From its modern incarnation with the advent of the flipper after WWII, pinball enjoyed a long run as the go-to electronic amusement pastime. It lasted until the 70’s, when the shimmering graphics and bloop and bleep siren call of video games lured players away from mechanical playgrounds to ephemeral worlds comprised of phosphors on a screen.
Pinball limped along, the market steadily shrinking until a few old warhorse manufacturers remained, companies like Williams, who attempted to resurrect the genre with a daring video/pinball hybrid system in 1999 called Pinball 2000. As detailed in the excellent documentary TILT: The Battle to Save Pinball (Two-Disc Set), this gambled failed, Williams moved to the more lucrative slot machine market, and so pinball has languished as a niche collector’s market.
But now former arcade operator and online pinball machine retailer “Jersey” Jack Guarieri has hopes to propel the silver ball back into public consciousness with a new machine of his own design, based on a slightly dated property… The Wizard of Oz. Guarieri’s sense of timing might be spot on though, riding the buzz of the upcoming Disney prequel to Wizard, Oz: The Great and Powerful. Only time will tell if Guarieri is truly the wizard who can save pinball.
Coming through the I/O Tower is word that Tron: Legacy, the 2010 sequel to Disney’s groundbreaking 1982 movie Tron, is itself getting a follow-up.
Legacy created a lot of buzz during its release two years ago, managed to pull in over US$400 million dollars world-wide, and spun-off an animated series titled Tron: Uprising, which airs on the Disney XD television network. It’s little wonder that Disney wants to continue plumbing the Tron universe. Legacy director Joseph Kosinski has been tapped for the sequel, with Jesse Wigutow in negotiations to write the script.
I liked Legacy when it came out in theatres. I saw it in 3D, and the movie was shot with 3D equipment as opposed to converted to the format after the fact, and it looked spectacular. In addition, the story was a bit more fleshed out than the original. Here’s hoping Tron 3.0 continues the upward cycle.
For more information on Tron and other video game movies that mattered, consult your local Dot Eaters entry.
Indelibly mixed in my memory with blasting rocks in Atari’s Asteroids and shooting Space Invaders at the local arcade, as well as seeing video games coming home with the Atari VCS and the then newly-minted Mattel Intellivision, is Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which was released to theatres in North America on Dec. 7 1979, 33 years ago today.
Detailing the return of “Admiral” James T. Kirk to the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, as a giant cloud menacingly approaches Earth with unknown intent, the film was savaged by critics at the time, calling it over-long, glacially-paced and too full of itself. The film series righted itself commercially in the next iteration, the rollicking Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, but I’ve been swayed over the years that TMP is a more pure Star Trek movie. Later films narrowed plots to episodic TV dimensions, but the original movie seems more true to the idea of exploring the unknown, grandiose nature of the universe. The effects by visual master Douglas Trumbull also seemed barely constrained by even theatre-sized screens.
Star Trek was my pop-culture obsession before video games beamed in, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture was a milestone on that journey.
Perhaps you’re like me, and one of the very first gaming experiences you had on a computer was a text adventure.
Sometimes a person is lucky enough to have a first experience, a first taste of something, that is so amazingly, compellingly good that it forever shapes how they think about that thing. For me, that first thing was Infocom‘s Zork, and it gave me a lifelong love of computers and gaming.
The text adventure was a genre that ruled the landscape of early computer gaming, until advancing graphics technology inevitably supplanted text as the canvas for creating worlds on personal computers. GET LAMP, a documentary directed by Jason Scott, takes a close look at the genre, from its inception as Will Crowther‘s original cave-diving Adventure, to its perfection at Infocom, to its effective demise in the late 80’s and resurgence in the modern era as home-grown Interactive Fiction.
Box art for Zork I, Atari ST version
As the premiere text adventure company of the era, a particular light is shone on Infocom, producer of classics such as the aforementioned Zork games, Deadline, Suspended, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy… the list is exhaustive. Interviews of those involved are numerous and informative, and form a captivating narrative about the company and what it was like to work there. It’s fascinating to hear the founders and game designers talk about how they were convinced they were on the cusp of creating a new type of literature that would stand the test of time. Now we look back with 20/20 vision and it seems so obvious that the writing was on the wall for Infocom even as it began making games, that inherent in the very idea of text adventure computer games is the seed that will sow the company’s destruction. It was inevitable that game designers, inspired by Infocom games, would eventually want to move on from monochromatic text and turn the lights on to see what is actually there. As well, hobbyist IF writers and players also feature in segments that highlight the fact that text adventures have survived and thrived after the demise of Infocom. Be sure to keep an eye out for a secret item in these interview segments.
