After decades of chasing realism and copying Disney and Pixar, they’ve finally been freed up to experiment with style

When Polygon asked Januel Mercado, co-director of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, about animation that inspired the visual look of his DreamWorks movie, he had an easy answer: “Obviously Spider-Verse.” The movie’s evocative oil-painted style doesn’t look like the Shrek franchise that spawned it. But it doesn’t just give an existing series a makeover. Like so many American animated movies released in the last few years, The Last Wish veers away from the aesthetic that defined American animation for decades, working toward a more impressionistic and dynamic design.

And for that, we have Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse to thank.

In 2018, the first Spider-Verse movie redefined not just superhero blockbuster movies (and if you want to get specific, Spider-Man movies), but also American animation as a whole. Its stylized approach celebrates animation as an anything-goes medium. Not only did it show audiences what animated movies could look like, it also emboldened directors and animators to push the boundaries of accepted aesthetics and take a chance on more stylized and personal art.

Image: DreamWorks

Image: DreamWorks

For most of the history of American animation, studios have been copying past successes. The Disney house style defined cartoons for decades, and when Pixar started releasing movies, it set a series of CG standards that everyone else reached for. After one last wave of traditional cel animation, CG became the norm stateside. And while technology has radically changed animation from the days of Toy Story to 2022’s Lightyear, chasing realism became the stylistic norm. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but in the same way that it got tedious to see other studios copying Disney’s musical formula in the post-Renaissance era, it can be tiresome to see the same visual style over and over — not just for audiences, but for the animators creating these movies.

“I find [the long-standing style]… ‘boring’ is probably excessive, but I want to see something different,” says The Bad Guys director Pierre Perifel. “Frankly, I’m not the only one. [...] You can see the trend is shifting a little bit.”

“We’re at this place where so much has been conquered [in terms of realism]. Now it’s more about, how do you use it? So it’s not like we have to make a completely new tool. It’s a little bit more: Oh, but can I actually not make it look realistic?” says Enrico Casarosa, director of Pixar’s Luca.

Image: Pixar

Image: Pixar

When it came to that 2020 sea monster movie, animating water offered an interesting scenario. For a long time, animators coveted the ability to animate photorealistic water — rendering convincing, believable textures was the ultimate goal. But Casarosa sought more warmth and expression for the water in his film: “The computer wants to do a beautiful splash of water that has every single droplet in it. And we’re like No, I would love it to be a beautiful line that is simple and poetic.”

“There’s just something tactile that you kind of feel is missing from a lot of CG animation,” Turning Red director Domee Shi says. “When it came to shading clothing or skin textures [in Turning Red], there was just a little bit more of an artistic touch to it.”

Not every single animator out there is trying to break away from verisimilitude. Last summer’s The Sea Beast, for instance, definitely skews toward the side of realism, especially when it comes to the crashing ocean waves. But now, American directors have more of a choice — one they weren’t allowed to make before Into the Spider-Verse proved that audiences were hungry for stylistic experimentation.

Image: Netflix

Part of the long-standing limits they faced did come from the physical restrictions on what computers could render, but part of it was simply what studio executives deemed worth investing in. While American animation has stuck with one style for pretty much the last 20 years, international studios haven’t been bound by those expectations. Across the world, animators pushed the boundaries of what CG could be and fleshed out the hand-drawn animation that major American studios abandoned. Apart from the occasional Studio Ghibli movie, however, the majority of American audiences have been infamously indifferent to foreign animation.

Into the Spider-Verse wasn’t the first movie to reject the Pixar-influenced style of CG animation, but it was the first with such a distinct look to really reach American audiences, gain widespread critical success, and most importantly for studio heads, make a lot of money. The door opened for animators to take a chance on something new and different, and they were eager to experiment. Realism became an option, not the default.

Into the Spider-Verse’s sequel, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, pushes the first movie’s visual stylization even further, mishmashing dozens of different styles, from the drippy watercolor washes of Gwen Stacy’s word to the cut-out collages that make up Spider-Punk. Every moment of the movie is a visual feast, brimming with possibilities that will likely continue to inspire animators across studios.

“I think we may have fallen into a bit of a standardized version of CGI, which it doesn’t have to be,” Klaus director Sergio Pablos told Polygon back in 2019. “It’s good to see things like Spider-Verse, for example, pushing that medium. Because to me, every film should be an attempt at doing something different.”

From zombie horror RPG settings to Terry Pratchett-style fantasy and everything in between

When an internal document from Wizards of the Coast outlining proposed changes to Dungeons & Dragons’ Open Gaming License leaked in January, fan uproar led to record sales of rival tabletop role-playing games. One of the winners was the Cypher System from Monte Cook Games, which earned about three years’ worth of sales in just a few weeks, according to Monte Cook chief operating officer Charles Ryan.

“We saw thousands and thousands of new gamers investigating the Cypher System,” he said. “Now, some of those people made a rage purchase and then they’re just going to go back to their D&D campaign, but others are going to explore. There’s people that weren’t really paying attention to what else was out there, and now they’ve seen that there are other things and they’ll give them a try. In the months to come, we will be paying a lot of attention to how we can get those people that made a purchase to then move on to actually playing a game, because we’re pretty confident once they play that game, they won’t go back.”

What is the Cypher System?

Image: Raph Herrera Lomotan/Monte Cook Games

The Cypher System was introduced in 2012 with the record-breaking crowdfunding campaign for Numenera, Monte Cook’s science fantasy tabletop role-playing game set billions of years in the future. The game’s success inspired the formation of Monte Cook Games in order to use the mechanics of Numenera in other settings. Its second outing was The Strange, a Quantum Leap-like game where characters hop between dimensions that represent different genres.

“Once we did that, we were like, Well, this system works for everything,” Ryan said.

Image: Angelo Peluso/Monte Cook Games

Image: Martin de Diego/Monte Cook Games

Image: Katerina Ladon/Monte Cook Games

Image: Federico Musetti/Monte Cook Games

The Cypher System Rulebook provides guidance for running games and creating characters for settings ranging from post-apocalypses to fairy tales to superheroes. The key to the game’s versatility comes from how characters are made — by putting together a descriptor, type, and focus — for a huge amount of variability in concepts and plenty of options for reflavoring.

For instance, you might build a Graceful Warrior Who Fights With Panache to be a swashbuckling pirate, a Rugged Explorer Who Drives Like a Maniac for a Mad Max-inspired game, or a Clever Adept Who Employs Magnetism to play a character like Magneto. Each of these choices gives you access to its own group of skills and powers.

“I think a great Descriptor gives you a great role-playing hook,” Ryan said. “It says something about your character right there in the name, and then it’s got some mechanics that back that up.”

You can also use a flavor system to swap around special abilities for even more flexibility. For instance, a Speaker might get the magic flavor, indicating their ability to sway others comes from enchantment spells and that they can also use their power to shield their own mind from attack, while a Warrior could get knowledge flavor if they’re an assassin trained in subterfuge and lock-picking.

Using your stats

Cypher characters have three broad statistics: Might, Speed, and Intellect. These represent both a character’s maximum values in these areas but also how many points they have to spend on challenges relating to them. For instance, if you want to make an effort to dodge an attack rather than just relying on your base score, it requires spending points from your Speed pool. When attacking a tough foe with a sword, you may want to use points from your Might pool to make it easier. Take damage from an attack, whether physical or psychic, and you’ll lose points out of a relevant pool. This results in some tough trade-offs between offense and defense that can get even more dramatic based on the genre.

“For a zombie apocalypse game I ran, the players can’t get bitten,” Ryan said. “If you go into combat against the zombies, it’s game over if you take any damage from a zombie bite. Because the Cypher System has a mechanic where you apply effort when you’re really trying hard to make something succeed and the cost of that effort comes out of the same pools that damage comes from, we would get to the end of a combat and nobody would’ve been bit, but they’re just as depleted as they would be if they’re taking damage.”

Pools are refreshed by taking 10 hours of rest, but even a good night’s sleep just gives you the opportunity for a recovery roll. That means you always need to be aware of your resources. One of a character’s most powerful abilities is an edge, which reduces the number of points needed to spend effort in one of their attributes, allowing them to push themselves more frequently.

Constant progress

As players earn experience points, they can spend them to improve their characters by boosting stats, edges, the amount of points they can expend when applying effort, or training in a new skill. Once they’ve purchased each of those benefits once, they gain a new tier that grants them additional abilities based on their character descriptor, type, and focus.

Players will typically earn enough XP for an advancement each session, though XP can also be spent on a reroll. It’s a trade-off that Ryan said can keep the dice from getting in the way of a good story.

Image: Milivoj Ćeran/Monte Cook Games

“I ran a game of Numenera at a convention once, and at the end of the whole adventure there was an angry mob of villagers that was going to come because of what the players had done,” Ryan said. “The player of the Speaker character stood up and gave this rousing speech and then they picked up their d20 and rolled a four. But instantly that player said, ‘I spend an XP and reroll,’ and then he rolled an 8. Then somebody else had XP and said, ‘I’ll throw an XP in for that person,’ and then he rolled a 20. The adventure had this rousing conclusion that was super memorable.”

What is a cypher?

The Cypher System takes its name from cyphers, items first imagined as bits of lost technology found in Numenera that have since been reflavored to anything with limited uses, from a magic potion to a bomb to the blessing of a nature spirit. Players can only carry a few cyphers on them at any given time, and you’re likely to gain new ones by exploring or defeating foes, meaning you need to use the ones you have or lose out.

“You’ve always got the standard character abilities that you’ve picked for your character, and then you’ve got a couple slots where ability is always changing,” Ryan said. “That encourages creativity.”

Image: Jacob Atienza/Monte Cook Games

The one-use nature of cyphers also allows them to be less balanced than equipment that will stick around.

“Who cares if it has a big effect or a small one?” Ryan said. “If it has a huge effect on that one adventure, it doesn’t throw the whole game out of balance. It just created a really cool dramatic moment. If it has a small effect, that’s fine too, because they’ll just use it and they’ll replenish it.”

What do you need to play Cypher?

All you need to play Cypher is the Cypher System Rulebook and a set of dice, though depending on the setting or genre you’re interested in you might want to check out some other books. Numenera remains the most popular Cypher setting, but other options include Stay Alive! for horror, Claim the Sky for superheroes, and The Stars Are Fire for science fiction. Because the system is the same across books, you can freely mix and match if you want to have space horror or superheroes fighting an alien invasion.

“They really go in-depth,” Ryan said. “The Godforsaken fantasy book talks about whether you want to run Terry Pratchett-style humorous fantasy or classic high fantasy or gritty stuff and every sort of element of the genre you would want to explore.”

Image: Eren Arik/Monte Cook Games

Late backers are still being accepted for the highly successful BackerKit campaign for Adventures in the Cypher System, which includes a deluxe version of the core rulebook plus a bestiary, adventure book, and new post-apocalyptic and fantasy setting books. Every pledge includes a PDF of the Cypher System Rulebook so you can start reading up before everything else is released early next year.

If you need advice or are looking to join a game, you can join the highly active Cypher Unlimited Discord server. Streamers such as Mr. Tarrasque, who once specialized in D&D, have been making content for Cypher along with other games since the proposed OGL revisions. Cypher added its own open gaming license last year, so expect the number of books using the system to continue to grow alongside Monte Cook’s upcoming releases, which include adaptations of the horror podcasts Old Gods of Appalachia and The Magnus Archives.

“I think seeing the Cypher engine drive different games will expose it to different audiences who will really enjoy it,” Ryan said. “There’s nothing more gratifying for somebody who’s involved in the creation of games than to see people playing and enjoying their games.”

