Video games don't love or hate you - they're just built that way

[Administrator]

When I played Kevin Tom's Football Manager as an impressionable child in the early 1980s, I was certain there were teams that had a genuine grudge against me. This is why I still harbour a dread of Middlesbrough that feels partially unwarranted. I saw the same sense of malevolent intent in the rival god from Populous, who seemed to predict and mock my every tactic at later levels, and in Civilization with those darn Aztecs.
Then in 1992 something happened that made me question my entire relationship with video games: I got a summer job at a game development studio.
If you've been reading my Eurogamer columns you'll know that I worked at Big Red Software in Leamington for several summers from 1992 to 1996. This small studio did a lot of work for Codemasters, based just up the road in Southam, but we also made our own original games - on very limited resources. There were, after all, only six of us when I started, and I was just there to write bad narrative and instruction manuals, and spent most of my time playing Monkey Island. We can pretty much write me out of the equation. But somehow in 1996 we made a pretty good game called Big Red Racing, a weird driving sim with jeeps, diggers and mud buggies and lots of jumps and ramps. One of our tracks was on Venus. We weren't really that into realism.
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