Unity, the popular multi-platform game engine, announced new changes for developers who use the software’s tools when making video games. I began thinking about 2013 and my years as a hardcore gamer while reading news of major structural changes in the game industry. This time, though, I was attentive, ready, and had a front-row seat. I wasn’t old enough in 2006 to appreciate the leap from the PlayStation 2 and Xbox to PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

I had a simple goal that summer: save enough money to preorder a PS4, buy a TV, and then buy GTA V and The Last of Us, a highly anticipated zombie apocalypse game that has recently been adapted into a TV show.Īt this point, I’d been playing video games for more than ten years, and I owned every one of Sony’s consoles-a certified fanboy. School had started two weeks before and I’d just wrapped up my first summer job where I bused tables at a dingy diner near Lake Michigan. (What we actually cared about was the quality of exclusive games only available on one or the other platform.) We’d trash-talk each other about who had the best hardware, as if we actually could measure the resolution and frame rate at that age. In my friend group, some of us had PlayStations, others had Xboxes. My high school teacher wasn’t convinced, but she didn’t write me a detention slip either. It only made sense to prioritize my gaming ahead of my schoolwork. My teacher shot a bewildered look toward me as I carefully explained how today was the release date of the long-awaited Grand Theft Auto V, the vast and anarchic open-world crime game, which would showcase the fullest capabilities of Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360.

Subscribe here.Ī decade ago, sitting in a world history class, I hollered at my friends, “GTA over GPA!” I was 15 years old, still a hardcore gamer back then. This article appears in the December 2023 issue of The American Prospect magazine.

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