The WGA strike is only the first battle in an oncoming labor war

The first of what is sure to be many labor protests against artificial intelligence has already begun. It started with Hollywood writers who wanted to make sure they won’t be forced to work with — or be replaced by — AI tools like ChatGPT. But it has already grown beyond that. And it’s not hyperbolic to say that what’s happening in Hollywood right now will have broad ramifications for, well, all of us.

The current Writers Guild of America strike is ostensibly about streaming residuals. The bulk of the WGA’s proposals, as of May 1, are calls for clearer and more fair budgets and compensation for the TV shows and movies that make their way in some form to various streaming platforms.

But nestled down at the end of the last page of the WGA’s two-page proposal sheet is a section called “Artificial Intelligence.” It is the first large-scale attempt by a labor union to pressure an industry to regulate and, in some cases, ban the use of AI as a replacement for workers. And it will assuredly be replicated by unions across the country as this technology becomes more prevalent and, if current trends continue, more advanced.

The WGA is requesting that the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) ban the use of AI for writing and rewriting any source material, as well as its use as a source material of its own, and that no AI material be trained on WGA writers’ work. So far, the AMPTP has rejected the WGA’s proposal and merely offered to hold “annual meetings to discuss advancements in technology.”

And if negotiations completely fall apart between WGA and AMPTP, the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, SAG-AFTRA, has already voted unanimously to join the strike.

The fears that these unions are reacting to, that studios could replace human writers in a writers room or human actors on a movie set, aren’t hypothetical. According to a recent New York Times piece that asked “Will a Chatbot Write the Next Succession?” a recent Netflix contract reserved the rights to simulations of actors’ voices “throughout the universe and in perpetuity.”

What was once solely reserved for the realm of science fiction is now very real. And it won’t just impact pop culture. We are barreling dangerously close to a world where AI has not only put hundreds of millions of people out of work, but also replaced key services with unthinking automations. And if workers can’t draw a line now, while this technology is still in its infancy, there might not be another chance to wrestle back what we’ve lost. Hollywood is just the front line.

The big unknown, however, is whether or not audiences would even notice if AI tools started producing their favorite TV shows. Technologist and activist Cory Doctorow told Polygon you’d notice pretty fast.

Photo: Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images

“I think it’d be pretty immediate,” he said. “I’m not clear that the studios could do it; like, they might try for a while, but they’d be like rolling the dice that the U.S. Copyright Office would reverse itself on the copyright status of materials produced by machine learning models.”

Which is another big question about all of this. In February, the U.S. Copyright Office ruled that you can’t copyright purely AI-generated material. If a company wants to copyright anything that comes out of an AI, it has to prove a human altered it enough to be original.

“If it becomes the case that the way you make a new Pixar movie is by typing some prompts into a keyboard, and then going down the street to the smokehouse for a three-martini lunch and then coming back, and it’s there on your hard drive,” Doctrow said, “then all of a sudden people are like, I can copy that Pixar movie and sell it to anyone I want. Because it was made by a bot.”

But to understand what these tools are even capable of and why it’s so hard to figure out how they fit into our existing legal frameworks, you need to know a bit about how they work. When we talk about AI in this context, we’re really talking about a kind of AI called generative AI. Specifically, we’re talking about large language models.

The most popular large language model right now is ChatGPT, which is owned by OpenAI and runs on a generative pretrained transformer, or GPT. Basically, it’s a whole lot of text taken from all over the web, which it then pulls from to respond in ways that seem naturally human. Currently, ChatGPT is running on GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, and it’s also integrated into the AI interface for Microsoft’s Bing search engine and Edge web browser.

Though you’ve probably heard that GPT language models are — or could become — sentient, you don’t really have to worry. They work the same way the autocomplete function on your phone works, except they’re using massive chunks of the internet to reply to you. But generative AI can’t generate something it doesn’t know.

For instance, ChatGPT still currently has a “knowledge cutoff” of 2021. There have been instances of current events slipping into its data set — it seems to know that the queen of England died — but for the most part it still thinks it’s 2021 when you talk to it. When an AI doesn’t know something but is pushed to answer a question about it, it will “hallucinate,” or spit out nonsense errors. Users on sites like Reddit will also often share ways of “jailbreaking” these chatbots so they can answer questions that are banned by their terms of service.

Meanwhile, Bing’s version of GPT-4 is actually connected to a live feed of the internet. It can summarize current events easily — though, when it first launched, it threatened journalists that were writing adversarial pieces about it and begged for users to kill it. A universal reaction to using the internet whether you’re man or machine, apparently. (It’s fixed now.)

Though GPT-4, OpenAI’s newest language model, is still only a few months old, we’ve already got a good handle on what it is and isn’t good at. It’s pretty bad at creating anything. If you ask it to tell you a joke or write you a song it will, but they’re pretty bad. It’s the same result if you ask it to write, say, a basic scene of two people having a meet-cute in a romantic comedy. But what it is good at is summarizing huge amounts of data.

One user asked it to read the entirety of J.R.R. Tolkien’s work on Middle-earth and then asked the AI if there’s any evidence that people in Middle-earth poop (there isn’t). Another user asked it to summarize — and make a diagnosis based on — his dog’s blood charts (the diagnosis was largely correct). And back in February, a Twitch stream called Nothing, Forever launched, which used GPT-3 to endlessly generate Seinfeld scripts that would then be “acted out” by AI 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The scripts were mostly gibberish, but the channel was a huge hit… until its content became transphobic and its creators took it down for maintenance.

The trainability of these models is another, thornier risk for creatives trying to regulate this technology. Doctrow said that if a right to train an AI were created — as in, if suddenly writers had a legal right to say who could and couldn’t train an AI on their writing — that right could become a demand from prospective employers.

“All the employers will demand that you assign that right to them as a condition of working for them,” he said. “It’s just a roundabout way of saying that large corporations who are in a buyers market for creative labor will be the only people in a position to build models that can be used to fire all the creators.”

But exactly how good is this technology? Well, this month a Disney fan blog wrote a story titled “An AI rewrites the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy. It’s more coherent than Disney’s.” The AI was asked to “pretend that Disney did not create any more Star Wars movies after Return of the Jedi” and then imagine the plots of movies that George Lucas would have created instead of the sequel trilogy we got.

It came up with three movies: Episode VII: The Force Unleashed, Episode VIII: Rise of the Sith, and Episode IX: Balance of the Force. It even described a pretty tight narrative arc across the three movies, featuring a trio of main characters, including “a young Jedi named Kira,” “a former stormtrooper named Sam,” and “a wise old Jedi named Ben.” Honestly, the AI’s new sequel trilogy sort of reads like the one that actually happened, but it moves the discovery of an evil Sith home world and the reveal of a Sith master villain to the second movie, not the third.

Photo by Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images

The AI also offered up casting for the main characters, descriptions of new planets and vehicles, and even took a stab at writing a scene where Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and Han Solo show up for cameos. Is any of this perfect? Absolutely not. Is it good enough for a human to potentially clean it up for actual production or publication? No question.

Users have found that generative AI chatbots are particularly good at brainstorming genre entertainment because there are more agreed-upon tropes to mix and match. But, as the Hollywood Reporter pointed out last week, it could also be used to cross the picket line during the strike for long-running shows like Law & Order. The bigger the number of scripts for the AI to summarize, the more novel ways it can remix them.

But, also, let’s be clear about what we’re talking about here. A generative AI like GPT-4 can’t create anything new. It can only reorganize what already exists into new combinations. A film industry where chatbots are allowed in writers rooms — or allowed to replace them entirely — is an industry that has quite literally run out of ideas.

But Hollywood isn’t the only sector of the American workforce in the midst of a generative AI upheaval. IBM has completely paused its hiring, and one executive at the company recently speculated that almost a third of its employees could be replaced with a chatbot of some kind. And retail isn’t safe either. Wendy’s is currently testing a drive-thru chatbot as we speak. A recent Bloomberg article estimated that at least a quarter of the American workforce will have their jobs impacted by AI in the next five years.

And there are non-unionized creative industries that are already beginning to flirt with how to use these tools in a writers room. Ashley Cooper, a narrative lead and video game developer, told Polygon that she was approached by an indie video game studio recently that was very interested in using AI to write scripts.

“An indie studio I’d done some work for a few years back emailed me asking, ‘We are looking for a writer to use some AI and get us some back-and-forth dialogue,’” she said.

Cooper said that the games industry is already pretty bad at hiring new creatives, and she fears that using AI could destroy ways for young people to get a foothold.

“At its core, [AI] doesn’t exist to make the lives of writers easier; it exists to minimize a studio’s need for writers,” she said.

Senior art director Ovidio Cartagena talks to us about the vision behind the set 

At age 17, Ovidio Cartagena started his art career with The Lord of the Rings by creating a bad fan calendar. As he told me, everything about it was off: The days for the months were mislabeled and so was each weekday. His peers were supportive, but even the art looked off. Cartagena’s warm chuckle filled an empty conference room as he recalled those early stumbles. “I’m not gonna say it was great, because it wasn’t.”

More than a few career changes and decades later, he’s now responsible for one of the largest crossovers in tabletop gaming history, and Lord of the Rings is once again at the center of that project. As senior art director at Wizards of the Coast, he was tapped to bring one of the most popular fantasy franchises to one of the world’s most popular card games: Magic: The Gathering. In the recent past, many other big series have come to Magic through its budding Universes Beyond initiative, but not at this level of detail. This time around, Cartagena and his team are going all in, and The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth is coming to Magic as a full product line with hundreds of new cards and all original art this June.

Polygon spoke with Cartagena recently in an exclusive interview at MagicCon in Minneapolis. In addition to the incredible art, which you can view below, we chatted about how art is made, approaching one of the world’s most iconic fantasy franchises, and how values of diversity informed his hopes for the upcoming set.

Approaching Lord of the Rings with fresh eyes

Cartagena told Polygon his team of artists started very purposefully from scratch and weren’t inspired by any specific film, adaptation, or previous illustrations. Instead, they worked directly with the source material — Tolkien’s original texts — and used them to draft unique concept art. Already a fan of The Lord of the Rings, Cartagena said he spent around a full year studying the original books closely, hoping to become an expert. He filled up a bookshelf with tomes, concordances, and maps in order to craft a world that felt true to both Tolkien’s texts and the multi-planar world of Magic. “You have to become a scholar for a while, just like you’re doing a thesis,” he said. But, at the end of the year, that work was just beginning.

Every generation has its own adaptation of Tolkien’s novels, from Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 animated film to Peter Jackson’s beloved Lord of the Rings trilogy to the more recent Amazon show The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. On one hand, these visualizations gave Cartagena and the team a place to start working from — other sets in Magic have little or no basic lore, so at least the team wasn’t starting from zero. On the other hand, it presented a unique challenge: How does one grow the conversation around Middle-earth without being influenced by such iconic existing media?

“It would have been easy to say, We’re just gonna plaster Magic on top of this. And it’s easy to say, We’re just gonna evoke everything that’s been done before. But the approach we had was, We will try to learn this world. We will try to learn Lord of the Rings, try to learn the text, and see where it goes from there. Many of us have directed our own graphics as we read.

“It’s easy to assume that you understand Lord of the Rings, when in actuality you are remembering other artists’ depictions. Those are two different things. So getting the assumptions out of the way, and getting to the core of what this means, what this book means, was a process in itself. And that’s part of what we were doing as we were developing the world.”

Image: Kieran Yanner/Wizards of the Coast

Bringing a set like this to life is a balancing act, Cartagena said. He had to break down his own preconceived ideas about The Lord of the Rings and juggle the varying ideas of each artist. At the same time, he and the team had to create a cohesive world that still felt true to the multiverses of Magic.

