You kids with your Tiktok dances and your blockchain pension funds. In my day a Boomer was a Left 4 Dead special and we spoke to them with respect even though they were bloated reanimated corpses who regurgitated liquid decay over us. It’s just how we were raised.
Things have changed, you see, over the last twenty years. In his 2016 documentary Lo and Behold, Werner Herzog likens the invention of the internet to the moment humankind discovered fire, and while we feel its associated changes most keenly in employment, monetary systems, data management and communications, gaming is always one of the more enjoyable nostalgic lead-ins. Lovely gaming and its treasure trove of fond memories and ever-increasing archive of things that have subsequently become ‘quaint’.
The internet was around in 2002, and its adoption was fairly widespread. But it was something you connected to at a desktop PC and browsed for a few minutes – and you were billed for every one of those minutes. The big games sites we know today were operational at the time, but magazine editors were still the tastemakers. Information, ideas and concepts traveled at a different pace, and as a result the games industry had a very distinct character from its modern counterpart. Journey with us, then, back twenty years, and let’s examine the industry we find there.
There were a few reasons it was the stuff of obsession, crowd-drawing conversation and controversy. Firstly, GTA III had released only a year previously. The entire concept of freely wandering a 3D city and interacting with it was only 12 months old, and then suddenly we were given another chance to do it, and this one had pastel colors and Hawaiian shirts.
That element of pastiche was crucial, because games hadn’t really sent up their cinematic and musical pop culture cousins in this way before. Illusion Softworks’ Mafia: City of Lost Heaven struck a brilliantly authentic mob movie tone the same year, but it did so with a straight face and a pinstripe suit. In Vice City, though, period elements were amplified for effects – it was a 1980s that never existed, but still felt pitch perfect.
So it came to pass that for a few months a significant portion of the population went about whistling Scorpions songs to ourselves and wondering whether we could pull off a baby blue suit.
Xbox had barely arrived by the start of the year, and its radioactive aesthetic felt dangerous and cutting-edge. The PS2 was a bit more established, and was bolstered by the arrival of Vice City (not to mention GTA III just a year before it). Nintendo fans, meanwhile, had a brand new console to occupy their desires and affections: the GameCube. Its owners were wowed by the tiny little discs its games were held on.
In a world before smartphones, gaming on the go meant stuffing a Game Boy into your bum bag (note: nobody actually still wore bum bags in 2002). Nokia was already plotting its incursion on the market with the N-Gage, due for release the following year, but the Game Boy Advance was your go-to for long journeys and bedtime Pokémon sessions.
PC gaming was enjoying an exciting transition from beige to black in the 2000s, and 2002 saw many games stuffed onto several DVD-ROMs that filled a game box. DJ-ing your way through an isometric RPG was par for the course.
But there were further changes afoot. This was the tail-end of the Voodoo 3 era, and ATI’s Radeon 9700 Pro was the new must-have graphics card. Its RRP was $399, and that was eye-watering money at the time. But the promise of playing Hitman 2, Bloodrayne and Medal of Honor: Allied Assault on high settings more than warranted paying 10% of the average US monthly wage for a graphics card.
In recent years the games industry has changed its portrayal of in-game characters and actors featured in advertisements in order to make women, people of color, and minority groups feel more included. 2002 hadn’t had that moment yet.
Game ads in magazines still used sexualized images of women to draw the male gaze over to them, as many examples on this Tumblr archive demonstrate. Female protagonists weren’t unheard of, nor were black player-characters – Metroid Prime and Shadowman 2 were among the year’s bigger releases. By modern standards, though, their depiction tended not to go far beyond their visual appearance. This was the year of both Hooters Road Trip and BMX XXX – we had a long way to go. Cate Archer showed us what a smart, and not overly sexualized female lead is like in No One Lives Forever, though.
How did we decide which game to buy next? Our purchasing behavior was similar to a music fan’s: hit and hope. But just as musos had MTV2 and VH1 to inform them, we had demo disc covermounts on games magazines.
Demos weren’t as generous as shareware versions of games, which might have contained several hours of material. Instead, they might have given you one match to play in FIFA or NHL, a taster of Spyro 2’s opening level, or maybe a tutorial from Age of Mythology to wet your whistle.
Demos were often broken or unstable, imposed arbitrary and frustrating time limits, and appeared far more often for the games you weren’t interested in than the big hitters. We love them dearly.
(AP Photo/The Times Daily, Jim Hannon, file)
IGN, GameSpot and Eurogamer were all years old by 2002 and had found large audiences. Newgrounds was open for business, and host to a lot of surreptitious schooltime and in-office Trials sessions. GameFront was your best bet for mods and patches, unless you wanted more Gordon Freeman in your life – you headed to Planet Half-Life when that was the case.
News, previews and reviews all appeared online for the big gaming sites, but many of us still preferred to go to magazines for them. And that wasn’t just because said magazines also came with demo discs.
Just to give you a little vertical slice of what games marketing was like 20 years ago, here’s a stunt Akklaim pulled to promote Shadowman: 2econd Coming. (Let’s put aside the fact that nobody stopped them from calling it 2econd Coming, just for a minute.)
The publisher offered to pay families of recently deceased people to feature a small billboard for the game on their headstone. It might be of particular interest to “poorer families”, said Akklaim.
Reception to this idea was, as you might imagine, rather negative. Judged to be in extremely poor taste, it drew considerable attention – which was the point in the first place, one supposes. Confronted about the extremely poor taste of the stunt, a spokesperson said at the time: “It’s a dark, gory type of game and we thought it was appropriate to raise advertising to a new level.”
If you ever find yourself saying the words “we thought it was appropriate” to reporters asking you about a marketing campaign so distasteful it’s drawn international media attention, you probably know in your heart, in that moment, that it wasn’t. It wasn’t appropriate.
(Bob Frid-USA TODAY Sports)
The total prize pot for all esports competitions in 2002, according to esportsearnings, was $968,000.00. That’s a stark contrast to the $175 million generated in 2021, but it’s not small change, is it? Counter-Strike topped the competition rankings with $400,000 to be won over 14 tournaments contested by 351 players, followed by StarCraft: Brood War and Quake III Arena.
It’s tempting to think that in such a comparatively smaller arena of competition, you might have been able to compete if you could take back your modern-day skills. But you only need to watch esports tournaments from that era to realize that’s absolute nonsense. Players from the ‘90s and early 2000s were the real deal. Even without the same financial incentive or competition structure around them, they approached the discipline like Olympic athletes.
Written by Phil Iwaniuk on behalf of GLHF.
