50 years of Panel 4, eh? And they said it wouldn’t last.

The Devil already has you.

PAGE 2

Yes, viewers, astonishing as it may seem, it was 50 columns ago today that I first brought you all The Voice Of Reason, swinging the Sword Of Truth and the Mace Of Justice at the software industry, then running away and hiding behind the Bins Of Concealment.

So I thought that now might be a good time to take a look back over the years and see what had changed thanks to the first half-century of my fearless and unstinting Campaign Of Righteousness.

And I was right. It was.

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Way back in my first-ever Panel 4, I noted the tendency of lazy and incompetent PC games programmers to simply up the minimum specs of their games whenever they couldn’t code them well enough to run properly on the machine they were supposed to. (Even though this restricts the game’s audience and ultimately strangles the PC games industry.)

And sure enough, programmers took those wise words on board. All games now run on a P166 and PC game sales have never been healthier. Hurray!

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46 Panel 4 columns ago, I expressed some puzzlement over what the various companies who kept buying the rights to the Amiga name hoped to achieve by it, since none of them ever got round to actually releasing a new Amiga.

(Amiga owners, of course, got very angry and said "The new Amiga will be out next week, and then you’ll be sorry!")

Four years, two more buyouts and no new Amiga later, it’s obvious that they were right and I was wrong. Oops.

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In my seventh-ever Panel 4 column, I wondered aloud what had happened to the bad old days of the late 1980s, when amazingly rubbish games had big-name licences attached to them and sold zillions of copies.

I also said that I hoped that by mentioning it, I hadn’t accidentally reminded them how much easy money they could make by doing exactly that.

1999: Terrible games of Tomorrow Never Dies, A Bug’s Life and Rugrats all top the charts. Sorry, everyone. Sorry.

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Three years ago this month, I just couldn’t understand why console manufacturers didn’t make their new machines backwards-compatible, so that you wouldn’t have just totally wasted the hundreds of pounds you’d spent buying games for the previous one.

I concluded that the only possible explanation was that the games business was run by incompetent idiots who all hated you.

But now, with Sony’s PS2 imminent, it’s clear that I was only 75% right. Boo.

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The very next month saw the UK release of the N64, and my Panel 4 predicted that it would turn out to be a mess-up.

I suggested that overpriced games, corporate stupidity and terrible developer relations would lead to a situation where Nintendo made fantastic games for the powerful new machine, but that hardly anyone else would bother and that the machine would die of software starvation.

Sometimes, chums, it would have been nicer to have been wrong.

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In Column 13, I wished that PC mags would stop wetting their pants over multiplayer network versions of games, since no normal people could ever play them. Some hope.

In Column 16, 25 pages were devoted to all the stupid things that had gone wrong with my stupid PC. Today it could be 100 and I’d still have missed a few.

And in Column 17, some paranoid Amiga owners made idiots of themselves.

Yep, some things will NEVER change.

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For Christmas 1997, we all watched a massive avalanche of (mostly terrible) games released, as many as had come out in the rest of the year put together.

Despite this being an obviously stupid plan (they can’t possibly all sell, and people buy games all year these days anyway), you won’t be surprised to have seen the exact same thing happen in 1998 and 1999.

And, unless the software industry suddenly triples in intelligence, for the next 500 years too.

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In March 1998, Column 25 celebrated the quarter-century mark by pronouncing Sega to be dead. The Saturn had finally keeled over and expired, and Sega had made so much of a mess of everything for such a long time that the company didn’t appear to stand a chance of ever being the force that it once was again.

Two years later, the Dreamcast launch, starved of resources and real marketing power, seems to have proved the point. The DC is a fine machine, but Sega simply couldn’t afford the cash to give it a fighting chance. Shame.

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And since the lovely Digi subs threaten to have me fired whenever I write any more pages than this, we’ll have to leave the second half of our retro lookback until next month, which also means I can go and play Ridge Racer 64 and Crazy Taxi now. Yay for me!

So far, I know, the news hasn’t been very encouraging. But perhaps the last two years will finally have seen the games business wake up and start to do things properly for a change.