The Music Series, Entry 1: Primus

Official Site

The Wonderful Wrongness of Primus

On the music that found me in a Canberra share house in 2008

I first properly met Primus in a share house on Boddington Street, Canberra, in 2008. I say “met” because that is how the experience still feels. Some bands arrive as a recommendation, a single on the radio or a name on a poster. Primus arrived as a couple of physical CDs, passed from one person to another at an unusually formative point in my life. I was living at 55 Boddington Street, getting to know my housemates Andy and Rhys, and trying to find a sense of direction after an incident involving my time in the Army. I did not know then that I was about to discover a band I would carry with me for the next eighteen years.

I already had some musical landmarks. I had known Tool since 2001 and Alice in Chains since 2004, and both had helped broaden my understanding of what heavy music could communicate. They showed me that there was room for complexity, unease, eccentricity and a certain refusal to behave. Even so, something was missing from the picture. I had not yet found the particular combination of technical brilliance, absurdist humour, angular rhythms and sheer personal stubbornness that Primus seemed to embody. I did not have the vocabulary for it in 2008. I just knew I was drawn to artists who sounded like nobody else.

One day Andy, having worked out some of the music I was listening to, asked a simple question: “Have you heard Primus?” Not properly, I told him. I had heard the name, but I had never really taken the time to go down that particular rabbit hole. He handed me two CDs. The one I remember most vividly was Sailing the Seas of Cheese. There was no elaborate introduction and no persuasive speech about why I ought to appreciate them. That was part of the beauty of it. Here was an album, in a plastic case, from someone whose taste I was beginning to trust. I put it on, and a new part of my musical life began.

It is worth remembering how tangible music felt then. You borrowed a disc, took it home, looked at the cover, read whatever you could find inside and listened until the record began to reveal its peculiar internal logic. You were not being offered a thousand other artists after thirty seconds. The album had space to make its case. I remember playing Sailing the Seas of Cheese at full blast while driving around Canberra, letting those songs fill the car as the streets passed by. It was an everyday, unceremonious setting for something that has stayed with me for most of my adult life.

Those drives are inseparable in my memory from another part of that year. I was approaching what I now recognise as a terrible decision involving my first girlfriend. I do not need to turn that private history into a neat lesson, or pretend I understood its implications at the time. I was young, I was navigating things badly in some respects, and I was still learning how to be myself. Yet there I was, moving through Canberra with this gloriously strange music playing at an irresponsible volume. The circumstances around me were complicated. The pleasure of hearing something completely new was wonderfully uncomplicated.

Sailing the Seas of Cheese, originally released in 1991, is a remarkably confident introduction to Primus. Les Claypool’s bass refuses to sit quietly in the place bass guitars are usually assigned. It snaps, burbles, lunges and practically leads the conversation. The guitar cuts across it at odd angles, the drums pursue their own restless geometry, and the songs remain recognisably songs despite appearing, at times, to have been assembled according to rules nobody else received. “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver” and “Tommy the Cat” have all the swagger of musicians who know exactly what they are doing, even while making the listener wonder whether they have gone completely mad.

That balance is what has always fascinated me. Primus can be funny without being disposable, virtuosic without feeling merely athletic, and weird without asking for permission to be weird. Their music never seemed designed to reassure everyone in the room. You could be baffled by it, irritated by it, amused by it or completely hooked. It would continue being itself regardless. I loved that immediately, although I probably could not have explained it as clearly back then. The strangeness did not feel ornamental. It felt structural, as though removing it would leave nothing recognisable behind.

Over time I came to recognise something personal in Claypool’s approach. He has always struck me as a man who is fiercely, almost cheerfully, himself. There is a freedom in that which I find deeply attractive. I have never wanted my taste, appearance or opinions to be determined by whether they happen to fit the prevailing expectations around me. I want to do things at my own speed, think my own thoughts, wear my own tattoos and follow my interests wherever they lead. That does not mean I have always done so gracefully, or that independence excuses poor judgement. It means I value the space to become a recognisable individual rather than a more convenient version of someone else.

There is a strong temptation to describe an outsider as someone who wants to stand apart. I think many outsiders are simply people who have found that their natural way of seeing the world does not line up neatly with the dominant one. That was my attraction to so much of the music I loved as a teenager and young adult. Tool offered one kind of intensity and interiority. Alice in Chains offered another, darker and more emotionally exposed. Primus came at it from a completely different direction, with bent humour, strange characters and a kind of muscular musical mischief. It was another missing link in a larger appreciation of people who make things on their own terms.

The title Pork Soda, from Primus’s 1993 album, captures that philosophy almost perfectly. Claypool has explained that the idea was an acknowledgement of Primus as an acquired taste, something as improbable and potentially unappetising as a meat-flavoured soft drink. I love that. It is a joke with an oddly precise understanding of the band’s place in popular culture. A group capable of tremendous musicianship was willing to package itself as something that might make people recoil. The joke was not that the audience lacked taste. The joke was that there was no sensible reason to expect universal approval, and no particular need to chase it.

