In celebration of the series’ 25th anniversary, Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown is getting new DLC that includes over 30 cosmetics and brings back three fan-favorite planes: the ASF-X, CFA-44, and XFA-27.
Each plane will also be getting seven of its own skins, including the popular “Cipher” skin. There will be an additional 10 skins from Ace Combat Zero and 20 different types of emblems included in the DLC as well.
The ASF-X, also known as Shinden 2 is a supporting fighter jet with variable wing function that first appeared in Ace Combat: Assult Horizon.
The CFA-44, also known as Nosferatu, is equipped with a railgun and a launcher that can shoot several missiles at the same time. It first appeared in Ace Combat 6.
And The XFA-27 was the first fictional aircraft to be added to the Ace Combat series and was inspired by ’90s stealth jets like the F-117 and YF-23.
The DLC will come alongside a free update that adds a Casual Easy difficulty mode, designed for first time Ace Combat players who want to check out the game’s campaign.
There’s more to come from gamescom 2020 on IGN, so make sure to take a look at our gamescom schedule. If you’re looking for a summary of the biggest news, check out our gamescom 2020 highlights.
Haven, the co-op adventure RPG, has been announced as a launch game for Xbox Series X, and we’ve got gameplay from the new next-gen version to show you.
Xbox Series X marks the latest in a large list of platforms Haven will arrive for. Other platforms are Xbox One and Windows Store (in Game Pass), PC (Steam, GOG, more), Nintendo Switch, PS5 and PS4.
We’ve got 10 minutes of Xbox Series X gameplay in 4K to show you, including exploration, combat, cooking and the game’s extremely laid-back soundtrack vibe:
From the creators of Furi and playable in solo or co-op, Haven sees two lovers, Yu and Kay restoring a forgotten planet – it was a part of IGN’s Summer of Gaming.
Joe Skrebels is IGN’s Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].
Epic Games continues a legal battle with Apple over Fortnite’s removal from the App Store, and CEO Tim Sweeney is having a little fun while the process plays out. The developer did the unthinkable: promoting a rival game, and all to demonstrate the value of Unreal Engine for Apple users.
On August 28, Apple seemed to take a shot at Epic Games by promoting a massive new update for PUBG Mobile on iOS. Typically, Epic Games would see PUBG Mobile as its competition, but because the game does make use of Unreal Engine–which Apple is looking to cut off from iOS and Mac developers–Sweeney promoted the game, as well.
The passive-aggressive nature of the tweet certainly isn’t lost on us, because if Apple does eventually cease Unreal Engine support on its devices, that would likely mean no more PUBG Mobile. Unreal is one of the most popular engines in the world, with support on nearly every device including mobile, PC, and consoles.
Epic Games’ shots at Apple have continued with its Free Fortnite campaign and tournament. It also gave away assets so players can make their own Free Fortnite merchandise, even giving permission for them to sell it. As the logo parodies one of Apple’s earlier designs, it seems Epic is trying to win in the court of public opinion if it can’t actually win its lawsuit.
And despite not being as successful as Fortnite, PUBG Mobile has managed to carve out a healthy niche. Its 1.0 update will include major improvements across the board, and a new competition is going to award $2 million in prizes.
Epic Games’ lawsuit with Apple is ongoing, with Apple recently terminating Epic’s developer account on the App Store as they fight over profit cuts and Epic’s decision to use an alternative payment system in Fortnite. While the case moves through the legal system, Epic is trying to get public opinion on its side with the “Free Fortnite” campaign, and it’s now even letting you make your own gear–and even sell it–to show where you stand.
Via an asset pack available on the Unreal Engine site, you can design and sell shirts, stickers, and other merchandise with Epic Games’ Free Fortnite logo. The logo is a parody of one of Apple’s older designs, and in Epic Games’ post on the subject, it appeared to put one of the stickers on a Macbook.
Epic filed a restraining order against Apple to temporarily allow it to continue using Apple’s development tools for the Unreal Engine, and this was granted by a judge while its lawsuit is ongoing. However, its request to temporarily reinstate Fortnite on the App Store was not granted, and the game is still unavailable to download on iOS devices as Apple owns the only authorized digital store. It’s also unavailable to download through Google Play on Android phones, but there are other storefronts on Android that offer the game.
Fortnite just began its Season 4 content, which you cannot play on iOS. If the game isn’t installed on your phone already, you also cannot re-download it. For now, you’ll have to use another system or console in order to get your battle royale fix.
Click To Unmute
Size:
Want us to remember this setting for all your devices?
As Tenet continues its release in international markets, we’re taking a look back at filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s entire feature-length filmography, exploring each of his films one day at a time. Today we continue with his fifth feature, The Prestige.
Full spoilers for The Prestige follow.
[poilib element=”accentDivider”]
A leap back to his stellar Memento form, Christopher Nolan’s fifth feature is an incisive work about the nature of creative obsession. The film bursts forth fully formed, richly detailed, and with a keen eye toward Nolan’s usual brushstrokes. It features more guilt, more dead wives, more self-constructed identities, and even more timelines that jump back and forth; the film might have bordered on self-parody, were it not so clear-eyed and propulsive.
In the latest entry in our ongoing look at Nolan’s films, we dive into the obsession behind the curtain of The Prestige.
Set during the rivalry between Ford and Tesla — a backdrop that mirrors its tale of ruthless professional backstabbing — The Prestige begins with Michael Caine’s illusionist ingenieur John Cutter explaining the three stages of a magic trick. They are, in order, the pledge, the turn, and the prestige, though the way they’re contextualized in the film, they may as well be three acts of a Hollywood screenplay.
