“Well, we know you liked that Superman movie…”
Way back in the mid-1990s, when most videogame consoles needed additional hardware in order to support four players simultaneously, some of the sharper corners of Edge’s trickier deadlines were smoothed off with a round or two of International Track & Field. Konami’s PS1 sports sim was hardly the most in-depth multiplayer pursuit of its day, but that simplicity was fundamental to its appeal: anyone, from junior designer to wizened sub editor, could pick it up and get involved. We’ve never really found another sports game that stands up to that original IT&F experience, and were looking forward to being regaled with what would surely be equally fond memories from its director, Keiichiro Toyama, in this issue’s Collected Works (p78). So we were a bit disappointed to discover that his passion doesn’t quite match up to our own – but then perhaps that is inevitable given that his career also includes Silent Hill, a game that will always demand more attention in the grand scheme of things.
Inevitably, it got us thinking about subjectivity – that in certain cases the circumstances of how we experience a game matter just as much as the amount of entertainment value it may provide on a professional critic’s scale of one to ten. We’ve lost count of the stories we’ve heard from people who grew up as children in the cartridge era and couldn’t afford to buy games themselves, relying instead on birthdays and Christmas. In such circumstances, isn’t it possible to imagine young Jimmy even wringing a few piddly drops of fun out of a game such as Superman 64, simply because he wasn’t sure where the next morsel was coming from?
Nowadays, of course, children can choose from an abundance of highquality games that can be played for free, on every available platform. It’s a model that famously underpins China’s videogame industry, fostering the biggest playerbase on Earth, and it may yet apply to this issue’s cover game, whose approach is apparently undecided right now. The scale of its ambition, however, couldn’t be more clear, as we discover on p52.