I think often about how my relationships with albums have changed since that share house. Digital libraries make almost everything immediately accessible, which is a genuine convenience. But the memory of a friend physically handing me two CDs has a weight that is difficult to reproduce. It connected a place, a person and a set of circumstances to the sound itself. Whenever I return to those early Primus records, I hear them as music, of course, but I also hear a version of Canberra in 2008. I hear the car. I remember the house. I remember Andy and Rhys. I remember being uncertain about my future and completely certain that I wanted to keep listening.

Eighteen years later, the person who drove around Canberra blasting Sailing the Seas of Cheese is both familiar and distant to me. My life and responsibilities have changed, and my tastes have widened. Yet Primus still sound like Primus. They still make me laugh, listen carefully and appreciate how much more interesting a distinctive artistic identity can be than a perfectly presentable one.

Now, in December 2026, Primus are due to return to Australia, playing alongside Queens of the Stone Age. I hope to see them. There is something beautifully circular about the possibility of hearing this music live, so many years after Andy first put those discs in my hands. I have also been thinking that this may, perhaps, be my last concert. I do not mean that as a dramatic pronouncement, and life may well change my mind. It is simply where I find myself: increasingly interested in choosing experiences deliberately, rather than collecting them indefinitely. If Primus became the closing chapter of my life as a concertgoer, I could think of far worse ways to finish.

Perhaps that is also why I want to begin this new series here. I have a hundred musicians and musical acts in mind, a hundred opportunities to explain the sounds, stories and personalities that have accompanied me through different stages of life. This is not intended to be a definitive ranking or an attempt to write the final word on anybody’s work. It is a record of personal encounters. Some of the artists will be familiar, some less so, but each will have earned a place in my life for reasons I want to remember and share. Starting with Primus feels right because discovering them reminds me what this whole exercise is about.

Music can be a form of companionship across time. It can preserve a street, a car journey, a friendship and an entire younger self without requiring any of those things to remain unchanged. When I think of Primus, I think of the sheer delight of realising that there are people in the world who are proudly, spectacularly unlike anybody else. I think of Andy’s CDs, Boddington Street, those drives through Canberra and an unexpected invitation to hear things differently. I have loved these cats ever since. If you are joining me for the next ninety-nine entries, I hope you will find a few old favourites, discover something unexpected, and perhaps hear a little of your own life along the way.

727 Days: The Road to the 10th (and Final) Generation of Interactive Art

There are 727 days between today, 5 November 2026, and 1 November 2028, the day I turn forty. I have begun imagining that birthday with an unusually extravagant accompaniment: the simultaneous arrival of PlayStation 6 and Xbox Project Helix. Neither company has announced that date, and a shared launch remains entirely my own hopeful construction. Even the year requires qualification. Nevertheless, putting a precise day against an uncertain future gives that future a shape. Two years contain enough ordinary living to make the person approaching the launch different from the person anticipating it now. A child grows, work changes, projects advance. Somewhere within that accumulation, another generation of machines might arrive and rearrange the possibilities of an art form that has accompanied most of my life. I am interested in what would justify that arrival, and what we would lose if it proved to be the last.

My previous essay, An Echo of Abundance, concerned the peculiar excitement surrounding four familiar names at the end of 2026: Ocarina of Time, Half-Life, Grand Theft Auto and The Elder Scrolls. Their convergence made the horizon feel crowded again. Hardware supplies a different kind of anticipation because a console promises conditions under which many future works might exist. Its appeal extends beyond the first games advertised beside it. There is pleasure in wondering what developers will discover after several years with the machine, which unexpected work will become inseparable from it, and how its particular compromises will shape the period we later remember. At thirty-eight, I recognise that anticipation without expecting it to occupy my entire life. The prospect of turning forty alongside another transition makes the relationship between personal time and technological time especially visible.

The public evidence already establishes a next Xbox more concretely than a release calendar. In March 2026, Microsoft's Jason Ronald described Project Helix as a console intended to play Xbox and PC games, built around a custom AMD system on a chip. He said alpha hardware would begin reaching developers in 2027. That is a development milestone, with considerable work potentially remaining before a consumer launch. Sony's May 2026 earnings discussion was explicit that decisions about the timing and pricing of its next generation had not been made. The company identified elevated memory costs and constrained supply as factors affecting its calculations. Consequently, I use PlayStation 6 as the familiar shorthand for Sony's successor and Helix as Microsoft's project name, while treating November 2028 as a scenario. ^[1,2]

There is an identifiable precedent behind the attention paid to 2028. In a submission published during the Competition and Markets Authority's investigation of Microsoft's proposed Activision Blizzard acquisition in 2022, Microsoft said the next console generation was not expected before autumn 2028 at the earliest. The statement explained a commercial argument being made four years ago; it was never a launch announcement. Its value today is historical. It demonstrates that the year circulated within serious industry planning well before the present speculation. A November 2028 transition would also place roughly eight years between successive Sony and Microsoft generations, following the seven years between their 2013 and 2020 launches. These intervals establish plausibility without creating a timetable. Supply conditions, development readiness and the continued earning power of existing platforms can change what once appeared to be a sensible horizon. ^[3]