The pledge, or the first act, shows the audience something ordinary; the film’s earliest timeline centers on the fledgling careers of Robert Angier/The Great Danton (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden/The Professor (Christian Bale), up-and-coming stage magicians searching for ways to push themselves and find new limits to their art. The turn, or the second act, is about making that ordinary something disappear; after Borden causes the accidental death of Angier’s wife Julia (Piper Perabo), the dueling magicians lose themselves down a dark and winding road filled with personal and professional retribution. The prestige, a trick’s extraordinary final step, is about bringing that ordinary, disappeared something back; not only does the film’s final act feature two apparent resurrections, it also reveals dark and painful truths about what both men have been willing to sacrifice — to hurt each other, and to achieve success.
Christopher Priest’s original 1995 novel is structured around modern-day descendants of both men reading their respective diaries. Here though, in a remixed version by Nolan and brother/co-screenwriter Jonathan, these diaries no longer function as tethers to the present — to our present, that is — but they act as key windows between the film’s three 19th century timelines. In the “present” or most recent timeline, Borden has been imprisoned in London for Angier’s death. He spends his days reading Angier’s diary which recollects, among other things, Angier’s journey to the United States. During this largely America-centric “middle” section, Angier in turn deciphers Borden’s diary, which describes events from even earlier.
However, the logistical lines between the three chronologies aren’t always as clear-cut as beginning, middle and end, with each segment compartmentalized to one character’s POV (Borden, Angier, and Borden again). The diaries are introduced as a means for us to better understand each man’s story (where they once were, and where they end up), but both men began writing their respective journals shortly after meeting one another, so the shifts in point-of-view tend to overlap within the same timeline. Some scenes from their early years are described by Borden, and read by Angier, while others are the opposite — and for good reason.
We, the audience, are neither witnessing Borden’s discoveries of Angier’s secrets, nor Angier’s discoveries of Borden’s — at least, not in isolation. Rather, we’re looking back on the entire tale from some mysterious, present vantage (the film lends itself to multiple viewings partially for this reason). After all, it’s eventually revealed that Cutter’s opening speech is addressed to Borden’s daughter Jess after the story has ended. We are, in essence, fulfilling the role of Angier and Borden’s descendants from the novel, merely an audience to two men trying to fool each other — and us.
Angier, after deciphering the code in Borden’s stolen journal, learns that Borden has sent him on a wild goose chase to Colorado. Later, Borden learns that Angier’s diary — handed to him posthumously — is addressed directly to him, and that he’s going to be executed for the murder of a man who’s still alive. These rug-pulls are certainly shocking for each character (and for the audience), but they illustrate something key about the film’s self-reflexive narrative.
Throughout The Prestige, characters talk about the audience wanting “to be fooled” despite looking for an illusion’s secrets; the narrative of a magic trick is enthralling, and the end must come at the end for it to remain so. Were Borden and Angier only interested in each other’s methods, they might have skipped around each other’s notes to find those factual details. Instead, they read them cover to cover. Embittered rivals though they were, they were more interested in knowing each other’s stories. They could’ve just opened to the final page, the way any of us could have simply chosen to watch the end of the film before anything else — but they didn’t, and neither did we.
“The audience knows the truth,” proclaims Angier. “The world is miserable. Simple. Solid all the way through. But if you could fool them for even a second, then you could make them wonder.”
Editing Time
Perhaps Angier is right. Perhaps we want to be fooled, and so we suspend our disbelief, ignoring the discontinuous nature of editing and accepting, in its place, whatever version of time it presents us.
Andy Serkis, David Bowie, and Hugh Jackman in The Prestige.
How a trick is really performed isn’t nearly as engaging as the performance itself. This point is hammered home when a behind-the-scenes explanation of Angier’s new bird trick is cross-cut with that same illusion being performed on stage for the very first time. It’s as if Angier is picturing, in his mind’s eye, the delighted reactions of those who have only seen the end result (rather than seeing Cutter painstakingly strap him to a trick-achieving apparatus, like a stuntman). In fact, knowing the secrets behind a trick can be downright upsetting, like when the nephew of Borden’s love interest Sarah (Rebecca Hall) figures out that a bird disappearing and “reappearing” often involves two identical birds, one of which is killed — foreshadowing Borden’s own fate.
In The Prestige, the slow unraveling of each man’s diary, as read by the other, yields a greater emotional impact than simply cherry-picking vital developments. Each man constructs an enticing web of words; we cannot avoid becoming tangled in their narrative allure.
Each paragraph is a confession of sorts, since the diaries have a specific audience of one, and each man is forced to get inside the head of a man he despises. One beat in particular permeates all three timelines in quick succession. Borden, in the earliest timeline, writes that he truly doesn’t know which knot he tied on Julia’s wrists the night she drowned; upon reading this in Borden’s diary, Angier, in the “middle” timeline, expresses fury and dismay. “How could he not know?” he asks, and writes in his own diary; Angier’s rage reaches Borden’s ears once more, as Borden reads these words back in the “present” timeline. “How could he not know?” the film echoes.
It’s a seemingly minor occurrence, but this emotional domino effect — a causal ripple between timelines — is emblematic of so much of Nolan’s work with editor Lee Smith. It follows a similar structure to the action in Dunkirk (separate war stories whose climaxes are made to align, even though in reality, they impact each other several hours apart) and Inception (simultaneous “kicks” permeating several dream layers, from one to the next).
