30 Games That Made Me Who I Am: 1999

In the very early 1990s, Sierra owned a chat room… online gambling… games service… thing called ImagiNation Network. I have no idea what any of the games on ImagiNation Network were called, but one of them was a multiplayer RPG that made me aware for the first time of the possibility of worlds inhabited by other real people. I didn’t actually play one of those multiplayer games until the The Realm, an awesome 1996 multi-user dungeon my brothers and I could only ever play using the free trial, so we were forever creating our characters anew when the trial expired every 30 days. In the

The Beauty of the Glitch

My video card has always been finicky. Mostly just the occasional, barely-noticeable pink lines dancing in the title bars of windows. (I had to look up what that very top bit of a window is called.) A little unnerving, but nothing serious. It served me admirably for years, despite being a touch eccentric. We were a good fit. I can appreciate eccentric. Last weekend, though, it took things to a whole new level. Where we’d had minor glitches before, we were now in full-blown catastrophic failure territory. The problem began with Borderlands 2, which froze up with garbled graphics and