Was there something about this subject that just didn’t work as a game, or are we dealing with a mere historical accident here? Let’s begin with a brief survey of the field of earlier games that did venture out into this territory before we turn to the one that will be our main focus for today. It strikes me that it’s worth asking why this is so. (And why not? Has humanity ever embarked on a grander collective adventure?) Further, games on this subject would seemingly have fit in well with the broader craze for realistic simulation, as manifested by everything from F-15 Strike Eagle to SimCity, which had taken a firm grip on the industry by the end of the 1980s.Īnd yet there just weren’t many simulations of this particular type, and even fewer of them that did very well. After all, just about every nerdy teenage boy goes through a race-for-the-Moon phase at some point. Specifically, I speak of games based on the realities of space exploration in a contemporary context, as opposed to the outer-space fantasias of Star Wars and the like. It’s rather about an interestingly scanty subgenre of games which seems like it ought to have been perfect for the demographic I’ve just described, but that for some reason just never quite took off.

Although I too have liked all of these things to a greater or lesser degree at some point in my life - I did, after all, grow up as a member of exactly the demographic in question - their extreme prevalence in the cultural ghetto about which I write has often left me searching, sometimes in vain, for games with a different set of values and antecedents.īut this article is not about one or more of those interesting cultural outliers. Computer games reflected the tastes of these boys and young men in other kinds of entertainment and leisure-time hobbies: Dungeons & Dragons, Star Wars, jet fighters, World War II, action movies, heavy-metal music, fast cars, and, when they could get a glimpse of them, fast women. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, they were largely the province of a rather specific demographic indeed: single white males between the ages of ten and thirty from relatively privileged socioeconomic circumstances, with a bent toward intellectual rather than active pursuits - i.e., the stereotypical “nerds” of pop culture. For in any free market, the nature of production is dictated as much by the consumers as by the producers.Ĭertainly this is true of computer games. Yet it applies equally in the world of the arts and entertainment.

That truism has been taken to heart by many in the time since - not least by our political classes.

“Demography is destiny,” said the French sociologist Auguste Comte apocryphally in the nineteenth century.

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