For the first issue of Edge, launch editor Steve Jarratt conducted a hunt for forward-looking quotes about the future of videogames. Many of the quotations featured in the two-page article were gleaned from magazines and the nascent Internet, but Jarratt did manage to score something of a coup by sourcing the phone number for noted science-fiction author Arthur C Clarke, who duly gave his thoughts on the future of entertainment.
Clarke predicted that the addictive nature of virtual reality could be a danger. “Of course, it could be a shortsighted view,” he added. “If we are plugged into the whole universe, why should we unplug ourselves?” Fortunately, we’re not quite at the stage where hopelessly addicted players have abandoned reality for a Ready Player One-style virtual world, but videogame addiction has been proposed as a disorder by the American Psychiatric Association.
An unusual inclusion in the feature was former Genesis frontman Peter Gabriel, who in 1993 was working on the musical computer game XPLORA1: Peter Gabriel’s Secret World. He predicted that the CD-ROM would “absorb entertainment” and we’d see “enabling technology which allows the consumer to think of himself as the artist”. Certainly, there’s been a huge shift towards player-created worlds since, although the days of players being exclusively thought of as male are long behind us.
Former vice president of Electronic Arts Mark Lewis predicted that games would become “connective” and “interactive”, and that one day you would be able to go to a movie theatre and “play the movie”, a prediction that was spot on, as discussed in our look at interactive films in E387. Meanwhile, Jez San, founder of Argonaut Software, imagined a future of “direct broadcast games” which would “constantly download new parts of the game into your machine while you’re playing”, which sounds a lot like the cloud-enabled gaming present.
Nick Alexander, then managing director of Sega Europe, envisioned virtual-reality games that could be “controlled by your thoughts”, something that still seems a long way off even 30 years on. Finally, Star Wars creator George Lucas was more down to earth with his prediction of how the “information super highway” would be one of the “greatest developments of the 20th century”. The Internet certainly did change everything, although it’s something of a shame the term “information super highway” has been left in the past.
10 Years Ago
Edge 229 arrived just as the hype wave was cresting for VR’s second coming, with Oculus Rift development kits arriving in the wild. Naturally, VR featured heavily in the minds of the experts who were asked to predict how games might evolve over ten years.
Tiago Sousa, then principal graphics engineer at Crytek, was hopeful for VR’s future. “A really comfortable, almost weightless and relatively cheap device has a good chance to become successful,” he said. “I can’t see myself playing with usual VR displays for too long, but if it would have the same weight as current 3D polarised glasses it would definitely become successful.”