More pertinently, this beat also centers an emotional outlook Nolan would go on to explore in Interstellar, in which a character posits “love” as a force that permeates time and space. In The Prestige, the emotions that ripple through time are far messier. Confused sorrow begets vengeful rage, which in turn begets crushing guilt — each in a single cut — as dialogue in the present becomes voiceover from the past, echoing across years in a singular moment.
The Brutality of Creation
There’s little difference between self-sacrifice and outward violence for Borden and Angier; for both men, performance is an act of masochism.
In an act of vengeance, Angier sabotages Borden’s bullet-catch trick by shooting off two of his fingers; later, Borden lobs off two fingers from his secret twin, so that both men can pull off their teleportation trick (and continue taking turns living as Borden and his engineer Fallon). Similarly, the first time Angier experiments with the transportation device built by Nikola Tesla (David Bowie), it creates an exact replica of him, who he promptly shoots dead, the way he tried to shoot Borden. And finally, in the film’s most macabre twist (or prestige), it turns out Angier has been creating these clones of himself as part of his stage act night after night, disposing of his “original” self by drowning him in a tank — not unlike the tank his wife Julia drowned in after Borden’s apparent mistake. (In fact, Angier’s final act of drowning, meant to frame Borden for his murder, involves the very same tank).
Christian Bale works his magic.
The very violence enacted against each man, which set them down paths of ruthless vengeance, becomes violence they enact on themselves (and on extensions of themselves) night after night, for the delight of the crowd.
Vengeance drives both men to tear themselves apart. Borden, in order to maintain his illusion and outdo Angier, lives an unfulfilled double life, with each Borden twin leading only half an existence. Angier, meanwhile, splits his very being, creating a physical replica of himself which he then mercilessly drowns (again and again), lest someone discover his secret. In a somewhat blunt artistic statement, both men are essentially killing themselves for their art — but they’re also killing those around them in the process.
Sarah, who goes on to marry Borden, spends her life with two different men, always suspecting something is deeply wrong, but never knowing exactly what. She eventually hangs herself. Upon re-watching The Prestige, it becomes clearer to us as outside observers that there are, in fact, two different Alfred Bordens; not only do their appearances differ at times (one appears to be slightly more gaunt) but as the film goes on, their attitude towards Sarah oscillates between loving and antagonistic.
However, despite these little clues, it’s impossible to tell exactly which Borden is which, or when. Such is the plight of Sarah, and of all those who live with others whose obsessions tear their soul in two, making them passionate in one moment and hostile in the next. “Secrets are my life,” Borden says.
Art vs. Family
The split between Borden and “Fallon” isn’t the film’s only duality that speaks to the perils of obsession. Borden and Angier are also sides to a coin, a dichotomy best exemplified by the film’s ending. For most of the story, Angier has fought in pursuit of vengeance, and his passions have led to his demise — many times over, and ultimately, at the hands of Borden. However this Borden, the one who survives, returns home to his daughter Jess.
While both men’s obsessions led them down self-destructive paths, Angier eventually fought, and created, for vengeance alone, casting aside both the love of his assistant Olivia (Scarlett Johansson) and the memory of his wife. However, while Angier’s passions were selfish, Borden’s final trick — his big reveal, after one of “him” had to die — was always informed by the passion that was his daughter.
The oldest of Nolan’s four children, his only daughter, was born in 2002, shortly before he embarked on his journey to make Batman Begins (his first big-budget summer blockbuster). Since then, his films have gotten larger in scale, and have involved shooting in numerous cities around the globe. This seemed to mark a shift in the way Nolan would approach his characters’ outlooks. His prior films centered on men driven by selfish goals whose journeys ended nihilistically, if not outright tragically. Following’s anonymous lead presumably ends up in prison; Memento’s Leonard Shelby sends himself on a never-ending quest for vengeance; Insomnia’s Detective Dormer is killed in a distinctly inglorious manner. These men’s missions never extended beyond themselves — until Batman Begins, in which Nolan creates a Batman who, unlike prior iterations of the character, wants to pursue his mission until he’s no longer needed. Throughout the Dark Knight Trilogy, his Batman wants to hang up the cowl and live a life of fulfilment. After Insomnia, Nolan envisioned a life after tragedy for his characters, and a life after their missions; his most recent film before Tenet, Dunkirk, is about men surviving war and returning home.
The Prestige, not unlike Inception and Interstellar after it, notably ends with a man walking through Hell in order to get back to his child.
However, Nolan’s protagonists being fathers would not be the only shift marked by The Prestige. This would be the last time one of his films would feature the eerie held notes of composer David Julyan (as much as I love Hans Zimmer’s bombastic opera, I do miss Julyan’s subtlety), but more importantly, it would also be the first Nolan film to veer into outright supernatural/sci-fi territory. One might make this case for Batman Begins, with its fantasy fear-gas only just beyond the realm of reality, but The Prestige belongs squarely to hard speculative fiction bordering on Gothic horror, in which hubris, and humanity’s relationship to nature and science, take center stage. Thematically, it follows the grand traditions set in motion by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), hailed by many as the first science fiction novel. Visually, Tesla and Angier’s experiments, as well as Borden’s version of the trick, all feature orbs, pylons and visible electric currents not dissimilar to the book’s most famous adaptation, Frankenstein (1931), directed by James Whale. The Prestige is a mad scientist tale.
