PRESS START / BROWSE MODE
Picture the scene; having arranged with 2 or 3 mates, my real-world lobby, to meet under the town hall at a certain time, because mobile phones were brick-like alien trinkets we’d only seen posh business men using in films, pocket money from our parents and a curfew our only equip trinkets. One quest in mind, stealthing into the local HMV and Game stores to see what looked “cool” enough to become part of our armoury.
Dodging the Grannies and their Michael Bolton CDs (no offence Mike, you’re pretty fucking metal actually!), surrounded by racks of coloured plastic sleeves, we looked for something that spoke to us on cover art alone. System of a Down’s “Steal This Album” always a talking point, I wonder how many copies they actually lost to wannabe rogues! Laughing at the Papa Roach’s lovehatetragedy art of a moshing baby and picking out one unlucky mate to tell them that’s what they looked like now! One area of the store held a special place in our hearts, THE LISTENING BOOTH! It was an ELITE level corner of the shop where we tightly huddled in, one party member designated as headphone holder (I’m not sure if this was a perk or a debuff!), connected by thick metal cord to the wall, likely to avoid any repeats of the SOAD album saga with the headphones, while the others huddled around this claustrophobic square trying to listen to the new release we could barely hear over each other’s Space Raider crisp smelling breath!
PLAYER TWO: WAIT YOUR TURN
Having gained an embarrassing number of discerning looks from other shoppers and staff alike for singing loudly in the booth, I swear we thought we’d got the lip syncing on lock but looking back now we were probably inadvertently giving a concert to the entire store… let’s be real it probably looked and sounded like a pack of hyena giggling raucously over the corpse of some innocent herbivore! We leapt seamlessly from music to gaming in the form of GAME. Checking our power walk was at least a beat per minute faster than the rest of our party, sadly then being checked by them to at least the same speed if not faster, one “drop zone” in mind… our grail, the demo console!
Hearts dropping when we realised there was a queue of kids like us already standing in one unified circle pit of nerdiness to try Rayman even though we probably all had it at home. Something about being centre stage on the shop floor for our chance to show the “masses” how good we were at the game… or how many times we could miss one jump in particular when stage fright took over… transfixed by a blinking screen, not giving a shit how many snack riddled hands had held this crusty controller that somehow felt very different to use to the same ones we had at home, our own Excalibur. Pretending to browse the shelves for that “one thing we specifically came in for” until a lull in the crowd allowed us to perform.
DOWNLOAD COMPLETE
Today, sitting ALONE in my sexiest Jurassic Park pyjamas and thick rimmed specs in my SecretLab gaming chair, Beartooth’s new single playing loudly on a digital album I’ve already pre-saved with a monthly subscription meaning I don’t even need to “buy” it, in my Arctis Nova Pro headset that can play my games AND music at the same time…, I find myself asking; “I have access to everything at the click or press of a search bar, did we lose some of the process of finding these things along the way? Do I choose what I discover or does an algorithm do that for me?”
Would I even know who Beartooth were without a genius playlist that curated what I wanted to listen to and expand on that with similar artists? After all, In Between popped up in my musical ingredients one day and by golly it cooked! I didn’t have to spend my pocket money on one of their albums alone to gamble on whether they’d connect with me or not. Beartooth aren’t from England, I’ve discovered so many different genres and styles of metal that I like from around the world, even The Gazette who are from Japan! Where else would I have had access to these sounds and with this ease?
Gone are the days where I would have to carefully carry around a thick bag of casette tapes or book of CDs to change into my Walkman or Mum’s car stereo because it was so primitive as a unit you’d only manage to use one at a time. With LITERAL weeks worth of music on my phone I can now use one gadget and be happy on a desert island for months (as long as there were good snacks and cool animals!).
Gaming is similar, my libraries expand by auto recommendation because I’ve played similar games, I don’t have to worry about my very ADHD brain forgetting where I’ve put that copy of Destiny 2 and buying it three times because the first two have fallen down the side of the bed without my noticing! I have friends around the world I can connect with in voice via services like Discord and even watch them PLAY the multitude of games we find, on streaming platforms!
However, as I sit and look at my original copy of Monkey Island through the cracked CD window, a gift from my cousins with a donated PC they gave to our family, I wonder… when everything is tailored to our tastes, where does the stuff we don’t know we like yet come from?
GAME OVER FOR THE DISC?
With the industry increasingly shifting towards digital distribution for gaming and with our music libraries now online, do we have a NEED for physical media in our lives? The comments on Sony’s announcement clearly had something to say for their CDs. There is STILL a huge market for second-hand copies, with physical stores like CEX still ever present in our consumer landscape. Leaving the house to buy a game at launch or the ever missed midnight release (I won a copy of Wrath of the Lich King when I went to a GAME dressed as a tauren for its MR!). Lending games to friends never to see the disc again because you’ve ignited that same burning desire in them about a franchise and to put it very simply, ownership! I have several really stunning steelbooks from my favourite games and I LOVE that I still have my early physical copies of Sam and Max, Day of the Tentacle, the list goes on! It’s like looking back at Pokémon card collector culture which unsurprisingly have also had a resurgence in collectorship of late! When I go somewhere new I buy a momento to remember my time there, discs feel much the same, but for favourite memories attached to these relics.
Music, hand in hand in this journey, with digital only releases, where is our joy at being the first of our friends to find an album in store (Woolworths actually sold me a copy of Muse - Absolution album a whole TWO DAYS before its official release, WIN! (sorry for not correcting you guys!)
As with the way of most things in the world, convenience is dominant, but should that remove the alternative entirely? Vinyl is a fair example of showing us that having a physical copy and all that it brings with it, can exceed the lust for digital. Artists can release every which way of colour variant and I think YUNGBLUD even put some of his ACTUAL BLOOD in a few limited edition copies, I bet vampires were thrilled!
If physical media is so obselete, why are we still releasing it? Streaming didn’t disappear because someone borrowed their Grandpa’s record player… Buying hard media clearly does the opposite, “this mattered to me so much that I wanted to own a physical copy”. There’s something about recieving a gift card for a service that doesn’t feel the same as saying “I knew you would like this so here you go, have a physical manifestation of my care for you”.
I like digital media, I don’t want to uninstall everything, go to the local shopping centre in my Jurassic Park pyjamas JUST to prove I can… I doubt they’d much like that either… BUT efficiency seems to have been at the expense of some really cool lore. I don’t believe that connections should dwindle for convenience, the two don’t need to be mutually exclusive.
Crusty controller aside, maybe I don’t need the case full of CDs but rather the stories that emerged BECAUSE of them. Digital media gives us almost everything we could want at the touch of a button (without forcing customers to endure tasty pjs!), I just hope somewhere we leave a little room for discovery, ownership and most importantly, happy accidents in finding things for ourselves.
PLAYER TWO: What piece of physical media could you never get rid of, and what memory is attached to it?
I LOVE this. You’ve raised some great questions for us all to contemplate and I too wonder many of these things. I try to make space for both digital delivery and physical media in my life, specifically in the way you touch on, because that album or movie means SO much to me, that a physical embodiment of it means just that much more. I’ve been re-enjoying Blu-ray purchasing as well recently, and maybe its nostalgia, but the physical act of putting on a movie rather than just scrolling for it hits different. Its hard to put in a nutshell.