GameTech: Good Omen for the fun of PC gaming

It was an omen of things to come. Easter weekend, 1995, my aunt came downstairs for breakfast. She saw me in the back room, sitting at the computer screen, wide awake, my face lit up like the resurrected himself. She was amazed — usually she was the first to rise.

Of course, I’d never gone to sleep in the first place. That’s what PC gaming will do to you. It’s personal. It’s pure. It’s gaming at its most intimate. On that Easter weekend in 1995, I pulled my first all-nighter — an omen of things to come.

Over twenty years later, in the bowels of 2017, countless all-nighters since, I had fallen out of love with PC gaming. Console accessibility had risen to take its place. The desk chair was supplanted by the couch, the office desk by the TV stand, the back room by the living room, the mouse by the pad. Games had become streamlined and managed. The intimacy was lost to immediacy.