You kids with your Tiktok dances and your blockchain pension funds. In my day a Boomer was a Left 4 Dead special and we spoke to them with respect even though they were bloated reanimated corpses who regurgitated liquid decay over us. It’s just how we were raised.
Things have changed, you see, over the last twenty years. In his 2016 documentary Lo and Behold, Werner Herzog likens the invention of the internet to the moment humankind discovered fire, and while we feel its associated changes most keenly in employment, monetary systems, data management and communications, gaming is always one of the more enjoyable nostalgic lead-ins. Lovely gaming and its treasure trove of fond memories and ever-increasing archive of things that have subsequently become ‘quaint’.
The internet was around in 2002, and its adoption was fairly widespread. But it was something you connected to at a desktop PC and browsed for a few minutes – and you were billed for every one of those minutes. The big games sites we know today were operational at the time, but magazine editors were still the tastemakers. Information, ideas and concepts traveled at a different pace, and as a result the games industry had a very distinct character from its modern counterpart. Journey with us, then, back twenty years, and let’s examine the industry we find there.
