Infinite Lives

Retro WIRED is a continuing retrospective of WIRED Magazine, 1996-2000.

By the mid-2000s, we’d realized we preferred to hide our game consoles. The 360’s faceplate, for instance, could be made to match the furniture, while the Wii was a slim, discreet box. The PS3 irked consumers: it was big and bold, all black gloss and chrome shine, totally undisguisable.

In the post-yuppie 1990s, though, we brashly displayed our technology. Ikea TV stands, with their frosted glass doors, deliberately paraded every component and console within, concealing only the wiring. Surround-sound speakers were mounted in the corners of the room or perched on willowy spires.

In Wired 6.08 (August 1998), Kevin Kelly—then Wired Magazine’s executive editor—tried to find the politest way to ask Martha Stewart whether she were actually ashamed of her computer. Stewart, herself an unlikely computer whiz, insisted that computers needn’t be ugly.

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Raina Lee introduces issue #3 of 1-Up thusly:

Welcome to 1-Up MegaZine, Issue #3. For those new to 1-Up, our publication represents the ghost of video game future; a world where secret golden coins and power-ups emerge out of the ruins (broken blocks), and everyone can live as many lives as they earn.

It’s a good introduction, encapsulating the dreamy-eyed intellectualism of the zine as a whole—and, for that matter, shedding light on the wherefores of this very website’s title.

1-Up is targeted at, we suspect, a particular kind of gamer. She is a cradle-to-grave gamer, to be sure, but because of the videogame industry’s current climate, she is cornered into that horrible niche called “casual” (or in Nintendo’s lexicon, “latent”) gaming. She intellectualizes and externalizes the videogames of her youth precisely because they are so internalized: her individual videogame experiences are woven into her earliest memory.

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