I first encountered them in Portal, and they only became more common. The XBox 360 has them. The PlayStation3 has them. Steam games have them. World of Warcraft has them.
Achievements.
They're a relatively new phenomenon, yet at the same time, old enough to be parodied: simply play jmtb02's flash game Achievement Unlocked and you'll see why.
It wasn't until recently though, that I saw a hint of what lay in our future. While browsing through the games available on XBox Live Arcade, I discovered that not only had a number of classic games -- Wolfenstein, DOOM, the first Sonic the Hedgehog games, hell, even Frogger -- been rereleased, they now had achievements too.
And I realized that this was the future that lay ahead. All the great games of the past are now destined to be resurrected only to be saddled with a series of side tasks to accomplish in addition to finishing the main quest. Like colorizing black and white movies, it's probably not a good idea to mess with these historical relics. But it doesn't appear that anyone's going to try to put a stop to it.
I could only imagine what some of these games' new achievements might look like.
And that is why I started this blog: to share with you some of the possibilities I've seen, and some of my thoughts on the concept of achievements as a whole.
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