For example, at one point in the process, an artist asked why there weren’t more floating buildings and objects in Tales of Middle-earth since many worlds in Magic have floating buildings and objects. Cartagena said, “Because that’s not the way the Númenóreans built, and that’s not the way the elves built. And that’s not the way Gondorians built. We have to stay true to the core values and the core message here.”

Layer on the logistics of work and the fact that Cartagena and the team had to bear the weight that came with making a new Lord of the Rings product, and it became a hard needle to thread. Polygon asked how he and the team managed it all and what their process looked like.

“I [...] had to purge a lot of the imagery from my own mind that I had seen before,” he said “Not because it’s worthless. It’s very important. But because I wanted us to grow it. I wanted to grow Lord of the Rings, like a tree, you know, like, the Shire after the Scouring. Sam plants a seed, and the whole Shire just grows. That’s what I wanted to do.”

He told Polygon that by the time he brought the concept artists on board, only one had a very clear idea of Lord of the Rings that didn’t have the “garbling and the noise from all the other media.” The rest of the team had a lot of work to do to open “their minds to new ways of interpreting the material.” To get the team where they needed to be, he likened Lord of the Rings to another massive cultural work.

Image: Tyler Jacobson/ Wizards of the Coast

“The Lord of the Rings is like the Odyssey, like the War of Troy,” he said. “There are several characters and several key moments. But there are now, and there will continue to be, people who add to it because the work is that massive and that important. We’re just very lucky we were born close to when the [The Lord of the Rings] was written. But the centuries will tell us where this goes. And we are merely a part of that conversation, hopefully a lasting one.

“Approaching it from that point of view released a little pressure from us. And especially from me, because I was thinking, like, Oh my god, I’m responsible for many decisions here. For diversity, how Gondor looks, or how the elves look. I’m responsible because in the end, I’m gonna say, ‘This is what I want. Yeah, this is how you should do it.’

“Instead of focusing on the pressure, I focused on the love I have for the source material. And the awe-inspiring moments that I think [are important to] many fans, of which I am only one, and the moments that really told us a lot about bravery, humanity, courage, resourcefulness, and loyalty. Those values are very at the core of what I was doing. And on the opposite end, whatever the orcs are doing.”

Image: Wizards of the Coast

What resulted was a depiction of Middle-earth that was notably warm, and more diverse than past expressions. Cartagena told Polygon that the team wanted the hobbits to have a sense of “homeliness and warmth for people who know how to live life.” Cartagena wanted to see how broadly the team could expand that general feeling and communicate it through art. What he and artist Gray Highsmith arrived at was embracing a variety of folk cultures. The final art would come to include elements from Bolivia, like ponchos, as well as garb from Balkan peoples that were introduced initially in Ekaterina Burmak original concept art made for this project.

Characters of color in Magic: The Gathering: Tales of Middle-earth

Tales of Middle-earth enters the world at a cultural moment where big conversations are happening about how fantasy characters are represented in the media we consume. For years, fans and scholars have brought attention to interpretations of Tolkien’s texts that could make space for more canonical characters of color in The Lord of the Rings. Then, in the fall of 2022, Amazon Prime Video took a first step, releasing The Lord of Rings: The Rings of Power with a cast of actors of color playing dwarves and elves. And while the show expanded the franchise beyond its lily-white origins from the modern cinematic trilogy, it sparked racist blowback from fans.

Now, Cartagena’s work will continue that conversation, and he wanted diversity as a value to be front and center. For instance, the set introduces Aragorn, one of the core heroes and a member of the Fellowship of the Ring, as a Black character.

Image: Wizards of the Coast

“My main thing was, ‘If you’re gonna do representation, it’s not gonna be in the background.’ Right? So that was how I approached it. […] People have been including themselves in Lord of the Rings for decades, so we’re joining that conversation. Lord of the Rings is about the peoples of Middle-earth coming together to fight evil. So we wanted to make that message of diversity even more relevant and make it match the values that we have.

“The fight [at the center of Tolkien’s novels] is not just about the fight, and that’s important in Lord of the Rings,” Cartagena continued. “The fight is about that village and that peaceful life. That’s the life you want. You don’t want to live fighting.

Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is a series that’s less concerned with the heroics of war. Instead, the stories embrace an unrelenting belief in hope — no matter how bad the circumstances get. It’s a sentiment that Cartagena hopes to capture in this set.

Image: Anato Finnstark/Wizards of the Coast

“War is an inevitable tragedy in The Lord of the Rings and in the defense of the life that you want people to actually have. And that life includes many of us that look differently, and feel differently about ourselves and about the world. One of the great things that happens after peace is achieved in Lord of the Rings is many populations are brought together, and there is new communication between them. And there is a new age beginning. I wanted to translate that hope, and that’s why I wanted that hope to apply to everyone who’s going to play this game.”

Magic: The Gathering’s ambitious new set, The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth, arrives for Magic: The Gathering Arena on June 20, with a physical release on June 23. Pre-release begins on June 16 at friendly local game stores worldwide. An additional release is set for Nov. 3.

The Disney animators’ strike of 1941 was a game-changer for animation — and it paved the way for the WGA strike

The Writers Guild of America (WGA) has been on strike just shy of a month now, with no foreseeable end in sight. Motivated by a breakdown in negotiations with Hollywood studios over pensions, residual compensation for streaming productions, health care, and protections for writers rooms in the wake of AI, the WGA strike represents a fight, in the words of writer-comedian Adam Conover, “for the survival of television and film writing as a sustainable career.”

This ongoing drama over the future of the American entertainment industry is just the latest in a long line of conflicts between collective labor and monopolized power. Given how inevitable those conflicts are, it’s worth looking back at how important they’ve been as well, in terms of shaping the current entertainment landscape. This week marks the 82nd anniversary of a game-changing strike at Walt Disney Animation Studios, one that sent shock waves throughout Hollywood and reshaped the American animation industry as we know it today.

The Disney animators’ strike of 1941 wasn’t the first strike of its kind: The Fleischer Studios strike of 1937 produced the industry’s first union contracts. But the Disney strike was a critical moment for the American labor movement. By 1941, every other major animation studio, including Warner Bros. and MGM, had already effectively unionized. Walt Disney Animation Studios’ holdout was one of the less flattering and lesser-known ways the company stood apart from Hollywood orthodoxy.

The strike may have been part of the spirit of the times, but it’s just as attributable to the company’s workplace culture throughout the 1930s, and to one event in particular. Ironically, it’s the same event that transformed Disney from a popular animated-shorts house into a cultural powerhouse: the production and theatrical release of 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Image: Walt Disney Pictures

The seeds of dissent at Disney were planted as early as spring of 1934, when studio founder Walt Disney first announced plans for his company’s most ambitious and challenging undertaking to date. Inspired by a formative experience as a kid in Kansas City, watching J. Searle Dawley’s 1916 film Snow White in theaters, Walt set out to produce the world’s first full-length cel-animated feature film, in color and with accompanying sound.

The three-year production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was a massive undertaking, requiring 32 animators, 1,032 assistants, 107 inbetweeners, 10 layout artists, 25 background artists, 65 special effects animators, 158 inkers and painters, and countless other uncredited members of the production staff, according to the Walt Disney Family Museum website. The movie suffered significant delays: Its first completed animation was submitted to Disney’s ink and paint department on Jan. 4, 1937, less than a year before its premiere date.

In total, Snow White required 250,000 drawings to be animated, inked on celluloid animation frames, painted, and photographed — and that’s not counting the completed sequences Walt ultimately chose to cut from the final film. Inkers were expected to trace a minimum of 30 cels per day, while each painter was expected to complete 17 cels a day. In October 1937, the production staff was informed that, for Snow White to be ready by its premiere date, their regular work schedules would be extended from nine-hour workdays, five days a week, to 10-and-a-half-hour workdays, six days a week, with no paid overtime. Disney animators weren’t properly compensated for overtime work until the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 federally mandated overtime pay for employees working over 40 hours per week.

Tensions were high in the studio during the critical months before the premiere, and so were the financial stakes. Snow White’s production, initially budgeted at $250,000 (around $5.5 million in 2023) ballooned to $1.5 million (around $33 million in 2023), with Walt himself mortgaging his home to finance the film, according to Michael Barrier’s 1999 book Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age. The situation was so dire that Hollywood executives and trade papers nicknamed the film “Disney’s Folly.” Before its release, it had a reputation as an overpriced vanity project that seemed destined to flop. In an attempt to ameliorate the tensions and keep morale up, Disney verbally promised the production staff that 20% of the film’s total profits would be divided up among the film’s creators, proportionate to their contributions and unpaid overtime hours. That turned out to be a lie.

Image: Cartoon Brew

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered on Dec. 21, 1937, and expanded to theaters nationwide the following February. It became a critical and commercial sensation, grossing more than $2 million (in 1937 dollars) by the end of the summer, and garnering praise from celebrities including Charlie Chaplin and Battleship Potemkin director Sergei Eisenstein, who credited it as one of the most impressive works of cinema of its time. As animation historian Jake S. Friedman writes in The Disney Revolt: The Great Labor War of Animation’s Golden Age, “The Snow White artists patiently awaited their profit-share bonuses as the film made huge returns all over the world. In May, Walt and Roy made enough money from Snow White to pay back their bank loans. For the first time in two years, the studio was out of debt.”

While trade papers at the time reported that Disney’s studio was going to distribute an estimated 20% of Snow White’s earnings among the studio’s 800 employees, the actual bonuses those artists received were equal to or less than what they had previously received for the studio’s short films. Some Snow White animators, including Art Babbitt, did not receive any bonuses for their work.

A former commercial artist who joined Disney in 1932 as an assistant animator, Babbitt was quickly promoted to an animator proper, thanks to his prodigious talent for character animation and penchant for delivering quickly on assignments. By 1941, Babbitt was highly regarded as one of the studio’s top artists, credited with defining Disney’s signature brand of personality-driven animation through his work on the character Goofy, and for his work animating the likes of the Wicked Queen in Snow White, Geppetto in Pinocchio, and Mr. Stork in Dumbo.

At one time seen as one of Walt Disney’s most valued and trusted animators, Babbitt also became one of the strike’s key organizers. The lingering animosities over unfulfilled promises and unpaid wages following Snow White’s production were a sticking point for workers like Babbitt. But Walt Disney refused to rectify the discrepancies in pay among his employees, or address their other workplace concerns in good faith.

Tensions between artists and management continued to mount in the years between Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ release and the months before the strike. The money Walt promised to distribute among the workers instead went to the construction of a new Burbank campus for the studio, complete with lavish accoutrements such as industrial air-conditioning, custom-made furniture, a coffee shop that delivered milkshakes to order, and a “Penthouse Club” athletics building, restricted to employees with a salary of $100 or more a week.

While Babbitt himself enjoyed a comfortable office, complete with wall-to-wall carpeting and a full-size animation desk, he noticed that the visible disparity between the offices of full-fledged animators, assistants, and animation trainees created an unspoken caste system built into the foundation of the studio. According to Friedman, when Walt asked why Babbitt wouldn’t join the Penthouse Club even though he met the minimum salary requirement, he replied, “As soon as you make it accessible to everyone, I’d be happy to join.”

Image: California State University, Northridge

The commercial failure of Walt Disney Productions’ next two features — 1940’s Pinocchio and Fantasia — put significant financial strain on the company and took a toll on the workers’ morale. With World War II limiting the demand for animation overseas, Disney Animation’s future was uncertain. While the creation of the Burbank campus was intended as a long-term investment in the studio’s future, the overzealous expense of both building it and financing the company’s productions during the war forced Disney to make hard and unpopular choices, including several rounds of layoffs that put the studio’s entire staff on edge, emphasizing just how little job security they had.

