Amazon Prime Video and Roku have long made competing streamers available in their app, but Netflix has always kept its app pretty isolated. The change comes amid YouTube, Netflix's biggest rival, announcing that it will be bundling Peacock as part of its premium subscription starting next year. While there are reportedly no imminent plans to make this happen, Netflix has already dabbled in third-party streaming partnerships in France, where it folded live channels and streaming content from TF1 into its app. And finally, the 9.58-second 1,000-meter dash set by Usain Bolt in 2009 has been smashed by Chinese robots participating in the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing on Saturday. The record set by the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center ran that distance in 9.39 seconds. Though most of the robots had to collide into crash pads and some of them had to be carried away on a stretcher afterwards. The games are a sort of robot Olympics designed to showcase innovation and bipedal robot technology, with other sports like jumping, football, and boxing also being showcased. You can read more on theverge.com. That's 90 Seconds on The Verge for Monday, August 24th, 2026.
All right, let's play some games. I'm joined now by Nilay Patel. Hello, Nilay.
I don't even think you have any idea what you've signed up for here.
Fabulous. Also has no idea. The Verge's Sean Hollister. Hi, Sean.
And our producer and game master, Travis Larchuk.
Hello everybody. What have you done to us today?
Okay gamers, we are going to play a game about the linear nature of time, which proceeds as always at the rate of one year per year. This game is called When Did That Come Out? So if you've ever played the card game Chronology or Timeline, this is a ripoff of that. So together...
Now we just got sued. I think we're playing a game called The Vergecast Enters Existential Litigation.
I can't debate it. It's like we play that every week.
I'm not a property expert on this, but I believe that you can only patent game mechanics, not copyright.
I think we're in the clear. I think we're in the clear. Okay. This is inspired by the card games Chronology and Timeline, but is legally distinct and different from them.
That's what I'm looking for.
Okay, great. So the way that this is going to work is that we're collectively going to build a timeline of gadgets. You will be given a random gadget on your turn and you have to figure out where in the timeline that gadget goes. If you are correct, it will be added to the timeline and you will get a point. If you're incorrect, it will be discarded from history and you will not get a point. This could butterfly affect the world and change events forever. So, so be careful. We will continue to play the game until we get bored or until we've recorded enough to reasonably insert a midroll break into this episode.
Okay, Nilay is going to kick us off. Nilay, your categories are, and these are loose categories, phones, wearables, or anything goes. Could be anything.
I'm going to have to go with phones, please.
All right, phones. All right, so we are starting the timeline. The timeline is seeded with the Nokia 9000 Communicator. And the object that you have to place on the timeline before or after that is the Samsung Galaxy Fold.
And I just have to pick before or after. I don't have to say year.
After. Okay, nailed it. Are you sure? Are you sure?
Are you sure?
I was doing the math. I think I could get the year.
You sure it came out after 1996?
This is actually a trick question. The Nokia 9000 Communicator is timeless. It is all years forever and ever. Nilay, you are correct.
Okay, David, you have the Nokia Lumia 520. I'm realizing we could play this game with just Nokia and numbers and it would be impossible.
And also there would be a thousand options.
Does anybody know what this was?
The 520 was okay. It was a plasticky Windows phone if I remember correctly. Sean?
I'm remembering like a baby blue. Is this right?
Yeah, that feels right. Yep.
This was back when they had that really like sharp design. Oh, it's great. Those are good times. Anyway, this goes between 1996 and 2009.
Okay, you are correct. 2013. Later than I thought actually.
You have the Fire Phone. And things are getting spicy now because the timeline is we have 1996, 2013, and 2019 on the timeline. So, where does it go? Fire Phone. This is difficult because I think the Fire Phone is only one year away from the Lumia 520 and I cannot remember if it's 2012 or 2014.
Is this a group project or is this a Sean project?
Well, this is Sean's point, but if you would like to collaborate and make this a cooperative exercise, that's fine.