The closest useful precedents for a shared moment are strikingly recent. PlayStation 4 launched in North America on 15 November 2013; Xbox One followed on 22 November. In Australia, the order reversed, with Xbox One arriving on the twenty-second and PS4 on the twenty-ninth. Seven years later, Xbox Series X and Series S launched on 10 November 2020, followed by PS5 on 12 November in its first markets, including Australia, and 19 November in its wider rollout. A generation can therefore feel simultaneous while its actual arrivals differ by days and territories. Those examples also show why an exact shared date would be unusual. On 1 November 2028, a Wednesday, two competing manufacturers would each need hardware, distribution and software ready together. Commercial rivalry supplies reasons to watch a competitor closely, alongside reasons to preserve a separate announcement and launch window. ^[4-7]

I enjoy imagining the coincidence precisely because it exceeds what the evidence requires. The attractive picture is simple: a birthday morning, two different interpretations of the future, and enough curiosity to make a familiar room feel newly connected to the wider world. The practical version would involve an Australian price I can actually afford, dependable availability and a reason to buy beyond the symbolism. I would welcome a November launch several weeks away from the first, or a staggered transition that gave developers more time. Affection for a date should survive contact with manufacturing reality. An announcement can place a product on a calendar; delivering sufficient stock and worthwhile games turns that calendar entry into an experience. The older I become, the more interested I am in whether a machine earns the space it occupies after its packaging has been put away. Quiet cooling, accessible controls and repairable parts would help either machine earn its place here.

That question gives the next transition a demanding standard. The PS5 launch already promised rapid storage, more convincing lighting, spatial audio and a controller capable of making touch part of the presentation. Microsoft now describes Helix through advances in rendering and simulation, including substantially greater ray tracing capability. Such announcements describe technical opportunities; their artistic consequences depend on decisions made by developers. I would like more responsive worlds, convincing physical interactions and fewer interruptions between an intention and its execution. A city that behaves more persuasively might matter more than a spectacular reflection. A smaller adventure whose systems communicate clearly might justify new hardware more effectively than an enormous landscape assembled to demonstrate its scale. The useful comparison will be between experiences made possible and the money, labour and energy required to produce them. ^[1,7]

Astro's Playroom provides a useful precedent for making a hardware feature intelligible through an actual game. Preinstalled on PS5, it was designed around the DualSense controller's haptic feedback and adaptive triggers. Its premise connected new sensations to a playful encounter with PlayStation's history. That is a persuasive starting point for a successor: give the player something coherent to do, and let the technology explain itself through the activity. I hope both manufacturers remember how much a modest, carefully designed introduction can accomplish. Technical ambition becomes easier to evaluate when the interaction is in my hands and the pleasure survives repeated play. A generation also needs room for discoveries that its architects did not anticipate, including small games whose inventiveness makes impressive use of limited resources. ^[8]

Helix also complicates the familiar idea of a console generation by bringing console and PC libraries into the same stated ambition. Sony's June 2026 strategy discussion similarly described a next platform extending the PlayStation experience beyond its traditional living-room setting. Neither development establishes a future consisting entirely of streamed games. They suggest that the boundaries around a platform may continue changing. A console could become a more flexible computer while retaining a controlled, comfortable interface. A portable companion could execute software itself, receive a stream, or offer both options. These arrangements have different implications for performance and independence. Calling all of them the end of consoles would conceal the choices being made. I would judge a successor partly by how clearly it explains what runs where, which purchases travel with me, and what remains available when a connection fails. ^[1,9]

The prediction that the coming machines could represent the final conventional generation has a long history. In 2018, Ubisoft chief executive Yves Guillemot told Variety that one more generation would be followed by universal streaming. Game Developer's contemporary account preserves the confidence of that forecast and its commercial attraction: ambitious games could reach people through televisions and phones without requiring a dedicated console. The PS5 and Xbox Series generation subsequently arrived, and their successors are now being developed. The forecast therefore supplies a useful precedent for caution about deadlines attached to technological change. Streaming can become more capable and more widely used while local machines continue finding customers. Whether the next generation proves to be the last will depend on the scale and persistence of those customers, together with the alternatives offered to them. ^[10]

The case for cloud gaming nevertheless deserves a fair account. A compatible television or inexpensive streaming device can provide access to demanding games without the initial expense of a powerful local machine. Microsoft announced Xbox streaming on selected Amazon Fire TV devices in 2024, and Sony offers direct cloud access to eligible games through PlayStation Portal in supported markets. These are existing arrangements, subject to service and membership conditions. On 4 November 2026, Microsoft also previewed new cloud input options, including a controller connection intended to communicate directly with the cloud over Wi-Fi. The appeal is easy to understand in a busy household: fewer installations to manage, another screen available, and the possibility of trying a substantial game without reorganising the room. I would value those conveniences alongside the ability to run games locally. ^[11-13]

Technical improvement does not make every connection equivalent. In cloud gaming, an input travels to a remote machine, the game responds, and newly rendered images return as compressed video. Network delay joins the other stages already present in ordinary play. NVIDIA's published GeForce NOW requirements specify both bandwidth thresholds and network latency below eighty milliseconds to its data centre, illustrating that download speed alone cannot describe the experience. Distance, congestion and the reliability of the connection still matter. Different games also tolerate disruption differently. A pause during a deliberate strategy game and an interruption during a precise defensive manoeuvre have different consequences. For a player in Canberra, the relevant test is the service's actual performance from home at ordinary playing hours. A demonstration under favourable conditions cannot answer that question for every household, region or genre. ^[14]

The financial argument also requires more than comparing a console's price with a monthly subscription. Cloud providers still need machines capable of running the games, together with the power, networking and capacity to accommodate people playing at the same time. Moving computation elsewhere changes who buys and operates that equipment. I expect the value calculation to vary with the player. Occasional access could be attractive to someone who would otherwise rarely use an expensive machine. Someone who plays throughout several years may prefer paying for dependable local hardware. A household might sensibly combine both approaches. Price changes and the availability of particular games could alter either calculation. These are reasons to examine the complete arrangement over time, including what remains accessible after a subscription ends, rather than assuming that removing the box automatically removes the expense.