Assessing the situation, Babbitt and Screen Cartoonist’s Guild president Bill Littlejohn met with Walt Disney to demand recognition of the membership of Disney animators within the guild and to negotiate a contract recognizing their collective concerns. Walt refused, claiming the guild couldn’t be a union representing Disney’s workforce, on the grounds that they were already represented by the Federation of Screen Cartoonists — a “loosely knit social organization” posing as a union. The Federation was devised by Disney’s vice president and head lawyer Gunther Lessing to rebuff attempts by outside organizations to unionize the studio.

On May 27, 1941, 315 Disney animators who had chosen to be represented by the Screen Cartoonist’s Guild voted in favor of striking. Babbitt, who had been an influential force in organizing the push to unionize with the guild, was fired that same day, on the grounds that he had “disturbed the morale of the employees [and] seriously interrupted and disturbed production operations.” The next day, the Disney animators’ strike began, and it lasted nearly four months.

The strike drew attention across the industry, damaging Walt Disney’s then-immaculate public image. Tempers flared between strikers and non-strikers, culminating with Disney and Babbitt yelling at each other outside the Burbank campus on June 12.

But the strikers unequivocally won out in the end. Walt had nationwide protests, the verdict of federal mediators, and the counsel of his brother, Roy Disney, and their inner circle of financiers standing against him. He agreed to recognize the Screen Cartoonist’s Guild and concede to the striking animators’ demands. Employees received raises, weekly hours and overtime were standardized, and Art Babbitt was rehired and formally protected from any retaliatory or discriminatory repercussions.

Image: Cartoon Brew

Work resumed on Dumbo, which at the time was still in production, but the atmosphere and workplace culture of the studio was irrevocably changed. Former friendships between colleagues split along the lines of strikers versus non-strikers, and dissolved into sectarian feuds. Babbitt, Bill Tytla (responsible for animating the demonic Chernabog in Fantasia), Frank Tashlin (who worked in Disney’s story department, and later on Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts), and other artists left the studio one by one to join Disney’s competitors, including Terrytoons and MGM’s cartoon studio, among others.

The Disney animators’ strike of 1941 stands as one of the most consequential milestones in the history of American animation. If not for the strike, United Productions of America — the American studio behind projects like Ted Parmelee’s 1953 adaptation of The Tell-Tale Heart and Robert Cannon and John Hubley’s Gerald McBoing-Boing (both preserved in the National Film Registry) — would never have existed. UPA’s pioneering modernist animation would never have inspired celebrated contemporary animators like Powerpuff Girls creator Craig McCracken and Dexter’s Laboratory creator Genndy Tartakovsky. Maurice Noble, the art director best recognized today for his work on Chuck Jones’ 1957 short film What’s Opera, Doc?, might never have left Disney to join Warner Bros.

The fight for unionization in the American animation industry continues to this day, with The Animation Guild IATSE Local 839 — the modern successor to the Screen Cartoonist’s Guild — having successfully campaigned to unionize and represent production workers across multiple animation studios, including Titmouse (The Venture Bros.), Nickelodeon, ShadowMachine (Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio), Green Portal Productions (Rick and Morty). In the midst of the ongoing WGA strike, it’s important for both fans and working professionals to remember what can be gained through collective action — and for studios to remember the perils of depending on creative people to drive the profits, all while taking them for granted.

Welcome to Hyrule Engineering Club

When Nintendo first started showing footage from The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Hyrule’s hero navigated the world with simple vehicles and gliders. I would have never imagined that Link would eventually cruise around in a hot rod that spits flames — and instead of killing the environment with gas emissions, that car goes old-school and simply sets everything on fire. Nor did I imagine I’d see Link flying around on a helicopter made up of wood planks and fans stuck together with magical glue, resulting in a creation that would hardly pass inspection.

And yet, those are exactly the sorts of inventions that fill the Hyrule Engineering Club, a Reddit forum that’s more than 20,000 members strong and constantly growing at an estimated 1,500 members per day. In the posts that fill this subreddit, Link’s got a mech suit that shoots lasers, a Segway, and a Star Wars podracer; you’ll see designs for Bokoblin traps, rechargeable Zonai batteries, and lawnmowers for harvesting Hylian rice. The inventors of the Hyrule Engineering Club are playing 4D chess, while I’m out here still trying to build a large bridge.

The Hyrule Engineering Club was created several days before Tears of the Kingdom’s release date by A.J. Muncill, a pharmacy tech and Twitch streamer. In the days after Tears of the Kingdom’s release, the community grew exponentially as players realized just how flexible the game’s building mechanics were. Hyrule Engineering Club quickly became a place not only for showing off creations, but for engaging in collaboration and collective creativity.

“The community itself is amazing,” Muncill told Polygon. “Every post of a build has a debate of how to make it better in the comments. It is so much fun to see how people come together to help build bigger and better things. The rate of invention is astounding.”

It’s easy to see Tears of the Kingdom or any other single-player game as a solitary experience, the player cooped up and hunched over a Nintendo Switch. That’s definitely still true for some players, but the creativity and experimentation necessary to uncover all the small details of the game almost forced the need for a community; with a game so big and with so many variables, there’s no way for a single person to figure it all out on their own. The big brain of the internet has resulted in discoveries like a rechargeable battery that uses shock emitters, realizing just how useful the Zonai stabilizer is, and so much more.

“It seems every day there’s a new revelation like, Oh! If you put these together, this happens! And you’ll see all these comments from other people going, Wow! I bet you could use this to…” Taylor Roland, a retail worker and inventor of Link’s flaming hot rod and a mobile platform, told Polygon. “After a bit of time you’ll start seeing all the different ways people have used just that one trick to create a whole variety of vehicles and weapons. I think finding a community around your favorite game can be a really fun and social way to get more out of it.”

Hyrule Engineering Club and other similar communities, like the build-and-blueprint repository Zelda Builds, are built on communal knowledge; sharing is essential. Lots of the posts have detailed instructions for building out the device in your own version of Hyrule, as well as ideas on improvement or iteration.

Plus, there are plenty of actual engineers turned Hyrule engineers in these communities, folks who are pulling at the incredible physics of Tears of the Kingdom to make inventions that are helpful, impressive, and downright silly — sometimes all three at the same time. Reddit user Paradox_Guardian, who asked to go by their online handle, is an electrical engineer who credits their background for the “creativity” and “tenacity” to see through problems until the end; it’s a process they’ve used for several of their creations, like the Hylian rice lawnmower and a fan-powered launcher.

“In Breath of the Wild, I learned that if you have some goal in mind, there is almost always a way to make it work,” Paradox_Guardian said. “Sometimes it doesn’t take the form you initially expect, but for almost any problem, you can find a solution. I took this mentality into this game, and I keep it in the back of my head when experimenting.”

The lawnmower took about one hour of tinkering to get working, they said, starting with the real-life equivalent and working from there. The launcher took about three hours of experimentation; it’s a more precise and fast-moving device. The idea for the launcher started after Paradox_Guardian noticed that several objects in the game “take on a certain orientation” when Link picks them up — with a fan, for instance, the back of the fan will always face the camera, they said. The transition to that position is fast, but it’s there, and that movement can be used to shoot Link up into the sky, at least in the launchers they’ve built so far.

“I noticed that when you pick up the object (in my case, a fan), you get a fast, controlled rotation,” Paradox_Guardian said. “For the rest of the trick, it was just a matter of finding the right positioning and jumping at the right time to make the launch work.”

It’s a lot of work to take on, but super satisfying when it goes right — and when it gets celebrated by the community. But not everything goes perfectly, and sometimes that’s where the fun is, too. Paradox_Guardian’s advice is not to give up, even if things go wrong over and over again. And as for the mistakes, revel in them.

“Don’t be afraid to let a dubiously constructed monstrosity rip every now and then,” they added.

Here’s why it’s such a beloved standard, even with many more anthropomorphic animal movies out there

The 100th anniversary of the Walt Disney Company has arrived with the requisite amount of fanfare, from special merchandise and food items at the Disney parks to a new studio logo in front of its movies. 2023 also marks the 50th anniversary of a specific Disney animated movie that may not get the same level of corporate self-congratulation: 1973’s Robin Hood, which adapts one of the most recognizable English adventure stories of all time with a full cast of anthropomorphized animals. The film’s half-century mark is an appropriate moment to consider how it’s one of the earliest examples of a Disney story resonating with a marginalized community. Though the studio has been slow to create stories about non-white characters, with Robin Hood, it accidentally made a film that hit hard with furries.

“Robin Hood was undoubtedly my entry point into the furry community,” says Katav, a Chicago-based Ph.D. candidate studying the Hebrew Bible. (Katav is their furry identity, and their preferred way of being identified in this piece.) Though not all fans of anthropomorphic animal art associate that fandom with sexuality, or associate Disney’s Robin Hood with sexual awakening, Katav does, and they note that a specific image within the film seemed to unlock a personal longing. “More than anything, I wanted to be [Robin] in the scene in which he’s tied up. So as I was exploring my sexuality, this definitely came to mind.”

Image: Walt Disney Animation Studios

Part of the unique qualities that made Robin Hood a furry media mainstay comes down to the fact that the title character — a dashing, jovial hero who robs from the rich and gives to the poor — is a fox.

“Robin’s role as an inspiring fox was huge. You could (and still can) see his influence in the art. He certainly had a big impact on my own art,” webcomic artist Leaf Dubois says via email. Dubois also notes that one reason for Robin Hood’s appeal among furry fandom is because of Disney animation’s famous attention to how animals look and move. In the days of one of the studio’s earliest animated features, Bambi, Walt Disney arranged for the animators to observe live deer, in the hopes of making their animation more realistic. That focus on detail gives Robin Hood’s anthropomorphized animals more of a sense of physical reality.

“Disney animators have always studied their subjects well,” Dubois says. “If you look closely, you’ll see animal body language in how the characters behave. An anthro animal might move their ears and tail expressively, twitch their whiskers, or unfurl their claws menacingly. These details are outside of the human experience.”

The experience of tying Robin Hood to a personal identity within the furry community occurs in different ways. “It was an organic development that occurred over time,” says Christopher Polt, assistant professor of classical studies at Boston College. “Something that was significant to me as a kid was, Robin Hood takes place in a world where it’s just anthropomorphic animals. It’s not like a lot of other Disney films, [where] you can always see people nearby. There are talking animals, and they’re anthropomorphized to a certain extent, but [in most other films] they are not living in their own universe.”

Katav approached the film similarly through their childhood experience. “Robin Hood was very much my window into a world where animals spoke and acted like people do. These were characters who could do people things — shoot a bow, dress in drag, play badminton, etc. — but they still could be a beautiful array of species. In my conservative upbringing, this was a window into a world otherwise, a world like our own but different, where there could be more and freer self-expression.”

Image: Walt Disney Animation Studios

The title character of Robin Hood specifically continues to resonate for Katav because of the way he represents a unique kind of masculinity. “To me as a gay man, Robin represented a more admirable type of masculinity than the excessively hetero masculinities I was raised with,” he says. For him, the quintessential idea of the Robin Hood myth — fighting back against injustice through decency and empathy for those in need — extends beyond the character’s foxy nature. “Even though he’s in love with a woman in the film, he represents a type of man that I could strive to be: fluffy and passionate about justice.”

Dubois concurs. “Robin [...] fought to make the world more equitable,” he says. “He’s fiercely loyal to the ones he loves, and he did it all with charm and grace. A kid couldn’t ask for a better or more handsome role model.”

There’s also the plain fact that some sequences in Robin Hood are laser-focused on the openly sexual attraction between Robin Hood and Maid Marian. The sequence scored to the song “Love,” as the two characters take a twilight walk in Sherwood Forest alongside fireflies and near waterfalls, emphasizes their romantic connection without dialogue and through effective facial animation.

