I sort of don’t think of Nethack as quite being a PC game, but yes, in terms of ‘what classic games do the great mass of gamers spend time playing even now’, a roguelike should definitely be in there. (For those who don’t strongly identify with the @ key, I’d suggest Fate).

KG

(That said, to be fair, Gamer do hire me to write a load of indie stuff I like for the magazine. Not many mags would have let me write 6 pages on ZangbandTk or a full spread on Dwarf Fortress or whatever. And to be fair to their Top 100, it doesn’t make a pretense of being a definitive list of best games ever, but rather the magazine’s favourite games in one day circa Summer 2007.)

And, I think if you stick around you’ll be pleased to find what we cover. In fact, if you wander through the archives, you’ll find stories on pretty much everything. Try the tags “indie” or “webgame” or “casual” to see what turns up. It’s a coincidence the week we’ve chosen to launch is also the week the most exciting first-person game in five years has chosen to come out.

Which is, of course, the one thing I’m not actually going to apologise for covering. It’d be as much as a lie not too.

KG

And looking at classic games, although some of the key ones are there, plenty aren’t. Only one, obscure, non-Infocom text adventure, but several graphic adventures that are played for laughs. No spot for Master of Magic, the game that even now causes otherwise sane people to wrestle with Dos Box in an effort to get it running on their whizzy new PC.

Instead, what do we have? Game after game in tired genres for teenage boys with too much time on their hands. Combat, sports, cars. Occasionally spies. The odd holocaust. A game is celebrated for how agreeably it allows you to kill time wandering around the map; another for helping people realise that gameplay doesn’t really count without graphics.

Next time you’re wondering why PC gamers are ‘persecuted’, try considering what proportion of the ‘greatest games of all time’ involve a viewpoint character, seen in first person, interacting with the game through the use of a weapon. You know, perhaps it would be reasonable to have a few games like that in the top 100, but surely not more than four or five?

The great thing about being a gamer this year is that suddenly, everybody, all at once, seems to have spotted that this is actually a minority taste and is out there making all the games for the rest of us.

And a lot of those great games are PC games and you ought to be covering them in this blog.

KG

KG