It was a slow and long lunch hour. I was headed into a few days of relative calm at work, and so my daily ritual of browsing the shelves of Babbages software store offered the anticipation of purchase.

It was a strange-looking box, jammed into the new releases and adorned with a couple of weird spaceships, a muddy color palette, and an unwieldy name. I had seen no marketing for this game—it seemed to have fallen onto the shelf halfheartedly, perhaps hoping nobody would notice and it could politely retreat into obscurity. But it was by MicroProse, which meant a lot to me, and the description sounded a little like one of my favorite board games, Imperium, from GDW. So I bought it, and when I played it later that night my world was a richer place. The game was Master of Orion.

It happens. You walk into a store and buy a game you’ve never heard of. Then you discover that the game is superb and it gently finds a place of honor in your gaming memories.

I remember the pain of deciding to buy Kampfgruppe by SSI, because it was so pricey—and my subsequent happiness when I realized that it was a masterpiece.


What games have you stumbled upon in a store? Impulse
purchases can be a pleasant surprise

These moments of discovery can alter your entire gaming path. You get hooked on a new genre and then you’re delighted to explore the older games in that genre, too.

Ever since Kampfgruppe, war games have proven to be an enduring source of pleasure for me. I sometimes wonder how many hours I’ve spent playing war games. Hundreds, no doubt, and it’s time I regard as well-spent. Because for me, games relax and inform like no other medium. Schiller concluded that man is no more authentic than when he is at play; I agree.

How we play our games is a private matter many times, which is a shame. Hamlet can be the worst play in the world with a bad actor, and the greatest with a good one. Playing games offers us far greater opportunity to celebrate the partnership of actor and writer than reading lines from a page.

But get gamers talking and the wonderful stories will come. I still remember with fondness playing Jagged Alliance 2 and collecting the heads of the assassins sent to kill us by the local crime lord. When we finally hit his compound, we threw tear gas into his room along with each assassin’s head, before my team burst in with our machetes drawn. Or the time my Sim, who started off moving into Pleasantville as an ex-Eastern bloc secret policeman bent on a life of crime, fell in love with a local policewoman and ended up married with kids working in the local garage. Players have so many wonderful and personal stories. Games do that; we don’t just play someone else’s vision, we make it our own. From the northern front push in War In Russia to your character in Baldur’s Gate, we all experience the same games in different ways.


Next, on a special episode of Full House...

It’s the anticipation of these high points that still makes finding a new game or seeing a preview thrilling for me after all these years. I have been playing and making games since 1980, when I first got my Sinclair ZX80. I can still remember how the flat keyboard felt and the smell of the plastic as I cracked open its packaging. In my boyhood dreams, the promise of a universe of entertainment for a lifetime was held within that little computer. And as I booted it up, I dreamt of starships, battles, and adventures; it all turned out to be true.

Today’s PC gaming continues that legacy! You can still find breakout games in a new genre every month in PC Gamer, or by stumbling upon them yourself in a store. Gary Grigsby still makes games every bit as good as Kampfgruppe. Despite all the years, the fads, the editing autoexec.bats, and the annual ritual predictions of doom…despite it all, the magic still holds.

September 5, 2008