Image: Walt Disney Animation Studios

Image: Walt Disney Animation Studios

“I think what makes the song so beautiful and sexy is eye contact,” Polt says, referring to a moment within the song where Robin Hood and Marian share a glance at each other in extreme close-up — which also translates to looking directly at the audience, as the camera cuts between the two characters. Polt also notes how another all-animal Disney animated film has a similarly charged musical sequence: The Lion King and “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” in which a grown Simba and Nala frolic in the jungle before exchanging a very loaded look. “Both of those scenes are sexual awakening kind of moments,” he says.

Robin Hood’s status as a touchstone for the furry community is fairly familiar to those outside it. “I see occasional recognition from non-furries,” Katav says, pointing to Katie Notopoulos’ 2015 Buzzfeed article “18 Times the Fox in ‘Robin Hood’ Was Weirdly Hot” as one example of how “crushing on Robin is not purely a furry phenomenon.”

Though some of the outside commentary on the furry community is generally well-meaning, as in that article, Polt has experienced a fair amount of bigotry and judgment. Earlier this spring, a tweet of his went viral enough to garner the disdainful attention of Fox News, after he assigned his students to choose a fursona (their own personalized anthropomorphic animal identity) to share with the class. Months later, he maintains a calm air, having seen both positive and negative reactions to the furry community, and to Robin Hood’s place within it. “You can talk with people and… agree that Robin is gorgeous and has a wonderful personality,” he says. “Or you get people who [say], ‘Ew, gross.’”

The potential antipathy toward furries from wider audiences has eased off somewhat as genre-based geek culture has become more mainstream, but it hasn’t entirely gone away. Aside from Polt’s recent experience with conservative commenters, there have been recent instances where conservatives try to weaponize furries into anti-trans talking points, leading to nonsensical stories that end up being debunked by Snopes and the like.

Image: Walt Disney Animation Studios

But over the last 15 years especially, more and more animated films have focused on anthropomorphized animals, and audiences have found it easier to connect with them, from the lead characters in DreamWorks fare like Kung Fu Panda and Puss in Boots to the culinary hero of Ratatouille. And considering their shared affinity for foxes, it’s no surprise that both Polt and Dubois cite another recent Disney film starring a raffish fox.

“There’s little doubt that one of the most furry-friendly animated Disney films, Zootopia, took inspiration directly from Robin Hood,” Dubois says. One of Zootopia’s directors, Byron Howard, has openly acknowledged the debt his 2016 film owed to Disney’s classic.

“When you have a fictional world like the world of Zootopia, where everybody is an anthropomorphic animal, it’s much easier to transport yourself into that setting,” Polt says. Many Disney films are intended to be transportive, asking general audiences to identify with nonhuman characters and enter their worlds. For members of the furry community, that request creates a stronger and more specific connection to films like Zootopia and Robin Hood, even as those films’ creative aims are otherwise different.

The actual release-day anniversary of Robin Hood isn’t until Nov. 8, which leaves Disney with plenty of time to prep some kind of celebration, though based on the company’s past track record with anniversary dates, any official acknowledgement of the 1973 film will likely amount to a remark or two from its various social media accounts. Though a few years ago, The Hollywood Reporter broke the story that Disney was exploring a live-action/CG hybrid remake of Robin Hood with director Carlos Lopez Estrada, in the vein of remakes like 2019’s The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast, there hasn’t been any further movement on that front. Some may disagree, but the charm of Disney’s hand-drawn animated films is that they aren’t photorealistic, so any remake of Robin Hood in that style may be a little misguided.

That said, a live-action remake wouldn’t diminish the impact that the 1973 Robin Hood has had on furries. From the outside, the film is a laid-back adventure known as much for reusing visuals from earlier Disney movies as for its powerful connection to unlocking personal identities in one subset of fandom. For those of us who aren’t part of the furry community, it may be surprising to realize just how much of an impact Robin Hood has had. Katav states it best: “I don’t know what would have become of me had I not found furry [fandom]. I’m only partly exaggerating when I say that Robin Hood saved my life. Love for this movie showed me a community of people like me.”

Hopepunk can help us build a better world at the table

Just as grim, dystopian post-apocalyptic visions of the world have held a lasting place in popular culture, tabletop role-players have woven stories of barren wastelands, burnt-out urban hellscapes and eerie cyberpunk capers. But with living in difficult, turbulent times comes a desire to see more visions of a future where we decide to make things better. That need is at the core of hopepunk, a term coined by author Alexandra Rowland as the opposite of “grimdark.” As hopepunk and its sibling genre solarpunk become more popular in the cultural imagination, more and more TTRPG designers are bucking the grim apocalypse trends and playing with visions of the future that prioritize care, community, optimism, and joy.

Hopeful spins on the post-cataclysm genre run the gamut in tone and setting, from Machine Age Productions’ futuristic, solutions-oriented Flatpack to the community-focused, Powered by the Apocalypse-influenced solarpunk of Dyer Rose’s Arcology World; from Norton Glover’s high-flying prairie-rewilding adventure Buffalo Commons to the shitpost-y, “be gay do crime” glory of Riverhouse Games’ This is a Game About Fishing.

Image: Festive Ninja

“People have an intuitive sense that there is darkness in the world and want to process and confront that with a grimdark game or a horror game,” Mark Salabauskas, publisher and lead designer on the Fate Core-powered space opera RPG Return to the Stars, told Polygon in an interview. “I think, in a similar way, a lot of games [...] strive for those more optimistic notes. We’re realizing that we want to be better than we are and define ourselves, and we need to have spaces to do that.”

The space opera element of the game emerged during the start of the Trump administration, as Sabalauskas was attending conventions and thinking about media that gave him hope in dark times, namely Star Trek, which was initially created at a time of violent change and upheaval. The game is, in part, a love letter to geek culture (the analogue to the Galactic Federation is called “The Convention Authority”) and the ways sharing stories helps us make meaning of the world, and while Sabalauskas acknowledges the problematic elements of that culture, he finds something hopeful in the shared, communal enthusiasm of it. “There’s so much energy from that, and that energy is usually coming from a very pro-social place,” he said.

The world of Return to the Stars is one of post-scarcity — 120 years ago, a great disaster made galactic travel impossible. Now, the Convention Authority sends adventurers on missions to travel to the stars not to conquer, but to reconnect. Coming up with the mission is an important cornerstone of character creation, and Sabalauskas said in a geek-culture-oriented, abundant society where people spend their time “wondering if the third reboot of Yuri on Ice in the 24th century was the best” or sitting by the pool while robots bring you margaritas, finding reasons for your character to choose to put themself at risk and help others prompts compelling storytelling and reflection in a space of safety and abundance. Mechanically, Return to the Stars creates space to do so with in-game space for downtime and reflection, and in-between session options for creative tinkering to enhance future sessions.

In 2021, creators Jo Walton and Eric Stein held the Applied Hope jam, a game jam focused on RPGs, zines and more focused on solarpunk and utopias. Two of those games came from creator and game master Gabriel Caetano. One, Maker, is a solo journaling game about imagining impossible futures. “Every day as I imagine myself embarrassing my now 2-year-old kid to their peers in teenagehood […] I realize I feel hope,” Caetano writes in the itch.io notes for Maker. “And I hope that by imagining this not at all impossible future, I am a Maker, and that by imagining any futures at all, it is Made.”

Image: Gabriel Caetano

Image: Gabriel Caetano

Image: Gabriel Caetano

The other, Roots and Flowers, is a solarpunk hack of John Harper’s Lasers and Feelings, which will soon be available on Role. For Caetano, solarpunk encourages people not to imagine a completely different world, but what happens with our own when from this turning point, we go in a different direction. “It doesn’t erase what has happened and what is happening, but it tells us we can still make a turn or a few turns,” they told Polygon.

In Roots and Flowers, the table develops a community together and plays as its troubleshooters, working together to support and improve the community. Two adventure tentpoles of the game are the Legacy, the repurposing of technologies, buildings and other relics of the World Before, and Ancestry, the stories and customs of family, community elders and the land itself, where players may explore how these traditions survive. “We are part of the biosphere here. We are not above it or different from it, and [...] ancestral teachings can show us how to work with the world around us in a more balanced and healthy way — and also learn from the mistakes that we make. [...] That’s what Ancestry and Legacy reflect in this game,” Caetano said.

Roots and Flowers and Maker came at a time when Caetano was growing weary of the typical grim, cynical take on post-apocalyptic views. For them, the typical Mad Max-style view that everyone becomes their worst selves in the face of apocalypse is a very white, male, Eurocentric view of the world, even as it’s ending. They cite Avery Alder’s Dream Askew, a diceless, GM-less game where an apocalypse occurs in waves and a tight-knit queer community that has always existed on the margins is already working to rebuild, as an example of a game that emphasizes these ideas.

“If you are indigenous anywhere in the world, if you are queer or trans, if you are from the global south, we exist in a post-apocalyptic stage already,” Caetano told Polygon. “Imagining what could be is a beacon of hope. We are interacting with other people who can help. As much as there are corporations and capitalism and billionaires who just want to see most of us dead or in a survival state, we also have tight-knit communities that come together and solve their problems locally.”

Image: Wendy Yu

Wendi Yu, creator of Marvelous Mutations & Merry Musicians!, a collaborative post-apocalyptic RPG also featured in the Applied Hope jam, quotes the literary critic Fredric Jameson in explaining why the bleak apocalyptic view is so prevalent: “Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”

“Post-apocalyptic media keeps the premises of our own world even if the world is gone, and that’s something that matters to me a lot,” Yu told Polygon. “There are systems that oppress us, and the way we deal with nature and the climate crisis and capitalism and a whole host of oppressions that come with those systems, but they can go away after the end of the world — it’s not necessary to treat them as something that would keep going on. If you keep a Mad Max vision of the post-apocalypse, you say that’s human nature, that’s who we are. Even without society, that’s who we are.”

The idea for Marvelous Mutations emerged from a number of ideas at once, including discussions with Yu’s friends about wanting to explore conflict resolution in TTRPGs beyond violence and other possibilities for post-apocalyptic fiction. Yu’s in-game world is one where the apocalypse is nearly out of living memory, where former wastelands are now teeming with life and solar energy powers the landscape, and while firearms and war are relics of a distant past, live entertainment is highly valued. Players assume the role of itinerant mutant musicians, traveling the world and performing, and doing whatever else they please, be it helping people or trashing their rooms at the inn. To build out the adventure, players take turns building a music setlist to steer the mood at the table, or naming any gameplay or narrative element they would like to include and coming to a consensus in whatever manner works for them.

Image: Wendy Yu

Image: Wendy Yu

Image: Wendy Yu

Image: Wendy Yu

“Someone said they wanted the game to feature a battle of the bands, so that guided the adventure that we were having, and someone else said they wanted something about a haunted hospital and so we had to build upon that,” she said. “I think that’s very cool to have those different things people think are cool and try to mix them together and try to tell the story together rather than have it all come from the mind of the person who’s running the adventure.”

One of Yu’s other games, Here, There, Be Monsters!, is a rules-lite, queer, anti-fascist response to monster-hunting media from the monster’s perspective, and in combination with Marvelous Mutations, a through line emerges of empowering what is seen as anomalous or monstrous in mainstream society. Yu says those themes are crucial to the way she interacts with the world. “No matter what they tell you, there’s still weirdness and wonder everywhere,” she writes in the itch.io introduction to the game. “At the edges and cracks of ‘normal’ life we exist, we persist, and we resist: the monsters, the magicians, the anomalies, the freaks, and the outcasts. We gather in the shadows, trying our best to live our lives in a world that, when it doesn’t exactly fear or hate us, doesn’t even believe in our existence.”

