alex james kane

After the artistic and technical hurdles of Oblivion and Fallout 3, Bethesda Game Studios hit another high point with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, one of the most beloved games ever made. Skyrim combined the team’s love of Norse mythology, “low fantasy” like Conan the Barbarian, and the snowy, pine-laden mountainscapes of the Pacific Northwest. They sought out native Scandinavian speakers to lend authenticity to the game’s considerable voice-over cast, which included Christopher Plummer, Max von Sydow, and series mainstay Lynda Carter. And they pushed their tools and engine to new heights, crafting the franchise’s most lifelike game world to date.

On Oct. 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy brought havoc to the East Coast of the U.S. Among the destruction, its 60 mph winds struck a construction crane atop the One57 luxury high-rise in midtown Manhattan and left the crane’s massive arm hanging precariously over a street. Buildings throughout the adjacent blocks were evacuated, and millions watched as footage of the scene unfolded across news networks.

Half a century has done little to dull the potency of Tobe Hooper’s 1974 shocker, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Makeup artist Tom Savini is fond of saying that old films aren’t really old if you haven’t seen them yet. And I hadn’t seen the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre until six years ago, shortly after discovering the online multiplayer game Friday the 13th. That project, by Gun Media and IllFonic, revitalized interest in the dormant Jason Voorhees property while also helping popularize the “asymmetrical horror” subgenre, which has its roots in video game series like Aliens vs. Predator and Splinter Cell. Gun’s latest—a collaboration with developer Sumo Nottingham—aims to give Hooper’s genre classic the same treatment as Friday the 13th: The Game but largely avoids the trap of having too much in common with the company’s earlier hit.

“The way Todd and I bonded was doing this kind of fake in-world stuff in the manual, and we wanted to do something like that for Redguard. Eventually, when the game came out, it would come out in the manual. And that’s when we realized we knew fuck-all about the world; there was nothing except Daggerfall, which is very small. There maybe was a timeline stuck somewhere, with just a bunch of names and stuff like that. And so much of it was kind of just coming out of a D&D game that the original [Bethesda] guys had done, and most of those guys were gone. So we started obsessing about the world or whatnot. For some reason, you can’t make a pirate game without deciding how the universe got created.”

Cayde remembers what it was like to die and return to the Traveler’s Light, he says. He remembers the warmth, the peacefulness of that place, and being reunited with Sundance, his Ghost. The Traveler doesn’t speak to us in Destiny, but our Ghosts do, and Cayde believes it’s all connected anyhow: the Guardians, their Ghosts, the Traveler, the Light. Separateness, in other words, is an illusion; we’re all one. This belief alone is our common ground with the Witness (Brett Dalton), a many-armed god seeking to dominate and control all life in the universe.

For Lee Towersey, everything changed at Celebration Europe in summer 2013. He’d been a member of the R2-D2 Builders Club for six years, having built his first film-accurate astromech in 2009, when Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy toured the club’s exhibition booth. Three months later, he was hired—along with fellow Builders Club member Oliver Steeples—as part of the creature-effects team at Pinewood Studios for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. In 2016, Towersey found himself lying on his back aboard the Millennium Falcon, remote control in hand, as Mark Hamill and Artoo (played by newcomer Jimmy Vee) were reunited for one of the greatest scenes in Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

“That day was very difficult,” Hryb recalls. “For a lot of different reasons, one of which was that the messaging wasn’t quite tight. There were a lot of questions… So it was a real struggle. Our message for the Xbox 360 generation was very clear, and now we were in a different position.”

“The Wachowskis—you’ve gotta remember, they’re cool people who watch a lot of entertainment, and they’re kind of fun. They’re not taking it all too seriously. Towards the end of Path of Neo, we said, ‘What would you like for an ending?’ And it was clear as a bell to them. They’re like, ‘We’re gonna have “We Are the Champions” playing.’ And we’re going, ‘Do you know how expensive it’s gonna be to license that song?’ It’s like, ‘No, no, no. We’re gonna have that song.’”

Fallout 4 is a game that opens with the destruction of the civilized world and pretty quickly hands the player a set of tools with which to rebuild it. Most players leave Vault 111 and make their way toward Concord, Massachusetts, where a man named Preston Garvey and a handful of civilians are holed up inside an old history museum. The place is littered with artifacts of the Thirteen Colonies and the Revolutionary War, and Garvey is among the last survivors of the Minutemen, a group descended from New England’s real-world colonial militia. There’s a case to be made that the Minutemen are the game’s defining addition to the greater lore of the Fallout universe. They’re a little squeaky-clean for an armed paramilitary, but their earnestness, and their philosophy of helping others—anyone in need—lends Fallout 4 a charm and replayability it might otherwise have lacked.

When LucasArts first announced Knights of the Old Republic in a July 2000 press release, the publisher described the project as “the first Star Wars role-playing game (RPG) for PC and next-generation video game systems.” This was just four months after Microsoft had unveiled its plans to enter the console arena with the first Xbox. The game’s release window was slated for 2002. But between Interplay going bankrupt during development on Neverwinter Nights and KotOR’s massive scope, the Xbox version of BioWare’s big Star Wars game was ultimately delayed to July 2003; the PC edition would land in November. That was assuming, of course, everything went as planned.