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"This is the shotgun," said Marty Stratton. "It has pump action and a rotating barrel. This is actually a really cool weapon. Then you have the chain gun. And this one is the grenade launcher. Watch how it chambers each round! Then we have the rail gun, which is a really nice weapon . . ."
Did someone mentioning tightening the guns laws? If they did, they forgot to tell quite a few of the exhibitors at last week's European Computer Trade Show. Although the name makes it sound like a dull event featuring grey men and grey boxes, the show was in fact "Europe's premier interactive entertainment expo" and was a chance for the world's computer games manufacturers to display their latest wares to fellow members of the trade. It's a hugely profitable industry, worth $10 billion worldwide and growing fast.
In two large halls at London's Olympia there was a cacophony of zapping and crashing and splatting emanating from countless video screens. There were flight-simulator games, role-playing games, motor-racing games and educational games, but those making the most noise were what are known in the trade as "shoot-em-ups", in which death and destruction are the major selling point. Take, for instance, Hexen H in which "swords, daggers, wands, staves and spells help you wreak fantastical fatalities on your enemies". Or there's Sin, in which you "blast your way through complex levels of unholy terror".
Both could be found on the Activision stand, where I met Marty, who gave me a demonstration of the company's most eagerly awaited new release, Quake 11.
"That's a heck of a shot!" said Marty excitedly, as he blasted his way through the game's remarkable 3D world, leaving a trail of havoc in his wake. "They've just made it so realistic. Watch the different death animations! Look, you can take their heads off," he noted as he decapitated one of his enemies. "I need a bigger weapon. Take a taste of the rockets. . ."
I left him to it and went for a coffee with John Anderson, a designer at a games company in Dallas called ION Storm. John worked on Doom II, the forerunner of Quake, and is currently working on a game called Daikatana, which...