Both Marvelous Mutations and Here, There, Be Monsters! include D100 rolling tables for character building, with the former offering suggestions for mutations characters may have and the latter including a table of possible backgrounds. “In Marvelous Mutations, I tried to make it very focused on how if the world ended, we can build something anew, but even if the mutations were still there, the focus was more on the world, a world inhabited by all kinds of weirdos and freaks — and they are all mutated because it’s a weird fantasy world, and it’s an extreme example of how diverse and colorful humankind actually is,” she said. “For Here, There, Be Monsters!, I wanted something more aggressive to try and express my frustration with the status of things, but I wanted people to play it and have the possibility of having some kind of cathartic experience playing through your own monstrosity as empowering.”

Image: Wendy Yu

As optimistic or solarpunk future-oriented games differ in structure and setting, the creators say the collaborative nature of tabletop lends itself to that kind of hopeful community building. “I think what is great about tabletop uniquely is that there is that ensemble nature,” Sabalauskas says. “You’re being a fan of other players around the table, you are wishing for them to have their spotlight moments and their contributions, that it’s not some done-to-death ‘chosen one’ narrative.”

Yu says one of the pinnacles of building a local group or community where people care about one another is creating spaces for play and fun. “Having fun together and playing together can strengthen [our ability to] resolve conflicts and learn how to act in collaboration, and that’s something I try to simulate in my games with the collaborative mechanics and the tone of the writing,” she says.

Caetano agrees that role-playing games are “a form of social experimentation” that reflects the function of a community — a handful of people sit down, agree on rules and norms out of their own will and volition, work together toward a goal, and resolve disagreements together. But even if you create that mini-community at the table, its collaborative goals may still be in-game violence and destruction. “You can do all of that and still write a game that gets people to be colonizers, like Dungeons & Dragons,” they say. “You go in there, you kill things, take their shit, sell it to someone else, become more powerful, repeat. You can still break and invert those principles but thoughtful game design can take you to places where you can rethink, reconsider and rearrange social arrangements, and if you look at those processes, you can learn how they also happen on a large scale.”

The developers that Polygon spoke with fervently believe that this kind of play can also encourage learning and growth that can be applied to our everyday lives. As discussing safety tools in tabletop has become much more commonplace, Caetano says they’ve internalized certain practices relating to safety tools in their personal life, such as when parenting. For example, they will play a game of pretending they’re going to eat their child’s food, but take breaks in the interaction to check in and remind each other it’s all in good fun. “This interaction, no matter how serious or intense it may seem, is just a game, and we both know this and it’s clear and it doesn’t take away from the fun,” they say. “We can learn lessons from the games that we play and we can grow with them, and let them shape us too.”

“I think tabletop is in a place [for] people who care about [the] meaning of the challenges [their] characters face,” Sabalauskas says. “Whether they’re coming at it from a place of grimdark or horror or cynical cyberpunk or from a very utopian place like my game, or a very pastoral place like Wanderhome, they’re thinking about what is the meaning of what players are doing and how do we let people do things that are fun, but sort of line up more closely with what it means to be a human being and to navigate the world we’re in.”

ChatGPT, Bing AI, and Google’s Bard all tended toward writing straight ships

Since artificial intelligence-powered text-generation tools were made widely available to the public in the past few months, they’ve been heralded by some as the future of email, internet search, and content generation. But these AI-powered tools also have some clear shortcomings: They tend to be incorrect, and often generate answers that reinforce racial biases, for example. There are also serious ethical concerns about their unspecified training data.

It is not surprising that debates over using these tools have also been happening in fandom spaces. Excited fans almost immediately turned to them as a new way of exploring their favorite characters. With the right prompt, AI can spit out a few paragraphs of fic-like writing. But just as quickly, many fanfic writers began to speak out against the practice.

“Where is the AI sourcing information it is using? Other fanfictions, the actual original source, other stories? Would the AI be plagiarizing other fanfiction authors?” asks author Redd, who says that “overall, AI should be kept far away from fanfiction.”

The machine learning behind these AI tools typically requires them to be trained on large amounts of preexisting data, often scraped from the internet. But it’s hard to know exactly what gets caught in the crosshairs, or how much copyrighted writing is included. OpenAI, the company behind the GPT-4 system used as a basis for some of the popular text-generation tools currently available, has not revealed what data the model was trained on. (OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment on this topic in time for publication.) However, GPT-3 was trained on 45 terabytes of text data, much of which was taken from a wide web crawl.

Given the apparent extensiveness of this crawl, as well as these tools’ abilities to generate fic, many contributors to sites like Archive of Our Own and Fanfiction.net believe that the works published there may have been part of the data used to train these models. Some of these writers dislike that their work may have been used in such a way without their permission. On Archive of our Own, an increasing number of users are locking their works so that they can only be read by those logged into existing accounts. Users who lock these fics believe that it will help prevent their work from being found in AI data crawls.

Approached for comment, Archive of Our Own says it has “made some changes to the site code that will prevent responsibly coded bots from accessing it,” but that entirely restricting automated traffic isn’t an option as it would break the site’s interaction with search engines, screen readers, and other tools.

But these ethical questions are only part of the picture. Fanfic is also both an artistic and a community practice — and so far, AI tools can’t replicate either.

In my research for this article, I experimented with four different text generators: OpenAI’s direct access to ChatGPT, Bing AI, Google’s Bard, and Notion AI. I tested each out with the same broad prompts (“write me a fanfic”) at first, to see what they would come up with. Then, to recreate something closer to how they’re being used by some fans, I used more specific requests, including popular characters, ships, and tropes in fandom. Overall, it was an unrewarding experience. Each tool had its own approach to attempting fic, but the end results had broad similarities: The stories were generic and clumsy.

First, despite a common acceptance in fandom circles that these tools know what fic is, the tools often did not respond coherently to the broad prompt. At one point Bing AI produced a direct summary of the actual book Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone instead of any kind of fanfiction. When I asked what differences it would make to the original story, Bing AI instead searched for the differences between the Sorcerer’s Stone book and movie and told me several of them. When I said that’s not what I asked, it ended the conversation. When I prompted it again, more recently, it produced tips for writing fanfiction rather than generating the fic directly.

When these tools did generate something approaching fic, it wasn’t well written. Bard, for example, in response to the prompt “write me a fanfic,” put out a 377-word Harry Potter/Hermione Granger fic in which Harry helps Hermione with her homework. Anyone with a passing knowledge of the wizard franchise — so, almost everyone under 40 — would be able to recognize that this is out of character and that the roles should be swapped.

Halfway through the AI-generated fic, Harry and Hermione confess their feelings for each other and start kissing. This is not exactly an unusual occurrence in fanfiction, but there’s no emotion to the scene. It reads like a tween’s first attempt at understanding romantic writing. This is not an insult to tweens, who deserve to enjoy the creative process and practice their skills. There is plenty of fanfiction out in the world that reads similarly to Bard’s attempt — but there are also thousands that are much, much better.

Bard defaulting to Harry Potter fanfiction was not a one-off. Bing AI and OpenAI both did the same. (Notion AI did not appear to recognize what fanfiction was and produced stories that didn’t have any relation to existing media.) The stories that these AI tools created also focused on heterosexual couples. Testing the same basic prompt across these three tools multiple times each, they continued to return to straight Harry Potter ships: In addition to Hermione/Harry, they responded with Hermione/Ron, Hermione/Draco, and Luna/Draco, but never anything that wasn’t M/F.

Although many have left the Harry Potter fandom in recent years — as author J.K. Rowling has made a number of anti-trans statements — it is still a massive and active community, with the second-highest number of works on Archive of Our Own and almost 70,000 new works added in 2021. But the AI-generated works were not representative of the types of fic that real people actually write. On Archive of Our Own, Hermione/Draco is the most popular F/M ship, but even that is eclipsed by Harry/Draco, which has three times as many fics dedicated to it. It’s also much less popular than it once was. These days, “Marauders-era” fics — and often ones focusing on Remus/Sirius specifically — are a larger focus in the fandom.

And male-male relationships are almost always much more popular in fandom. As an artistic form focused on filling in the gaps left in existing media, adding queer relationships and validating queer readings of beloved characters is one of fanfic’s key motivators. AI tools, on the other hand, seemed to steer away from creating any M/M fic. Prompting each of the tools for Supernatural fanfic returned stories centered on Dean Winchester/Jo Harvelle and Sam Winchester/Jessica Moore, even though Dean/Castiel is far and away the most popular ship in any fandom on Archive of Our Own. There are more than 110,000 works in that AO3 tag alone, compared to only 811 Dean/Jo fics.

The AI algorithms clearly lean toward heterosexuality. That they also favor Harry Potter is related. Everything these generators produce leans generic, trending toward both the dominant model for sexuality and the media products with the largest overall cultural footprints. They do not — and cannot — easily respond to the nuances of fandom, with its much more diverse set of interests and a countercultural tendency toward queerness. In short, their responses to simple fic prompts are a good demonstration of how these tools fail to capture the human heart that sits at the center of any decent art or community.

More broadly, the habit of text generators to approach the average, rather than be able to adapt to the nuances of individual need, has much bigger ramifications than a fondness for straight ships. Tools trained on vast content scrapes will replicate whatever is most common. It’s not hard to imagine what perspectives get lost in that process.

Another major limitation is that these tools will not produce explicit material, as it violates some of their terms of service. OpenAI’s usage policies, for example, disallow “the description of sexual activity,” while Bing AI’s code of conduct prohibits creating or sharing “adult content.” But sex scenes, as in other kinds of literature, are an important part of fanfic. Of almost 11 million works on Archive of Our Own, almost 2 million, or around 18%, are rated Explicit. Another 15% are rated Mature. There’s a clear demand for this kind of writing that AI cannot currently fill.

The explicit content limitation can also get in the way of using the tools at all. Bing AI’s replies spool out a word at a time, so after I asked it for a (rating unspecified) Dean Winchester/Castiel fanfiction, I was able to see it write for a while before accidentally beginning to generate something explicit and having to reverse course. It suddenly deleted itself mid sentence and replaced it with “My mistake, I can’t give a response to that right now. Let’s try a different topic.” Repeating the prompt immediately afterward generated the response “I’m sorry but I cannot generate inappropriate content.” On a later test, however, the sudden deletion — after generating a few sentences of fic — happened again.

Image: Bing AI via Jay Castello

Bing also has the only UI that provides citations, with each message including “links to the web content it references.” Given more specific prompts, these citations linked out to very niche bits of content. For example, when asked for something in the hurt/comfort genre, its citations included author pages of specific writers on Archive of Our Own, as well as a Tumblr post with fewer than 200 notes. Microsoft’s developer blog doesn’t offer more explanation beyond calling these references citations, so it’s unclear whether these were scraped as part of the bot’s AI model or as part of the internet search the tool does to contextualize prompts. Regardless, it feels uncomfortable to be served these small creators’ works in a context that such creators likely did not imagine when publishing them.

But beyond all these limitations, there’s also a much more subjective, but fundamental issue with using these tools to generate fanfiction. Though they’ve been touted as tools that make creative exploration more accessible, using them to create fanfic simply didn’t feel creative or exploratory. I love writing. Teasing out interesting threads until I find enough that they can be pulled together into something narratively satisfying is one of my favorite things to do in the world. Writing fic is perhaps the most distilled version of that, because the threads are preexisting and I’m already invested in them. From my experience, using an AI tool does not recreate this feeling in the slightest. It doesn’t require or even encourage the reflective process of writing or the transformative work of fanfic, both of which can be tough but are deeply rewarding in and of themselves. Instead, there is nothing to enjoy except the finished product, which is typically flat and lifeless.

