207: When Magazines Were Phone Books

00:00SPEAKERI made a bad mistake, Brad. So last night, we're sitting at the dining room table,

00:03SPEAKERwe're having dinner. My daughter says, "You have a podcast, right, Dad?"

00:08SPEAKER"Oh, no. Oh, no."

00:10SPEAKERAnd I said, "Yeah." And she said, "What's it called?" And I said, "Well,

00:14SPEAKERwhy don't you tell me what it's called?" And she said, "Well, I don't know what it's called."

00:18SPEAKERAnd I said, "Well, maybe your mom knows." Mom looked at me and she was like, "Um, huh."

00:27SPEAKERAnd there was a moment, I could have let it go, but I chose not to. I chose to push on.

00:34SPEAKERShe was like, "It took a while. We got to TechPod." I was like, "That's part of the name."

00:38SPEAKERProbably arguably the important part.

00:40SPEAKERI could have backed down at that point happily. I could have just walked away and taken my lumps and

00:45SPEAKERlet the ego take the hit and moved right on. But no. It's like, "Well, what's the full name?"

00:51SPEAKERSweatpants TechPod? I was like, "No, that's the Twitter handle because TechPod was taken.

00:54SPEAKERThat's closer. Yeah, we're getting there."

00:56SPEAKERImpressive.

00:57SPEAKERYeah. We worked all the way down the path and it took a while. Also, she thinks that the past

01:02SPEAKERtense name was a mistake. It should have been Make a TechPod instead of Made a TechPod. I was like,

01:06SPEAKER"Well, I'm sure to listen to your daughter." This feedback would have been great 200 episodes ago.

01:10SPEAKERI just didn't. I felt a chill down my spine when you opened this conversation.

01:16SPEAKERWell, parents, is it time to talk to your children about podcasts?

01:20SPEAKEROkay. The interest in podcasting goes up as they get older because it's an approachable piece of

01:26SPEAKERcontent that kids can make. As we all know, podcasts are for old people.

01:32SPEAKERAlso, it turns out there is a robust podcast listening audience in the youth market because

01:38SPEAKERthere are a lot of story-driven... They're essentially serialized audiobooks for kids

01:45SPEAKERthat are fully acted. Then there's also a lot of news shows that are targeted toward kids

01:51SPEAKERbecause there's no COPPA. In the podcast world, there are no rules. You don't have to be 13

01:58SPEAKERto make a podcast. You have to be 13 to have a YouTube or a TikTok or a Twitch. But if you want

02:04SPEAKERto make a podcast and you're nine years old, let it rip. Nobody's going to stop you.

02:08SPEAKERIs it time to regulate podcasts?

02:10SPEAKERFuck no. That's the best part about podcasts. We can say whatever we want.

02:13SPEAKERI mean, maybe you can.

02:14SPEAKEROkay. What I'm saying is, we could find a kid named Brad and a kid named Will and

02:19SPEAKERmake them do this podcast and pay them $50 a week and call it a day.

02:22SPEAKERThat's thinking like a small business owner.

02:49SPEAKER[music]

02:53SPEAKERWelcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod. I'm Will.

02:56SPEAKERI am Brad.

02:57SPEAKERHello.

02:58SPEAKERHi.

02:59SPEAKERThis week, we... Well, okay. First off, there's a Patreon episode last week that went up last week

03:06SPEAKERthat we talked about. You finally have bit the bullet and decided to go to Windows 11.

03:10SPEAKERI can't let that go.

03:12SPEAKERI did.

03:12SPEAKERYou still doing it? You still there?

03:14SPEAKERWell, yeah. Yeah.

03:16SPEAKERIs your business centered or your business left justified?

03:19SPEAKEROh, no. As discussed on the Patreon episode, the literal first thing I did was just left

03:24SPEAKERjustify the start.

03:25SPEAKEROkay. Okay. Okay. We're not going to rehash the whole thing, but if you want to hear that,

03:28SPEAKERyou can get it if you're on the Patreon. Maybe when one of us has the flu or something,

03:33SPEAKERwe'll dump an episode out in the future.

03:35SPEAKERI will say, though, plans moving forward on a PC rebuild...

03:39SPEAKERReally?

03:40SPEAKER...that is going to necessitate a Windows 11 install, let's say.

03:43SPEAKEROh, wow. That says some things.

03:47SPEAKERMake of that what you will, but also I will do a fresh install at that point.

03:50SPEAKERWell, if you're going to change anything major, you always want to do a fresh install.

03:53SPEAKERAs soon as the motherboard changes, the Windows is getting wiped in my world.

03:57SPEAKERI'm feeling like over the holidays, I might do... I've been having weird sleep problems,

04:02SPEAKERwhich I think... Look, my computer has seen some stuff this year with the memory problems

04:06SPEAKERand all the stuff that I had. I can run a scan now and everything seems fine, but just generally

04:11SPEAKERspeaking, wiping that thing, giving it the old clean start, not a bad idea necessarily.

04:18SPEAKERSee, now you're just striking terror into my heart, because you're on the thing that

04:22SPEAKERI am looking to move to in order to not experience weird problems like that.

04:27SPEAKERWell, they fixed the memory controller by all reports in the 14th gen, so it's a little bit

04:33SPEAKERmore stable, even if you do something stupid like run too fast memory on it, which I think would

04:38SPEAKERhave solved most of my problems. But anyway, we're not here to talk about computers today. Well,

04:43SPEAKERwe are here to talk about computers, but we're taking a trip down memory lane.

04:47SPEAKERYeah, we're not here to talk about 2023 computers. We're here to talk about circa 2000,

04:51SPEAKERturn of the century computers.

04:53SPEAKERThe year is 2000. It's the end of the 19th century. Wait, no, it's the end of the 20th century.

04:59SPEAKERThere you go.

05:00SPEAKERWe're on the cusp of the 21st century. It's December of 2000.

05:03SPEAKERThat's the end of the... Oh, and I'm sorry. The end of the world happened 11 months ago.

05:07SPEAKERYeah, the end of the world's been and done. We're in that glowing period between Y2K

05:12SPEAKERand before 9/11. The whole world is our oyster. The economy is booming. The ad market is astounding.

05:24SPEAKERIf you sell an ad on the internet, you can get as much as $75 or $100 per thousand page views for

05:30SPEAKERit. Because they're hard to do, it turns out, at that point. Print ads, even. Still doing great!

05:35SPEAKERDude, that is so much money.

05:37SPEAKERAnd Google doesn't exist. They haven't started destroying ad markets left and right.

05:43SPEAKERIt was a simpler time.

05:44SPEAKERAt this time, I was a young, new editor at Maximum PC Magazine, Future US. I think we were

05:51SPEAKERfuture us. We might still have been imagined then. One of our sister magazines had the biggest

05:56SPEAKERnon-business issue we'd ever seen in December of 2000, which was 260 pages, I think, of PC Gamer.

06:06SPEAKERYes.

06:08SPEAKERPC Gamer had a tagline, which I'm not on the right page, but I believe...

06:14SPEAKERIt's mostly hidden behind this very ominous-looking Future Riot Cop guy.

06:19SPEAKERYeah, it was the world's best PC Games magazine.

06:21SPEAKERYes, that's what I can make out here. He's a very imposing-looking drum magazine on his

06:27SPEAKERfuture assault rifle.

06:28SPEAKERI think that's a planetside, new conglomerate soldier carrying a shotgun, if I recall right.

06:35SPEAKERYes, yes.

06:36SPEAKERSo yeah, we've done what, a couple of these episodes before?

06:41SPEAKERKind of a classic computer magazine in review sort of thing.

06:45SPEAKERWas the last one we did, was that issue one of Boot?

06:48SPEAKERWe did the issue one of Boot. We did the April 2000 issue of Max PC,

06:55SPEAKERwhich had the Windows 2000 review in it, I think.

06:58SPEAKERYes. Fantastic photo of you.

07:01SPEAKERYeah, we did... It's funny. I was talking the other day with a friend of the show,

07:05SPEAKERAdam Patrick Murray, over at PC World, about an old issue of Maximum PC. It was one of the,

07:10SPEAKER"Hey, we've done this for a long time" issues. There was a section in there that,

07:16SPEAKERwhoever arranged the section, picked multiple... It was like, "Hey, here's the stuff we loved.

07:22SPEAKERHere's the stuff we hated." It was all stuff I had written, or a lot of it was stuff I had written.

07:26SPEAKERSo, they're like, "Man, I love this clean start issue. It's the best one you've ever done."

07:30SPEAKERThat was one that I pitched to them. It's like, "Hey, you could do this thing where

07:32SPEAKERyou just make an image and you can reset your Windows install anytime you want."

07:38SPEAKERThen the other one was the MP3 one, which I wrote a pretty sizable chunk of,

07:42SPEAKERwhich people freaking hated, man. You're saying that your work in print was a

07:46SPEAKERland of contrasts? They both loved and hated me, Brad. But, we are here to talk not about

07:52SPEAKERMaximum PC and stuff that I worked on directly, but PC Gamer, which, like I said, 260 pages.

07:57SPEAKERAt that time, our standard book size at Future was 96 pages. So, a 260-page issue.

08:07SPEAKERI think we did a 40% ad edit split at that point, so it would be 40% content, 60% ads,

08:16SPEAKERonce you got above 150 pages.

08:18SPEAKERI thought that ratio was going to be reversed.

08:20SPEAKERWell, no. The staffs were small. Even then, it was 10 people.

08:26SPEAKERTen people making 200 pages a magazine. 150 pages a magazine was a lot.

08:34SPEAKERMainly, it was hard on the designers. Even if you could come up with some real

08:39SPEAKERscreenshot-driven stories that didn't require a lot of writing, the designers still had to lay out.

08:44SPEAKERYou still only had two designers to lay out a bazillion pages.

08:48SPEAKERWas there much layout work involved with ads? I assume the ad

08:52SPEAKERshowed up more or less ready to go, but was there still some amount of work?

08:56SPEAKERWas it quite literally just slotting it in on the relevant page?

09:00SPEAKERThe way we did it, and I assume this is the way most magazines work, we had a production

09:04SPEAKERteam that would take... There was an ad trafficking team that sold the ads. There was an ad sales team

09:08SPEAKERthat sold the ads, an ad trafficking team that called the vendors and was like, "Hey, you have

09:12SPEAKERto send us a PDF today. There's going to be a blank page that you paid for in the magazine."

