It is my birthday this week. And while that may not sound like a worthy subject for Pushing Buttons, bear with me.
I am now 54 – and so officially in my mid-50s – and I still write about video games for a living. I play video games every day; I work in a home office where I’m surrounded by video games. When I’m not playing them, I’m probably thinking about them. But at times like this, I think: maybe should I stop someday? Is there an upper limit on how long someone can do games journalism? Certainly I only know of a handful of people my age who are still writing about games on a full-time basis. Some of my friends outside the industry still play games, but usually only one or two a year – EA Sports FC, maybe, the latest blockbusting narrative adventure, Nintendo with the kids. If you’re not careful, life has a way of shepherding you away from your interests.
I now find it difficult to keep up with some areas of the industry. The world of esports feels utterly alien – the multitude of leagues and competitions, the emerging superstars, the controversies. Following it all is a full-time job, one that is more suited to a sports writer. I’m also way behind on influencers and content creators – I don’t watch Kai Cenat, LazarBeam or QuarterJade, though I have a vague sense of who they are and how important they have become as arbiters of taste. When I go on press trips to see new games, I’m old enough to be a parent to most of the young writers and creators I meet.
The thing is, I’m still obsessed with how games work and how they’re made. I belong to a generation that assumed games would always be for kids, but they’re patently not now. From the nostalgic adventure Lost Records: Bloom and Rage, which deals with middle-aged regret to the God of War series with its study of parenthood and legacy (and part of the “dadification of games” trend, which started when a certain generation of developers started to have kids), video games now tell stories that span a whole lifetime. So we need journalists of all ages to write about them. Consider film journalism. Roger Ebert wrote about film for the Chicago Sun-Times until his death in 2013; the Observer’s late, great film critic Philip French officially retired at 80 but kept writing about cinema until he died two years later. They never stop watching and enjoying movies, so why should they have stopped writing about them?
I now have a longer history in games playing than a huge majority of the younger writers I read, commission and admire. I played Pac-Man when it first arrived; I owned a Commodore 64 and a Mega Drive; I reviewed a game on the Virtual Boy, for god’s sake. At the risk of this becoming a self-indulgent take on Roy Batty’s closing speech, I’ve seen things you people would believe, but perhaps didn’t actually witness. If history has taught us anything, it’s that first-hand experience is vital in understanding sociocultural impact. And while, today, anyone can load up Space Invaders on an emulator, the experience of seeing that game in 1978, in its context of disco, the early home computing revolution and Star Wars mania, has a kind of emotional patina that is hard to conjure in 2025.
I often say how vitally important it is to keep playing – whether you’re playing video games, chess, football or historical battle re-enactments. It’s also important to keep asking questions about the world and the things we enjoy. And when you’ve been doing that long enough, you get to know how the stories often end. Currently, we’re worried about censorship in games, thanks to the machinations of payment processing companies. But I’ve been here before – I’ve been through Mary Whitehouse and Jack Thompson and a 100 tabloid moral panics. It’s reassuring to know that this too shall pass.
You are always an active part of what you enjoy – the books you read, the teams you support, the gigs you go to. Life is a network of experiences between which we get to draw our own connections and conclusions, and create our own maps of the vast, dizzying cultural landscape we live in. This is as true at the age of 95 as it was at 16, or in my case, at age 54.
In short, you’re stuck with me. The game, I hope, is far from over.
What to play
As I’m in a nostalgic mood, I would like to recommend the retro collection Gradius Origins from Konami and developer M2, the undisputed expert in updating classic titles to modern machines. Origins gathers all six instalments in the revered arcade shoot-’em-up series, including Gradius 1-3 and the spin-off Salamander titles, including Japanese, North American and often prototype versions, and it adds an impressive new addition, Salamander 3.
These are superlative side-scrollers with cool spacecraft, excellent weapon power-up systems and surreal biomechanical landscapes and bosses. Enemy attack patterns are intense yet beautifully choreographed, the action precise and unforgiving (although you do get to save your progress this time round, unlike the originals). Alongside the games, there are tantalising digital galleries including arcade flyers, concept art and guides to all the enemy ships. It’s a wonderful blast down memory lane.
Available on: PC, PS5, Switch, Xbox
Estimated playtime: 20 hours-plus
What to read
-
I enjoyed this article by Maddy Myers about Death Stranding 2’s fourth-wall shattering moments. I’ve put 100 hours into Hideo Kojima’s weird masterpiece, and his nods to the artificiality of the world have been refreshing reminders about the hyperreal nature of modern games and the role players have in completing the illusion.
-
Variety has a wide-ranging interview with Electronic Arts Entertainment’s president, Laur Miele. It seems there are plans for an Apex Legends movie, to go alongside the publisher’s Sims film that is in the works. Personally, I’d rather see a Mirror’s Edge or Titanfall movie, or even better a new Mirror’s Edge or Titanfall game.
-
Over the weekend, the video game retail site GOG offered 13 mature-rated games for free, including Postal 2 and House Party – and one-million players took them up on the offer. Its intention was to raise awareness of censorship in gaming, after the controversy regarding payment processing terms and NSFW titles. Eurogamer has more.
after newsletter promotion
What to click
Question Block
Here’s one from Kohigh Mathy on Bluesky:
“Why do some genres, like music, real-time tactics and point and click adventures, seem to vanish for years, only to resurface? Is it market fatigue, tech shifts, or something else?”
There are a number of reasons, I think. In a similar way to how certain movie genres continually disappear and return, partly it’s do with generational cycles of influence. A game developer who loved a genre as a child may, as an adult, seek to re-create it – part of the reason we’re seeing so many low-poly survival horror games now is that the creators grew up playing Resident Evil on the original PlayStation.
There’s also a cultural, even sociopolitical element – developers are inspired by the world around them and it could be that some contemporary events or themes are best realised by specific game genres. So we may see a sudden boost in military real-time strategy games during periods of global instability and conflict. I think there are technical influences, too. When a new console or graphics card is released, there is a rush to produce classic genres on that platform, because veteran players who fondly recall those game types like to see them reinvented.
Then there’s the interplay between nostalgia and innovation in the rediscovery of old genres. In a market where everyone is making Souls-likes, hero shooters and deck-building games, there’s value in producing a new take on, say, a 1990s-style interactive movie game, or a graphic adventure, or a button-bashing multi-sports sim – this way, you’re producing something a little different while still harking back to much-loved archetypes. It’s a win-win situation.
If you’ve got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.