// PC GAMER — GAMING
The first physical PC game I remember playing shows what Sony is thoughtlessly destroying
Me and a bunch of big-box PC games are going to go full boomer or prove a very important point.
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Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it's the canon height of Thief's Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.
You might have caught it in the news: Sony infuriated absolutely everyone recently with a single blog post (usually it's me who does that) announcing that, come the big year 2028, PlayStation owners can wave goodbye to physical media. It's the information superhighway or the, ah, highway from here on out—your games will be digital or they will be nothing at all.
The tide of anger at Sony was such that it was only temporarily diverted when Xbox CEO Asha Sharma spent a Monday marching from studio to studio with a chainsaw and a can-do attitude.
I suppose Sony's antics are old-hat to you and me. We are PC people; we have been de facto digital-only for over a decade at this point (almost two for me, to be honest: I made my Steam account in 2009). The last time I built a PC with a disc drive was back in 2015, and I didn't use it for anything but moving around photos.
Nevertheless, Sony's war on the physical realm got me thinking: what was the first big-box PC game I remember handling, back when I was a speck of a boy at a hulking Fujitsu desktop? Was it good? Was it an all-time classic, rightly embodied in unconquerable materiality?
No. It was Tunnel B1, a 1996 first-person shooter that asks 'What if a hovercraft had machine guns?' and which no one but me remembers. It's an odd thing—despite its year of release, it feels like a transitional fossil between dime-guzzling arcade shooters and something more modern, more narrative, more id-inflected.
It is a messy beast of a game that does not really have all that much going on, which I imagine is why its Wikipedia article cites contemporary GamePro reviewers Scary Larry and Dr Zombie as feeling pretty ho-hum about it. We should go back to being called things like Scary Larry. I'm just called Josh. It's terrible.
I remember turning it over in my hands, fascinated by the screenshots. What wonders were contained within?