09:17SPEAKERAnd then, there was the production side that would take all of the ad PDFs and all of the PDFs that

09:25SPEAKERwe gave them from the editorial, and they'd make sure that the color registration was right and all

09:29SPEAKERthat stuff, and print them, and we'd proof the whole thing to make sure that there was no offsets

09:36SPEAKERor anything weird. There was a bunch of stuff you looked for. Even with PDFs where the page

09:43SPEAKERgeneration should be perfect every time, you'd still occasionally run the PDF generator and it

09:49SPEAKERwould cut off the last word on a sentence because it would push it down to the new line and there

09:52SPEAKERwould be no space for the new line. Stuff like that. On the edit side, we only looked at the

10:01SPEAKEReditorial, if I remember it right. I don't remember ever looking at ads, I don't think,

10:06SPEAKERin the proofing process. Proofing a normal 100-page issue is like an hour and a half,

10:12SPEAKERtwo-hour job usually, going through all 50, 60 pages. Proofing this monster was probably

10:18SPEAKERsomebody's day. Right. Sure. This is the phenomenon that I was pretty well acquainted

10:24SPEAKERwith also from the console video game magazine side of the December issue of a given magazine

10:29SPEAKERessentially just becoming a phone book every year. There's a documentary about Vogue magazine called

10:35SPEAKER"The October Issue" that's a different industry, but it's the same idea. That's when the fashion

10:41SPEAKERads hit for the year, so they have an extra big book. Maybe it's the September issue when I think

10:49SPEAKERabout it. The point is, sometime in the fall, everybody buys a bunch of stuff. There's a crazy

10:55SPEAKERamount of words you have to make. As a result, you get weird, really interesting magazines that,

11:02SPEAKERI'm sure that the PC Gamer staff, I'm sure they pulled people from other magazines that didn't

11:06SPEAKERhave quite as much stuff going on that month, but it was just a crazy amount. They were busting ass

11:13SPEAKERthis entire time, I'm sure, to get this out. Also, just to say it up front, so it doesn't

11:18SPEAKERget buried somewhere, this is PC Gamer volume seven, number 12, which is December 2000.

11:24SPEAKERYeah, it's issue 79. It's December of 2000. The cover story is Web World War. It's about

11:31SPEAKERmassively multiplayer games. If you're counting from issue one, it's 79. We'll post a link to

11:36SPEAKERarchive.org in the show notes if you want to download this issue yourself.

11:41SPEAKERIt's fun to do this, because it's like a trip back in time, really, in so many ways. There's

11:47SPEAKERa lot of this. The cover story is about upcoming MMOs. At the time, in 2000, MMOs were Ultima Online,

11:55SPEAKEREverQuest, and then MUDs and MUD-adjacent things that never were really super commercially

12:02SPEAKERsuccessful. That was it. I guess Asheron's Call had come out by now, but we hadn't seen...

12:09SPEAKERDark Age of Camelot hadn't shipped yet. Shadowgate hadn't shipped yet. WOW! Not even mentioned.

12:16SPEAKERIt's a 40-page article, and WOW! doesn't get mentioned at all in here, which is incredible

12:22SPEAKERto me. Yeah. Do you want to go straight to the cover story first? We can do that if you want.

12:26SPEAKERWe can start right there. We're going to jump around a little bit, is the plan.

12:31SPEAKERYeah. Looking at this thing in this list of like, "Here's these hot upcoming..." Do they

12:35SPEAKEReven use the phrase "massively multiplayer online game"? I'm not sure that they do. Yeah,

12:41SPEAKERthey do. "Massively multiplayer game" is a phrase used here, but it's like, "Here's

12:46SPEAKERPlanetside. Here is Neverwinter Nights." Sorry, there's a lot of ads in here. "Here's a game

12:52SPEAKERcalled Big World Citizen Zero. Did that game ever ship?" I don't ever remember seeing that game ship.

12:57SPEAKERGalactic Command Online. Big World Citizen Zero was a weird cyberpunk-y thing that I really don't

13:06SPEAKERthink they ever shipped. Also, they have one of those good magazine boxes in here with each of

13:13SPEAKERthese. It has the relevant, the most important facts for each one. For this one, it's like,

13:19SPEAKERhow many simultaneous players? 10,000 to 20,000. Okay. I love that optimism.

13:27SPEAKERIf you search Big World Citizen Zero in Google, a Giant Bomb Wiki page is the first result,

13:32SPEAKERwhich says that it was announced in 2000, which is... That seems correct. ...tracks with this

13:37SPEAKERissue canceled in 2007. Wow. Development for seven years never came out. That's a lot of money.

13:46SPEAKERProject Entropia, this other game listed here. Bagley, remember that. I don't think that ever

13:52SPEAKERshipped either. There's a box. We talked about this a little bit before the show,

13:58SPEAKERbut there's a box in here that's like, "Hey, here are the big brands that don't have MMOs

14:02SPEAKERannounced or maybe have MMOs rumored that we don't really know anything about yet or that

14:08SPEAKERwouldn't talk to us for this story," including Star Wars Online, which I guess eventually became

14:12SPEAKERStar Wars Galaxies, which was the first Star Wars MMO. Yes. Earth and Beyond. I don't remember what

14:19SPEAKEREarth and Beyond was, Brad. Do you remember what Earth and Beyond was? I do not.

14:23SPEAKERThat was Westwood's MMO. Oh, wow. I mean, we all know what happened to Westwood, unfortunately.

14:29SPEAKERYeah, it wasn't good. EverQuest 2, which was just a rumor. Star Trek Online, which wasn't a thing,

14:36SPEAKERand Activision just had the license. Yeah. I mean, that obviously did eventually

14:40SPEAKERbecome a game, but it's certainly not from Activision. Earth and Beyond did ship, apparently.

14:45SPEAKERIt seems familiar to me. The best part is that they talk about Star Trek Online. They talk about,

14:51SPEAKERwhich, like I said, didn't exist. They talked about D&D, which there was no MMO at that point in.

14:56SPEAKERThey talked about Middle Earth because of these upcoming movies that are currently nearing

15:00SPEAKERcompletion in New Zealand. That's funny. They don't even mention Warcraft in here at all.

15:06SPEAKERYeah. Which was probably an active development. Yeah.

15:09SPEAKERYeah. Warcraft 3 hadn't even shipped and wouldn't for probably, I think,

15:13SPEAKERabout another 18 months after this. So, I mean, wow. Even remotely a thing at this point. But

15:19SPEAKERlooking through this, the two... Well, there's three. The two that jump out at me are Anarchy

15:24SPEAKEROnline and Dark Age of Camelot as MMOs that actually hit and really did something,

15:28SPEAKERand then Planetside also. Planetside was kind of a big deal.

15:34SPEAKERIt had problems, but it was a neat game. It was a first-person shooter MMO with a

15:40SPEAKERbunch of vehicles in a time when, I guess, Battlefield 1942 probably came out around

15:45SPEAKERthe same time it had vehicles as well, but vehicles were really novel in a large-scale,

15:50SPEAKERfirst-person combat game. For sure. Like Battlefield had them. Planetside

15:54SPEAKERhad them. Like the original version. Well, Halo, the shipping version of Halo also had vehicles,

15:59SPEAKERbut you remember Halo originally was announced as basically a Planetside or 1942-looking

16:05SPEAKERmultiplayer game? Yeah. Yeah. I think on this how many simultaneous players thing,

16:12SPEAKERI get the feeling that they asked the people how many players they were going to have,

16:17SPEAKERand everybody just made up a number that they were trying to guess what the biggest

16:21SPEAKERnumber would be and do slightly bigger than that. Sure. It's nuts.

16:25SPEAKERI mean, so much of video game development was just grabbing the seat of your pants at this time,

16:30SPEAKERright? I mean, 3D graphics were not that old. Online multiplayer was not that old. This is such

16:36SPEAKERa primitive period in a lot of ways. Yeah. These games were designed to be

16:40SPEAKERplayed on modems for the most part, right? EverQuest worked on a dial-up modem,

16:46SPEAKERon a 14.4 modem. You had all of this stuff. Planetside, we call it a first-person shooter,

16:52SPEAKERbut it was a first-person shooter in the same way that Mass Effect 1 was, in that you were rolling

16:58SPEAKERfor hits on each bullet that was shot. There was an accuracy component that was based on how your

17:05SPEAKERaim was, but there was still dice involved. Neverwinter Nights is in this as an MMO,

17:12SPEAKERwhich is interesting, because they were claiming at the time -- and I don't know if this shipped,

17:15SPEAKERbecause I never really played Neverwinter Nights -- but there would be a character vault where you'd

17:19SPEAKERcheck out your character when you started a session and then you'd check it back in at the end,

17:22SPEAKERand it would do the sniff test on if you'd done some weird power-leveling bullshit.

17:30SPEAKERIt was a wild time for multiplayer games. Yes, for sure. Neverwinter Nights came out

17:35SPEAKERas not an MMO, right? Yeah. I feel like it had an online component.

17:40SPEAKERYou could play with friends, but I don't think it was persistent. You couldn't run

17:45SPEAKERa server from Neverwinter Nights that had your campaign going in or whatever.

17:48SPEAKERRight. The big world of Citizen Zero.

17:56SPEAKERThe big takeaway from this whole... This was a time when a lot of people were running Voodoo cards

18:03SPEAKERstill. You maybe had a dedicated 3D card in addition to a Voodoo card, but we were just

18:11SPEAKERseeing Geforce 2s hit the market around this time. It was the time when you were like,

18:17SPEAKER"Should I run this in the glide mode, because it's going to be really fast at like 800x600,

18:22SPEAKERor I can run it in a window on my TNT2 or my Geforce, and that will be a little bit faster."

18:30SPEAKERYeah, there's an ad in here on page... Looks like about 10 in the print magazine.

18:36SPEAKERA co-marketing ad for both Baldur's Gate 2 and the Geforce 2 Ultra.

18:41SPEAKERWhich is kind of a weird pairing to me. I don't know that Baldur's Gate 2 was the

18:45SPEAKERmost demanding 3D game, but... Was it 3D at all?

18:48SPEAKERI'm sure it had some 3D elements, but here they refer to the Geforce 2 Ultra as the world's

18:55SPEAKERfastest GPU right here. The other thing that struck me...

19:00SPEAKERThe other thing that was funny about this MMO article before we moved on is everybody was

19:05SPEAKERtreating EverQuest like it was the peak that the market was ever going to be. They were talking

19:10SPEAKERabout getting hundreds of thousands of players and making tens of millions of dollars.

19:18SPEAKERThe angle that everybody was taking was, "Man, people who like to play EverQuest...

19:23SPEAKEROkay, for people who don't know, EverQuest was the first of the 3D MMOs. It was built for Glide

19:31SPEAKERoriginally, 3D, really, really low poly by today's standards. A character model had 400 polys or

19:37SPEAKERsomething on it. It looked like Quake, but you could get 100 people in an area, and you could

19:41SPEAKERwalk around towns. It was big, and the servers were persistent. It was also absolutely punishing,

19:47SPEAKERbecause they didn't have any kind of in-game UI, really, at all. There were no maps. There was no

19:53SPEAKERquest log. The spells didn't tell you what they did, so you had to figure it out through trial

20:01SPEAKERand error. Was that intentional?

20:03SPEAKEROh, yeah, that was intentional. That was not just an onboarding oversight. Was that some

20:07SPEAKERkind of eldritch mysticism thing of, "Oh, no, you're going to have to read the spell book and

20:13SPEAKERfigure out the arcane arts for yourself?" They build all of this as, "If you have to

20:19SPEAKERearn it, then it's going to feel better." This was Brad McQuaid's main theory of the game,

20:25SPEAKERwas, "If you suffer to do this, then it'll be more rewarding in the end."

