Quote:
Originally Posted by Anaraxes
Just to pick a couple of nits to fix in the intro, since I can't usefully comment on the IN setting itself:
Sam Walton opened his first department store in 1950. His second store, the first "Wal-mart" by that name, opened in 1962. The company had two dozen stores in 1967, and went public in 1970. By 1995, the company had almost 2000 stores (plus 240 "Supercenters", 433 Sam's Clubs, and 276 international stores), was pushing $100 billion in annual sales, and it had been five years since Sam Walton had received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his success. Hard to be more of a thing than Wal-mart already was by 1997. I didn't pick up anything from the OP about how the appearance of Wal-mart was to influence development of the IN setting, but I don't think there's anything there in 2017 that Mammon and Marc haven't already had to deal with in the previous generation.
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I wouldn't call "276 international stores" particularly ubiquitous. That's, what, one or two per country on average? Wal*Mart only really became a thing when its international footprint became as large as its footprint in its home country.
When a game deals with the entire world, plus dreamscapes, plus Heaven and Hell, what happens in a single country has a rather small effect.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Anaraxes
This one depends on your definition, I suppose. 1997 is too early for what we now call "3G" -- third generation cellular tech, which term of course implies two earlier generations. In 1997, the analog brick phones had largely disappeared. "2G" digital technology (GSM and CDMA) was in use, including SMS text messaging, and the latest cool phones looked like this. "Smartphones" technically existed (PDAs with added cellphone features), but weren't very popular or common, especially outside of business use, and weren't much like the current smartphone culture. So you might focus attention on the changes due to relatively open third-party app development and possibilities enabled by higher data rates, more than just mobility and constant communication connectivity, which were (or should have been) already present in the '97 version of the setting. |
Sure, the "candybar" phones were out there - but was anybody using them?
In 1997, you had to ask whether anybody in a crowd had a phone. Nowadays, it's rare that somebody in a crowd doesn't.