Google's Stadia provides a concrete warning about confusing technical feasibility with a sustainable platform. When Google announced its closure in September 2022, it said the service had been built on strong streaming technology but had failed to attract the expected audience. Consumer access ended on 18 January 2023, with refunds announced for eligible hardware and purchases. The episode does not establish that competing services must fail. It establishes that a functioning technology can disappear because the business surrounding it does not meet its operator's expectations. For players, the consequence extends beyond a disappointing investment. Access to a particular version of a game can depend on the continuation of a service over which they have little influence. Any argument for replacing the remaining local alternatives should explain how it would address that dependence and earn durable confidence. ^[15]

There is also a precedent for consumers changing a platform's intended direction before release. In June 2013, Microsoft abandoned Xbox One's proposed recurring online verification and restrictions surrounding disc-based games. Its official explanation acknowledged players' wish to lend and resell games and to play offline. The revised policy removed the twenty-four-hour connection requirement. That episode belongs in any account of an inevitable transition to permanent connectivity because it records an actual negotiation over the conditions of play. Players can welcome a network's conveniences while objecting to dependencies imposed on ordinary use. I would like the next generation to make its expectations equally explicit before anyone commits money. The conditions under which a purchase works deserve as much attention as a promotional demonstration, especially when a machine is presented as the beginning of several years of entertainment. ^[16]

Physical distribution, digital purchasing and cloud execution must also be distinguished. Sony announced in July 2026 that production of physical discs for new PlayStation releases would end from January 2028, while previously released disc games would be unaffected by that transition. This is a substantial change for collectors and retailers. It does not establish that the games replacing those releases will run remotely. A downloaded game can execute on local hardware, with offline availability depending on its design and licensing conditions. Conversely, a box on a shelf may contain a code or require further downloads. The relevant questions concern where the playable data resides, what authorisation is required and whether the work can still function if its original distribution arrangements disappear. A future without new discs could therefore remain a future with consoles for many years. ^[17]

Nintendo supplies another reason to resist a universal timetable. Switch 2 launched on 5 June 2025 and sold more than 3.5 million units worldwide in its first four days, according to Nintendo. That response demonstrates substantial demand for a distinctive piece of local gaming hardware, although it cannot predict the market a decade from now. Nintendo's game-key cards also reveal how untidy the boundary between physical and digital has become: the card authorises a download and must remain inserted during play, while the downloaded game runs on the system. Buying something tangible therefore does not always mean receiving the software itself on that object. The lesson for 2028 is to examine specific products and arrangements. Portable play, local responsiveness and familiar controls can retain their appeal while the methods of selling and delivering software continue to change. ^[18,19]

Preservation consequently belongs near the centre of my expectations for the next machines. Microsoft's Helix announcement includes a commitment to keeping games from four Xbox generations playable, and Sony's current backward compatibility arrangements demonstrate the value of carrying an existing library forward. Neither fact guarantees complete compatibility on an unlaunched successor. I would want clear information about supported games, accessories and saved progress before release. An accumulation of purchases is also an accumulation of associations: a particular soundtrack, a world visited during a difficult year, a game someone else recommended. Requiring people to purchase access repeatedly places pressure on that continuity. Local execution can help preserve it, provided the necessary software and permissions remain available. Cloud access can help people encounter neglected works, while still leaving the long-term question of who can keep those works functioning. ^[1,20]

I can imagine several outcomes beyond 2028 without declaring any of them inevitable. Cloud services could become the ordinary route into blockbuster games for a much larger audience, leaving powerful home machines as specialist products. Console and PC systems could gradually share more software and interfaces, weakening the old divisions while retaining local computation. Dedicated hardware could continue through further generations because enough people prefer its reliability and simplicity. Different regions might settle into different combinations. Even if PlayStation 6 and Helix proved to be the last products shaped like today's rival home consoles, hardware would still exist somewhere, and people would still need devices through which to play. What might end is a particular commercial rhythm: two prominent successors arriving in the same season and becoming reference points for the following portion of our lives.

The timescale matters here as much as the destination. A final generation beginning in 2028 could remain in ordinary use throughout much of the 2030s. If another seven or eight years passed before the market approached a comparable transition, we would be discussing 2035 or 2036. That arithmetic is illustrative, without predicting either company's plans. By then, a generation purchased on my fortieth birthday would have accompanied a substantial portion of another decade. Manufacturers would owe those players dependable support even while pursuing different customers elsewhere. A gradual movement towards streaming would still involve households replacing equipment at different times and retaining older games for different reasons. The claim that everything becomes cloud based therefore needs a duration, a geography and an account of continuing demand.

