The #RiseOfSkywalker began in earnest in 1987, the year of the 10th anniversary #StarWars celebration. Long before #Rey, #Ben aka #KyloRen, #Finn, #PoeDameron and the #KnightsOfRen, #computergame developer and publisher #Domark could not believe its luck when #Atari strangely did not value their Star Wars arcade game license highly.
Advancement has silenced cogwheels, mechanisms and scraping drive heads. A reflection in silence on the noise of the future resting in the far-away past.
Box office figures tell harsh tales. While Rogue One earned more than a billion dollars worldwide, Solo could not even crawl past 400 million dollars globally. The difference in narrative perspective explains the Death Star-sized revenue gap.
What a great pleasure and honour it is to join Steve Erickson’s most delightful conversation with one of the gaming industry’s finest: Simon Butler, weaver of pixels and tales from 8- to 16-bit and beyond.
Due to engagements related to the world of academia, I have been somewhat absent from the vast environs of the interwebs. Over the next two months, I promise to return with
When I saw Star Wars: The Force Awakens on December 16th, 2015 I was perfectly oblivious to any advance publicity. It had all started in late October 2012, when news broke that Walt Disney Studios had taken over Lucasfilm and its many assets. Kathleen Kennedy was appointed chief officer of the once Lucas-helmed enterprise and quickly proceeded to start pre-production of the seventh Star Wars installment (whilst prepping the spin-off film Rogue One in secret) . This course of surprising events made me abandon, unfollow and ignore dozens of film-related websites and social media accounts. Old habits were instantly dropped and I started distancing myself inevitably from one of my favourite hobbies, the film industry. It is therefore that I had not seen a single second, millimeter or anything of the new Star Wars: The Force Awakens, whose midnight premiere I attended on said December 16th, 2015. I went in totally blank, here is how I received a film whose marketing machinery I had ignored with monkish patience.
A fan awakens as Andreas Wanda recounts how he experienced Episode VII after a 2 1/2 year-long media sabbatical. (C) Walt Disney, Lucasfilm
Illuminated in a mesmerising green hue of ethereal beauty and presence, a home computer of old comes to life, leaps off a page in Sam Dyer’s latest masterpiece in the exceedingly rewarding “Visual Compendium“-series. Opening the impressive volume emulates perfectly that moment a computer is switched on, with every page impersonating the starkly coloured screen display of the titular ZX Spectrum. Sam Dyer’s “ZX Spectrum: A Visual Compendium” is a special experience of layered significance.
Layers of history, experience, enjoyment, insight and colour are in story for the readers of Bomb Jack and Paperboy in Sam Dyer’s ZX Spectrum: A Visual Compendium from Bitmap Books, available at www.funstock.co.uk. Photo by Andreas Wanda.