To that end, it’s also science fiction that gets to the root of a rather unsettling notion: It’s a story about the horrors of being freed from the limits of human potential. Each Nolan film that followed The Prestige would, in some fashion, have its characters push up against these boundaries. Whether or not they broke them, they themselves would occasionally break in the process. For Angier and Borden, breaking past these limits involved transcending the physical self. But in order to be in two places at once, one needs to also be two people, each with their own egos — whether Angier and his drunken doppelganger, or the Bordens, partners born of one womb, or even the many Angier clones, men born of the same body. The result is broken legs, amputated digits, and personal sacrifice so horrifying that it needs to be locked away in a basement — all in the name of some combination of revenge and artistic pursuit.
Like Bruce Wayne’s constructed identity in Batman Begins, born of desire for retribution and taking the form of horror-inspired theatrics, The Professor and The Great Danton can no longer separate their art from their vengeance. Beyond a point, those ambitions become one and the same, and only one man is finally able to decouple them… only one of the two — or three, or several dozen, depending on how many Bordens and Angiers there eventually were.
With his final breath, Angier invokes “the look on their faces” — the audience’s faces — as a dying prayer and a noble end goal, despite being surrounded by horrors of his own making. It’s a lie he tells himself to justify atrocity, but one he seems to believe. Meanwhile, in order for the remaining Borden to return to his daughter and live a complete life, he has to lose everything and everyone he loves. It’s not that art must lead to self-sacrifice and misery. It’s that it so often does, when self-sacrifice and misery are confused for art itself.
Sometimes there’s more to it than anonymous faces in the crowd; sometimes the goal of art is an audience of one — but whether it’s meant to inflict pain or wonder on that one person is a vital difference.
As the film comes to a close, two scenes are placed in sharp, poignant contrast: the inevitable reveal of Angier’s “prestige materials” — a watery mass-grave — and Borden reuniting with his daughter, the only piece of him that feels honest and without obfuscation. He hugs her, right after Cutter teaches her a simple trick.
Art can feel like a horrifying extension of the self, but as human creations go, Nolan also finds beauty — in the face of a child.
There’s nothing quite like seeing justice properly served, and Twitch viewers certainly saw that when a Call of Duty streamer accidentally revealed himself to be a cheater. Shortly thereafter, he was banned from Twitch, and players can enjoy themselves knowing there is one less dirty rotten cheater profiting off dishonesty.
While bragging about how good he was at Call of Duty: Warzone earlier this week, streamer MrGolds had his screen showing a Windows task manager, but underneath it was the cheating program EngineOwning. This didn’t go unnoticed, and his Twitch account is no longer available.
EngineOwning advertises itself as an “undetected” cheat system for big-name shooters. That might be true for the game software itself, but eagle-eyed viewers weren’t going to let him get away with it. The program has several settings related to “aimbot” tools, making it rather funny that he was bragging about his gunplay in the clip at the time his cheating was discovered.
Just earlier this month, Infinity Ward stressed that it would be rolling out more bans for accounts that were using third-party software, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise if more players using these sorts of tools are also banned from the game itself. With Warzone also placing cheaters together in their own exclusive lobbies before, perhaps MrGolds can get a taste of his own medicine, too.
Produced by Nickelodeon Animation Studios for Netflix, Glitch Techs is an animated sci-fi comedy series about a unique team of teens that protects citizens from real-life video game creatures, or “glitches.” The underdog series, frozen in production by Nickelodeon before finding a home on Netflix, is gaining traction with fans as both a surprisingly earnest love letter to gaming culture and clever science fiction for the entire family. With 10 new episodes dropping this month, co-creators Dan Milano and Eric Robles look back on the creative trajectory of their series and the influence of their collaborative crew.
Back in 2015, in his office at Nickelodeon Studios, Eric kept a box of ideas under his desk. His first animated show Fanboy and Chum-Chum had finished production and, like many creators, he was expected to come up with other potential properties as part of an overall creative deal. Over time, boxes upon boxes filled up with sketches, doodles, pitches and thumbnail storyboards. Some were based on whims, others on months and months of development, but all inspired by childhood and the kinds of shows he’d grown up with.
Nickelodeon’s head of development at this time was Jenna Boyd, who had suggested that Eric meet with Dan, a TV/feature writer she felt would make for a good creative partner. They connected over mutual interests and began developing a series based on a video game the company was looking to adapt. But as interest in that idea waned, Nickelodeon studio head Russell Hicks urged Eric back toward his box of ideas, where Russell had unearthed a sketch of a boy and a robot fighting video game monsters under the handwritten title “Glitch Techs”…
Smash cut to a year later as Glitch Techs was being green-lit to series by Nickelodeon Animation. And we, its creators Dan Milano and Eric Robles, were largely focused on our pie-in-the-sky list of goals for what the series could become. First and foremost, we wanted action – true to the kind that made us race out of bed when we were kids to watch on Saturday mornings with a bowl of sugar cereal. Second, we wanted to mix a grounded character tone with supernatural humor, paying tribute to properties which had helped shape our childhoods like Ghostbusters and Men in Black.
Never during any of those initial talks did we discuss cultural diversity, gender tropes or moral thematics. We were just two more boys in the animation sandbox, playing with our toys and waxing poetically about how cool it would be to bring them to life. Although our backgrounds were fairly different, by the time we met we’d each been in the industry for over a decade. (Dan is from the Northeast with a bachelor of fine arts degree and a background in puppeteering, and Eric, a self-made artist from the Los Angeles area, had originally planned on a career in law enforcement.)