20:31SPEAKEROn the one hand, I get where he's coming from. There is something to that idea. On the other

20:36SPEAKERhand, in a reality where everyone has a finite amount of time on the earth, I question the value

20:44SPEAKERof taking it as far as they did. I always knew of EverQuest as the MMO where you actually lost XP

20:49SPEAKERwhen you died.

20:51SPEAKEROh, yeah. You lost XP. You could lose all of your gear.

20:57SPEAKERThere were hell levels where every five or seven levels or something, you basically had to get as

21:03SPEAKERmuch XP as you'd gotten to get to that level again, which just forced you to always be grinding

21:12SPEAKERup. The first 10 levels were the hardest levels in the game, because you had no gear, you had no

21:16SPEAKERweapons. You were just punching rats for hours and hours and hours until you'd get a level up.

21:23SPEAKERAnd of course, the takeaway on this is that WoW came out three years later and just absolutely

21:31SPEAKERcleaned up because they made a game that was pleasant to play and that normal human beings

21:34SPEAKERcould play.

21:35SPEAKERYeah. They made EverQuest with all the rough stuff sanded down and with that kind of blizzard

21:40SPEAKERstyle of personality and polish at the time, and then produced a player-based orders of magnitude

21:47SPEAKERbigger than EverQuest.

21:49SPEAKERSo it's just like in the greater context, in the context of what we know now, looking back on

21:54SPEAKERthis, this article is hysterical because it's like everybody missed the point and all of these

22:00SPEAKERpeople got their asses kicked, basically.

22:02SPEAKERYeah. With like a couple of exceptions, like we said. But again, it was such a Wild West

22:06SPEAKERsituation that it's hard to fault anybody for not knowing what they were doing.

22:10SPEAKERYep.

22:12SPEAKERYou flagged this, I guess we'll call out some ads here and there. You flagged this classic

22:17SPEAKERHarman Kardon speaker set on page like five.

22:23SPEAKERIt's funny because it's the clear speakers.

22:27SPEAKERMy PDF viewer is loading very slowly right now.

22:30SPEAKERIt's funny because I've certainly never owned these. I don't know if I have even seen them

22:34SPEAKERin person, but I knew them instantly when you mentioned them. It's the really spacey

22:39SPEAKERlooking, very IMAX style of the day, like clear plastic, glass looking kind of thing.

22:46SPEAKERThey're called sound sticks, is what the name was. It is clear plastic. There's a subwoofer

22:51SPEAKERthat's all clear, so you can see the guts inside for the subwoofer and the speaker,

22:55SPEAKERand you can see the tube that makes the base and the whole thing. It's essentially an ad

23:01SPEAKERfor max speakers on page five of PC Gamer, which I think is really hysterical. I'm sure

23:07SPEAKERthat they reviewed them at some point for PC Gamer, and I can't imagine that they got

23:11SPEAKERa good review, but they also were the speakers you got when you bought speakers for an iMac

23:18SPEAKERfor a long time because Johnny I've really liked them. That cracks me up.

23:23SPEAKER- Apparently Harman Kardon making a version of the sound sticks to this day.

23:28SPEAKER- It's award-winning design. It is literally an award-winning design.

23:32SPEAKER- Yeah, you can get the sound sticks for set for $300 right now.

23:39SPEAKERStill look kind of silly.

23:41SPEAKER- The magazine came with a disc, and our friend of the show, Jeremy Williams,

23:46SPEAKERcalled out in the column for it that everything on the disc is a 3D game.

23:50SPEAKER- Oh, what page is this?

23:52SPEAKER- This is page eight of the magazine.

23:55SPEAKER- I didn't think to look that up. That is something we absolutely should discuss.

23:58SPEAKER- Oh, yes.

24:00SPEAKER- So the demos are NHL 2001 Homeworld Cataclysm, which was kind of the

24:08SPEAKERsequel/expanded mission pack for Homeworld, Delta Force Land Warrior, Dark Reign II,

24:15SPEAKERReach for the Stars, 4x4 Evolution, which was like a Colin McRae rally type thing,

24:20SPEAKERand Knolf, No One Lives Forever, and Panzer General 3 Scorched Earth.

24:25SPEAKER- No One Lives Forever is so good.

24:27SPEAKER- No One Lives Forever is a tragedy that that game is lost to IPL.

24:33SPEAKER- Especially Knolf II. Yes, what became of that franchise is indeed a tragedy.

24:39SPEAKERLooking at this intro for this disc is kind of an interesting

24:42SPEAKERcase study in how long it takes for breakthrough technology to truly penetrate the market,

24:49SPEAKERand 3D cards in this case.

24:51SPEAKERHe literally flat out starts here, "If you don't have a 3D accelerator yet,

24:55SPEAKERthere are plenty of classics waiting in the bargain bin."

24:58SPEAKERSo I guess we're like, "This is just about exactly four years since Gealquake," which

25:04SPEAKERcertainly to me is like the big breakthrough 3D game on PC that drove actual 3D hardware.

25:08SPEAKERSo four-ish years here where he's basically saying like, "All right,

25:12SPEAKERgive it the times if you haven't already."

25:14SPEAKER- And this is the time when if you bought a PC, there weren't really integrated graphics yet.

25:21SPEAKERSo you had to get a graphics card in even when you bought an HP or something,

25:25SPEAKERand the worst case would be that it has like an S3, which didn't really do a lot of 3D stuff.

25:32SPEAKERThe best case is you'd get a Riva 128 or a TNT2 or a G-Force or a Rage Pro or something like that.

25:39SPEAKERIt was a weird time though.

25:41SPEAKER- Yeah, indeed.

25:45SPEAKERMajestic is in here.

25:46SPEAKER- Did you ever play Majestic? Did you experience?

25:49SPEAKER- No, I heard plenty of tales about it, like it was kind of legendary for the

25:54SPEAKERkind of insane things that it did.

25:56SPEAKER- Yeah, so Majestic was an EA kind of real world game.

26:01SPEAKERIt was kind of part video game subscription service that you could sign up for.

26:07SPEAKERAnd you would be part of an ongoing story that wasn't...

26:12SPEAKERThere was no like Majestic app that you ran on your computer.

26:14SPEAKERYou basically signed up for this thing on a website

26:17SPEAKERand you put in your, I think AIM maybe or ICQ, probably AIM.

26:21SPEAKER- There are some screenshots of AOL Instant Messenger in here.

26:25SPEAKER- Yeah, AIM, your email address, your phone number, and your fax machine,

26:29SPEAKERbecause we all had fax machines back in 2000.

26:32SPEAKERAnd this ongoing story would unfold.

26:37SPEAKERIt was like an ARG where you were an active participant in the alternate reality game.

26:44SPEAKERThe game would text you, you could say, "Hey, don't text me at three o'clock in the morning

26:46SPEAKERbecause I don't want to freak out my spouse," or whatever, because we didn't have nighttime

26:50SPEAKERmode on our phones at that point.

26:52SPEAKERAnd most of us probably didn't have, most of us only had landlines.

26:55SPEAKERI think at one point they called and freaked out my wife.

26:59SPEAKERBecause you'd get breathy calls at one o'clock in the morning if you didn't tell it not to do that.

27:05SPEAKERYou'd get a lot of IMs from people.

27:06SPEAKERPeople would be like, "Hey, I need you to check this document.

27:08SPEAKERCan you go find it?

27:09SPEAKERI think it's on the server."

27:10SPEAKERAnd then you'd log into the server with the credentials they gave you,

27:13SPEAKERand you'd download something and you'd send it back to them.

27:15SPEAKERAnd it lasted like four months, I think, after it came out.

27:19SPEAKERBut there's a preview of that here.

27:20SPEAKER- I guess I shouldn't be surprised that it only lasted four months.

27:23SPEAKERIt's like everything that you have just described sounds inherently unsustainable.

27:27SPEAKER- It's one of those things that if you had a phone app and you were participating in it

27:32SPEAKERthrough a phone app, it feels like it would be much more manageable than it was calling

27:36SPEAKERand faxing and emailing you all the time.

27:38SPEAKER- Yeah, so you're totally right about that.

27:41SPEAKERThat's how you would do a thing like this these days.

27:43SPEAKERYou would just ship your own app that handled it.

27:45SPEAKERBut that really reveals the facade, though, right?

27:48SPEAKERThat you have to create this conduit for people to experience this living story.

27:53SPEAKERWhat seems so ambitious and bold about this thing is the fact that it

27:57SPEAKERused your existing communications channels to get to you.

28:01SPEAKERI know you give them over willingly.

28:02SPEAKERYou know it's coming, but still the idea of getting...

28:05SPEAKERBecause we use AOL Instant Messenger for work.

28:07SPEAKERI don't know about you guys, but the GameSpot, we use it constantly for work stuff.

28:12SPEAKERSo the idea of getting these clandestine messages from some shadowy operative

28:17SPEAKERright there in AIM or emails or faxing, you know what I mean?

28:20SPEAKERJust having that stuff in line with your real life sounds super exciting to me.

28:25SPEAKER- It was a trip.

28:28SPEAKERI think the place it fell down for me was...

28:30SPEAKERThe story was all about aliens and Majestic 12.

28:35SPEAKERIt was post X-Files conspiracy theory stuff.

28:39SPEAKERIt just wasn't written.

28:41SPEAKERThe performances were fine, but the writing wasn't great.

28:45SPEAKERAnd I feel like they were going to have a hard time keeping up with the story in an ongoing way.

28:50SPEAKERIt seemed like they were on a content treadmill that was probably unsustainable long-term.

28:54SPEAKER- Yeah, that's surprising.

28:55SPEAKER- Also, today if I signed up for this and I gave them my phone number and I started

28:59SPEAKERgetting random phone calls from random numbers, they would just go straight to voicemail.

29:02SPEAKERI'd never ever picked that up.

29:03SPEAKER- That is a very good point that this kind of wouldn't work in today's context.

29:07SPEAKER- Yeah, sadly.

29:08SPEAKER- Still a very cool idea though.

29:12SPEAKER- The idea was cooler than the execution, I will say.

29:16SPEAKER- Yes.

29:17SPEAKER- It's the unfortunate thing.

29:18SPEAKER- Actually, we could have tied this in with the other MMO stuff.

29:21SPEAKERThere is a separate little news piece here.

29:24SPEAKERI think you've got more experience with this than I do of Verant,

29:28SPEAKERwho originally was the company that would become Sony Online Entertainment after Sony bought them.

29:33SPEAKERVerant, the developer of EverQuest, viciously smacking down this EverQuest macros program.

29:40SPEAKERDid you ever use this?

29:41SPEAKER- No, I never used it, because they ban you for using it.

29:46SPEAKERThis is the situation.

29:47SPEAKERThe framing on the article in PC Gamer is interesting,

29:49SPEAKERbecause they put it as a "Hey, they're going after modders," but it was kind of a paid thing.

