I’m having trouble focusing these days, again. Stress-induced, maybe. It’s making sitting at a non-usual beer joint a bit uncomfortable, hearing the chatter of some children on one side and some nimbys on the other. Forced to pick, I’d prefer the children.
Plus there’s a terrible pain in all the diodes on my left side. But I digress.
Been trying to write a short video documentary about the CD-ROM magazine Launch, a peculiarity of the Y2K era. It’s been glacial as all my projects tend to be, so I’m going to put some less organized thoughts about it here and hope that it keeps the gears turning.
Launch was, first and foremost, profoundly weird. Perhaps all the CD-ROM magazines were, I really need to get one of my vintage systems set back up so I can test this theory. But in any case. Imagine a version of Myst, except instead of puzzles, it had FMV interviews with famous musicians, movie trailers, that kind of thing. And ads. Oh good lord, so many ads.
A copy of Issue 9 came packed with our new family PC, a massive Gateway 2000, back in 1996. That similarity to Myst led my brother and I to treat it like another game, though it was a confusing one at best. In retrospect, Launch seemed to shoot for a 24-39 demographic, affluent techheads who though the idea of browsing a magazine on CD was “cool.”
My brother and I, 10 and 7 respectively, were pretty far from that market. We prodded around at the interviews — other than Jewel, who we knew of since Alaskans are required to know about any and all famous Alaskans, we’d never heard of the musical acts. The movies were well above our interest level, the game demos didn’t seem to run on our PC. The included cartoons and digital fiction were… well, unusual. Honestly, we probably spent the most time on the ads — maybe not ideal for the advertisers who paid a thousand dollars per megabyte to be represented on the disc.
Viewed in retrospect, Launch might be easy to criticize — and as I’ve started and stopped my retrospective over the past 6-some years, I made many stabs at criticism. But the more time has passed, the more sympathetic to it I’ve become. Launch tried to be something different, something new. And as an artifact of its era, it’s really impeccable. Not sure if that makes it “good,” but it’s not worthy of ridicule I think.