Press Play

2021 has been a year , shall we say.

There is way too much to go over in text form what has happened, but to name a few: Ubisoft and Star Wars, Bethesda and Indiana Jones, Bethesda and Microsoft, closures of Japan Studio and Google Stadia’s first-party unit, the return of Nintendo Direct and releases of the likes of Hitman 3, Returnal, Resident Evil Village, Mass Effect: Legendary Edition and more.

Oh, and the return of E3. And that is just between the period between January and June. And before everything hits the fan the following month.

The first of a two-part feature-length Press Play goes over the year, the biggest news stories and biggest releases of the year within the first half of 2021.

Part two will feature July through to December, including the Activision Blizzard stuff that has happened over the majority of the second half of the year as well as in August and September, release silly season and more.

That will go live publicly tomorrow at the same time as this is now, 5pm GMT, but you can listen to part two right now if you become a $2 podcast early access tier to our Patreon here.

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Mid-January

I’m on my way from my home in Derry, Northern Ireland – literally four days after launching Play Diaries – for a three hour trip across the border to the Republic of Ireland. Depending which way you’re going from in Derry, if you head east, you can be heading across into the border into Bridgend in Co Donegal within 15-to-20 minutes or Lifford – also in Donegal – in 45 minutes if you head south via the town of Strabane in Co Tyrone.

However, for this adventure, we’re having to go through Belfast to Dundalk for Run for the Border, a meet up between the Irish game development communities in both countries.

The event takes place in the shadow of Brexit two weeks after, but unbeknownst to what would happen months down the road with the worldwide Covid-19 outbreak. But before all of that, the event sees a jovial and friendly crowd as it hears from a pack of speakers on their respective works: how to make and publish your own boardgame, the experiences from funding some of Northern Ireland’s games scene, making 3D art on a budget and how the idea for Northern Ireland’s biggest games production ever came to be respectively.

Not to mention, chatting and nattering over a few drinks and a few slices of pizza. All that good craic.

“The mentality behind it was that we all became aware that the Northern Irish and the Republic of Ireland rarely get together on the island,” says Run for the Border lynchpin and Italic Pig boss Kevin Beimers. “We might go to San Francisco and bump into a few familiar faces at GDC, might do the same thing at gamescom, but in terms of the North going down to State of Play or the South coming up to the Belfast Media Festival, there’s not a lot of transfer there.

“It’s almost like it’s just a little bit too far away to spend a day on it, you save your money for another bigger event. So we thought if we could get the two teams together, we’re so close, it’s a two hour drive the there might be partnerships, there might be ways that different funds could be used against each other.”

Adds Vicky Potts, co-founder of Belfast-based Murder at Malone Manor developer Whitepot Studios: “The general vibe for Run for the Border, like it’s really got that kind of friendly, you know, everyone’s really excited to see each other type thing. When you arrive, you get these unrelated sort of trading cards almost. So it’ll be like different names for different games or TV shows and you have to sort of swap with other people to try and collect all of the same set.

“It’s got that sort of feel when you’re starting a new year at school or whatever, and you’re trying to find someone to trade Pokemon cards within the playground. Yeah, it’s good. It’s fun, friendly.”

In a special feature-length episode of Press Play, we delve into Run for the Border, how Northern Ireland’s biggest games production ever in Paleo Pines came into existence but almost didn’t (as already written about here, though this episode has more details and background than what’s in the piece), how Brexit will affect the scene and how both the North and South can collaborate together among several subject matters.

Nearly four years since it was first announced as an actual game after some initial inspiration seeing a GIF of an actual bird skating, today, Skatebird finally arrives on PC, Xbox (including Xbox Game Pass) and Nintendo Switch. Even with a last-minute delay from an August release to today’s rearranged release date, the game could not have come at a better time for the skating renaissance that is building with the launches of Skater XL and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 as well as the early access launch of session and the impending return of EA’s Skate.

Even with its chill nature, Glass Bottom Games’ Megan Fox is ready for Skatebird’s absurdity to release onto the world and what players do with it as they roll it out. Now that it is out, how does it fit into the skating renaissance in games, find itself revisiting the skating boom of the early 2000s and more as well as what comes beyond Skatebird?

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So I’ve not really talked about this aspect of myself on the site a whole lot, if at all, since Play Diaries launched back in January. But I am a queer-identifying person.

And there are a lot of queer-identifying people in the LGBTQIA community within the games industry. Representation with games, both the actual games and the people who make them, is finally starting to catch up, albeit slowly. But just in the past month alone, let alone this hellscape of a year, representation has picked up in a massive way through one of the biggest AAA releases of this year, The Last of Us: Part 2.

In October of last year, I hosted a panel about being queer in the games industry at EGX (remember when physical shows were a thing?) featuring five fellow folks in the UK games industry among various disciplines from development to comms to streaming and social media to talk of being queer and their experiences.

Them being Izzy Jagan (Junior Global PR Manager for Life is Strange, Square Enix), Hannah Flynn (Director of Communications, Failbetter Games), Charleyy Hodson (Head of Social Media, Xbox UK and Ireland and one of the on-air personalities for Xbox On), Els White (Game Director, Spider Lilly Games) and Ed Fear (Game Director, Mediatonic).

In this episode, we discuss first coming across queer content in games (spoiler: The Sims is a popular answer), how far queer representation has come along in games, what work remains in bringing representation forward, how they can be achieved and more as we do an hour-long panel that is hopefully enlightening, entertaining and fun.

When Final Fantasy 4 released in 1991 in Japan, it marked the beginning of one of the most influential periods in the JRPG genre and signaled one of Square Enix’s – or SquareSoft as it was then – most successful periods ever. Not only with FF4, but with 1994’s Final Fantasy 6 and 1995’s Chrono Trigger. Now, nearly 30 years on since it began, that successful trifecta of games will influence an upcoming JRPG with massive promise. The kicker? It’s coming from a small indie team in South America.

Cris Tales, announced last summer at E3, is a homage to some of the most famous JRPGs of all time. You play as Crisbell, a heroine who’s had recently awakened time powers and must save the world with her fellow companions Cristopher and, wait for it, Matias the frog. Seriously. But the big twist isn’t within the game, but outside it. Cris Tales is not your usual JRPG. This is not being made in Japan, but rather in South America. Specifically, Colombia. It’s an odd mix when you think about it, but it’s definitely different and unique.

Executive producer Derek Neal describes how those games help bring together a fusing of Columbian and Japanese cultures.

“You know, my favorite games from history are things like Final Fantasy 4 and 6, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, these kind of SNES classics from my childhood. Again, I basically had played all of the same games and had a very strong passion for them. And they really wanted one of the things that we both sort of feel is that modern RPGs have strayed very far from those roots. Like there’s been lots of interesting evolutions and changes to the genre over time.

"But we were nostalgic just for the experience that we had back when we were kids working on those games. And so, [studio head of developer Dreams Unincorporated] Carlos [Rocha Silva] really wanted to bring that to people, the RPG fans of today and kind of create something that was, you know, a more direct evolution of those formative experiences from our childhoods.”