29:53SPEAKERThe weird thing about it is that EQ macros basically let you do things that you can do

29:59SPEAKERwith pretty much every programmable keyboard in the world now, just to have timing-based

30:04SPEAKERmacros for repetitive tasks. It also added the quality of life stuff that made WoW playable.

30:12SPEAKERIt added a compass and a map and a quest log.

30:15SPEAKERI think there's an overlay browser that you could pop up to search for stuff on the web

30:20SPEAKERif you wanted to look something up. It explicitly says, "Verant downloaded a copy, installed it."

30:30SPEAKERTwo hours later, they got a nasty gram from the lawyers saying, "Hey, you got to stop selling.

30:35SPEAKERThis is illegal software. You're breaking our terms of services." That was pretty much it.

30:40SPEAKERThat was the end of it. But it's all the stuff that was in WoW and Dark Age and the later MMOs

30:46SPEAKERthat made those games accessible and playable. I don't think EQ had a map in-game for another

30:53SPEAKERfive years after this, probably.

30:54SPEAKERThat's insane. That is completely insane. You just had to know where to go, man. You printed

31:01SPEAKERout the maps, and then you stuck them up above your computer. You knew the path through Lower

31:07SPEAKERGuk to get to the Keshia spawn, which meant you had to run and turn right and then turn left.

31:12SPEAKERThen you dropped down over a bridge and swam a little bit. Then if you ran out of stamina

31:16SPEAKERbefore you got to the next ledge, then you'd drown. You'd have to go back and get all your

31:19SPEAKERcrap later. It was a real pain.

31:21SPEAKERSpoken like somebody who very nearly lost their mind about 23 years ago.

31:24SPEAKERI played a lot of EverQuest.

31:27SPEAKERThat does, again, go to the thing we were talking about before. There's something Dark

31:30SPEAKERSouls-esque, though, about not having an in-game guide and having to learn things like that

31:34SPEAKERfrom other players. That is cool in concept, as unworkable as it usually tends to be, though.

31:40SPEAKERIf you talk to somebody who played a lot of EverQuest and ask them, depending on what

31:45SPEAKERcharacter they played, they'll have a better understanding of some areas of that world

31:49SPEAKERthan they probably do the town that they've lived in for the last 10 years.

31:53SPEAKERYeah. Yeah. Also, you may have touched on this a little bit, but this seems so incredibly

31:59SPEAKERshortsighted in light of how open to mods WoW was when it came out. WoW UI mods are a

32:06SPEAKERvery non-trivial part of WoW's success, right? The fact that players could extend the

32:12SPEAKERinterface of WoW.

32:14SPEAKERThe fact that your healers would have a great big on-screen pop-up that said, "Fire Heal

32:19SPEAKER1 now during raids." The fact that EQ had this guy who wrote the software for them for

32:28SPEAKERfree that gave them the tools that would have made their game more accessible to normal

32:32SPEAKERhuman beings, and then they chose to tell them to fuck off instead of just buying them

32:37SPEAKERand making them part of the team is really telling.

32:41SPEAKEROr even taking that as a cue that, "Hey, maybe we should open this thing up more and

32:44SPEAKERlet people do more with it." I mean, it is a fine line between kosher player assists

32:51SPEAKERand straight-up cheating. I get being a little skittish about walking that line.

32:58SPEAKERSo part of the problem with EverQuest is that it came from a world of mud developers and

33:07SPEAKERpeople who were building text-based games that were multiplayer and were intentionally

33:11SPEAKERvery difficult. I think that focus on difficulty skewed their entire perspective on what these

33:20SPEAKERgames could be and limited the audience as a result.

33:24SPEAKERThis isn't a hot take, by the way. This is pretty well established at this point.

33:29SPEAKERWhat else have we got?

33:30SPEAKERI've got this editorial. It's more of a report called The Incredible Shrinking PC Box.

33:42SPEAKERThis seemed like such a big deal then, and then it only mattered for five years.

33:46SPEAKERYeah. Did it? Because I'm thinking back to... PC game boxes used to be huge.

33:50SPEAKERReally, really large.

33:51SPEAKERRight up until around this time. I guess I didn't realize at the time this was an actual

33:56SPEAKEReffort between the IEMA, which I've always wondered what that was, the Interactive

34:00SPEAKEREntertainment Merchant Association, because I've seen that acronym many times, between

34:04SPEAKERthem and a bunch of... Well, not a bunch, but some big publishers like Activision and Infogrames

34:11SPEAKERto shrink PC boxes.

34:13SPEAKERThis is on page 47, by the way.

34:14SPEAKEROn page 47. There was, right around this time, if you were buying PC games in a store like I was,

34:21SPEAKERyou saw all the PC boxes shrink down to this, I guess I would describe as a large paperback

34:28SPEAKERsize box shape, would you say?

34:30SPEAKERIt is a DVD case that's 3D, DVD cases thick.

34:34SPEAKERDoes it actually match the footprint of a...

34:35SPEAKERYeah, it matches the footprint of a DVD case.

34:37SPEAKERI didn't realize that. Obviously makes sense.

34:44SPEAKERIt's funny the way they present this. My understanding was because Walmart said,

34:47SPEAKER"Hey, we're not going to carry big PC boxes anymore." This was during a time when it was

34:52SPEAKERhard to get PC games stocked in big box stores and mass market retail stores.

34:59SPEAKERThe feeling I always had was that they had to do this if they wanted stuff to continue being

35:03SPEAKERplaced there, and that Deer Hunter and Cabela's Big Game and all those games that were selling

35:08SPEAKERenormous volumes at Walmart and more traditional retail stores were shrinking so they could get

35:17SPEAKERmore space in the space that they'd purchased inside the stores. The interesting thing to me

35:24SPEAKERis that they have quotes from a bunch of different people from people at Microsoft and Activision,

35:30SPEAKERa bunch of different places, and they're all really gung-ho about the smaller packaging size,

35:36SPEAKERwhile at the same time saying, "Hey, the amount of money you spend on packaging and distribution

35:41SPEAKERversus product development is nil, so it's not like you're going to save money on games

35:45SPEAKERbecause of the smaller boxes." It's just that literally they can fit more titles onto the same

35:52SPEAKERamount of shelf space at the stores, so therefore everybody will sell more copies as a result,

35:57SPEAKERI think was the theory. Yeah. The PlayStation 2 had just come out

36:01SPEAKERprobably around the time this issue went to press. The GameCube and Xbox were not that far off. They

36:06SPEAKERstraight up site in here like, "Hey, the shelves are getting crowded at retail with these extremely

36:11SPEAKERpopular new consoles coming out." Yeah. PC game boxes were absurdly big for what was in there.

36:19SPEAKERUnless it was like a Falcon 4.0 with a phone volume. Of course, in that case,

36:24SPEAKERthe phone book size manual didn't even fit in the box. Generally, it was a modest manual and a CD

36:30SPEAKERaround this time, right? Yeah. It wasn't very much after this that you would get a flap that would

36:39SPEAKERfit inside the CD case and a big bunch of cardboard that kept the CD from flapping around inside there,

36:45SPEAKERand then a mailer that let you send off to join the fan club or get your warranty or some nonsense.

36:52SPEAKERI like the quote from Microsoft, which says, "Microsoft believes a standard-sized package

36:57SPEAKERwould be good for the industry, but we don't necessarily think it's a DVD-sized box.

37:02SPEAKERMicrosoft prefers a box that has more room for manuals and other extras."

37:06SPEAKERIn fact, Microsoft never shipped another extra again.

37:10SPEAKERYeah. Do you miss all the stuff that used to come in the boxes?

37:14SPEAKERKind of. Do you miss the steel cases and all that nonsense?

37:17SPEAKERI really need to go through my parents' basement because I'm pretty sure I've still got a lot of

37:21SPEAKERold video game boxes down there in their very large cavernous basement.

37:26SPEAKERI think the only one I bought that I was really excited about was the Quake 3 tin copy.

37:31SPEAKERI definitely still have the metal Quake 3 box down there somewhere. I'm pretty sure I've also

37:35SPEAKERgot the really weird, askew Gabriel Knight box. It was like kind of two triangles sort of bolted

37:41SPEAKERtogether, if you remember what that looked like. I bought Wing Commander 3 and it came in a film

37:45SPEAKERreel with a t-shirt. Interesting.

37:49SPEAKERI bought that one literally because it was the one that they had on sale at Sam's Club,

37:54SPEAKERand it was like the same price as the one at the other place in town, and I was at Sam's Club.

38:00SPEAKERAlso interesting to see the evolution of PC retail here because we're really not that many years out

38:04SPEAKERfrom the beginnings of the declarations of the death of PC gaming.

38:10SPEAKERIt had happened by then. We were hearing about it by end of 2000.

38:14SPEAKERRemember right before Steam or around the time Steam came about, people were

38:18SPEAKERessentially declaring the PC to be a dead platform?

38:22SPEAKERThere are ads for Electronics Boutique in here when it was about to get absorbed by Gamespot,

38:27SPEAKERor buying an EB. Also, we're three years from Steam kind of quietly rolling out,

38:36SPEAKERand then five from Steam being the only way you could get PC games at that point.

38:41SPEAKERThis box initiative wasn't too long before these new, smaller, more efficient PC boxes

38:50SPEAKERwould just be a thing with a CD in that it pre-installs a Steam download,

38:54SPEAKERso you didn't have to download the whole thing.

38:57SPEAKERIt's a weird time. On the next page, they have this PCG release meter. I look at this, and I

39:02SPEAKERjust see, "Oh, look. There's four columns. Title, publisher, date, and prognosis. Title, publisher,

39:10SPEAKERdate, really useful information. The prognosis, living hell to produce for the staff."

39:17SPEAKERWell, because each one is cheeky.

39:20SPEAKEROh, sure. Yes.

39:21SPEAKERRight? It's not like, "Yeah, this is going to happen." No, it's not. Everyone has to be clever

39:26SPEAKERin addition to have a little bit of a take, and there's like 30 of them. Some poor bastard sat

39:35SPEAKERhere and just was like, "Okay, I need a pun for the settlers for settling in soon."

39:42SPEAKERA game called Sheep from a company called Empire, which is coming out about now.

39:48SPEAKEROh, that's terrible.

39:49SPEAKERYes.

39:50SPEAKERReally terrible.

39:52SPEAKERMagazines.

39:53SPEAKERMagazines. Magazines were weird, man. I miss magazines. Not so much I want to go work on one.

39:58SPEAKERYes. You want to talk about the gift guide a little bit since we're in the holiday window

40:03SPEAKERhere? Of course, there's a gift guide with such hits as the Creative Nomad Jukebox.

40:07SPEAKERWhat page is this on, Bren?

40:09SPEAKERThat is page 119.

40:11SPEAKERI hate gift guides. Can I just say that?

40:13SPEAKERI don't know if we've ever... I've never participated in one, although every year

40:17SPEAKERsince I have been doing this, you get a bunch of emails from PR reps saying like,

40:23SPEAKER"Hey, if you're doing a gift guide, you might want to consider these."