That rhythm has cultural value, though I would not defend every practice attached to it. A generation provides shared reference points for criticism and memory; it can also encourage unnecessary replacement and loyalty to companies whose decisions deserve scrutiny. My hope for 2028 is that a recognisable transition gives developers worthwhile new possibilities without turning existing players into obstacles. I want games with an identity, interfaces that respect attention and machines that fit comfortably into a household. The 727 days ahead allow time to judge the announcements against those expectations. Developer hardware, public demonstrations and eventual pricing will each supply different evidence. None requires a permanent state of vigilance. I can look forward to the future while finishing work already begun, enjoying games already available and remaining present for the much less repeatable events of family life.

On 1 November 2028, I would love to turn forty with a new PlayStation and a new Xbox arriving together. The wish is personal, and its pleasure survives the possibility that the companies choose entirely different dates. If these become the final conventional consoles, I hope they leave behind accessible libraries and a convincing example of why people valued having the means to play at home. If further generations follow, I hope they continue earning their place through the work they make possible. Cloud gaming may occupy far more of that future; its eventual reach remains something we will discover through use. For now, the date is 727 days away. I can imagine the first unfamiliar startup sound, the controller in my hands, and a new world waiting while an ordinary birthday morning continues around it.

Research and source notes

Sources checked on 5 November 2026. Essay length is 3,000 words, excluding the title and references.

[1] Jason Ronald, Xbox Wire, 11 March 2026. From GDC Building the Next Generation of Xbox.

[2] Sony Group Corporation, Investor Relations, 8 May 2026. Corporate Strategy and Earnings Announcement Presentation Q and A Summary. Questioner 3, page 3: next platform timing and pricing were undecided; component costs and memory supply were material considerations.

[3] Microsoft, UK Competition and Markets Authority, 2022. Microsoft response in the Activision Blizzard merger investigation. Paragraph 3.80 records the then expectation that another generation would not launch before autumn 2028 at the earliest. This was a historical submission, not a product launch commitment.

[4] Sony Computer Entertainment, Sony, 3 December 2013. PlayStation 4 Global Sales Surpass 2.1 Million Units Following Europe Australasia and Latin America Launch.

[5] Xbox Wire, Microsoft, 4 September 2013. Xbox One to Launch on November 22 2013 in 13 Markets.

[6] Xbox Wire, Microsoft, 10 November 2020. Power Your Dreams Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S Now Available Worldwide.

[7] Jim Ryan, PlayStation Blog, 16 September 2020. PlayStation 5 launches in November.

[8] PlayStation Blog, Sony Interactive Entertainment, 11 November 2020. Unleash the power of the DualSense wireless controller with Astro's Playroom.

[9] Sony Interactive Entertainment, Sony Investor Relations, 5 June 2026. Game and Network Services Segment Small Meeting Q and A Summary.

[10] Alex Wawro, Game Developer, 6 June 2018. Ubisoft CEO There will be one more console generation after that we will be streaming. Contemporary reporting of Yves Guillemot's Variety interview. The original interview is linked from the report.

[11] Xbox Wire, Microsoft, 27 June 2024. Xbox Gaming Coming to Amazon Fire TV Play More Games No Console Needed.

[12] Sony Interactive Entertainment, PlayStation, Accessed 5 November 2026. Cloud streaming on PS5 and PlayStation Portal.

[13] Xbox Wire, Microsoft, 4 November 2026. Preview Two New Ways to Play with Xbox Cloud Gaming.

[14] NVIDIA, GeForce NOW, Accessed 5 November 2026. System Requirements for GeForce NOW Cloud Gaming.

[15] Phil Harrison, Google, 29 September 2022. A message about Stadia and our long term streaming strategy.

[16] Don Mattrick, Xbox Wire, 19 June 2013. Your Feedback Matters Update on Xbox One.

[17] Sid Shuman, PlayStation Blog, 1 July 2026. Physical disc production ending in January 2028 for new games releasing on PlayStation consoles. The announced change concerns physical distribution of new releases and does not itself establish cloud execution.

[18] Nintendo Australia, Nintendo, 13 June 2025. Nintendo Switch 2 sets record selling over 3.5 million units globally in first four days.

[19] Nintendo, Nintendo Australia, Accessed 5 November 2026. Nintendo Switch 2 Game Key Cards.

[20] Sony Interactive Entertainment, PlayStation Support, Accessed 5 November 2026. Backward compatibility PS4 games playable on PS5 consoles. Existing PS5 compatibility arrangements. No PS6 compatibility guarantee is inferred.

Echoes of Abundance: On VI, Half-Life 3, TESVI and Ocarina’s Remake in 2026

How four extraordinary developments made the end of 2026 feel like an older, larger age of video games

For some years now, I have been trying to identify an absence in the experience of following video games. The medium has continued to produce remarkable work, often in greater quantities and from a broader range of creators than at any previous point in its history. Yet the calendar has felt different. There was a time when the horizon itself seemed crowded: a great new game promised for this Christmas, another returning franchise gathering rumours, an unfamiliar piece of hardware about to rearrange our expectations, some improbable announcement capable of changing the conversation before anyone had even seen it in motion. The pleasure began long before the purchase. It lived in the waiting, in the magazines and trailers, in tentative conversations with friends, in the sense that several futures were approaching at once. As 2026 winds down, I have felt something of that atmosphere return. Four developments in particular have brought it back: a new Ocarina of Time I can actually play, the persistent possibility of Half-Life 3, Grand Theft Auto VI arriving after thirteen years, and the sudden, official emergence of The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel. They are four different kinds of event. Their proximity, and the length of the waits behind them, make this moment unusual.

