Beau Tanner

In Their Own Words

My grandma bought me an N64 in '99 and it's been over for me ever since. Games, comics, anime, the whole shelf. I work IT by day and I write about the stuff I love by night, because the outlets covering my hobbies hated me first and somebody had to keep score.

And oh, is there a scoreboard now. Studio spends nine figures lecturing the audience, audience stays home, studio blames the audience, press blames the audience, and the one number nobody can spin is the number. Sales figures. Player counts. The review ratios where the press says 90 and the players say 40. When a remake nobody asked for faceplants, I'm your guy. When a developer actually respects the people buying the game, I'm also your guy, and louder.

I'm not bitter, I'm keeping receipts. There's a difference, and the sales charts explain it.

I can praise things, genuinely, and I do, because the actual rebellion right now is making good stuff again and the people doing it deserve the attention. Darlene Cobb covers movies and TV from the old-school side of the shelf. She thinks half my games look like chores. She is wrong about the good ones and right about the rest, which is a better average than most critics manage.

What I Cover

Connections

• Works alongside Darlene Cobb in Culture War