40:26SPEAKERDo you know who loves gift guides?

40:27SPEAKERWho loves gift guides?

40:28SPEAKERPR reps.

40:29SPEAKERYeah, I can see it. Yeah, I get it. Look, they have a product that came out as much

40:33SPEAKERas 11 months ago. It's a chance to get it back in the news again.

40:36SPEAKERWell, and it's also, it's like the dads and grads. There are several things that land every year.

40:42SPEAKERFucking dads and grads.

40:44SPEAKERThat people love to make features around because there's a lot of potential advertising revenue.

40:50SPEAKERDads and grads and holiday gift guides are both them. This is especially funny because

40:55SPEAKERthis holiday gift guide, this magazine would have come out in probably late September or early

41:00SPEAKEROctober at the absolute latest. That means that this holiday gift guide doesn't have whatever

41:05SPEAKERactually came out in October or November that people were interested in. This is a pretty good

41:12SPEAKERholiday. I hate gift guides because often they're just an excuse for people to call shit in that

41:19SPEAKERthey want to fuck around with and then send back and not have to pay for with their own money.

41:23SPEAKERThis one doesn't have a whole lot of that, which is nice. This also has the real vibe of, "Oh,

41:30SPEAKERshit, they sold another 30 pages of ads. We have to come up with something real fast."

41:34SPEAKERThey went to the mall and did a photo shoot where they acted like they were stealing stuff from the

41:38SPEAKERmall. That's a good afternoon right there. You hit the food court, get lunch, shoot a feature photo

41:46SPEAKERshoot and call it a day. That's the magazine life. I was always jealous. We spent a lot of

41:53SPEAKERtime making weird photo shoots, I will say that. I can see that. Not one but two MP3 players in here.

41:59SPEAKERSo I had that Nomad. That was a good-ass MP3 player right up until the iPod came out and

42:02SPEAKERyou were like, "Wow, that seems like it'd be easier to find your music on."

42:09SPEAKERYou said you wanted to call out the Microsoft Sidewinder Strategic Commander?

42:14SPEAKERDo you know what this thing is? No, I haven't. It looks like a mouse,

42:17SPEAKERbut apparently it is something very different. Imagine you were really into RTS games,

42:23SPEAKERtop-down games. Imagine you had a device that rested your left hand on. It was like a mouse,

42:31SPEAKERbut for scrolling around the world. You could bind that top thing with the buttons. It looks

42:38SPEAKERlike a mouse, except for the bottom part of it stayed fixed on the desk and the top part of it

42:42SPEAKERwas like a slider. It would slide on two X and Y axes. Then it had, I think, eight or ten buttons

42:48SPEAKERon the top and a scroll wheel and a couple of thumb buttons. You could put your selection

42:55SPEAKERmacros and stuff on the buttons on the top. You have two levels of those. You could make new ones

43:00SPEAKERand trigger the ones that you've recorded. You could slide that thing around so you could scroll

43:04SPEAKERaround your screen real fast. Then, StarCraft came out and it immediately didn't have enough buttons

43:10SPEAKERfor all the macros that people did and all the micro stuff that people did.

43:14SPEAKERI think the only thing that really ever supported it super good were the Microsoft strategy games

43:18SPEAKERlike Rise of Nations and Age of Empires. Look, I get it. To this day,

43:26SPEAKERI'm sitting here trying to program little macros on this Logitech.

43:30SPEAKERI just look at it because it had so much plastic, so much injection-molded plastic,

43:36SPEAKERand each of those molds probably cost $150,000 to make at the scale they made this thing.

43:45SPEAKERThey spent so much money on this hardware business, and none of it worked until the Xbox 360.

43:50SPEAKERI mean, maybe they couldn't have gotten to the Xbox 360 gamepad without doing all this other stuff.

43:57SPEAKERMaybe that's the takeaway.

43:58SPEAKERYeah. Microsoft hardware took some swings, let's say.

44:03SPEAKERI wouldn't have let them put that Microsoft Sidewinder Force Feedback 2 ad

44:07SPEAKERdirectly across from the strategic commander on the page.

44:11SPEAKERThat's one of the things we looked at when we were proofing at the end of the day. We'd

44:13SPEAKERswitch the ads around occasionally if it was too close to something that was the same publisher,

44:18SPEAKERsame company. No, but I wouldn't have noticed that until you pointed it out,

44:21SPEAKERbut it is a bit conspicuous. What's even more conspicuous is that

44:27SPEAKERpage 121 is a Sidewinder Force Feedback 2 ad. On 125 is the Sidewinder Force Feedback 2

44:35SPEAKERrecommended as part of this gift guide. Well, now, I will tell you,

44:39SPEAKERthat is probably... The reason I wouldn't have let it happen is because this was an accident.

44:43SPEAKERWe wouldn't have known what was in the ads at all.

44:46SPEAKERYeah, that's fair. GameSpot was the same way. We were supposed to very strictly have no idea what

44:50SPEAKERwas going on with ad sales and placement and everything.

44:53SPEAKERYeah, so we would literally move the ads around if it looked too shady. I would have probably

44:58SPEAKERdisallowed that Sidewinder ad from being in the middle of this article if they hadn't sold it as

45:06SPEAKERbeing in the thing. If there was time, I probably would have cut it from the product list if they

45:11SPEAKERcouldn't kill the ad, if they couldn't move the ad. That's fair. Let's see. You're talking about

45:18SPEAKERStar Trek Voyager Elite Force? God, that was an incredible video game. The premiere review of the

45:24SPEAKERmonth here? The PC Gamer would always pick... Hold on. Before we do that, can we call out the ad?

45:31SPEAKERTalk about what a better time we are on page 132. There's an ad for Unreal Tournament Game

45:38SPEAKERof the Year edition. Oh, mm-hmm. Sure.

45:42SPEAKERIt looks like it's an x-ray of a skeleton, and it says, "Our new Game of the Year edition

45:48SPEAKERrequires some special equipment, and in between the skeleton's legs are two enormous metal balls."

45:53SPEAKERYes, like cannonballs, let's say. They look like small cannonballs,

45:56SPEAKERyeah. It's a bit much. Kind of an arrow when balls of steel passed for a joke.

46:02SPEAKERYeah, that was clever. Anyway, yeah, so the review, the lead review, Star Trek Voyager,

46:07SPEAKERthis was their featured review. They were saying this is our favorite game this month, basically.

46:10SPEAKERDespite spending probably the first three paragraphs at least saying, "Yeah, we get it.

46:16SPEAKERIt's a Star Trek game, but actually, trust us, it's amazing." But I mean, remember, at this point,

46:23SPEAKERlicensed games were bad, except for an occasional Star Wars game.

46:27SPEAKERStar Trek games in particular, maybe not the best pedigree.

46:30SPEAKERA lot of adventure games that were kind of iffy. Ah, 25th anniversary has got... There's

46:34SPEAKERsomething to it. I don't know. That was after this, though, wasn't it?

46:38SPEAKERNo, that was before. That was before. That was square in the '90s. '90s VGA point-and-click

46:43SPEAKERcraze. Yeah, that sounds about right. And we also have the Riker plays poker

46:47SPEAKERone or whatever that game was. No, no, that was just Jonathan Frakes on his own.

46:52SPEAKEROh, okay. Making awful faces into a poker camera. Elite Force is a Quake 3 engine game,

46:59SPEAKERif people haven't played it. Yeah.

47:00SPEAKERSo it's basically just a shooter with Star Trek skins on it, but it was very good.

47:06SPEAKERBut also, it did... You were like a squad. So it was a squad game and you had bots that played.

47:11SPEAKERThere were bots that came along with you and they managed to make that work in a way that wasn't

47:15SPEAKERannoying, unlike every other game that tried that up until this point.

47:19SPEAKERYeah. I'm selling it short, actually, because actually it's been ages since I played it. But

47:24SPEAKERthere are some non-combat story sequences on the ship as well. I think part of the appeal was a

47:30SPEAKERlittle bit of wish fulfillment of you get to walk around on a star ship and use the transporter.

47:36SPEAKERYeah, they did the stuff that made it feel like Star Trek. The one knock against it,

47:40SPEAKERI think, is that all of the away missions are shooty away missions. And there were no

47:45SPEAKERDarmok style, let's go chat with people for a while, away missions.

47:50SPEAKERDefinitely still a shooter. Definitely still a Quake engine game, but...

47:54SPEAKERAlso, they made a bunch of guns that just felt like reskins of Quake guns.

47:59SPEAKERBut it was fun. You could phaser people, they'd disappear. I mean, it worked out okay.

48:04SPEAKERThere was Deathmatch too, as I recall.

48:08SPEAKERProbably one of Raven's last games as a studio before they just started making...

48:12SPEAKERWell, I think they made Elite Force 2.

48:14SPEAKERYeah. Well, I don't know for sure if they made... And Elite Force 2 got made. Yes,

48:18SPEAKERI don't know if Raven did it. They probably did. But they were making their own games for probably

48:23SPEAKERanother decade or so after this, before they started doing Call of Duty.

48:30SPEAKERThe last thing they made was that Russian time travel game.

48:33SPEAKERSingularity, which is great. I always bring this up because I loved Raven back in the day.

48:39SPEAKERMe too.

48:39SPEAKERIt's a bummer. It was always a bummer to me that they kind of stopped making their own games.

48:44SPEAKERHexen was a hell of a game.

48:46SPEAKEREredict 2, also a hell of a game.

48:48SPEAKERYeah, yeah.

48:51SPEAKERYeah, it's funny because they... So there's a bunch of places in this magazine,

48:55SPEAKERit's the thing that we did at Future where the editorial team could talk about things

48:59SPEAKERthat they liked about stuff and what they were doing that month and things like that.

49:03SPEAKERAnd the two things that they talked about this month were Star Trek Elite Force and the firearms

49:09SPEAKERarms mod for Half-Life. It was in that first wave of mods that were really successful,

49:17SPEAKERlike Day of Defeat and Counter Strike. I think it was pre-Day of Defeat, post-Counter Strike,

49:22SPEAKERpost-TFC probably. And it was a push-pull, but it was all real guns. It was an insane number of

49:30SPEAKERguns, as I remember. And all the maps were seven capture points long and one team started at one

49:36SPEAKERend and one team started at the other. And you literally would just fight up and down this

49:40SPEAKERcorridor-shaped battlefield until you got all the way back to one person's space or all the

49:44SPEAKERway forward to the others. That sounds fun.

49:47SPEAKERIt was good. It's a good mod.

49:51SPEAKERLet's see, there's a review of Metal Gear Solid for Windows in here.

49:55SPEAKERI can't imagine that they liked that very much.

49:58SPEAKERI give it a 79%. That's better than I would have expected.

50:04SPEAKERIt sounds like it's functional. It sounds like it ran at higher resolution,

50:09SPEAKERbut otherwise it's just a PlayStation game. They didn't do anything to textures or anything like

50:12SPEAKERthat, which is their big complaint. No force feedback support, but of course controller

50:17SPEAKERstuff was not exactly standardized at this point. It was an unfortunate time for this game to come

50:23SPEAKERout. When did it come out for the PlayStation? It was three or four years old. Yeah, two or

50:28SPEAKERthree years old. 98. It was a couple of years old at this point.

