Popculturalprecursors

Tippett Studio, the legendary Berkeley special-effects house founded by Phil Tippett, is closing up its animation workshop after declaring bankruptcy. This weekend, the studio is being emptied out in an estate sale: models, props, cameras, lights, product

Anyone who's seen a John Wick movie or Taken knows that vigilante action-thrillers can be fun and cathartic. But as Jamelle Bouie writes, Uwe Boll's latest film, Citizen Vigilante, fails even at its meager ambition to be a satisfying right-wing revenge fa

Pokémon Go was released a decade ago and quickly amassed more than half a billion downloads. It wasn't the first augmented reality game to use a phone's GPS to tie gameplay to your physical location, but no location-based game before or since has matched

The familiar Scooby-Doo theme song plays. BEEEEP. Velma and Scoob arrive at Shaggy's house to bring him along for a fun day on the beach. BEEEEP. But Shaggy isn't answering his doorbell! BEEEEP. He refuses to go to the beach because he has acne. He's even

Fourteen years after its Kickstarter campaign began, Star Citizen has crossed a milestone that would have seemed absurd when I first wrote about it for WIRED in 2015: more than $1 billion in lifetime crowdfunding...The game still doesn't have a final comm

Sometimes a popular media property is defined by one iconic line. If you grew up with a television in the monoculture era, you probably remember many of these:"Everybody lies.""Make it so.""Whatchoo talkin' 'bout, Willis?""Just one more thing...""Dy-no-mi

This may be hard to believe, but 20 years ago, farm simulations were the niche-est of niche game subgenre. Here's how I felt I had to explain (and defend the existence of) them in a 2004 Wired magazine piece."Who would possibly want to play Little House o

Everyone is talking about the next installment in Denis Villeneuve's Dune films. But the most ambitious-and arguably best-adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune never made it past pre-production.That version was a unique collaboration between the artists behi

I first interviewed Steve Meretzky nine years ago about his trailblazing game A Mind Forever Voyaging for Glixel, a short-lived gaming portal launched by Rolling Stone. It was the first year of the Trump presidency, and it felt like an appropriate moment

I'm trying out a different format for this edition of the newsletter. Here is the story of the world's first robot combat competition, the 1989 Critter Crunch, presented as a zine.I initially wrote a version of this piece for Wired magazine, and that's in