Slice of Sci-Fi recently interviewed one of the driving forces behind Children Of The Gods and what I heard got my interest enough to track it down, slap it on my iPod and give it a listen. Its an serious long term audio drama, which is a rare experience for those of us in the US who missed the golden age of radio.

Although, I have to say, ever since I first heard Well’s War of the Worlds audio drama, I’ve been a huge fan.  There’s just no modern content.  Except, maybe the Alien Voices stuff.  I’ve bought a number of their CDs for car trips, and they are a great way to pass the time.  But I digress…

The core concept in Children Of The Gods is that we’re seeing events 500 years or so after the events in Independence Day. Including the much mocked virus Jeff Goldbloom gave the aliens. The first chapter lays out this history of the world between the movie and the now of the story including technology advances, why we fled the earth, and the current system of government.  I’ve in the middle of the third chapter right now, and its pretty good.  I’m going to continue to listen to it.

A cool aspect of COTG, outside of the story, is that its mostly a volunteer effort with people providing voice active from all over the world.  As its not professional voice actors, the quality of performance can be hit and miss, but not so much that its turned me off.  My big fear was the quality of acting would distract from the story.  However, Clerks showed me that in some cases, story and dialog can overcome sub-par acting.  They are also only 3 chapters in, so I figure they are still shaking out putting together the podcast as well as the actors or whatever.  For some tv shows that can sometimes take the whole first season.

Now that its easy to put together high-quality audio and video content on commodity PCs, I think its inevitable that we’re going to get some audience created content that is as high, if not higher, in story content that what the "content producers" are putting out.  I think enough people are getting fed up with the crap coming from hollywood and the record producers that they’ll start rolling their own.  The big question is if they’ll be able to get other people to pay for it, or if it’ll all be for the love of it.