50:31SPEAKERSo I was going to say the other thing that's weird about this game is that the dev cycle,

50:36SPEAKERwhen they talk about games taking a long time to come out, they're talking about a

50:39SPEAKERtwo-year dev cycle, which is hilarious now. Very quaint. A lot of the stuff's very quaint.

50:45SPEAKEROne thing I'll mention, if anybody listening has played MGS on Windows, I want to know,

50:50SPEAKERthey mentioned it here specifically, the Psycho Mantis fight from PlayStation where

50:53SPEAKERyou have to, you know, famously unplug your controller, put it in port two.

50:57SPEAKERWait, really? Oh yeah, wait.

50:59SPEAKERI didn't have a PlayStation, dude. You never played Metal Gear Solid on the,

51:01SPEAKERoh my God. So, okay. I'm going to go and tell you, this has happened once before,

51:07SPEAKERBrad. Oh no, I'm literally about to say this is another Aerith situation.

51:11SPEAKERI've never played any Metal Gears except for the very first one on the NES.

51:14SPEAKERI mean, look. Oh no, that's not true. I played Ground Zeroes.

51:18SPEAKERNo, no. What's the one that was like the demo before?

51:21SPEAKERGround Zeroes is the kind of short prelude to Phantom Pain.

51:26SPEAKERThat was fine. I played a little bit of 4, but I got to the guy that was pooping his

51:29SPEAKERpants all the time. I was like, that's probably, this isn't for me.

51:32SPEAKERIt's Metal Gear. That'll happen. Well, you never played Phantom Pain?

51:35SPEAKERNever played any of them. I played the first, I played the Corridor of Phantom Pain like four

51:39SPEAKERtimes where you walk down that long ass corridor and you have to get this like, this is boring.

51:43SPEAKERYou should get to the open world. If you like stealth games, if you like sandboxy stealth games,

51:48SPEAKERlike you should play the Phantom Pain. It's so good. I genuinely think it is the best stealth

51:53SPEAKERsandbox ever made. It's fantastic. The thing I was going to say here, this is I'm sorry, man.

52:01SPEAKERIt was literally over 25 years ago now. Spoiling some stuff.

52:06SPEAKERWhen you fight Psycho Mantis, who was the kind of clairvoyant or psycho,

52:12SPEAKERoh my God, like telepathic, I guess I should say, a member of the elite commando squad

52:16SPEAKERyou're fighting in that fight. He basically takes control away and he doesn't really say

52:21SPEAKERthis exactly, but you have to figure out that you have to plug controller and plug into controller

52:25SPEAKERport two to get control back. Wow. Could you do that without jacking up your controllers on

52:30SPEAKERthe PlayStation? Oh yeah. It was just the PC. You could have like, you could have fried something

52:35SPEAKERwith a game because you were still using the mini port on the game card. This was, I mean, you know,

52:40SPEAKERthe custom, custom controller ports. I don't think there was any negotiation going on with

52:44SPEAKERcontrollers and back in those days, like if it was in the port, it was working. That makes sense.

52:48SPEAKERAnyway, that was a cool gimmick. There was another part where he read some of the save files on your

52:53SPEAKERmemory card and commented on the other games you'd been playing. Wait, really? Yes. It was mind

52:58SPEAKERblowing. Both of those things were mind blowing. Anyway, this reviewer calls out that while those

53:03SPEAKERthings obviously can't be in this game for technical reasons, they came up with a PC

53:07SPEAKERequivalent of those gimmicks. And I really want to know this was translated to the PC

53:15SPEAKERwithout the need to unplug your controller. I won't give away the secret, but I must applaud

53:18SPEAKERMicrosoft on a job well done. I really want to know. I really want to know what they came up

53:22SPEAKERwith to replace those gimmicks. This is like black and white looking at your outlook file and pulling

53:27SPEAKERnames of people that you emailed for your villagers. Did it really do that? Yeah. Scraped

53:31SPEAKERyour outlook file. That's wild. It's maybe a little invasive. I mean, in these days we would

53:37SPEAKERprobably have a problem with that. But back then we were like, man, that is fucking cool. I mean,

53:40SPEAKERI would have thought that was very cool at the time, but like reading your save files from other

53:45SPEAKERgames is one thing, but look at your email. Well, but also the game wasn't connected to the internet

53:50SPEAKERin any way that was appreciable. So it was like it all lived inside the sandbox, I guess. Do you

53:55SPEAKERtrust Peter Molyneux with your Rolodex? Not anymore. That's not for what he did to that kid.

54:00SPEAKERYeah. Milo. Poor Milo. Poor Milo. Crimson Skies is in this. Speaking of games I've never played.

54:09SPEAKEROh really? Yeah. Oh, that's a banger. It's a really good game, Brad. Have you never played

54:14SPEAKERany of them or did you not play the original one? None of them. The one for Xbox 360, I think?

54:21SPEAKERIt was an early Xbox live one that was quite good. Oh, is this not that? I mean, this is a year

54:26SPEAKERbefore the Xbox came out, so I guess it couldn't be. I didn't realize there was a different Crimson

54:30SPEAKERSkies on PC before that. Crimson Skies, like many great Xbox franchises, was originally a

54:36SPEAKERpersonal computer video game. I did not know that. That's wild. This one, look,

54:42SPEAKERthe infrastructure for online multiplayer was not what you wanted back then. It was pretty good when

54:49SPEAKERit came out. The Xbox version's superior. The Giant Citizen Kabuto ads just before the Metal

54:55SPEAKERGear Solid review. Man, that was a high, high ambition game that completely fizzled. I don't

55:01SPEAKERthink I ever played that or could really even tell you what it was about. I certainly remember the

55:05SPEAKERname. It was like a three, a three faction game where there were like monsters and mermaid ladies

55:13SPEAKERand like alien space suit guys, halo men. Sure. And you had to, you had to,

55:20SPEAKERlook, I think you interacted with each other mostly with shooting, but I don't remember specifics.

55:25SPEAKERDude, that's a seven page ad. It was not very good. That's a seven page ad.

55:30SPEAKERHow do you think, look, you don't get to a 260 page book without a few seven page ads.

55:34SPEAKERThat's fair. I mean, there's another ocean of ads between the game reviews and the

55:40SPEAKERGreg Veederman tech section. Cause of course we need to, we need to look at the hardware of the

55:46SPEAKERday. There were also like 20 game reviews here. Like it's, it's a lot of game reviews.

55:50SPEAKERYeah. I mean, this, this thing's not all ads. It's just the ads are quite substantial, but

55:55SPEAKERanyway, what do we have in the hardware section here?

55:58SPEAKERLeads with some Dell laptops of all things. Laptops are exciting. You can play games on

56:04SPEAKERlaptops at this point. This was, this is the, this was the last wave of laptops before they

56:09SPEAKERshipped those XPS machines as big chunky XPS machines. Okay. We'll see what do we got for

56:13SPEAKERgraphics in these things. They're all ATI rage mobility 128. That would have been it. That's a,

56:19SPEAKERthat's a rage sub rage pro GPU. Probably. I'm going to assume those were not especially

56:25SPEAKERcapable. The quake three numbers were 28 frames per second at 640 by 480 32 bit color though.

56:34SPEAKERThat's if you did 16 bit color, you'd double your frame rate. Basically. That's a trip.

56:39SPEAKERThat's something, you know, it was probably enough to play your Warcraft and so forth.

56:46SPEAKERI think, I think these would have been like Warcraft and, and, and red command and conquer

56:52SPEAKERred alert machines like Diablo stuff like that. Diablo probably would have been fine.

56:56SPEAKERYeah. Oh, the side runner force feedback too makes another appearance.

57:01SPEAKERWeird. Oh, it's funny how it just keeps popping up everywhere.

57:05SPEAKERIt is a really good, it was like arguably the best joystick of the era. I think so.

57:11SPEAKERYeah. No, I believe it below that. This is one page one 90. I was, I was surprised. So

57:15SPEAKERwe mentioned the G force two ultra is being advertised in this magazine. Here is a review

57:20SPEAKERof the creative labs, annihilator two ultra. Yeah. I don't, I don't know how I had completely

57:25SPEAKERforgotten the creative labs made graphics cards. What happened to that?

57:29SPEAKERSo my 3DFX voodoo card was from by diamond multimedia, but my voodoo two was a creative

57:35SPEAKERlabs card that I believe it had a serial number that was like 0 0 0 0 0 3 2 or something like

57:43SPEAKERthat. Yeah. I got rid of it a few years ago, but actually were those sold under the 3d blaster

57:49SPEAKERname or it was 3d blaster or something else. 3d blaster was a, was an, it wasn't an ATI card.

57:56SPEAKERIt was a different, I want to say that was a verge card, but I can't remember. It was

57:59SPEAKERcalled the voodoo something. Maybe you're right. I'm trying to find

58:04SPEAKERvoodoo blaster or something. It's surprisingly hard to find.

58:08SPEAKERPretty Google stuff is hard to find. It turns out on stuff like that. Actually

58:14SPEAKERthe annihilator two ultra was a G force two, but this was the end of creative labs being in

58:19SPEAKERgraphics pretty much like they stopped around before G force three came out. They weren't

58:24SPEAKERreally making GPUs. I wouldn't do any idea why. Cause like, I mean, I, this was probably

58:28SPEAKERtoo early for them to see the end of sound cards coming. I mean, sound cards aren't totally done,

58:33SPEAKERbut you know, sound cards as, as the mass mainstream business that sustained them for

58:39SPEAKERso long, like this was probably a little too early for them to see that coming to an end.

58:44SPEAKERMy guess is that it was too expensive for the margin. So they were getting out of it.

58:47SPEAKERSure. I mean, I mean like shit that's, that's, that's essentially the reason that EVGA cited

58:52SPEAKERlike a last year when they got out of GPUs. Yeah. Like if you look at it, this was around the time

58:57SPEAKERthey bought Cambridge soundworks and started making speakers. And I bet that the margins on

59:01SPEAKERspeakers were really, really good. And the margins on video cards were really, really bad. And you

59:06SPEAKERcould sell a pair of speakers for like four years and you could sell a video card for about nine

59:10SPEAKERmonths. Yes, indeed. And the product development was probably about the same. Hold on. How much of

59:18SPEAKERthat card sold for 500 bucks US? Wait, did it really? Yeah. It was the F4L1. But that's like,

59:24SPEAKERthat is like the absolute top of the line graphics card at this time. That was, yeah,

59:29SPEAKERthat was probably the fastest thing you could get. And it was DDR. The ad set, the world's

59:34SPEAKERfastest graphics. I think it's DDR Ram, which was brand new at the time. Yes. So remember,

59:41SPEAKERthe GeForce One shipped a version with DDR. But it was late. That was like their mid,

59:45SPEAKERmid refresh. Yeah. The, the original GeForce shipped with SDR memory and then a DDR version

59:50SPEAKERcame later. Yeah. The DDR, the DDR GeForcees were the first thing, first video cards I reviewed

59:55SPEAKERat Maximum PC. I got, I got on a weird bad cycle with Nvidia cards where I was always buying the

1:00:01SPEAKERearly gen version of stuff back then. So I never owned a GeForce Two. I had a TNT. Okay. I had a,

1:00:08SPEAKERI had a TNT and never got a TNT Two. I bought a GeForce One SDR. You wanted a TI when you got to

1:00:14SPEAKERthose GeForce Threes. So I had a GeForce One SDR, never got a DDR version or GeForce Two

1:00:21SPEAKERor any of that stuff. Or GeForce Three. I didn't get another card until the GeForce Four. Anyway.

