Something occurred to me the other day that… I think I'd always known, but for one reason or another, it came into sharp focus while I was writing an article.
Have you noticed that, when looking back to gaming eras such as the PS1 and PS2 in particular, the games that tend to attract the most excitement and interest among wannabe gaming historians and retro collectors tend to be the ones that were a little more obscure, perhaps a little more clunky, perhaps a big bit "weird"?
Part of the reason for this is that a lot of the "big name" well-known games from those ages have been rereleased several times over the years — franchises like Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid are prime examples — but it's also down to the fact that a lot of the lesser-known games simply didn't have a lot of time and attention devoted to them in the press of the period… and the Internet wasn't around for the community to pick up the slack.
Somehow, though, many of these games have endured and become cult classics or highly prized on the collector's market, and I think that's cool. Well, maybe not the "collector's market" bit; it's nice to be able to afford things sometimes! But more importantly, it's also a good reminder of why I started doing what I'm doing with MoeGamer, and indeed before that with my JPgamer column on USgamer… and before that with my work on Games Are Evil.
The vast majority of the games I cover on MoeGamer — particularly the Cover Game features — are deliberately chosen because they don't get a lot of column inches devoted to them in the current commercial press. The reasons for this are many and varied, the most likely being that there simply isn't time to cover every game out there, and the EA, Ubisoft and Activision games of the world are always going to pull in more ad impressions than some peculiar RPG. Their audiences are inherently larger, which means more readers for coverage, which means more ad revenue for commercial sites. It makes business sense, but it doesn't do a lot to paint a broad picture of this era of gaming from a historical perspective.
The realisation I came to is that what I'm doing now is basically what some people are still doing today with relatively unheard-of PS1 and PS2 games: finding experiences that are somehow interesting, unusual, creative or otherwise fascinating, and celebrating them regardless of their perceived "status" in the industry. We live in an era now where there are distinct "tiers" of game releases, different people have different tastes, and a game selling ten million copies doesn't necessarily mean that it's either "good" or universally appealing; it just means it's a blockbuster.
That's why I get fired up and excited about what I do. There aren't many places out there writing about the things I do in the amount of depth I do. And while my audience may be small in comparison to some other destinations on the Web — I'm a one-man show, remember, with the exception of Chris' excellent contributions to the podcast — I like to think I'm doing my little bit to highlight some unusual, off-the-beaten-track experiences now rather than twenty years down the line… which hopefully means people won't be stuck having to pay £80 for a copy of [insert obscure RPG here]!
If nothing else, people stop by literally every day to read about Honey Select Unlimited on MoeGamer, so there's always that…
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