As we developed the idea of Glitch Techs and shared it with others, we grew exponentially more excited as we discovered its creative potential. A show that could play with video game genres offered an intimidating amount of options for both visual styles and conceptual ideas. In these early stages, particularly in the exploratory artwork, the characters were our action figures and the world was one big playset – complete with vehicles and accessories. Truly, it was like the old Kenner Star Wars commercials come to life, with us even making the verbal sound effects to the set-piece images.
The enthusiasm of development spread quickly to members of the development team, including Phil Rynda, who arranged a presentation for Nickelodeon Corporate centered on the idea that the Glitch Techs world was an original IP with the potential to allow kids and gamers to become recruits and invest their imaginations into the show.
Cynical Expectations… and a Roadmap
Meanwhile, the changing world around us had made it clear we could no longer take gender inclusion for granted. As our two lead characters developed into a male/female relationship dynamic, it was obvious that as role models they could be an example and help to normalize a healthy ideal to children, including our own. But even by this point, the heart of the show had yet to surface.
Once the show was green-lit, we decided to bring in some writing consultants, particularly from the gaming culture, to widen our understanding. Through friends, contacts and network connections we were able to amass a group of writer/creators, many with direct ties to the gaming world. Felicia Day and Sandeep Parikh were well known for The Guild and Legend of Neil, Ashly Burch had written for Adventure Time and her own gamer-centric series of web shorts, Hey Ash Whatcha Playin. Mike Mika was a game designer and studio head from Other Ocean Studios and a beloved gaming fan/historian. Gabe Swarr, a devout gamer, had been developing several projects for Nick at the time, including the interactive game Roboburger, before going on to develop the new Animaniacs for WB. Aaron Lemay was Senior Director at Odisi Games and creator of The Gamers Way, Jeff Trammell was a gamer and young winner of Nick’s writing fellowship, Sarah McChesney was a writer/performer developing for HBO, Brad Bell had co-created the web series Husbands, and David Anaxagoras was writer/creator of the Amazon series Gortimer Gibbons: Life on Normal Street.
To break ice with the group, we asked the consultants to list their most cynical expectations of a Nickelodeon series about video game culture, not expecting that their answers would become the clearest roadmap for the missing element of our show – its conscience. They picked apart the way force typically was celebrated more than intelligence. We discussed the “nerd” tropes that continued to paint anyone who expressed passion, emotion or even a hint of obsession as abnormal underdogs – despite such feelings being the norm among so many in the audience. Gamers in particular were often shown as toxic, lazy, intolerant and detached from reality. References to nerd and gamer culture were typically pandering, lacking any real understanding or nuance. Among them, “gamers” and “female gamers” were treated as separate concepts, with the latter being treated as some rare unicorn – despite the actual demographic being closer to 50/50.
As creators, we cannot express the excitement of deconstructing all these elements or the value of having such a diverse group of individuals express what shows and video games had meant to them growing up and what had been sorely missing from their diet of esteem and inclusion. Other kids were now not only sharing the toys in the sandbox, they were giving them a higher purpose. And clearest of all was that these ideas did not require lessons or speeches or spotlights of any kind in our series. All they needed was honest inclusion. They were a factual part of our and our childrens’ everyday world. All we needed to do was write what we all knew and reflect the world we saw, rather than lean back on what seemed typical of children’s TV.
At no point did this feel like homework for us. At no point was this a threat to our creative points of view or considered a compromise of our grand, creative vision. It felt eye-opening and enriching and promised to make the world exciting and relevant in a way we would not have accomplished on our own, especially while being distracted with all the daily challenges that producing entails. It was also just fun to sit with others and deconstruct which of our favorite books, shows, movies and games we truly loved and why. In every case, it was a matter of intimacy, a feeling that those stories spoke to us on a level that felt earnest. Suddenly, we wanted Glitch Techs to be more than fun, we wanted it to ring true, and we wanted it to connect with an audience the way we had felt a connection to the shows we loved. And most importantly, we wanted the consultants who’d given us their time to know we had truly heard them and that their input would be embraced.
Checking Our Guts
Although off to a good start, it was clear the characters should not remain archetypal and that they be defined by more than a single trait (a shortcut often employed in early development). Context and motivation in our stories would be key. Nobody, not even our digital AI glitches, would be cast in the role of a villain. Ideally, audiences would be able to understand all sides of a given conflict, whether they agreed with the character’s motives or not. Supporting characters were treated like main characters, ensuring there were truly no small parts and that even the smallest lines were an opportunity to showcase strong personalities.
While hiring, it was important to look for diverse talents and to make ourselves open to those individual points of view. Once we saw how outside input was elevating our project, we became hungry for more. We might get along with a writer or an artist because they shared inspirations and senses of humor, but that feeling of comfortable fraternity that might have normally made for a hire in the past was now seen as a potential roadblock. It was important that everyone come from different backgrounds and have different perspectives on the material. After all, what does it benefit the creativity of a show to hire multiple people with the same foundational ideas?