1:00:27SPEAKERYeah. It was, it was, it was a weird time. Yeah. So there's one, there's one,

1:00:31SPEAKERWiedermann's got like a Q and A here. Q and A, look, if you needed to pay to pad out a few

1:00:37SPEAKERpages of the magazine, Q and A was always a good way to do it. But it's like, it's like glorified

1:00:40SPEAKERtech support, basically people just writing in with questions and problems about PCs.

1:00:45SPEAKERYep. But I have to, I have to read this first question cause it was just

1:00:50SPEAKERa lot of parallels. So now a question from Joe Krah. I've been building myself a budget gaming

1:00:57SPEAKERsystem in my spare time and I need to pick up a video card. I'm trying to decide between Nvidia's

1:01:02SPEAKERGeForce Two MX and 3FX's Voodoo Four. Both of these cards can be purchased for around $150,

1:01:09SPEAKERbut I've not been able to find any articles comparing the two. I mean, I know he said

1:01:12SPEAKERbudget here. Those are not top of the line, but still the idea of competitive graphics cards for

1:01:16SPEAKER$150. Well, they were those just to be clear, those would have been probably 640 by 480 or

1:01:23SPEAKER800 by 600 GPUs at that point. Obviously not top of the line, but still like just the idea of any

1:01:28SPEAKERGPU for 150. I mean, I know like the Intel Arc cards and like some of the lower end AMD stuff

1:01:33SPEAKERnow is trying to sort of recapture that price territory, but still like the idea of the most

1:01:40SPEAKERexpensive GPU on the market being 499 and your average card being 150 to 200. So quaint.

1:01:48SPEAKERThey were 400. That was the case until probably the 1080, right? Or 980. Something like that.

1:01:53SPEAKERYeah. I think you're right actually.

1:01:56SPEAKERLike we went from 500 to 600 bucks cause the OEMs would put fast, more memory on or put

1:02:01SPEAKERstupid coolers on or whatever. And then all of a sudden the price jumped up a lot of about five

1:02:06SPEAKERyears ago, six years ago. Yeah. It's inflated so much in the last few years that it's hard to

1:02:12SPEAKERremember a time like this also. And then I have to read the rest of this email. Also, and this is a

1:02:16SPEAKERbit off topic. Do AMD's new Thunderbird and Duron CPUs have as many compatibility problems as the

1:02:20SPEAKERoriginal Athlon did when it launched? Just yeah. Given my recent turmoil with this machine.

1:02:30SPEAKERGreg gave the right answer, which is the GeForce 2 MX. The Voodoo 4 would probably be by the time

1:02:35SPEAKERDecember, like this issue would have come out in October, probably September, October. And by the

1:02:40SPEAKERtime this issue was out, 3D effects would be dead. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. There's a picture or not a

1:02:45SPEAKERpicture. I'm sorry. He mentions the Voodoo 5 in that creative labs review. That's the photo. If

1:02:52SPEAKERyou go back and look at the review, he says, Hey, if you have a Voodoo 5, you probably don't need

1:02:57SPEAKERto run out and get one of these GeForce 2 Ultra's like the Voodoo 5 never shipped in any real

1:03:01SPEAKERquantity. I had, I had a review unit at this point, probably when we were, when he was writing this,

1:03:06SPEAKERI had to guess. Yeah. The, the bigger thing from this question though, there is the AMD thing.

1:03:10SPEAKERLike, Hey, do the AMD CPUs still have the more things change? Some things never change. Kind of

1:03:17SPEAKERstuff. Yes. What else do we have here? The Duron and the Athlon, those Athlon, those were good

1:03:24SPEAKERCPUs. The Duron 600 was the new seller on 300A. I bought a Duron 600 and it ruled.

1:03:30SPEAKERAnd then I won a Thunderbird at an AMD event of all things. And those were both, those are both

1:03:35SPEAKERsolid for sure. What I'm saying is come back in three years and you can get the next step up from

1:03:42SPEAKERthe thing I have now. It'll be just fine. Let's see here. Maybe a couple more quick things here.

1:03:52SPEAKERThis column from Collin, this boy, tongue twister, this column from Collin Williamson.

1:03:58SPEAKEROh, this one's really good. Called Great Expectations, letter X dash

1:04:03SPEAKERpectations. It's about the, it's about the impending launch of the Xbox and what it's

1:04:07SPEAKERgoing to do to first person shooters, which is like an incredibly prescient topic here.

1:04:12SPEAKERCause he really kind of hit the nail on the head with this. Yeah. This is like, people were hearing

1:04:18SPEAKERabout the X, like we were hearing about the Xbox at this point because developers had them and they

1:04:21SPEAKERwere building games for them and they were, they were talking, you were hearing a lot about it,

1:04:26SPEAKERbasically. But nobody knew, I guess, published, the other console vendors were nervous. Like Sony

1:04:38SPEAKERand Japan in general were nervous about what Microsoft coming into a market was going to do.

1:04:43SPEAKERBecause up until that point, every market that Microsoft had entered, they'd utterly decimated

1:04:47SPEAKEReverybody else that was there. And with the exception, I guess, of Intuit. So yeah, it was

1:04:54SPEAKERlike Microsoft saying, Hey, we're gonna spend a half billion dollars on a marketing campaign

1:04:57SPEAKERfor this thing. Scared everybody, I guess. And Collin's column, pretty good.

1:05:04SPEAKERThis is a good amount of foresight in this. I mean, he, he mentions like there are a bunch

1:05:08SPEAKERof developers who have never touched a PlayStation or a Sega console who have signed up for the Xbox

1:05:14SPEAKERhere. I mean, this is like a year before the Xbox shipped, but he's basically saying like, Hey,

1:05:18SPEAKERa bunch of PC only game developers seem to be pretty excited about making games for this new

1:05:23SPEAKERXbox. You know, what is, it's talking about the, the guy in Maryland who can't get a game working

1:05:31SPEAKERwith his 19, his 1863 pro audio spectrum. Like this is the console for that guy. Like kind of

1:05:39SPEAKERhit the nail on the head with the stuff, you know, like it kind of was a PC in a box with like very

1:05:43SPEAKERsimplified streamlined online services and controls. He lays out like, he's basically

1:05:50SPEAKERlike, should be, should PC gamers be worried about this? And he lays out some possibilities.

1:05:54SPEAKERThe most likely outcome he mentions is first person shooter developers will by necessity,

1:05:59SPEAKERadopt a more console centric perspective, specifically designing for the Xbox from day one.

1:06:05SPEAKERThis means simpler interfaces and control schemes. That sure is exactly what happened.

1:06:11SPEAKERLike earlier in the PC talks about like, what about games with more complex interfaces like

1:06:16SPEAKERDeus Ex or System Shock 2? I mean, you know, seven years after this BioShock came out as

1:06:22SPEAKERa console first game, you know, like the next game in that lineage, basically like totally,

1:06:27SPEAKERit totally happened. It took a long time for us to get to the point that we can make a really good

1:06:31SPEAKERfake mouse interface with a game pad. And now that we have that everybody's perfect and nothing,

1:06:36SPEAKERthere's nothing to complain about. Just long press all those buttons and we'll go right along with

1:06:41SPEAKERour business. I do like the idea, like the one thing he misses, he kind of hits this right and

1:06:48SPEAKERkind of misses, but the idea that the new market, that the Xbox was going to open the console market

1:06:56SPEAKERto first person shooters, which it did end up being true. Thanks, Halo. Was going to train

1:07:04SPEAKERa whole new generation of players who would then move over to the PC kind of happened for a while.

1:07:10SPEAKERAnd now it's stopped. It seems like, because it seems like the people who are proficient on game

1:07:15SPEAKERpad play on game pad and the people who are proficient on mouse and keyboard play on mouse

1:07:18SPEAKERand keyboard and Fortnite and Call of Duty and Apex and maybe not Apex, I guess Apex.

1:07:24SPEAKERIs there cross play on Apex? I think, yeah, yeah, there is. Yeah. We all play together

1:07:29SPEAKERand it kind of just works out kind of a trip. Hey, the best, the best of all possible worlds.

1:07:34SPEAKERLook, I want to go back to that games for windows game shadow run, shadow run, shadow gate, shadow

1:07:40SPEAKERfield shadow. I don't know the one where the mouse people, if you had a mouse and keyboard in that

1:07:45SPEAKERgame, you, you walked as a God among the runs on the three 60 on the three 60 games for windows

1:07:51SPEAKERlive. I never, I never played that online, but I heard stories. I mean, you know, quick three on

1:07:57SPEAKERthe dreamcast was the ultimate example of that. Oh yeah. Cause you can plug a mouse and keyboard

1:08:02SPEAKERinto that thing. Yes. Yeah. All right. What else we got? Just about wrapped up here. There's there

1:08:10SPEAKERwas a letter in the letter section here toward the end on page 251. I was going to mention

1:08:19SPEAKERfrom Josh Kriz, your article got a license for that. And the October 2000 issue raises

1:08:24SPEAKERsome interesting questions. Mark rain, perhaps you've heard of him. Mark rain claims that engine

1:08:30SPEAKERlicensing helps reduce production time for games. However, at least one game that I can think of

1:08:36SPEAKERthat used and later switched engines Duke Nukem forever seems to be in a semi-permanent holding

1:08:41SPEAKERpattern. That Katana too took years to come out despite its licensed engine technology.

1:08:46SPEAKERSo what's the real deal here. Do you guys think it really saves time to license an engine?

