“And wherever you’ve gone

and wherever we might go,

it don’t seem fair… today just disappeared.

Your light’s reflected now, reflected from afar.

We were but stones: your light made us stars.”

- Pearl Jam, Light Years

No, that quote is not from Ten. It came a number of years later, after Pearl Jam had miraculously survived the pathetic and traumatic death of Grunge, which floundered and crashed to the dirt in the wake of Cobain’s suicide like a monster severed from its head. It’s a nice stanza, though; nice because it shows a thoughtfulness and appreciation outside of self effacement; because it suggests that the group never intented to drive Grunge into the ground and then give up and go home; because it stands testament to the virtuosity and integrity Pearl Jam brought to the game in the early nineties, exploding with Ten as a launch pad for whatever organic path was waiting for them beyond it. Unlike almost any other seminal album of the Grunge era (even Soundgarden’s phenomenal portrait of pain, Superunknown) Ten wasn’t a dead end. It was a beginning. Read the rest of this entry »

Remember Me?

I’m no authority on gaming culture, but I know enough to know that to write on the history of video games without mentioning Myst (Miller 1993) is to write on the history of cinema without mentioning The Maltese Falcon (Huston 1941). It’s not a question of taste, although I love them both – it’s that both of them fundamentally changed the mentality behind both production and consumption of their respective media. And I’m no essentialist either: The Maltese Falcon was not strictly the first film noir, nor was Myst the first ‘thinking man’s game’. But they were the first to take the distinct elements of the genres they came to embody, and base themselves around those elements with ferocious conviction. Read the rest of this entry »