There is an obvious temptation to call 2026 one of the greatest years in gaming. I would resist that formulation for now, because a year can be judged properly only after its releases have been played, argued over and remembered. Half-Life 3 remains an unannounced prospect; Sentinel is a title, a setting and a promise of future work rather than a game arriving this Christmas. Even Grand Theft Auto VI, scheduled for 19 November, has yet to face the ordinary test of being in our hands. The narrower claim is: the final weeks of this year have reassembled an almost forgotten arrangement of anticipation. The most famous unfinished conversations in gaming have become active again, and the activity is occurring on different levels of certainty. If I were arranging these four events by their present tangibility, Nintendo's release would stand first, Rockstar's imminent launch second, Bethesda's formal naming third and Valve's still-unconfirmed sequel fourth. This is a ranking of evidence, not of artistic value or personal affection. It is precisely the mixture of fulfilment, proximity, revelation and possibility that gives November its peculiar electricity.

Today, 5 November, Nintendo has released its full remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for Switch 2. I have begun playing it, and the early experience has been phenomenal. That is an immediate, personal reaction, rather than a claim to have already measured every dungeon or every change. The original arrived in 1998, when the transition from two-dimensional adventures to convincing three-dimensional worlds still felt like an encounter with the future. Its innovations have long since been absorbed into the language of games: lock-on combat, cinematic spatial storytelling, a coherent world governed by time, music as action, and the extraordinary narrative compression of a childhood suddenly interrupted. The 2011 Nintendo 3DS version provided a beautiful and valuable restoration. What many players continued to imagine, however, was an undertaking on a different scale: Hyrule rebuilt for contemporary hardware without losing the compact, intricate logic of the work beneath it. For over a decade the possibility had occupied fans. Now that question is answered by an actual object, installed and playable, rather than another elaborate fan rendering or prediction. [1] [2]

The significance of this return goes beyond resolution and polygon counts. Nintendo has rebuilt the presentation, introduced orchestral music, expanded dialogue and voice work, and made movement and camera controls more flexible. Critics reviewing the release ahead of launch have praised the care with which it retains the original's design while making its spaces newly expressive; Famitsu awarded it 37 out of 40, and other early reviews have been similarly enthusiastic, though some identify the inevitable limits of preserving an old structure. [1] [3] There is a tension here that every serious remake must negotiate. Fidelity can become a museum instinct, carefully retaining the appearance of life while excluding the risk and vitality that produced the original. Aggressive reconstruction can just as easily erase the contours of a cherished work. Ocarina of Time is especially demanding because the passage of time is already embedded in its subject. Returning to the Kokiri Forest is never simply a visit to a familiar location. The player has grown older; the work has acquired decades of associations; its small distances carry the weight of what has happened in the meantime. Playing the remake in my late thirties, with a household and responsibilities that would have been difficult to picture in 1998, gives the simple act of setting out from home a different emotional dimension. The game need not pretend those years did not happen. It can accompany me across them.

The second development has the opposite status: nobody has announced Half-Life 3. That sentence deserves to remain plain, because this series has attracted more wishful inference than almost any other in gaming. Half-Life 2 was released on 16 November 2004, so its twentieth anniversary occurred in 2024, not last year; the gap is now approaching twenty-two years. Its sequel episodes extended the story, and Half-Life: Alyx demonstrated in 2020 that Valve could still return to this world with extraordinary technical ambition, but the specific possibility of a proper numbered continuation has haunted the culture for well over fifteen years. [4] [5] The question became a joke because it remained a serious desire. For a generation of players, 'Half-Life 3 confirmed' is simultaneously a punchline and the name of something they would genuinely love to see. There have been enough false dawns to justify scepticism. Nevertheless, recent reporting has given the familiar speculation more substance than a recycled meme. During an October 2026 GameSoundCon discussion, Valve audio designer Mike Morasky referred aloud to 'HLX', a project identifier that observers have associated with a possible next Half-Life game. His mention was reported by both VGC and PC Gamer. That is evidence of an internal project designation, not a release announcement or confirmation of the title Half-Life 3. [6]

The Game Awards takes place on 10 December 2026, and speculation has settled naturally on it as a possible stage for a reveal. Nothing publicly established requires Valve to use that event, or to announce the game this year at all. [7] I still find myself imagining the moment: the unexpected silence in a live presentation, the first recognisable sound, the immediate recognition spreading through a room and then through millions of homes. To understand the extraordinary emotional potential of such a trailer, one has to remember what Half-Life represented. The first game helped make the first-person shooter feel like a continuous inhabited drama; the second integrated physics, performance, environmental design and an unsettling political world into something whose influence extended well beyond the genre. A third major entry would arrive under a burden of expectation that no developer should have to carry, especially in an era when every ambitious release must confront immediate scrutiny, elaborate technical demands and an audience trained to expect constant updates. I hope for an announcement, but would rather Valve remain silent than substitute a ceremonial logo for an idea capable of justifying the return.

