paul smith's Snaps & Bytes e-home
June 1999: The PC is dead.
More than that, it's starting to smell. The beige box recalls the austere 1930s compared to a groovy iMac. The monitor is a midget next to the new generation of giant digital TV's. PCs are tolerated in the office environment because they only have photocopiers, staplers and hole-punches to compete against. And you can't do your accounts on any of those. It's a very different story in the home. Against the limp foes of yesterday, like the SNES, the all-conquering power of the 486Dx2 chip was king. Example: Doom, the finest game of all time, took years to come out on other systems. But now the best games wait to get ported to the PC. In 1998 Gran Turismo was as hot a title as money could buy, yet it's still to have a Mintel outing. Look at any software chart, like ELSPAs, and you'll see games systems are dominant. Since the virtual death of the Amiga platform and the birth of Multimedia in the early '90's it's been the home market that pushes PC architecture to higher and higher spec's. and that means games. Thus the advent of next-gen. games systems three or four years ago must of had a big dampening effect. Proof: Many PC stores also sell consoles because many stores wouldn't survive by PC business alone. You need to spend a grand plus on a full-on 'n' frisky P2 with a monstrous 3D card to compete with current £100 games systems. And the £200 128-bit Dreamcast and PSX-2 aren't all that far away. PC's still exist only because 1) You can't word-process or print with a Nintendo. 2) You can wander the 'net with them. 3) Erm, I can't think of another good reason to own a home PC, let alone spend hundreds of pounds per year upgrading it. Think about DVD for a second. It's just the technologically improved version of the CD-Rom. But like CD-Rom, DVD for PC applications is the bastard offspring of another entertainment market. Audio CD technology gave us the 'rom. Digital Versatile Disk was once the Digital Video Disk. Who wants to watch a DVD Movie on a pokey monitor when they could spread out on the sofa and watch it on a 32" Wide-screen TV instead? Popcorn in your keyboard, anyone? It's like listening to a CD through your PC's speakers. Who does that when there's a good Hi-Fi with remote control in the room? And as PCs have become more complex and software more complicated the chances of them working 100%, 100% of the time, has dropped to the chances of intelligent life being discovered on Mars, or in PC World. You have to set aside an hour to install and configure new software, plus another hour to actually get the bastard to work. Unless you're running an office app. that is. It's time to face the facts; PC's make crap games machines. The only thing which keeps them going is the considerable installed user base and the kind of specialist titles which are hard to port to a 'sole. Example: Hasbro's Rollercoaster Tycoon is fine on a PC but all those options, features and menu-in-menus would be a bugger to navigate with a pad.
Looking to the future, the Dreamcast is likely to have a built-in modem so now you can murder your mates by 'phone. The pocket-memory-card-game thingy will extend its appeal into new areas. Apply DVD technology and you've got a Video player as well as an Audio CD player, as in the old Playstation and Saturn (I've still got mine. Am I alone?) Put it all in a saucy black case with brushed aluminium detailing to stick under your vast TV and you've got a winner. Make that box openable (not actually a word, but it deserves to be) and upgradable (not actually a word either) by a Sega Licensed Technician(tm) and you've got a device which could use mass-market PC technology like hard-drives or LS120s on a games dedicated board. Don't you wish you could exchange the pants performance 'rom in your laystation for a 40x speed one? Loading-bars would slash across the screen rather than creep like a glazier, err, glacier. The words 'Please Wait' would flash up on the screen so fast you couldn't read them. Bliss. The point of all this is if your business relies on people buying a PC from you to play games on (even if they're not admitting it, even to themselves), be afraid Be very afraid. As the wiffy Amiga was once surpassed by fresher products, so the home PC could be in the next couple of years.
786 words. Sorry. Thanks for the cheque Dale, you can be sure I'll be spending it sensibly. Wax Lamps, Pringles, The Phantom Menace merchandise… that kind of thing. Ciao.