Building an original IP amid the hundreds of licensed properties that so many studios were developing during this time was an exciting prospect. Glitch Techs was wholly original, but of course felt familiar enough due to homaging so many genres. It seemed to be the perfect Trojan horse for fresh ideas and so we started to revise our goals concerning gamer culture. We wanted the show to be a love letter to the very best that gaming and fandom had to offer, while also modeling behavior that would work against the potential for toxicity. We wanted to take a well-rounded look at gaming concepts and avoid overt lessons so viewers could draw their own conclusions. We wanted to celebrate the power of being informed, the value of vulnerability and the practice of healthy emotional intelligence.
All of these things required deliberate application and presence of mind to maintain. Inclusivity in our media culture is improving all the time, but for children of the ’80s like us, the truth is that some of the most insidious forms of exclusion come when we get tired and let our brains default to auto-pilot. There are moments where we would catch ourselves – or allow others to point out that we had resorted to things that were typical, reliable and sometimes tainted.
Over the years we’d both found that crews were used to some creators asking genuinely for diversity, but also unconsciously pushing against it when actually faced with creative details they found foreign or unfamiliar. We needed to remind people to not second-guess themselves OR us when designing darker skin tones, or in policing “classic” gags that might come at the expense of characters’ bodies, intelligence or esteem. Those weren’t always obvious to us, so many things made it through various stages before they were rooted out, while others we failed to find may well have made it into the show. Despite that, the willingness to deconstruct and check our guts amid the other challenges of making a show was something that we had to not only become familiar with, but actively appreciate.
Listening to the Team
When writer David Anaxagoras suggested adding a Muslim female to the cast, Nickelodeon suggested we ensure a thoughtful depiction by taking on a consultant. As a result, we met with Sue Obedi of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, who graciously consulted on our scripts and animatics. What would be the point of including characters for children to truly identify with if we allowed ourselves to accidentally misrepresent their truth?
It helped that instead of waiting for a studio to assign us a consultant late in the process, we made it an organic part of our early writing process. This allowed for most changes to be implemented well ahead of time, leading to interesting changes that came with unforeseen benefits, rather than forced changes added begrudgingly to otherwise “perfected” work. That said, sometimes a piece of feedback WOULD come to us late, or at a stage where we were not particularly in the mindset for consulting.
We’ve had to literally force ourselves to stop mid-way through a justification about a gag. It slows down the day. It opens us up to criticism and potential adjustments we don’t want to make or discuss. But because we’ve replaced our notion of “compromise” with “collaboration,” we learned to listen. In many cases, we would discuss details of context and intent. But when there wasn’t time for an entire discussion, we allowed ourselves to just trust. At the end of the day, most of these notes should not require justification.
If we trust and respect our team, if something was important enough for them to bring up, we had to assume it would be important to others. Over time we found that the willingness to adjust these kinds of details only served to elevate them, providing the show with an originality and nuance we can look back on and be so very proud of.
When depicting gamers, it was important to stay true to the mindset. In our pilot, we devised the initial meeting between our co-leads as one in which our male lead, Hector (aka High Five), is shoved by the antagonist and helped up by our female lead, Miko. Looking back, we’d drawn subconsciously on the trope of a bullied individual meeting up with an ally, who shows up conveniently in an almost western-style heroic fashion. But the context of the scene was an online game, and one that writer Ashly Burch took issue with. “What kind of gamer in a PVP match stops to help some rando?” she said. “If anything, she’d think, ‘Sucks to be him,’ and happily move on with one less competitor to worry about.”
This seemingly small suggestion was one that did require a significant re-board at a time when we were absolutely NOT in the mindset to make changes. But by spending the time on the solution instead of the problem, we not only addressed the note, but developed a far better meeting for our characters, now revised as them literally being thrown TOGETHER by the antagonist. This made Five being victimized a problem for Miko as well. He was now in her way, and for her to advance she needed to deal with him. The two characters remain out for themselves, but now as they parted ways we were able to establish them with a common rival – motivating them to team up more organically later in the sequence.
Connecting With the Fans
We screened our animatics in Nickelodeon’s newly-built screening room, placing them on the big screen where everyone could get a cinematic feel for what we were creating. Among our crew and those who would visit, a great deal of the commentary was around the characters and dynamics as being not just fun, but earnest, relatable and often surprising. Though we never lost sight of our child demographic, we were endearing ourselves to people our age and older – kids of the ’80s who ate that same sugar cereal on Saturday mornings but now appreciated the value of having them fortified with vitamins. There’s still plenty in the show that feels familiar, things that can be called out as traditional, things that will qualify as tropes, intended or unintended. But on the whole we found that there was so much more for us to enjoy and felt encouraged that others might feel the same.
When we look at Glitch Techs we see everything we set out to create. A fun tribute to Saturday Morning cartoons that draws on gamer culture in a genuine way and uses the genre as material for relatable stories rather than a gimmick to trigger nostalgia. It is earnest and open-hearted and, though it is in no way perfect, we take great pride in being its co-creators and far more in being true fans of our crew, who helped us make something that surprises and entertains us no matter how many times we watch.
Ultimately, the conscience of the show is what evoked the passion of its talent, who like us became addicted to deconstruction and collaboration. They not only gave us so much of themselves during production but in their continued support long after. Through word of mouth and custom artwork, the team has used the #glitchtechs hashtag to share their pride. They’ve connected with the fans who have validated their work for us all and whose constructive opinions help shape it for the future.
At a time when we are all so desperate to look ahead to a better world, we are deeply thankful to have helped bring about something that lets young faces to not only see themselves on TV, but in a world where they are all united equally as a team. If the Glitch Techs audience continues to grow on Netflix, we hope they and Nickelodeon Animation will allow us to produce more shows utilizing what we’ve learned. Regardless, we will take these lessons to all of our future productions. While it was always our dream to build strong entertainment, Glitch Techs gave us our first taste of what it means to truly help build a strong community.