Then there is Grand Theft Auto VI, whose scale almost resists tidy description. Rockstar has scheduled the game for Thursday, 19 November 2026, thirteen years and two months after Grand Theft Auto V first launched in September 2013. The company has positioned its new story in the state of Leonida, with a return to Vice City and a central partnership between Lucia and Jason. [8] [9] These are facts about a release we can count down to, not a verdict on the game itself. Still, the passage of thirteen years is astonishing. The fifth game belonged to the closing period of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 generation. Its successor arrives in a world of subscriptions, streaming, enormous online communities, social feeds, globalised trailer analysis and unprecedented development budgets. Whole stages of adult life can occur between mainline Grand Theft Auto instalments. A series that once seemed to supply frequent episodes of cultural disruption now operates on a timescale closer to that of major infrastructure projects or epic film cycles. It is difficult to imagine a sharper emblem of how the blockbuster segment of the industry has changed.

The approaching release is fascinating partly because Grand Theft Auto continues to have an unusual ability to cross the boundary between specialist gaming conversation and general popular culture. The series' ambition has never been confined to producing a larger urban playground. Rockstar constructs a setting dense with music, parody, signage, incidental drama, voice, vehicles, routines and architecture, then lets players move through that setting at their own pace. At its best, the result feels like an entire satirical culture that has somehow become navigable. Whether Grand Theft Auto VI achieves that quality is a question for the coming weeks. The enormous attention surrounding it should not be mistaken for advance proof of greatness; development time is not a guarantee of artistic coherence. Yet the prospect of a new Vice City becoming a place in people's everyday conversations is undeniably thrilling. I miss the periods when major games felt like shared appointments with the unknown, when people across different tastes and ages suddenly became curious about the same place. November may provide another one. A carefully built game world can briefly supply a common geography for millions of imaginations.

The fourth development arrived with remarkable timing. On 3 November 2026, Bethesda Game Studios finally gave The Elder Scrolls VI its proper title: The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel. Announced originally in June 2018, the game had existed for more than eight years primarily as a numeral, an atmospheric teaser and the almost abstract promise that Bethesda would one day return to Tamriel at this scale. The studio's fortieth-anniversary presentation supplied a name, a logo and a suggestive desert image, accompanied by language pointing towards Hammerfell. Bethesda itself cautioned that further information remains some way off. There is still no confirmed release date, and there has been no full gameplay demonstration. [10] [11] I have spent enough years following The Elder Scrolls to understand why a subtitle can nevertheless produce such a substantial change in feeling. The word 'six' invites arithmetic, a place-holder in an indefinitely deferred series. Sentinel invites geography. It is a location in Hammerfell, associated with the Redguards, their history, their politics, their coasts and deserts. A project that once existed in the vaguest possible future has acquired a point on the map. That modest act of naming has made it newly conceivable as a world.

The Elder Scrolls is inseparable from a particular kind of abundance in my own memory. Morrowind offered a world that seemed determined to proceed according to strange laws of its own; Oblivion brought a new sense of physical presence; Skyrim arrived on 11 November 2011 and became one of the emblematic games of an entire period. I remember the atmosphere around Skyrim as much as its content: the confidence of the announcement, the conversations before launch, the sense that a single role-playing game might occupy a season of one's life. Fifteen years later, Sentinel has made that mode of anticipation available again, even if only in embryo. My imagination runs quickly from a name to a possible opening: an exhausted traveller waking beneath a pitiless sun, following the uncertain promise of water, approaching a settlement whose history is older and more intricate than it first appears. That scene is my own speculation, not an account of revealed gameplay. It interests me because Hammerfell could offer an identity distinct from Skyrim's snow, stone and northern myth: heat, trade, seafaring, ancient kingdoms, contested landscapes and the disorienting possibilities of a desert. I want Bethesda to build a place with a culture rather than a merely impressive surface.

The restraint required here is real. A title reveal can sustain enthusiasm for a week, but a world of the promised scale must be made by people, with enough stability, time and creative freedom to do their work properly. The Game Developers Conference's 2026 State of the Game Industry survey reported that 28 per cent of respondents had been laid off in the preceding two years and that half said their current or most recent employer had conducted layoffs during the preceding year. Those are survey findings, not a census of all workers, but they describe a climate far removed from the frictionless celebration often implied by blockbuster marketing. [12] I cannot welcome the return of enormous franchises while pretending that the people responsible for making them are incidental to the spectacle. Their labour, continuity and craft are the substance of the medium. Nor do I assume that Sentinel will appear alongside the next Xbox in 2028 simply because the pairing has become an appealing idea. It may be an attractive image, and reports about the console transition make it possible to imagine, but Bethesda has offered no timetable. What 2026 has provided is the first new anchor for that imagination in years.

