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1UP COVER STORY
1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF MAY 21 | WHAT IF?
What If?: Gaming’s Alternate Realities
1UP explores what might have happened had video game history gone differently.
People love to look back at the past and ask, “What if things had gone differently?” Navel-gazing at history spans cultures and races. Whether it’s author Harry Turtledove making a fortune by contemplating how differently the American Civil War would have gone if someone had time-traveled to give the Confederate Army machine guns, or the manga Konpeki No Kantai in which the Japanese navy beats up America in World War II before teaming up to kill Hitler, second-guessing ourselves seems to be human nature.
Maybe it’s the competitive nature of the medium, but video gamers seem especially fond of revisiting the past and wondering about alternate outcomes. As the Three Fates in the image above suggest, games have woven a rich and complex tapestry in their mere half-century of existence — a tapestry whose design and nature could have changed radically had things turned out differently.