Today Nintendo Switch owners can upgrade their consoles from the paltry 32GB of built-in storage to 256GB for only $30 or 512GB for only $60. You could have an entirely digital library of Switch games and not even break a sweat. The other big news today is a very rare discount on the Plex Pass lifetime subscription. At just under $89, this is the lowest price we’ve seen for this very useful service, ever. Other deals include a 5TB portable drive for $99.99, the first discount we’ve seen on a gaming PC equipped with the new 10-core Intel Core i9-10900K processor, $10 rewards when you preorder Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, and more.
______________________________ Eric Song is IGN’s deal curator and spends roughly 1/4 of his income on stuff he posts. Check out his latest Daily Deals Article and subscribe to his IGN Deals Newsletter.
A new trailer for Call of the Sea premiered during Future Games Show, discussing the themes of Out of the Blue Games’ debut title. According to Out of the Blue Games co-founder Tatiana Delgado, Call of the Sea takes inspiration from H.P. Lovecraft’s stories, albeit with a twist.
“But as you can see, although our game is heavily influenced by his tales, Call of the Sea is a twist on the traditional H.P. Lovecraft works,” Delgado said. “We’re trying to focus on the surreal and the oneiric more than the horrific and the grim. In short, Call of the Sea isn’t a descent into madness but a rise to sanity. Losing your mind makes you see a dream-like, colorful world.”
Previously, Delgado said the team wanted to specifically “target the next gen” with Call of the Sea, which is scheduled to release for Xbox Series X, Xbox One, and PC later this year. The game will be available through Xbox Game Pass as well.
“As soon as we saw what was possible, we wanted to do it because–although we have a stylized, visual style, so it’s not realistic–we wanted to get as much as possible from the graphics side,” Delgado said. “And I think we can benefit a lot from the next-gen and, we’re kind of different for what you would expect from a next-gen game.”
Note: This post contains some spoilers for Control and some tiny story tidbits. If you want to uncover it all on your own, you might want to come back after you’ve completed Control and the AWE DLC.
When Control was released, it was fascinatingly weird and full of mystery. As we tried to fight the extra-dimensional Hiss, we learned about the strange entities in charge of the Federal Bureau of Control, discovered supernaturally Altered Items, and uncovered story tidbits linking Control to a Remedy cult classic, 2010’s Alan Wake. But the game’s greatest secret was hidden away in its best sequence, the Ashtray Maze. Listen carefully to the song that plays there, and you could hear a secret message that seemed to hint at hidden content buried somewhere inside Control.
One year later to the day, Control fans have discovered what that secret message was all about. It did hint at hidden content–but it was content that didn’t appear in Control until the release of its final DLC expansion, AWE. Discover the right nook of the Oldest House in AWE and you’ll find the puzzle’s solution, unlocking a tiny tidbit of a story Easter egg–and what seems to be the game’s greatest piece of gear.
Here’s what the secret message is all about, how to find it, how to solve it, what it reveals about Alan Wake, and what you get as a reward.
The Secret Message
To understand what was uncovered with the Control secret message, you have to understand what it’s telling you to begin with. The message appears in the song “Take Control,” which appears in the Ashtray Maze toward the end of Control’s story. The song is credited to the Old Gods of Asgard, a band that appears in Alan Wake, made up of brothers Tor and Odin Anderson (the Old Gods are portrayed by real-life musical group Poets of the Fall). In Alan Wake, the Old Gods of Asgard’s songs had the same reality-bending powers as Wake’s writing, but they had fought, and defeated, the supernatural Dark Presence that eventually captures Wake at the end of that game.
The Old Gods of Asgard have manifested supernatural powers from their music, which seems to be why their song helps you get through the Ashtray Maze.
So the Andersons are characters in the world of Control, but there’s more to the song than an Easter egg. Between verses, there are portion where you can hear someone talking–but the words are reversed. Run those portion backward and you discover Control’s hidden message (our interpretation of it, anyway, but there on Reddit there have been others):
“In their drunken fevered state, seeing double, profoundly, the pyramid in the stolen file becomes a spruce tree.”
“The diamond will tell you where 1-19-7-1-18-4-9-19 (an A1Z26 cipher that translates to ‘Asgard is’).”
“Landing on the polar star and rushing on to the red room, find the cord to take you to a secret rendezvous.”
Players tried to figure out what these instructions were referring to, but came up empty in the aftermath of Control’s release. Now we know that they (or at least some of them) were referring to AWE, although not all the clues make perfect sense just yet.
The Diamond Will Tell You Where
The first part of the secret message, the “drunken fevered state,” always sounded like it referred to the Anderson brothers and the background story in Alan Wake about how they drank moonshine made with water from Cauldron Lake, which might have given them the power from the Dark Presence to alter reality through their music. The “pyramid in the stolen file becomes a spruce tree” bit isn’t really relevant to the rest of the puzzle, but it seems like it might have been referring to The Foundation DLC, and the description of the Oldest House as an ancient, living tree.
