Somewhere at the Intersection of Nostalgia and Enthusiasm for the New

First published in GRIND III, page 3.

Somewhere at the intersection of nostalgia and enthusiasm for the new... When we didn't have computers, we dreamt of games. Once we got the computers, we dreamt of them running the games from the magazines. By the time we had computers powerful enough to run the games from the magazines, we no longer had time to actually play them. And once we did find the time, we started writing... forever thinking about what we could have played if we hadn't stubbornly insisted on carrying on with the GRIND project.

Somewhere in the middle of that succession of ambivalences, we also welcomed consoles into our living rooms. Once we'd made sure we had access to next-gen games, we started looking to the past to discover what we'd missed in our post-communist childhoods. And after filling our shelves with various collections, we thought again about our origins: about the days when the only original games we could afford were the ones shrink-wrapped with LEVEL magazine or the Italian PC Games bought from Metro.

GRIND exists somewhere at the intersection of nostalgia and enthusiasm for the new. At the crossroads between technological pessimism and the hope that the future will be neither Orwellian nor Huxleyan. In perfect balance between the idea that we're living in a post-creative era and the promises of the big studios.

If you added up the years of play logged by every editor who contributed to this issue, you'd comfortably reach 120.

And that's exactly the point: we've been around long enough to have seen it all, and yet not so long that we've turned cynical and indifferent. We know what's good and what we like, we've had plenty of practice at setting our priorities, but at the same time we never pass up the chance to waste an evening on a mediocre but fun game. Because play, at bottom, is there to entertain us, and writing about play helps us immortalise the memorable moments of our lives.

We hope you'll enjoy reading our work as much as we enjoyed hammering away at our keyboards for yet another run of articles. And if you don't read it, then at least keep the thick, glossy pages somewhere safe from damp and sunlight until somebody else discovers them.

The first GRIND invited you to think beyond the conventional magazine format. GRIND 2 challenged you to feel the difference from the gaming magazines on the newsstand. Now GRIND 3 appeals to your sense of balance: we gathered old games and new, then put their qualities and their flaws in the scales. Then we sprinkled in a healthy dose of critical analysis, sweetened with intuition. We wrote the most detailed version of the reviews, then asked ourselves what you'd actually want to read out of that whole pile of information. And the result, we hope, will delight and disappoint you in equal measure. Because the antithetical forces of the universe – good and evil, joy and sorrow, masculine and feminine, reason and emotion, PC and console – merge to furrow and smooth your brows in a succession calculated with great precision.

Welcome to the end of the GRIND trilogy – a genuinely confusing epic, one that sets its priorities and its trajectory according to the personal whims of a handful of editors who refuse to give up even as the interested audience shrinks from one issue to the next. Because GRIND itself is a choice: we could just run the main story, but people like us can't take the easiest path. It simply isn't in our nature.

VLAD COSTEA