So my latest article is something that’s been on my mind for a while: the people still making physical games feel genuinely special, the lack of physical games going forward (looking at you, Sony), and what everyone lost with the old-old ‘big-box’ PC gaming era.

I just try to take a look look back at the era of PC gaming, manuals, maps and all the little extras that made opening a new game part of the experience. How “physical” has changed in recent years, and a handful of developers, publishers and community creators who are still putting real care into physical releases today (including RowanFN, whose work creating custom manuals and inserts I had the chance to cover last year)

If you’re interested in game preservation, collecting, or simply miss the days when a physical game was more than just a case and a download code (shitty shitty GTA VI discovery), I hope you’ll enjoy the read. It might be a bit of a…watch-me-go-off-on-tangents article, but it is still important in a way. I think.

These days I play my games wither on a switch or an emulator. I like physical games, and if i like a game I’m emulating I try to get a physical copy of it. One of the reasons I like having the physical copy is that it gives me a plausible reason to have the data. Even if I got it through alternative sources game publishers can’t complain, especially if the game is now defunct.

Which i think is part of the problem. Stop Killing Games is a thing for a good reason. If I bought a game, but the only way for me to access it is through dead corporate servers, and links that have been left to rot, why shouldn’t I pirate it? The company itself forced me to. Or worse they brought back their old catalog through a subscription service. Sorry Nintendo, im not paying five bucks a month to play the original Legend of Zelda.

I do miss the manuals. Warcraft had a beautifully illustrated booklet of all the units thst i read backward and forward as a kid. I think the modern digital only environment speaks to an ethos of exploitation endemic to capitalism. The corporate shills control production of the art of video games. And the artists and the people who consume that art are exploited for the sake of publisher profits.

It is bigger than just gaming but capitalism and its exponential nature, monopoly and rent seeking tendancies. Want to fix gaming smash the state until the I opt the fuck out. You will only slow things down. The pdfile class has the whole world in their hands.