Call them text adventures, or adventure games, or the more grandiose interactive fiction, these types of games created entire worlds only with words on a screen. GET LAMP brightly illuminates the forgotten dark corners, hallways and caverns of these worlds and the people who crafted them. Good thing too, because you don’t want to end up reading these words:
I don’t know if you’ve seen the videos from The Angry Video Game Nerd, aka James Rolfe, but you should. In a vast web series, the AVGN tortures himself by playing the crappiest games ever made, and inevitably becomes enraged that such dross was ever foisted onto an unsuspecting public.
Just released is the trailer for a feature-length film made by and starring Rolfe, and it looks like it won’t disappoint the fans. The movie details the Nerd’s attempt to uncover the fabled burial site where, as the bottom was falling out of the video game industry in 1983, Atari took millions of unsold cartridges of their excremental E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial game and dumped them into a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico. They then covered the whole thing in concrete and walked away like nothing happened.
Rolfe and his team expect the movie to be released in 2013, but there’s no promises. Be sure to check out Rolfe’s other tirades as well.
According to New York Magazine, there was a heated battle to purchase the movie rights for the seminal Atari arcade game Asteroids that helped solidify the industry back in 1979.
Universal has come out on top, and has tapped disaster movie meister Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012, ad infinitum) to direct.
Emmerich assures that only the latest 3D technology will be used to create the A-shaped spaceship, to be rendered in outline graphics and presented in a process known as Black and White.
Okay, just kidding about that part. As per usual with these things, the storyline will be bloated up, this time into a tale of the remnants of humankind living in an asteroid belt alongside an alien race, who are not as benevolent as first surmised.
Emmerich will be assisted by Transformers: Dark of the Moon producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, and scriptwriter Matt Lopez, of Disney’s The Race to Witch Mountain. All involved are no doubt hoping rocks aren’t the only things the movie breaks when it collides with audiences in 2014.
The two Max Payne games, Max Payne (2002), and Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne (2003) were immensely fun third-person shooters. Released by Rockstar, both games were balletic bullet-fests, borrowing heavily from such influences as Akira Kurosawa and The Matrix. They weaved a tortured story of tragedy and redemption, and featured novel level design that played with established norms in the genre.
So little had been heard about their follow up, Max Payne 3, that a lot of people had given up on it. Some fans had come to the conclusion that the terrible 2008 Marky Mark movie released under the Max Payne name had finally sent the project to the morgue. Recently, however, images of the game have surfaced from Rockstar. Sure, it’s only three pics, but still at least something to satiate fans of one of the best third person game series around.
The following is a hilarious video plea from Peter Weller about plans in Detroit to build a statue of the character Robocop, a role he played through the movies Robocop (1987) and Robocop 2 (1990). They made another theatrical sequel, a made-for-TV movie and a TV series, but Weller stamped robotically away from those projects.
The movement to cast the metal lawbringer in bronze is spearheaded by a very active Facebook page, currently enjoying, at the time of this writing, Like nods from 1573 people. There is also a Kickstarter page if you’d like to kick in a buck or two for the effort. The best guess to why this campaign is catching fire, aside from the fact that Robocop is awesome, is that Detroit, being the city the movies are based in, has come up against seriously hard times over the last decade, and people need to make something positive out of it. Sure, it seems like a frivolous gesture in the face of such hardships, but sometimes a frivolous gesture can make all the difference. Having a life-size statue of Robocop would be a tourism-generating landmark, at the very least.
Anyone who has played the first two Bioshock games knows that the partially destroyed, underwater city that they are set in, called Rapture by its founder Andrew Ryan, is a big draw of the series. So gamers were jazzed that a film based in this fallen world, helmed by serious director Gore Verbinski, was in the pipeline. But even though Verbinski helmed the first three of the phenomenally successful Pirates of the Caribbean movies, he apparently doesn’t have enough clout to get the Bioshock movie made, in a way that he sees fit for the source material.
Comingsoon.net has an interview with Verbinski, who jumped ship from the Bioshock project two years ago, where he states that the reason for his departure is that he could not raise financing to do the film with an R rating. The combination of a dark vision and the high price tag of creating Rapture evidently sunk the project.
It’s a sad tale, because with all the crap movie adaptations of vaunted video games we get nowadays, the Verbinski Bioshock project looked like it had all the makings of a classic movie of a very special video game. You could also look at the silver lining: at least Verbinski refused to water down the material to meet a PG rating. Current development of the Bioshock movie is unknown.
Watched Tron: Legacy for a second time last night, with friends. Everyone agreed it was a good movie, that like its predecessor has a lot to say above making a lot of noise, looking good, and selling toys.
While the original Tron strived to create a religious allegory out of the world of computers, its sequel creates a parallel between the quest for digital perfection and Nazi puritanism. Flynn attempts to create the perfect system, but in the end realizes that his son represents his greatest creation.
