Good evening. You are listening to Three Moves Head, and I'm your host, Rob Zakney.

Tonight, we welcome back our friend, freelance writer, T.J. Hafer.

Hello.

And we're also joined by Games Beats Project from the New American Century,

Games Criticism Fellow, Rowan Kaiser.

Good evening.

And, Rowan, sort of in honor of, or in reference to your honorific uh for this evening show

you're taking us all the way back uh 15 years to 2003 2003 in games and we're going to sort

revisit the highs and lows of that year, trends, memorable moments.

And I was wondering if you could set the stage a little bit for us.

And sort of what are the big headline items of this year?

What are the big takeaways?

How do we frame it?

Well, in addition to the creation of ICE and the implementation of the Patriot Act, we also

have the, obviously, the invasion of Iraq. And this spills over to video games, because everything

is terrible. Just, no, this is actually a really interesting and kind of weird year for video games.

I'm not going to do one of the big full histories because nothing

is quite as chaotic as the 90s. But the two big things here, one of which is tremendously

important for strategy games and one of which we'll cover a little bit. The strategy game or

PC gaming centered one is that this is sort of that weird lull of a period after, you know, the golden age of PC games,

but this is a year before Steam is even released and like five before Steam becomes a major thing.

So there's kind of a trend towards when companies realize they have something that's working,

...