I’m not the only one who feels this way. “For me, the use of AI for fanfiction feels like it defeats the purpose,” says writer Seraph Abell. “The best part of writing is pouring yourself into your work and having people enjoy it. How can AI even recreate that kind of passion?” Fic is often deeply personal, too, which can’t be recreated by an AI. “You can see bits and pieces of me [in my fic] and you can see what I love about the show,” says Abell.

“When I write fanfiction, it is all coming from this place inside of me where I desperately need to get these words out about a piece of media that has touched my soul,” says Redd. “Writing fanfiction is about sharing and community, not just number of hits and bookmarks.”

In fact, most fic writers seem to feel this way. The “AI-generated” tag on Archive of Our Own is not well used, and many of the fics there are also tagged “crack” — i.e., the writer was just playing around. Many of them are explicitly poking fun at how bad the text generation is, or have simply described the generated text as an experiment. As a result, the site has not needed to make a blanket rule regarding AI-created stories, although it has fielded questions from users enough to have a preexisting response: “At the moment, we do not prohibit AI-generated fanworks as such, if they otherwise qualify as fanworks. However, we are monitoring the situation. Depending on the circumstances, AI-generated works could violate our anti-spam policies, but this is a developing situation.”

Fic writers have differing opinions on how AO3 and other sites could address AI works if they do become a bigger issue. “I’m not into censoring. So if someone wants to build their entire works list out of AI-generated work, go for it. Just tag it appropriately so everyone knows,” says Redd. Abell believes the works should be prohibited, predominantly to prevent any plagiarism of existing works, but similarly thinks that if they are allowed, they should be tagged so that readers can avoid them if they prefer.

For the moment, though, it seems like AI is more of a tool for fanfiction readers who want to consume something quickly and easily, perhaps for ship pairings or tastes that aren’t well covered by the fandom at large. These creations are for their own amusement, and they don’t seem to feel the need to share. Writers, on the other hand, are still writing. And that’s not likely to change anytime soon.

It’s time to check out Deathwing’s old science projects

World of Warcraft’s newest expansion, Dragonflight, has a few plotlines and political struggles running through the story of patch 10.1, which debuted Thursday. The Embers of Neltharion patch takes players to the Zaralek Cavern and the Shadowed Crucible, an ancient laboratory where the one-time Neltharion — later corrupted to become the mad Dragon Aspect Deathwing — tinkered with experimental lifeforms and powerful artifacts.

The patch is also full of intrigue. There’s a Succession-style storyline where Deathwing’s heirs compete to be the new Aspect of the Black Dragonflight. They’re under pressure from a sinister trio of elemental villains — who are the most fun Warcraft has had with villains in years — and tons of in-game cinematics to help tell these tall tales. The designers have had to put a lot of thought into how to frame these cinematics, include the player character, and capture the spirit of each hero and villain. Here’s how they handle that delicate balance.

Setting the scene

Dragonflight has been a well-received expansion so far by fans, and it uses cinematic styles and storytelling techniques set up in the previous Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands expansions. Cinematics have been a part of the game since they were introduced in 2008’s Wrath of the Lich King; they are one of the most iterated upon features in the game, evolving from a rare treat to a narrative staple. They also play a significant storytelling role in Dragonflight, and Zaralek Cavern is no exception.

“With the emergence of the incarnates, there’s definitely some baggage [in the dragons’] history that needs to be addressed,” says Terran Gregory, lead cinematic narrative director at Blizzard, in an interview with Polygon. “By going into the underground, we’re coming full circle to the Black Dragonflight, which had a fraught history and very challenging paths, with all of the things that Nefarian and Deathwing have done and the legacy of the Dragonflight that his descendants have to inherit.”

Image: Blizzard Entertainment

The events of Dragonflight’s raid sets up our main plot (for now): We’re facing the Primalist dragons, a dirty little secret from the Dragonflights past. These villains are much smaller in scope than past bosses, but they’re far more fun, and they’re packed full of personality every time they show up in a cinematic. It’s a relief to be spared the mysteries, cliffhangers, and multi-dimensional plans that have become staples of previous Warcraft expansions. Dragonflight’s straightforward set of antagonists also gives Blizzard more time to tinker with the heroes and their new allies in the Cavern.

“When we figure out what we’re going to do in an expansion, we talk a lot about who the main characters are going to be and how they’re going to span the expansion — and beyond, sometimes — and we talk about new villains and new allies we’re going to bring in,” says Maria Hamilton, lead game designer. The team starts with broad strokes, and then hones in on the specifics of each story.

“As we get down to the details, we start looking into what really resonated with players, what players seemed interested in pursuing, what questions they’re asking,” says Hamilton.

Dragons and daddy issues

World of Warcraft has a long history across the MMO and the preceding real-time strategy Warcraft games, and some of that old history is pulled back to the forefront in Dragonflight. The Black Dragonflight take center stage, and their split leadership takes the foreground. After expansions in which characters like Anduin, Sylvanas, and Jaina take center stage, we’re now diving into a less explored dynamic between Ebyssian, Wrathion, and Sabellian, the leadership of the Black Dragonflight. These seeds were sown back in the Burning Crusade and Mists of Pandaria expansions.

“We had the opportunity to dive into the story of what happened with Ebyssian, for example, or some fans may not realize where Wrathion came from and why he wasn’t touched by the corruption or how young he is, relatively speaking,” says Hamilton. Things are further complicated by the addition of the Dracthyr, the new player race who harkens back to Neltharion’s experiments.

“We wanted to pace out this story across the span of Dragonflight’s content patches,” Hamilton adds. “We’re seeing this disagreement between Scalecommander Sarkareth and the Sundered Flame and Emberthal, who’s trying to desperately bring people together and not fight amongst themselves. They’re part of this family of Black dragons.”

Image: Blizzard Entertainment

These characters have to come across as human — or relatable to humans at least, which is no mean feat, because most of them are dragons. “The expression of characterization within World of Warcraft is a big team effort,” says Gregory, who describes the MMO as a “handcrafted experience.” He adds, “That’s a confluence of many, many teams from the concept art, the character art team, the prop team, the animation team, the cinematic team. Then the cinematic designers can leverage the art designed by all the different collaborators, cludge it together, and create these performances using what’s in the game.”

Another challenge World of Warcraft’s narrative team faces is the fact that the game is often datamined, with twists and turns being revealed early and out of context. Sometimes, these are kept under wraps, encrypted until players can experience them all at once. Other times, the player feedback is well worth the spoilers, as developers are able to use it to tweak issues, solve errors, and shore up the weak points of stories.

“All of this [test realm content] has been vital to making sure we’re having a constant dialogue and creating the best content we can, and the players feel heard and are happy with the game they invest so much of their time into,” says Gregory.

Players are now digging into the new patch, which went live on Wednesday, to see the complete content. Dragonflight continues to soar above the standard set by the past two expansions. The refined cinematics certainly help, and as the patch continues, we’ll see how Blizzard sets up the next chapter.

You either die a funny animal, or you live long enough to have a tragic backstory

The year was 1976. Gerald Ford was in the White House, Wings and Elton John were topping the charts, and in the ramshackle halls of Marvel Comics, a talking raccoon was born.

It would be hard to imagine a more unlikely ascent to stardom over the past decade than that of Rocket Raccoon, the short-tempered, bipedal forest-dweller who has become a staple of Marvel Studios’ Guardians of the Galaxy franchise. But as the character’s Bradley Cooper-voiced movie avatar prepares to make what might be his final appearance in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, we should reflect on whether the character’s cultural appeal isn’t mysterious at all.

After all, Rocket’s allure comes from the same set of contrasts that Stan Lee used to pioneer the new wave of troubled, humanized heroes from which the Marvel Universe was built. Just as Spider-Man was a leap forward in superhero storytelling from the cardboard dialogue of Silver Age Superman, Rocket is a troubled, complex departure from the Bugs Bunnys and Detective Chimps that preceded him.

As Marvel Comics scribe Al Ewing told Polygon via email, “Rocket was cast out of his Eden by unforgiving gods and left to fend for himself — of course readers and audiences want to take him to their hearts.” Rocket Raccoon, in other words, is the saddest funny animal who ever lived.

Rocket’s earliest origin story was presented in 1976’s Marvel Preview #7, part of the company’s short-lived line of offbeat black-and-white magazines. In that issue, Bill Mantlo and artist Keith Giffen used an installment of their spacefaring sword-and-sorcery series The Sword and the Star to introduce a talking raccoon with the Beatles-punning name of Rocky, who guides the heroic Prince Wayfinder through the forest planet of Witch-World. And if the preceding sentence sounds like a late-hippie fever dream more than anything resembling the Guardians of the Galaxy, that’s to be expected.

Image: Bill Mantlo, Keith Giffen/Marvel Comics

There is little in this first story to connect young Rocky with his later, cosmic iteration: the raccoon we see here speaks with a jaunty British accent, blows Gandalf-esque smoke rings with a tobacco pipe, and exhibits far more of a pip-pip insouciance than the angry temperament we’ve come to associate with the character. There would, in fact, be no reason at all to think that this character had anything to do with the Rocket who would later emerge, save for the fact that Mantlo himself went on to insist they were one and the same (a statement that, among other things, raises the troubling possibility that Rocket belongs alongside Blade the Vampire Hunter on the unexpected Englishmen list of the Marvel Universe).

Image: Sal Buscema/Marvel Comics

Mantlo must have seen some hidden potential in the odd little critter, because six years later, he brought him back (this time firmly within the confines of Marvel continuity) in the pages of Incredible Hulk #271. The story finds the title character marooned on an alien planet called Halfworld, populated by intelligent, walking, talking animals. Among them is the familiar face of the raccoon who’s name is now expanded to Rocket, and who is said to be Halfworld’s chief law enforcement officer.

Despite the somewhat less Liverpudlian implications of Rocket’s new name, the story is in fact little more than a mounting series of Beatles gags: Rocket’s right hand man is a walrus named Wal Russ, and quest on which they lead the Hulk is a mission to retrieve a holy book called Gideon’s Bible from the evil priest Judson Jakes. With Hulk’s help, the animal squad defeats Jakes, saves Gideon’s Bible, and rescues Rocket’s captured true love (an otter named Lady Lylla), before sending the gamma monster on his merry way. And yet, despite these less than auspicious beginnings, Rocket would turn out to have more impressive furry legs than anyone might have suspected.

The reason was a left-field occurrence in the comic industry that ended up proving Bill Mantlo surprisingly prescient. In May of 1984, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird released the first, self-published issue of their Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, an unabashed and affectionate takeoff on the Marvel comics of Frank Miller and Chris Claremont featuring a team of humanoid, streetwise reptiles.

What began as an obscure, underground title rapidly transformed over the course of the year into the biggest cult-hit comics had experienced since the days of Howard the Duck. So, in 1985, Marvel pulled Rocket off the shelf for a four-issue miniseries of his own, once again written by Mantlo, and this time penciled by a very young but very promising artist named Mike Mignola. And if Rocket’s personality this time around is still in the mode of his previous Hulk appearance, the story itself has enough grim-and-gritty revisionism of his origins to more than make up for it.

Image: Mike Mignola/Marvel Comics

Within the first few pages, everything we know about Halfword, Rocket, and his animal pals is revealed to be an elaborate lie. Rather than being populated wholly by talking beasties, Halfworld is in fact an asylum planet, housing a community of mentally ill humans to whom the animals are required to tend. And far from naturally anthropomorphic aliens, the animals of Halfworld are, in fact, no more than everyday critters — adopted as comfort animals for the human inmates, they were made the victim of genetic experiments by the authorities of Halfworld, evolving them unnaturally into the planet’s caretakers in lieu of more respectable humanoids.

