It Comes Out When?

It's normal for movies, television shows, and video games to be announced years before they're released. Maybe not four years before they're released, like Blizzard's new Starcraft game—that deception is pretty unique to video games.

Given the deluge of games in front of us at the moment, it's understandable to feel exhaustion at the mere suggestion of thinking about a video game coming out in four years, when we're all trying to work through the games in the past 30 days.

Still, what does the industry look like in four years? Is Activision Blizzard even still part of Xbox? What new body part will ache in weird ways that we cannot explain?

Patrick: In-between parenting duties last weekend, I saw that Blizzard announced a new Starcraft game. Cool! Neat, even! But a few moments later, I noticed the game had a release date: 2030. Let’s put aside whether that’s anything more than an illusion meant to inspire faux confidence in fans. It was at that point that I started doing the math in my head about what age I would be when this Starcraft game came out. I’m going to be 42 years old in February 2027. Let’s assume Starcraft is going to come out in the fall, right? That means I’ll be 45 years old, or halfway to 50, when Starcraft arrives. And that’s assuming the game isn’t delayed. (It will be.)

I bring all of this up to say that, increasingly, I’ve started thinking about how old I’ll be when something I’m looking forward to arrives. It’s why, as I argued on a recent stream reacting to the latest Nintendo Direct, I applauded Nintendo’s approach to announcing video games. Generally speaking, when Nintendo announces a video game, you’ll be playing it pretty soon. Six months? A year? Maybe immediately following the Direct? But you’re rarely spending years in the queue.

The Dark Tower is one of my all-time favorite stories. It’s a seven book series and a total mess. When Stephen King was in a car accident in the late 90s, he freaked the fuck out, worried he would never finish writing The Dark Tower. What started as a leviathan he was slowly working through over the course of a lifetime, his own personal Lord of the Rings, became an anxiety attack—and you could feel it in the writing. There are plenty of beautiful, harrowing, and lovely moments in those final books, including the ultimate ending to the saga, but King’s flirtation with mortality caused an existential crisis that ripped the sails out of King’s calculated storytelling.

To be fair, as a Constant Reader, I would have been sad, too, if King hadn’t finished The Dark Tower. Let’s assume King’s accident was prophetic, that he only had a few years left to see his own project through. Is a flawed ending to The Dark Tower by the original author better than someone else picking up the pieces, or no ending at all? Yeah, totally. I’d take that every time.

But this all got me thinking about how we’ve both reached the age where…well, anything can happen? I’m not trying to be overly morbid, but there’s outcomes where stories we’re invested in, stories we’re waiting for, stories that we haven’t gotten to yet…that we might not ever get to. Have you started thinking in those terms at all, too? Does it influence what you prioritize in terms of what you watch, listen to, or play? Does it make you look forwards or backwards?

Rob: You know, when I contemplate that stuff it's rare media that preoccupies me. I have juggled multiple projects for my entire adult life and I usually have to do collaborative work during the regular workday. Today I'm on the hook to record something and do a stream in the early evening. It's also some of the most beautiful weather we've had in weeks. The anxiety or grief I feel around the passing of time and the advancement of mortality isn't about a season of a TV show or the release of a game. It's that I am losing time with loved ones or just to be inside my own body, because I'm usually committed to multiple things from 10 AM to around 5 PM, and then various admin tasks get squeezed around that.

That's become more pointed as years have gone by. That the best part of every day is devoted to work that has to be done in a sealed-up room in front of monitors for hours. I think moving to the new place even made it worse because now there's an entire little forest outside, and countless little tasks and outdoor seating areas where I could spend time. MK and I are looking at some comfortable outdoor furniture where we could comfortably work with our laptops for hours, because if I have to sit there checking emails or classifying stuff for Quickbooks, I want that work to steal as little as possible from the things that bring me the greatest joys.

Which might also point to another problem facing some of these games publishers. Your audience is older! They have other priorities! StarCraft and Brood War meant the absolute world to me when I was 17.  This trailer would have made me ridiculously excited in 2004, and I'd have been watching it multiple times a year until 2008 or 2009 when it finally came out.

But time exists differently as an adult. The part of your brain that remembers video game release dates four years out is the same part that remembers an oncology follow-up for a family member, tax due dates, a vacation you've been putting off for years. When you're a kid, games are a destination that time is pushing you towards. Time is a flowing rapids and you're always navigating, and games are just rocks tossed into that stream.