For One Night Only
Games of the Kingdom
There was a time when Great Britain was the place for game development, or it felt that way at least. The original British wave was a little before my time, but learning about what was a kind of great, unrestrained creativity that spread from the bedrooms of enthusiastic videogame and PC fans to home computers everywhere, with videogame after videogame sitting on the shelves of local game shops, that has been both exciting and a little sad at the same time. That kind of creative freedom will likely never exist in the games industry again now that there are so many established approaches to development, marketing (not to mention legal regulations) and so on that such a boom is almost impossible today to have the kind of massive production of individual creativity.
What you might think of as a second wave of British videogame domination taking place in the late eighties but particularly the nineties: Ocean, Psygnosis, DMA Design, Rareware, Core Design, this was the time for Donkey Kong Country, Wipeout, Grand Theft Auto (the old GTA) and everyone’s favourite tomb raider, Lara Croft. British games were all over consoles, and many of people involved had their roots in the home computer market and that first wave.
Today things are quite different: many of the companies above either went out of business, were subsumed by bigger beasts, or just dropped off in the quality of games they produced. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t still plenty of games being made in Blighty, and a new games showcase has been announced to shine a spotlight on some of them.
For One Night Only is the ‘new showcase celebrating UK games’ that is promising ‘exclusive reveals, new trailers and live developer interviews’ from British games developers.
The event is airing on the 29thof July, from London.
Playing videogames, writing about videogames, considering videogames—that about sums it up. Videogames are the one hobby that I’ve kept since I was only little, zapping ducks on the NES or knocking out MR. X. And when I’m not enjoying classics from the bit generation of games or checking out those earliest of polygons, I’m probably playing something from today’s age of modern gaming: if I’m not complaining about it. Something I’m doing at the moment? Taking the Multisystem 2 for a spin.
