PC Gamer (US Edition) Holiday 2021

MOLLIE TAYLOR Twitter @mollietayy This month Taught us all about competitive farming. I think it’s about throwing turnips at each other? TYLER WILDE Twitter @tyler_wilde This month Learned so much about Sifu’s martial arts that he had to register his hands as deadly weapons. CHRISTOPHER LIVINGSTON Twitter @screencuisine This month Became the mayor of a town full of the galaxy’s least grateful aliens. NAT CLAYTON Twitter @its_natclayton This month Took some screenshots of Mirror’s Edge so good they made us question our perception of time.…

Harry McCracken is not the name of a Cold War superspy, but a man who was once a developer for Radio Shack’s TRS-80 microcomputer. McCracken recently went back to have a look at his first game, Arctic Adventure, which he wrote when he was 16 around 1980-81—a text adventure inspired by the work of Scott Adams, a pioneering designer of the Adventure series. As was common, Arctic Adventure was distributed in The Captain 80 Book of BASIC Adventures: Pages of type-it-yourself BASIC code, each entry its own adventure game. Despite the emulators and swathes of TRS-80 software available online, however, McCracken couldn’t find Arctic Adventure. “I know of only a couple of contemporary mentions of it on the internet, and no evidence that anyone has played it since the first Reagan administration,”…

HIGHS Cookie monster Cookie Clicker has come to Steam, and immediately topped the charts. Furry friend A hamster picking buying and selling crypto at random has made a 20% return on his investments. Runescape reversal Runescape developer Jagex tried to shut down the Runelite HD mod. After a fan outcry it later announced it would help out the creator instead. LOWS The settlers Activision has settled for $18 million over allegations of workplace discrimination. Opaque Windows With bizarre error messages and a muddled response from Microsoft, Windows 11 launch has been a mess. Crikey New Zealander Charles Upham is ‘reimagined’ as Australian Lucas Riggs by Call of Duty: Vanguard. Kiwis aren’t happy.…

One of the most wonderful things about the evolution of esports is that these days, any game can be a contest. Long gone are the days where ultracompetitive ventures like Dota 2 or Counter-Strike are the only ways to enjoy high-level gaming. This was evident when at the beginning of August, Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone announced the first-ever Stardew Valley Cup—a tournament that would pit four teams against each other for a $40,000 prize pot, donated by Barone himself. The objective was to take on 100 challenges within three hours and to try to complete as many as possible, with each challenge offering a different number of points depending on its difficulty. Small things like naming a chicken after Barone would net a team ten points, while more difficult tasks…

For many game developers, becoming a quest designer on the Witcher series would be a dream come true. For Pawel Miechowski, however, it was a sign he was in the wrong place. The Polish writer had been working on a smaller project, which was cancelled as CD Projekt piled as many bodies as it could onto the franchise that would make its name. “I’m a big fan of The Witcher, but being a quest designer is totally not my thing,” he says. “I felt kind of lost. I decided to quit.” A bunch of Miechowski’s friends found themselves in a similar boat, and quickly founded 11 Bit Studios. “Bits are always even, 2-bit, 4-bit, 8-bit,” Miechowski points out. “Beginning with the name, we wanted to make unconventional connections.” That approach was borne…

IT’S EASY TO LOOK BACK ON MID-’90S INTERPLAY AS A HAVEN FOR RPG DEVELOPMENT, BUT THAT’S FAR FROM THE TRUTH The Black Isle isn’t even an island, in reality. It’s a peninsula in the Scottish Highlands, home to B&Bs and commuters working in nearby Inverness. Visitors frequent cottage museums and peer out across the damp beach, looking for bottlenose dolphins. In the imaginations of Interplay’s internal development team, however, Black Isle became a blasted rock in the middle of the ocean, illuminated by fierce lightning strikes—more akin to The Witcher’s Aretuza than the real-life place accessible by the A9 trunk road. Yet that’s the spirit with which Black Isle Studios was founded—an enthusiasm for extrapolating mystery and adventure from a mundane world. It first did so with Fallout in 1997. Developed by ’80s…