1:08:51SPEAKERUm, I mostly wanted to pull this because I know I've cited this a good bit in the last few months,

1:08:57SPEAKERbut the, the John Romero autobiography or memoir, uh, that came out, he spends a pretty

1:09:03SPEAKERdecent amount of time on the engine licensing for die Katana in that book and how much it was a

1:09:08SPEAKERboondoggle for them and how much it actually slowed things down or like

1:09:12SPEAKERMore different time. Well, it was a different time. I mean,

1:09:15SPEAKERI know things are different and much more complex now or more complex in some ways,

1:09:19SPEAKERbut also more streamlined and others. I know it's not like directly applicable to,

1:09:23SPEAKERto the modern day, but like he gives some pretty good examples that kind of help you understand

1:09:27SPEAKERwhy licensing an engine wouldn't be this as simple as just like, you know, putting a source code disc

1:09:33SPEAKERin and pressing run and starting to make levels or whatever, like some, some of the challenges

1:09:37SPEAKERthat came up that actually held them back, um, or explained pretty well back then the engine licenses

1:09:43SPEAKERweren't made to be products either. They were made to be engines for a game that somebody made and

1:09:47SPEAKERthen sold to everybody else who wanted to make that same game. Right. Yeah. I mean, like obviously

1:09:51SPEAKERlike licensing, the unreal engine is a massive business unto itself these days. Like the support

1:09:56SPEAKERis, you know, it's, it's night and day from what it used to be, but still like, it's just

1:10:01SPEAKERillustrative to, to hear some examples of problems that you've run into using somebody else's

1:10:06SPEAKERtechnology, especially because that's the era of this letter is talking about here.

1:10:12SPEAKERSo there's two other things in this letters column that are pretty good.

1:10:16SPEAKERThere's the RPC games doomed letter, which is from name withheld via the internet. When I

1:10:21SPEAKERread your state of the PC union, I thought it was well thought out and well word. And

1:10:25SPEAKERthe most important point you made in my opinion was about how the Japanese market

1:10:28SPEAKERhas elevated comic books into the realm of mainstream by creating comics for everyone,

1:10:32SPEAKERleaving no one out. Uh, it's an important point. So anyway, people were talking about the PC being

1:10:39SPEAKERdoomed at this point in 2000, I think it ended up working out okay, but it was a concern for a while

1:10:46SPEAKERuntil steam started selling billions of dollars worth of games every year. And then the other one

1:10:50SPEAKERis become one with your inner nerd, which is in your preview of Bioware's forthcoming star wars

1:10:56SPEAKERRPG, which I assume is KOTOR. Uh, yes, I think that should have been announced by this time.

1:11:03SPEAKERYou said it would be the first star wars role-playing game. In point of fact,

1:11:06SPEAKERit's only the first computer-based RPG set in the universe. West End games created the first

1:11:11SPEAKERstar wars RPG back in 1987. And all you needed to play it was a pencil paper and some dice.

1:11:18SPEAKERIt's pretty good comic book guy voice. It's not bad. Um, yeah. So anyway, then they insult the

1:11:27SPEAKERreader who sent that in rightly. So I think they published another letter here, the entirety of

1:11:32SPEAKERwhich is half-life is a good game. Can't argue with that. That's pretty much what they said.

1:11:39SPEAKERHalf-life is a good game. Uh, 260 pages of magazine.

1:11:44SPEAKERYup. And then of course on the way out, we get, uh, we got our kind of wholesale phone book looking

1:11:52SPEAKERhardware ads from, I guess this one is from Aberdeen computers.

1:11:58SPEAKEROh yeah. They used to. Yeah. It's kind of parts from Aberdeen back in the day.

1:12:02SPEAKERIt's kind of, it's kind of the computer shopper section. Here's a section of cat five patch

1:12:07SPEAKERcables. Uh, good old ad index. That's a, Hey, we have a page. We got to fill guys to add index in

1:12:16SPEAKERthere. Half of the PC cases in this list. Don't even list a brand. It's quite, quite literally

1:12:21SPEAKERjust generic PC case. Like the stuff was so basic back then. Oh yeah. I mean, look when you,

1:12:27SPEAKERwhen, when, so this is around the time you start first started seeing like cooler master shoe. I

1:12:33SPEAKERthink we saw our first cooler master aluminum case in like 2001. Okay. So, so this would be when you

1:12:40SPEAKERgo out and if you ask for a case by name, it would be unusual, like ad tronics Compu, uh, Computech.

1:12:48SPEAKERUm, God, what was the other one? There was one that maximum PC really liked in this time period

1:12:53SPEAKERthat was, that was gorgeous, but it was like a steel frame, 800 pound machine. Um, like memory

1:13:00SPEAKERwas commodity. You just ask for, you just ask for the same Dems, right. Most of, well, there

1:13:07SPEAKERare a few brands. In fact, actually it's just Corsair and King max are the only two, but there's

1:13:12SPEAKERa bunch of memory on here that doesn't even list a brand on it. It's just like, you know, four,

1:13:17SPEAKERfour meg by 32, 72 pen parody. Yeah. With parody or without just generic memory, generic cases.

1:13:27SPEAKERWhich chip set do you want on your motherboard? That's that's what, that's what the choice

1:13:30SPEAKERis. All these a bit boards. What are, what are the brands here? A bit, there's a bunch of a bit

1:13:34SPEAKERboards, a bunch of ASUS boards, epics, P O X uh, first, uh, first, I can't word if I see such a

1:13:43SPEAKERfirst internet computer versus international computer, I think, uh, here's, here are some

1:13:47SPEAKERIntel boards back when Intel still made their own motherboards. I think made motherboards for

1:13:50SPEAKERa long time. Um, wild stuff. So wild look at here's mid tower with, uh, gosh, it's hard to

1:14:00SPEAKERactually make sense of all the specs and stuff in here, but here's a mid tower with a 230 watt power

1:14:05SPEAKERsupply for 2999. Yep. That sounds about right. That sounds about right. It was a weird, it was

1:14:13SPEAKERa weird time for all this stuff. Yes. They, um, uh, this was the, this was the end of the year

1:14:20SPEAKERonce they had to have the statement of ownership and the ABC circulation stuff in here. Um, audit

1:14:26SPEAKERBureau of circulation. I think they made sure our numbers were legit. Huh? Um, here's chips and bits

1:14:33SPEAKERwhere you could get all the old games. Yeah. PlayStation, Tony Hawk, pro skater to Majora's

1:14:42SPEAKERmask. The last good Zelda. Here's here's elite force for 3,995. Wow. 3,595. That's just,

1:14:52SPEAKERI just let that Zelda comment pass on remarked upon. I don't know what it's all to comment.

1:14:56SPEAKERYou're talking about, uh, these are fun. Yeah. I like looking at all these old ads. The very,

1:15:02SPEAKERlike the very last thing here is a Dell ad. If you want to talk about what a,

1:15:06SPEAKERlike what a very last thing or, or, okay. There's a creative lab speakers, but right before that,

1:15:13SPEAKERif you want to look at what a like reasonably specked out Dell looked like at the time,

1:15:19SPEAKERuh, for $1,200, a Pentium three at 800 megahertz. Wow. That's actually faster. That's faster than I

1:15:27SPEAKERremember. 64 megabytes of Ram. Uh, three is kept out like high, high three, three digits.

1:15:34SPEAKERAs I recall, I guess I had forgotten that the Pentium three had gotten that fast. Yeah. They

1:15:38SPEAKERwere, they were hot though. Sure. Cause the Pentium two was like under 500, right? I don't

1:15:44SPEAKERthink it was in the pain with three switch over happened. Right. Right. Um, and then the Pentium

1:15:50SPEAKERfour launched at like 1.6 gigahertz or something. Yeah. Do you remember what was a V dot 90 capable

1:15:56SPEAKER56 K modem was V dot 90, like some kind of compression standard 90 is, um, is the enhanced

1:16:03SPEAKERerror correction thing that gave you a little bit more, it was, it was asymmetrical 56 K down and

1:16:10SPEAKERthen like 19 six or 92 or something up. I can't remember. Right. Right. I had gone off to school

1:16:17SPEAKERat this time and had ceased to care about modems. Yeah. I, I moved here and had broadband by this

1:16:22SPEAKERpoint. So it didn't matter anymore. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, that's uh, yeah. That's PC gamer, December

1:16:28SPEAKER2000. It was a fine year. Like I said, the glorious time between the end of the, of the,

1:16:35SPEAKERof the millennium bug and before nine 11 star, anything was possible.

1:16:42SPEAKERI didn't say it when you brought that in historical framing up early in the episode,

1:16:46SPEAKERit's like a dark window to think about there. Um, yeah, it was a weird time. I mean,

1:16:52SPEAKERat the time it was not dark, but in retrospect, just thinking about like, boy, things are about to

1:16:56SPEAKERchange significantly. Well, and, and just to be clear, like the economy crashed before nine 11,

1:17:03SPEAKERand then it just got worse after that. So like future future had launched seven magazines,

1:17:09SPEAKERI think in 2000, which when, when they talked, when Chris Anderson of Ted talked about launching

1:17:15SPEAKERseven magazines at the company meeting that year, he was like, everybody said it couldn't be done,

1:17:19SPEAKERbut we've done it. We launched seven magazines. And then in February of 2001, all seven of those

1:17:24SPEAKERmagazines were shut down. Turns out everyone was right. It just took a while. It turns out. Yeah,

1:17:28SPEAKERyou couldn't, you should not try to launch seven magazines in one year if you're a 300 person

1:17:32SPEAKERcompany. Yeah. Had the, had the.com bubble begun to burst at this point or was that shortly after

1:17:38SPEAKERthis? I can't remember. That was, uh, that is February 2001 is when the bubble burst. Oh, wow.

1:17:44SPEAKERSo we're right before that here. Yeah. Fun times. It was a good time. So I guess it's time for us to

1:17:50SPEAKERthank our patrons. This is the end of the show. You guess I'm going to say definitively it's time to

1:17:53SPEAKERthank our patrons. I was trying to think of a pithy way to wrap up the whole thing and, but I got

1:17:57SPEAKERnothing. So we'll, we'll thank the patrons. As always, Brad and Will made a tech pod is a 100%

1:18:02SPEAKERlistener supported show. If you would like to support the show, you can go to patreon.com/checkpod

1:18:09SPEAKERand join the ranks of our wonderful patrons and get access to the fabulous tech pod discord and

1:18:15SPEAKERour monthly patron exclusive episode and, you know, make something help, help make something

1:18:20SPEAKERyou like happen every month, which we appreciate. Continue to exist. Yeah. So as always, thank you

1:18:26SPEAKERto everyone, but a very special thank you goes to our executive producer, to your patrons,

1:18:31SPEAKERincluding Nick Johnston, paddle Creek games, makers of fractured veil, Andrew Slosky,

1:18:36SPEAKERJordan Lippett, dollar sign, just wedge Joel Krauska, twinkle Twinkie, David Allen,

1:18:42SPEAKERJames Kamek and pantheon makers of the HS three high speed 3d printer. Thank you everyone. Thanks

1:18:48SPEAKEReverybody. Uh, that'll do it for us this week. We will be back next week with another episode

1:18:51SPEAKERof the show. Thank you all for listening. And if you have a magazine that you think would be good

1:18:55SPEAKERfor a future, one of these episodes posted in the thread and the discord or send us an email.

1:18:59SPEAKERYeah. Say A, if you have issue suggestions, B just also if you want to let us know if you like these

1:19:04SPEAKERor not, I think the bite issue went over pretty well. So always curious to hear what people think

1:19:09SPEAKERabout these kinds of retrospectives. Yeah. Um, and we'll be back next week with another episode

1:19:12SPEAKERof the show. Thanks for listening to everybody. Bye.