For decades, the Star Wars Holiday Special was a misbegotten artifact of a specific era of network TV variety-show thinking, and Lucasfilm seemed content to pretend it never happened. Fans considered it a black mark on George Lucas’ franchise, and made it the butt of endless fandom jokes. But that’s...
50 years of game history, as told through 60 games
Julian “Jaz” Rignall has been playing games for nearly 50 years, and writing about them for most of those. The former competitive arcade game player and Mean Machines editor has seen the games industry morph through more generations than are easy to count, and now he’s written a book about...
Wicked tackled ‘one of the most difficult things you can do in CG’
From plucky talking bears to motion-capture apes, from Avatar’s sentient space whales to Toho’s relentless Godzilla, computer generated creatures take center stage in movies more and more often these days. If there’s a big-budget film coming out, you’ll likely find a mountainous sandworm or a sound-hunting alien in it. The...
For Humberly González, Star Wars Outlaws wasn’t a stepping stone, it was the dream
Do or do not — there is no try when you’re an actor leading a game like Star Wars Outlaws.First, it’s Star Wars, a franchise whose most ardent fans fight daily battles over the legacy of the series, often at the expense of the talent involved. The actual work —...
The untimely demise and belated resurrection of the notorious Captain Blood
Preservation is top of mind for many developers and professionals in the games industry nowadays. In the wake of the abrupt sunsetting of Concord last September and the news this past March that Sony has begun backing up its PS5 game builds as part of its larger ongoing preservation efforts,...
Palworld global community manager on its meteoric launch: ‘We definitely panicked’
When the small Palworld team, based in Japan, hit the green light on the game on Jan. 19, 2024 — successfully pushing the game public into early access — developers gathered around the office vending machine to celebrate. Immediately, players started to flood in. It was an instant success. The...
Sonic 3 director says Keanu Reeves fixed a key scene for Shadow the Hedgehog
Bringing Shadow the Hedgehog to life on the big screen has been a two-decade journey for Jeff Fowler, the director of Sega and Paramount’s live-action Sonic the Hedgehog movies. Fowler finally got his wish with his 2024 movie Sonic the Hedgehog 3. But he first got his hands on Shadow...