The Visual Cortex: Covering TRON

Today this surfaces in the Cortex: a scan of the July, 1982 cover of Electronic Games magazine.

EG was the premiere video game magazine of its time.  I remember strolling into the drug store with my mom and spotting the second issue of EG on the rack in 1981.  It bothered me forever more that I missed that first issue.  EG was published from 1981 to 1985, the year its name was changed to Computer Entertainment in order weather the big video game crash and focus more on the burgeoning computer game market.  EG helped form video game journalism, and its influence lives on through the myriad of print and online coverage of the scene that exist today.

The feature story here is, of course, the release of Disney's video game extravaganza TRON, which promised to transport the audience into the inner-world of these new fangled computer boxes.  The hype for TRON was pretty intense, and helped seal the fate of the movie as a curious social artifact when ticket sales were considerably less than expected.  The movie itself is fun, but muddled and disjointed.  You can read the history of it, and two other seminal video game films from the early 80's, in my TDE article here.

EG was also the reason I stubbornly always called them "videogames", before Google's search algorithm convinced me the combined term never caught on, and would punish me in search rankings if I used it.

Without further ado, the July, 1982 cover of EG:

The Visual Cortex: Beautiful Skye

Where I flip through my image archive and ruminate on what pops up.

This time we land on Lady Deirdre Skye, leader of Gaia's Stepdaughters. She is one of the faction leaders of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, the stunning turn-based strategy game that also served as the first product from Firaxis, the development house that was formed by game legend Sid Meier, along with Brian Reynolds and Jeff Briggs. Meier and company had created gaming history (literally and figuratively) with the towering Civilization TBS games for Microprose; when that company changed management, Meier and his crew vacated to greener pastures.

The Lovely Lady Skye

One of the victory conditions of Civ was the colonization of Alpha Centauri by the players' civilization, so it was a natural fit that Firaxis follow up on how mankind was fairing in its new home. It's been awhile since I've played SMAC, so I can't talk much about the game, beside the fact that it had a truly massive tech tree. Also, that it was a tonne of fun to play. I don't think I ever played as Lady Skye, but Gaia's Stepdaughters were tree-hugging environmentalists whose weapons usually consisted of marshalling the semi-sentient planet's wildlife against the enemy.

In the tradition of the excellent research Firaxis puts into its games, Gaia was the ancient Greek personification of Mother Nature.