1268: Printing Press

Print media is very much on the way out, particularly in the games industry, but I enjoy keeping some around for old times’ sake.

Specifically, as I’ve probably mentioned a few times before, I have several back issues of the now defunct PC Zone magazine on my shelf, each of which contains a single article that I wrote on a freelance basis — mostly game walkthroughs, because no-one likes writing those.

Occasionally I like to have a flip through those old magazines. It’s nice to look back on what the games industry looked like nearly 20 years ago (jeez) and see what people were excited about. It’s also interesting to ponder which grand plans came to fruition and which didn’t; which supposedly “big games” ended up being massive successes, and which were big wet farts.

One of the most interesting things about reading an old magazine in 2013, though, is realising what an impact the Internet has had on our brains. More than once I caught myself reading something in one of these old Zones and habitually looking to the end of the article for the comments section. Of course, being a magazine, there is no comments section (unless you scribble on the page yourself) and thus this is a stupid thing to do, but I found it interesting that the way The Internet works is now so firmly ingrained into my brain that I just do things like that on reflex.

The letters pages are also interesting to look at. One of the most fascinating things I rediscovered recently is that people have been whingeing about tacked-on multiplayer modes ever since 1997 — one chap got a Letter of the Month award for complaining about how X-Wing vs Tie Fighter wasn’t as good as either X-Wing or Tie Fighter because it didn’t have the story-driven campaigns of its predecessors. (He had a point.)

The other one that raised a bit of a smile was a selection of gentlemen defending the fact that they found Lara Croft attractive — yes, the low-poly, big-lipped, pyramid-breasted Lara from 1997, not the gritty one from the recent reboot. Of all things, it brought to mind the popular otaku discussion of whether “2D” or “3D” is better. (Inevitably, to most otaku, the answer is “2D”, but that’s a topic for another day, I think.) “Lara is a collection of pixels,” runs the slightly flawed argument, “and Pamela Anderson is just a collection of pixels or ink on a page, because none of us are ever likely to actually meet her.” Well, true, I guess, but… oh, let’s not get into that now.

Anyway. If you happen to have any old magazines lying around, think twice before you throw them out; they make interesting cultural artifacts to look back on, as they take a snapshot of how people thought and felt at a particular point in time. They’re also something to do on the toilet on the off-chance all the electronic devices in your house are out of battery.