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21 January 2015

It’s OK for PC gamers to be a little arrogant – they know they’ve backed the right platform

It might be a tasteless joke, but the thousands of people proud of being part of the "PC Master Race" know they're getting the best bang for their buck when it comes to gaming.

By Phil Hartup

This conversation has been coming for a long time. Back in 2008, when the term “Glorious PC Gaming Master Race” was coined during a Zero Punctuation video, it was perhaps never intended to stick quite as well as it did. Now, six years and a console generation later, there’s a three hundred thousand strong reddit subgroup bearing the name. The in-joke scuttling under the radar has at last broken cover and now, inevitably, people are giving it something of a hard stare.

Obviously, it’s not surprising that the name has attracted some heat. Bunch of people calling themselves the Master Race, calling outsiders “peasants” – it was inevitable that there would be a response as the term caught on. The kneejerk reaction was always going to be to cry elitism, or, worse, imply there’s a racist or classist element to it all. But on closer examination this is largely not the case.

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