Retrovertigo

When the boots and I were summoned to the PCPP offices to be part of the 150th edition nostalgia-thon, we arrived to find the so-called real-life staffers of the magazine bent over past editions with their faces contorted into hideous rictuses or possibly ricti of terror.

“My god,” said the Editor, “I can’t believe they let us print this.”

Okay, so sure in the olden days the mag might not have looked quite as, shall we say, readable as it does now, but the men who put that magazine together out of spitballs and gumption were brave pioneers. Much like the developers making the games the magazine featured.

“Oh man,” said Vic when he saw the pile of magazines, “which was the one where we reviewed Heavy Gear? That was awesome. Or Phantasmagoria, that was awesome too. Or hey, how about Starsiege? Awesome.”

We dug about in the big bin of games in the back room, installed them, booted DosBox where necessary, and played the titles Vic had just mentioned. We soon discovered they all had something in common.

“These games suck,” said the Editor. I had to agree. Blocky graphics, limited control, soporific audio, how anything that came out before 2004 managed to get a Gold Award we had no idea.

“This,” said the Deputy Editor, “this is a harsh moment of realisation.”

“You think you’ve got problems?” said the art director of a completely unrelated magazine, popping her head over the partition. “I play The Sims 2. And my PC is screwing up, but I can’t just do a clean install of Windows you know.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“Because when you play the Sims 2 you install like seven expansions, and then a dozen Stuff Packs so reinstalling the whole game would take about six hours. I am not kidding, six hours.”

She disappeared behind the partition again.

“What does that have to do with old games sucking?” asked Vic.

“Well I guess it makes you wonder,” suggested the Deputy.

We scratched our unshaven chins and wondered.

“About what?” asked the Editor, still flipping through old copies of the mag in the same way someone with a really bad ulcer will keep probing it with their tongue. That is, wincing and screaming occasionally.

“About whether today’s awesome games will seem really crap in another 12 years,” said the Deputy, with some insight, I thought.

We considered his point.

“I don’t see how anyone could think Crysis is crap, ever,” said Vic, very definitely.

“Is it chilly in here?” asked the Editor suddenly.

Vic wandered off to find the air conditioning controls.

“Sure have been a lot of changes in the mag since it launched,” I observed over the Editor’s shoulder. He made a sort of non-committal grunting noise. “Hey, you should do whole pages of nothing but text with a tiny picture of a joystick at the top again,” I said, turning to where PCPP’s Art Director normally sat. “Hey, where is he?” I asked.

“Out in the car park,” replied the Editor, not looking up. “He just spends the whole day out there shuffling his car from parking space to parking space in order to beat the parking cops.”

“Does it work?”

The Editor just pointed silently to a whole pile of parking infringements that were sort of stratified beneath a pyramid of empty V energy drink cans on the Art Director’s desk.

“The irony is he knocked back a $300-a-year car space in a garage two blocks from here,” said the Deputy, then laughed uproariously as Kings Quest VI spooled through what it obviously thought of as a cinematic opening.

“Where’s Vic?” I asked. Then black smoke started pouring out of the air conditioning vents.

Later, in the car park, in the rain, as the Art Director argued with the parking cops that taking his car out of the bay, driving six times around the block, and then putting it back in the bay should constitute a reset of his two-hour limit, we watched fire-fighters pump litres of retardant foam into the PCPP office building’s ducting. Then they pumped retardant foam all over Vic, and also called him a retard, with scant regard for social vilification laws.

“At least some things never change, right?” I said. The Editor just stared at me through soot-ringed eyes.

“We celebrate our 300th issue in November 2019,” he said. “Is he still going to be alive then?”

I stared at Vic, who was giggling even as the firemen rolled him in the gutter and stamped on the still-smouldering bits.

“I fear so,” I said. “I fear so.”