Here's what I know, and this is like a weird sense memory of these phones, and this tells you exactly how poisoned my brain is. I associate every one of these devices with a different office. Like I remember where we were, what office we were in when the Fire Phone came out, which is going to help me immensely through this.
It is a damn shame that I don't.
Having worked from home for most of that period, I'm going to go with after 2014. I think it's 2014. Let's do it.
Okay. Between the Nokia Lumia 520 and the Samsung Galaxy Fold, you are correct. 2014. Well done. Going back to Nilay, you have the first Google Pixel.
So on the timeline, we have the Nokia 9000 Communicator 1996, Nokia Lumia 520 2013, Fire Phone 2014, Samsung Galaxy Fold 2019. Nilay, would you believe me if I told you there was a Google Pixel in 2002 and then Google just forgot about it for like 15 years? I will give you a hint, which is it will not be between 2013 and 2014.
Good. And also presumably not between 1996 and 2013.
Sometimes you get a lucky break.
Wait, what happens if... So they're not there. Just to be clear on the setup here, there's not two things that happened in 2014.
If a year is already on the timeline, it will not show up again in that timeline.
I love how invested Nilay is in winning this.
I'm just experiencing my youth again, Sean. I'm just feeling all the feelings. And I believe it's funny. My strong memories are the Pixel 2. But I'm going to say between Fire Phone and Galaxy Fold.
All right. Between 2014 and 2019, you are correct. 2016.
That's a Fi office. That's what I remember.
What were the snacks like in that office?
At the time, what were the snacks like? Because snack vendor has changed since then.
When we moved in that office, the snacks were glorious.
Yeah, there are rumors of overtime snack deterioration. Anyway, it's the IBM Simon. Does anybody know what the IBM Simon was?
Remind me. I'm not sure that I do. What was the IBM Simon?
I'm going to go ahead and say it was a phone.
All right, David. This would be a good time for me to introduce the concept of lifelines. You have three lifelines. You can use a lifeline once for the entire game. Your lifelines are Wikipedia: I will read you a random sentence from the Wikipedia page of this thing. Picture: I will look at an image of this thing and describe the image to you. Or this is a lifeline that no one's ever thought of before. It's called One Out of Two, which is I will tell you two possible places on the timeline where this thing could go.
Okay, picture. Great. This thing is like a very long black rectangle. It has...
I'm pretty sure I know the answer. I'm just enjoying this now.
This thing is like a very long black rectangle. It has...
Yeah, we've at all.
Also a very long screen on it, like an LCD screen, and it comes with a thin black stylus on the side.
Dude, you just described the Samsung Galaxy Fold.
The picture I am looking at, let me see, it looks very skinny, and the picture I am looking at has it pictured next to an older iPhone, and it is definitely like longer than that original iPhone. I confess you've made my answer slightly more nerve-wracking for me, but I'm going to say this goes at the very beginning, before 1996.
Okay, you are correct. 1994.
You said stylus and I was like maybe this is 1999. Like that was just the BlackBerry Pearl.
Thank goodness. Thank goodness that there's nothing between 1996 and 2013 yet.
This is the stages of our career. Sean, where did we work then?
Does anyone remember what the BlackBerry Pearl 8100 was?
Apparently, it was an Engadget.
It was an Engadget. Yes. The office was in Union Square. It's now the Instagram office, which just says everything about everything. But this was one of Joanna Stern's favorite phones. It was a consumer BlackBerry.
Yeah, the Pearl was the skinny one, right? That was like they did away with the wide and they tried to smush the keyboard into a much skinnier thing.
All right. Did the BlackBerry Pearl 8100 come out between 1996 and 2013?
All right, back to Nilay. This will be once the timeline reaches eight things, we will begin a new round. So this is the Surface Duo, potentially the last one this round. If you will recall, Panos Panay announced these devices on our podcast at our office, the one that Travis is sitting in right now, and then it was the pandemic. So, this one is easy. This is...
How were the snacks then?
That was the height. And after that, it was all over. They realized that no one was coming there. The snack budget fell to nothing.
I'm really realizing, Nilay, you have organized your adult life by phone launches. Like, this is really who you are.