Taken together, the four developments trace an extraordinary spectrum. Ocarina of Time has crossed the threshold from desire to experience. Grand Theft Auto VI stands on the near side of release, so close that the waiting can be measured in days. Sentinel has emerged from anonymity into a named geography, although the larger world remains distant. Half-Life 3 continues to flicker between credible clues and an announcement nobody has made. The point is that they have arrived in the same stretch of cultural time, each activating a different muscle of anticipation. One allows the familiar to be encountered afresh; another promises the imminent shock of something entirely new; a third gives shape to a very distant horizon; the fourth reminds us that the impossible announcement may still, one day, happen. Four separate clocks are suddenly audible. I had almost forgotten how pleasurable it could be to hear them ticking together.

I have also become wary of the reflex to declare that everything was better when we were younger. Nostalgia contains genuine information about the conditions under which experiences became meaningful, but it is not a reliable historical database. Earlier decades contained their own disappointments, closures, speculative marketing, technical compromises and exhausting stretches of sameness. Our memories are selective; they retain the electrifying surprise and discard many ordinary Tuesdays. The modern games industry offers forms of creativity and access that earlier generations could scarcely have imagined. The Entertainment Software Association's 2026 survey found that 67 per cent of Americans aged five to ninety play video games for at least an hour each week, with the average player aged thirty-seven. The audience has grown up, broadened and built gaming into the ordinary structure of life. [13] That development should make us more attentive to the diversity of the medium, rather than resigned to its apparent predictability. The real question is whether an adult player can still experience the abundance of cultural possibility that once seemed to arrive so naturally. This November, for the first time in a long while, my answer feels like yes.

Age changes the proportions of an event. When I was younger, a new console or an important game could occupy the foreground of an entire year. Now there is work, a marriage, a child, a home, responsibilities that are both more demanding and more meaningful. I do not want to recreate the habits or circumstances of my adolescence. I want the art that accompanied those years to remain capable of participating in this life. I can play a little Ocarina of Time before returning to the household. I can enjoy a speculative Half-Life discussion without allowing it to swallow an evening. I can look towards Vice City, or imagine Sentinel's horizon, without confusing anticipation with obligation. The old abundance was partly the impression that the future was always replenishing itself. It is possible to recover that feeling in smaller, more deliberate measures: not by being permanently online, not by monitoring every insider's account, but by giving a few genuine events their proper weight. A new world is worth looking forward to. So is the simple freedom to put it down again.

For that reason I would not yet pronounce 2026 a renaissance, still less declare the industry's problems solved. Four giant names cannot resolve precarious employment, rising costs, formulaic design, the uncertainties of preservation or the pressure to turn every pastime into a continuous service. Even a successful November might leave all of those questions exactly where they were. What it has done, unexpectedly and rather beautifully, is remind me of a sensation I thought might belong permanently to another time. I recognise the approach of several extraordinary things; I can distinguish the fact from the hope; I have begun playing one of them today. Somewhere between a familiar forest, an unannounced scientific nightmare, a sunlit American city and a desert whose final form remains unknown, a little of the old excitement has returned. It need not be permanent to be valuable. It is enough, at the end of 2026, to recognise an echo of abundance and to be glad that the sound still carries.

And perhaps that sound is already reaching into the next generation. My next article will turn from these four great works to the days between now and the console race of 2028, when I turn forty on 1 November. Xbox has publicly identified its next-generation project as Project Helix and plans to put early hardware into developers' hands in 2027; reporting has pointed towards a possible 2028 arrival, although no launch date is official. Sony has likewise said that neither the date nor the price of its next console has been fixed. [14] [15] I nevertheless like to imagine a November 2028 in which the PlayStation 6 arrives just as I enter a new decade of life. I want to examine what that coming transition could mean: the preservation of our libraries, the promise of genuinely new forms of play, the design of the machines themselves, and whether another console generation can make the future feel startling again. The present article began with a return through time. The next will ask what happens when, once more, we look forward.

Research and source notes

This essay reflects information available on 5 November 2026. Forecasts, hoped-for announcements and the author’s early playing impressions are expressly distinguished from confirmed events. Numbered references document externally verifiable dates and reporting.

[1] Nintendo Australia, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Switch 2), 2026. Source

[2] Nintendo Australia, Ocarina of Time 3D (2011) product information. Source

[3] Nintendo Life, first Famitsu review of Ocarina of Time remake, November 2026. Source

[4] Valve, Half-Life 2 twentieth-anniversary project (original release: 16 November 2004). Source

[5] Valve, Half-Life: Alyx (released 23 March 2020). Source

[6] Video Games Chronicle, Valve developer discusses HLX, 23 October 2026. Source

[7] The Game Awards, announcement of 10 December 2026 ceremony. Source

[8] Rockstar Games, Grand Theft Auto VI date announcement. Source

[9] Rockstar Games, Grand Theft Auto V original launch date. Source

[10] Bethesda Game Studios, June 2018 announcement of The Elder Scrolls VI. Source

[11] Xbox Wire, The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel name reveal, 3 November 2026. Source

[12] Game Developers Conference, 2026 State of the Game Industry survey. Source

[13] Entertainment Software Association, 2026 Essential Facts about the US games industry. Source

[14] Xbox Wire, Project Helix next-generation console announcement, March 2026. Source

[15] Video Games Chronicle, Sony says PS6 date and price undecided, August 2026. Source