Thirty years ago, in the very first issue of Edge, a selection of luminaries gave their predictions of how videogames would evolve in the coming years. In 2013, another group of industry professionals looked into their crystal balls to see what the future of videogames held. In 2023, we’re looking back at those predictions to see how they have fared in the cold light of reality. In addition, we’ve gathered a group of analysts, technologists and industry leaders to ask how videogames might evolve over the next ten years. As an added bonus, since this is Edge’s 30th anniversary, we’re also asking them what the far future might hold, 30 years hence. Considering just how much videogames have changed since 1993, the future world of 2053 could be a very different place indeed.
For the first issue of Edge, launch editor Steve Jarratt conducted a hunt for forward-looking quotes about the future of videogames. Many of the quotations featured in the two-page article were gleaned from magazines and the nascent Internet, but Jarratt did manage to score something of a coup by sourcing the phone number for noted science-fiction author Arthur C Clarke, who duly gave his thoughts on the future of entertainment.
Clarke predicted that the addictive nature of virtual reality could be a danger. “Of course, it could be a shortsighted view,” he added. “If we are plugged into the whole universe, why should we unplug ourselves?” Fortunately, we’re not quite at the stage where hopelessly addicted players have abandoned reality for a Ready Player One-style virtual world, but videogame addiction has been proposed as a disorder by the American Psychiatric Association.
An unusual inclusion in the feature was former Genesis frontman Peter Gabriel, who in 1993 was working on the musical computer game XPLORA1: Peter Gabriel’s Secret World. He predicted that the CD-ROM would “absorb entertainment” and we’d see “enabling technology which allows the consumer to think of himself as the artist”. Certainly, there’s been a huge shift towards player-created worlds since, although the days of players being exclusively thought of as male are long behind us.
Former vice president of Electronic Arts Mark Lewis predicted that games would become “connective” and “interactive”, and that one day you would be able to go to a movie theatre and “play the movie”, a prediction that was spot on, as discussed in our look at interactive films in E387. Meanwhile, Jez San, founder of Argonaut Software, imagined a future of “direct broadcast games” which would “constantly download new parts of the game into your machine while you’re playing”, which sounds a lot like the cloud-enabled gaming present.
Nick Alexander, then managing director of Sega Europe, envisioned virtual-reality games that could be “controlled by your thoughts”, som
