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| Bicentennial Man | By Charles Ardai | ||||||||
| Okay, Charles Ardai Hasn’t Written For All 200 Issues -- But Pretty Close (originally published for CGW's 200th issue in 2001) It’s funny, the things you remember fifteen years later. The first time I heard of Computer Gaming World was when a marketing guy from the magazine called me to say he’d seen my reviews in some other game magazines, and how would I like to write for the granddaddy of them all? His name was Bill Oxner. I never heard from or of him again. I did say yes, though, and after a few months of on-and-off conversations with CGW’s founder, Russell Sipe, I found myself launched on a course I could not possibly have imagined I’d still be pursuing in the year 2000. This was in 1986, and by then I’d already written about games for more than a dozen publications, most of which had since gone out of business (no connection, I hope). I’d lived through the first two boom-and-bust cycles in the game industry, and at the ripe age of 17 I was something of a grizzled veteran. I ended up assigned to write CGW’s first “Year in Review” cover story, followed by a 5-part series called “Titans of the Computer Gaming World.” “Titans” was supposed to deliver the definitive opinion about the five biggest companies in the industry at the time. As I recall, Activision was furious that our definitive opinion was that many of their games sucked. They weren’t the last. That’s the thing I remember most about the past 15 years: not the handful of games we adored, but the piles and piles of them that we hated, the ones so bad they weren’t worth the magnet-swipe it would have taken to erase them. What I loved about CGW -- and still love -- is that no one has ever been afraid to shout loudly in these pages when he saw a naked emperor. Theodore Sturgeon famously said that “90 percent of everything is crap,” and this is certainly true of computer games. At CGW we always viewed ourselves as the most fearless crap-spotters in the industry. Polishing Our Crystal Balls This doesn’t mean we always got it right. In my first article for CGW, I wrote this: “Clearly, 1986 has been a good year for computer games. New innovations kept surfacing throughout the year and changing the way we look at our software. For instance, this was the year we introduced the third dimension to computer chess.” It was also the year Ultima IV changed computer role-playing games forever -- but chess, apparently, was what stuck in my mind at the time. I also called a number of major trends wrong: I thought text adventures would come back, for instance, and that “interactive movies” would go away. Which taught me an important lesson -- never bet against the newer, better, sexier technology. This was the big trend we called right: technology kept improving at an accelerating pace, and every year that passed saw more barriers broken down and more previously impossible goals met. When games started talking, it was a big thing: in the early nineties, I wrote review after review of CD-ROM “upgrades” of earlier titles, with the one added feature being digitized speech. When games incorporated cinematic “cut scenes,” it was a big thing. When adventure games switched from showing a side view of small, two-dimensional characters to showing Lara Croft from every possible camera angle, it was a big thing. (Two big things, come to think of it.) Every time gamers thought the industry had reached a stable stopping point in terms of what games looked like and how they worked, some innovation came along and changed everything. Tomorrow’s Games Today It’s easy to think that tomorrow’s games will look a lot like today’s, only maybe a little faster and slicker -- but this is always wrong. Here’s a thought experiment: Imagine showing one of today’s games to a kid from the Atari VCS era. Now try to imagine what sort of quantum leap forward a game would have to represent to fill you with a comparable sense of awe and disbelief today. That quantum leap game you’re imagining? Twenty years from now every ten-year-old will carry one like it in his pocket and think it’s old-fashioned. It’s been a fun decade and a half. Many millions of words later, we’re still finding new ways to say, “This game sucks” -- and, more rarely, “This one’s really worth your time.” I look back and I can’t believe how many of those words I wrote, starting with longhand manuscripts (yes, really) submitted to legendary CGW editor Johnny Wilson while I was still in high school. George Jones, CGW’s current editor, pointed out to me the last time I visited the CGW offices that I’ve been writing for this magazine for half my life. I don’t know why this startled me. I do know why it made me proud. In this age when most games are hopelessly out of date in 15 months, the idea that one magazine could establish itself as the leader in its field and then hold onto that position for half a lifetime is inspiring. Happy Birthday, CGW. And thank you Bill Oxner, wherever you are.
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