The AWE DLC focuses heavily on tying Control to Alan Wake. Control protagonist Jesse Faden receives a message from Wake through the Hotline that directs her to the Investigations Sector, a previously sealed area of the Oldest House. There, she discovers why the section was sealed: There’s a murderous, hideous monster running around in the area. That monster is what remains of Alan Wake character Dr. Emil Hartman. In the 2010 game, Hartman, a psychiatrist, briefly held Wake at his lodge in an attempt to understand and use Wake’s supernatural abilities for his own gain. Wake escaped when the Dark Presence attacked, but Hartman survived.
Throughout AWE, we find out what happened to Hartman. He briefly tried to work with the FBC, but was prosecuted for his attempts to take advantage of artists, including Wake and the Andersons, as a “paracriminal.” After doing his time, Hartman went directly back to his work attempting to gain control of the power of Cauldron Lake and the Dark Presence, however. He dove into the lake to try to learn more, and apparently was possessed by the Dark Presence. The FBC found him, captured him, and interred him in Investigations for study, until he broke out and killed a bunch of people.
Blow a hole in the wall near a radio playing “Take Control” and you’ll find the next step in the puzzle.
As Jesse chases Hartman through Investigations, intent on finally putting him down before he can escape into the rest of the FBC and wreak more mayhem. After an encounter in the Eagle Limited AWE section of the sector, Hartman escape through a passage in the wall. The section is called “Shifting Passage,” and as Jesse gives chase through it, and if you’re paying attention, you might spot a picture hanging on a wall that shows that same wall with a hole in it.
Blast a hole in the wall and you’ll enter a secret area, which contains a hidden bit of lore to pick up. If you look up, though, you’ll see that there’s an office above you, turned on its side. Fly up through its door to get a look around. There’s a radio nearby that’s playing, what else, “Take Control.”
This is the spot you want to be in. Smash through the wall beside the desk that holds the radio and you’ll find another secret location. This is a diamond-shaped passageway that leads to a small, strange clock sitting on a pedestal.
Finding Asgard
The next chunk of the song is just a series of numbers, and at the time the message was being deciphered, players discovered the numbers were a simple cipher about the location of “Asgard.” That’s in keeping with all the Norse mythology theming with the Old Gods of Asgard, but what does the sequence mean?
When you find the clock, you’ll quickly discover that you can start and stop the movement of its hands on the clock’s face. Stop them on certain numbers and the clock will ring like an alarm. The trick here is to plug in the numbers from the cypher sequence. Any that are over 12 are taken to be in 24-hour format, or “military time.”
Pressing the interact button causes the hand of the clock to move around its face. Stop it on each number in the sequence to unlock the path forward.
So the sequence appears like this in the song: “1-19-7-1-18-4-9-19.”
But inputting into the clock, you need this sequence: “1-7-7-1-6-4-9-7.”
You do that by stopping the clock hand on each number in sequence as it rotates around the face–if you stop on the wrong number, you have to start over, like a combination lock. Enter the full sequence into the clock and a hole opens in the floor behind it. If you look down in the hole, you’ll see your next step: the Polar Star, a star-shaped stone set into the bottom of the shaft.
The Red Room
Drop down onto the “polar star”-shaped platform, then head into the Red Room, where you’ll have to fight waves of enemies.
When you drop down the shaft to the Polar Star, your next destination is just ahead: the Red Room. This is a usual Oldest House office area, but bathed completely in red light. There are no lore drops or anything else to find inside, but when you enter the Red Room, you’re attacked by waves of Hiss. Fighting them off is tough, but if you manage to beat them, the next step of the puzzle unlocks.
The song tells you to “find the cord to take you to a secret rendezvous.” In Control, the “cord” refers to a strange light cord that appears periodically in the Oldest House. Pulling the cord three times instantly transports you to the Oceanview Motel, a strange supernatural location that can link parts of the Oldest House together. In the AWE DLC, you visit the Oceanview a couple of times, where you’re treated to cutscenes in which you see Wake talking with Thomas Zane, another Alan Wake character. After all the enemies in the Red Room are dead, you’ll find a cord pretty much in the center of it. Pulling it three times, predictably, takes you back to the Red Room.
Where Asgard Is
Once you get into the Oceanview Motel, you’ll get a message from Wake that gives you a tidbit of Alan Wake lore.
This is a bit of a lackluster visit to the Oceanview, given some of the others in Control and even in AWE. When you arrive, there’s nothing much going on. As usual, your goal is to find the key to the door with the inverted pyramid on it, which provides your exit. To get it, you’ll need to go to the one open guest room in the motel and collect the key off the desk.
When that happens, you receive a quick, brief Hotline message from Wake, who talks briefly about Valhalla, a retirement home founded to be a place where the (already ludicrously old) Anderson brothers could live out their twilight years. There’s not a lot of information, but that’s basically the gist of what this secret is all about. AWE tells the story of what happened to Emil Hartman after Alan Wake, and this year-long secret tells what happened to the Andersons. THe pair live (or lived) out their days in a retirement home that was founded some five years before Control in 2014, called Valhalla. Despite being there, the existence of “Take Control” suggests they continued to entertain with supernatural rock god prowess.
Your Reward
The Aerobics personal mod might be the very best one in the game.
Though the secret provides only a tidbit of Alan Wake lore, it does dish out something pretty significant: a “Personal Mod,” one of the pieces of gear you can equip in Control. This one is called Aerobics, a top-tier mod that gives you health whenever you use your Evade move in the game. Since most players are likely to use Evade almost constantly to avoid incoming enemy fire and other danger, this is an exceedingly good mod. And with the addition of the Shum horde mode in AWE, the Aerobics mod is likely to be exceptionally useful to anyone who finds it.
