Post-PopCult

The Post-Pop Cult Age

Almost everyone reading this grew up under a largely monolithic American pop culture. Whether it's Baby Boomers' love of the Beatles or the multigenerational Star Wars fandom that originated with Gen X, anyone who came of age in the past several decades could easily navigate the pop landscape by several…
July 23, 202114 Comments
It's Dangerous to Go Alone

It’s Dangerous to Go Alone

80s parents stereotypically trashed video games as brain-rotting wastes of time. But the best games of that time did contain nuggets of wisdom, one of the foremost being "It's dangerous to go alone!" A notorious game mechanic of 2D era adventure games involved starting the main character without the main…
July 13, 20212 Comments
FF VII Remaster

Defusing the Pop Bomb

Rivers of ink have been spilled in our corner of the counterculture scene about Cultural Ground Zero. For the uninitiated, that's a shorthand description of the abrupt decline that struck Western entertainment right around 1997. The movie moguls, rock gods, and video game wizards who'd spent the 80s and 90s…
June 11, 202115 Comments
Final Fantasy IV Rydia

A Storytelling Triumph

During last night's Retro-spective stream, my cohosts Dorrinal and Catholic Lancer mentioned how much of a storytelling triumph Final Fantasy IV is. It's said of many classic works in counterculture circles, but FFIV is the kind of game you couldn't get made today. The plot features multiple redemption arcs, public…
June 3, 2021

Final Fantasy IV Retro-Spective

  A quick reminder to all my readers that my new live stream series, Final Fantasy IV Retro-Spective premiers tonight on Geek Gab's channel at 10:00 PM Central. We'll be playing through the JRPG classic on the original SNES hardware. That means all kinds of fun glitches to exploit, so…
May 20, 2021

Shadowrun (1993)

We've documented Gen Y's vices in copious detail these past few years. But if Gen Y has one virtue, it's a knack for remembering what the Pop Cult would prefer stayed memory holed. For example, the AAA video game publishers really don't want you thinking about pre-Ground Zero 2D video…
May 20, 2021

Cursed Consoles

Despite their bleeding edge trappings, video games have come into their own as a mature technology. The video game industry is now older than most of the people reading this post. Like theater and movies, video gaming has amassed its own body of insider lore. This secret history runs the…
May 20, 2021
The Other Amazon

The Other Amazon

Original Diablo developer Mark Kern calls out Blizzard's woke revisionism in Diablo II: Resurrected.     Mark is better qualified to take Blizzard to task than most, being a pre-Ground Zero game dev from the days when developers made games for players, not for themselves. Author Adam Lane Smith sums…
April 16, 20215 Comments
Gaming Ground Zero

Gaming Ground Zero

In which author David V. Stewart takes the Cultural Ground Zero ball and advances it ten years down the field: Maybe you’ve heard of cultural ground zero: 1997.     Now let’s talk games, because unlike other institutions of culture, the games industry kept on growing and innovating for another…
April 7, 202111 Comments
Chronology

Chronology

These decades later, 1995's Chrono Trigger stands as the capstone of the 2D JRPG genre. You could argue that Final Fantasy VI, released the year prior, is the better game on aesthetic or technical grounds. But at least in North America, CT marked the end of an era when console…
April 5, 202111 Comments