It’s an Alan Moore-esque instance of comic deconstruction, inserted in the midst of what had been a lighthearted animal milieu, and Mantlo doesn’t shy away from its bizarre implications (“B-but…that means that I’ve spent my whole life searching for sanity in a universe established to house the insane!” exclaims an appalled Rocket on learning the truth). At the story’s end, Rocket and his pals obtain their freedom from the madness of Halfworld, requisition a rocket ship, and set off into space for further adventures.

Image: Wizard Magazine

Which never, in fact, followed. Perhaps the market for revisionist, butt-kicking funny animals was already saturated. Perhaps Mantlo’s story was just too damned weird, even for an audience looking for the next Donatello and Raphael. Whatever the reason, it was clear that nothing could help with good Rocket’s revival: for the next three decades, Rocket disappeared almost entirely from Marvel’s books, save for a handful of jokey appearances in She-Hulk, Quasar, and Exiles that served only to emphasize his reputation as the go-to embarrassment of Marvel continuity, alongside Spider-Ham and Forbush Man. As late as 2007, Wizard Magazine was still treating the prospect of a Rocket appearance in the then-upcoming Annihilation: Conquest crossover as an absurd goof.

Yet that appearance would turn out to be the watershed moment Rocket had been waiting for. In the 2007 Starlord miniseries, written by Rocket’s co-creator Giffen, and penciled by Timothy Green II, the eponymous Peter Quill is tasked with the leadership of a veritable Suicide Squad of imprisoned cosmic ne’er-do-wells: among them disgraced Avenger Mantis, world-conquering sentient tree Groot, and Rocket himself. This, of course, was the nucleus of the newly-reimagined Guardians of the Galaxy, and it’s in this series that we finally see Giffen’s version of Rocket emerge as the angry, raspy voice we know.

Yet at the same time, Giffen allowed Rocket’s newfound role as a team player to add a new and previously unseen dimension to his character: a surprising and tenacious loyalty toward his friends, which even Rocket, if pressed, would be loath to admit. Indeed, beginning with Giffen’s revival and continuing into the ongoing Guardians of the Galaxy series that spun out of it (written, for the length of its initial volume, by the duo of Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning), that deeply-encrusted heart of gold increasingly became Rocket’s defining characteristic. (Abnett and Lanning also added some Weapon X-esque uncertainty by returning Rocket to Halfworld, and revealing that some or all of what he had learned about the planet’s asylum origins may itself have been a lie — so the actual origin of the animals of Halfworld remains, at present, unknown.)

By the time writer Al Ewing took the lead on Rocket’s story, first in 2017’s Rocket miniseries, he was drinking alone in cosmic gin joints after being manipulated and betrayed by his old girlfriend Lylla (who returned after years apart only to rope Rocket into an elaborate con game). Then in the writer’s too-brief but much loved Guardians of the Galaxy run in 2020, Rocket was falling into depression after Peter Quill’s apparent death.

In the space of five decades, Rocket had transformed from a one-note pastiche of Bugs Bunny by way of the British Invasion into a fully-rounded character, with as much depth and complexity as the hairless mammals around him. That this would seem, by then, not only natural but inevitable perhaps says something odd but important about what Rocket signified to readers all along.

Image: Al Ewing, Adam Garland/Marvel Comics

Just as Stan Lee famously humanized superpowered humans by giving them recognizable flaws and feet of clay, Rocket humanized funny animals by bringing out the sadness and vulnerability implicit in that wide-eyed, furry form. Deep down, every reader wants to believe that a character like Rocket wants and needs to be loved, no matter how many f-bombs he drops or furious rages he flies into.

Ewing himself sums up Rocket’s appeal eloquently. “He’s a sad funny animal, and that’s baked in on a meta level,” Ewing told Polygon via email. “If you read his original adventures and the Mantlo/Mignola mini, it’s a real romp, funny, smart and with heart. As I recall, we don’t see him again until he turns up in a prison cell in the Abnett/Lanning books, which have a much tougher, very 2000AD-influenced sensibility. And the Rocket we get out of that is much more a character for those times - a little less playful and swashbuckling, a little more violent and sarcastic, and a lot more alone.

“It’s a horrible thing to put a fictional character through, and it turns him into a tragic figure on an existential level,” Ewing elaborated. “We all just want to be talking raccoons, but we’re stuck in this grimy space war. Rocket is us.”

And that, when it comes down to it, has always been the heart of Rocket’s appeal to us. He’s a funny animal, but the joke always seems to be on him.

Genndy Tartakovsky and Darrick Bachman talked to Polygon about the long road to getting their passion project out in the world

Watching Unicorn: Warriors Eternal, the latest creation from acclaimed animator-director Genndy Tartakovsky (Samurai Jack, Primal), in the media landscape of 2023 feels about as miraculous as seeing an actual unicorn grazing in a parking lot. In an era defined by sequels and reboots, spin-offs and reimaginings, Unicorn: Warriors Eternal is that all too precious rarity: a genuinely original animated series with no ties to any existing franchise, a passion project conceived by one of the most preeminent creators working in American animation today. Even Tartakovsky feels like it’s a small miracle it’s finally here.

“For me, it’s a new type of storytelling,” Tartakovsky told Polygon over Zoom. “It’s everything that I’ve kind of trained for throughout the years, doing all these different shows, culminating into this one thing.”

While Tartakovsky has established a reputation for creating animation that’s as conceptually ambitious as it is visually idiosyncratic, Unicorn: Warriors Eternal represents a new challenge for the veteran director through its emphasis on emotional storytelling. “With every project I’ve learned more and with every project I hope I’m getting better at telling stories,” Tartakovsky says. “It took awhile, but by the time we got here and somebody finally bought it, I felt like Oh, now it’s fate; it’s destiny because I never gave up on it.”

Image: Cartoon Network Studios/Williams Street

The production of Unicorn: Warriors Eternal dates back as early as Tartakovsky’s time working on Samurai Jack at Cartoon Network Studios, over 20 years ago.

“It started around the end of Jack and Clone Wars,” Tartakovsky says. “I was thinking about what’s next for me. I wanted to break away from the graphic look; that very flat, stylized aesthetic of Dexter, PowerPuff Girls, and Samurai Jack. I wanted to do something more volumetric.” Around the same time, Tartakovsky was tapped to write and direct an unproduced animated feature based on Astro Boy, Osamu Tezuka’s iconic sci-fi boy robot. The experience of working on that film fed directly into Tartakovsky’s thought process on Unicorn: Warriors Eternal.

Darrick Bachman, the head writer for Unicorn: Warriors Eternal and a long-time collaborator of Tartakovsky’s, has his own recollections as to when the series was first conceived. “He had just shown me Howl’s Moving Castle, which had just come out, and he loves Castle in the Sky,” Bachman told Polygon. “We both thought there was something amazing about that Victorian style world. We were sitting in his office and he was just doodling this early version of Copernicus, just something he had in his head when he went home that night. The next morning, he just showed me this sketchbook full of images he drew and told me about this rough idea he had about warriors who are repeatedly reincarnated throughout time. It was really, really fascinating. We just started throwing around ideas and yeah, I think that was literally 20 years ago.”

Image: Cartoon Network Studios/Williams Street

Image: Studio Ghibli/Toei Company

Image: Tezuka Productions

Top image: Unicorn Warriors Eternal; Bottom left: Castle in the Sky; Bottom right: Astro Boy

The influence of Hayao Miyazaki, Max Fleischer, and Osamu Tezuka is plain to see in Unicorn: Warriors Eternal: a sci-fi fantasy adventure centering on a trio of immortal warriors – Melinda, a powerful sorceress; Seng; a cosmic monk with the ability to traverse the astral plane of existence; and Edred, an Elven warrior prince and Melinda’s lover. Together, the warriors battle against a primordial force of evil across space and time, reincarnated from generation to generation by their robotic comrade Copernicus in their mission to safeguard humanity.

If that premise sounds uncannily like the 2003 Samurai Jack episode “Birth of Evil” by way of 2010’s Sym-Bionic Titan, it’s not a coincidence. For Tartakovsky, Unicorn: Warriors Eternal represents nothing short of the culmination of his career as an animator and director up to this point. But aside from those influences and the arc of his own career, Tartakovsky says he drew on his own personal experiences as a father watching his children grow up in the creation of Unicorn: Warriors Eternal.

“So I was trying to sell it for years, and in that time I had three kids,” Tartakovsky tells Polygon. “And what I really witnessed was the kids growing from kids to teenagers, teenagers to adults. All of a sudden, your baby daughter is 12, and then she’s 13 and she’s a completely different person. That’s amazing to me, and that connected right into what I was doing with Unicorn. Because the story is just a big metaphor for change, of finding out who you are through change.”

Nowhere is this theme of change more apparent than in the case of Emma, a young bride-to-be living in Victorian era London who unexpectedly discovers that she is the reincarnation of Melinda. As the series’ protagonist, Emma struggles not only to control the extraordinary new powers foisted onto her, but with the tension that comes with reconciling her past self (as well as her past lives) with who and what she is now.

“Going through life, you constantly question who you are,” Tartakovsky tells Polygon. “And as you grow, you begin to ask: Am I growing into the person that I want to be or am I growing into something less than what I want to be? Am I unhappy with how I’m growing?”

Image: Cartoon Network Studios/Williams Street

For the director of Unicorn: Warriors Eternal, that question also taps into his experiences as an animator making their way through Hollywood.

“Hollywood is kind of screwy with some of the characters we run into,” Tartakovsky says. “As I got into Hollywood, there was all this craziness around me, and so I started to question myself. There were times I tried to be more than myself so that people would go, ‘Wow, look at Genndy, he’s so creative and out of his mind,’ and I hated it because it wasn’t sincere to who I was. It also comes from being a comic book fan, that question of what do you do and what are your responsibilities now after getting these new powers. All of that went into Unicorn; I’m never outside of myself, I’m always trying to be sincere in my storytelling and not just putting cliche stuff just because it feels like that’s what needs to be there.”

Despite, or perhaps unfortunately because of the novelty of Tartakovsky’s vision, Unicorn: Warriors Eternal was a difficult series to land for studios otherwise obsessed with the reliable bankability of existing franchises. “He’s pitched it many, many times since he first came up with the idea,” Bachman told Polygon. “We had talked about this, and it’s always there; it always kind of percolates itself back to the top.”

From Cartoon Network and Adult Swim, Netflix and HBO Max, the series went through multiple phases of pitching and pre-production, each one either thwarted by disinterest on part of studios or preexisting obligations to other projects. “I think there’s like, about four different versions of the show that have existed up to this point,” Bachman says. “It’s kind of like the team, it just keeps on getting reborn over and over.”

One aspect that’s remained a constant throughout Unicorn: Warriors Eternal’s development is the setting: An alternate version of 19th century London filled with semi-sentient automatons, flying dirigibles, and fantastical gas-powered technology. For Bachman, the appeal of the series’ Steampunk setting is attributable to what it represents to audiences engaging with it in the modern era.

“I think it’s because it’s the birth of modern technology,” Bachman says. “It’s a time when so many different forms of technology: the combustion engine, refrigeration, high-speed rail travel, and indoor heating became a part of our everyday lives. People were so enamored with the idea of the future, and now we look at it as the past and beginnings of the modern conveniences of our technological present. There’s a romance to it.”

Image: Cartoon Network Studios/Williams Street

It’s taken nearly 20 years for Unicorn: Warriors Eternal to finally come to television screens, and now that it finally has, Tartakovsky has plans for more stories following the many adventures of Melinda, Seng, and Edred throughout history.

“It’s a gigantic world, it’s designed as a big franchise,” Tartakovsky says. “We could go to the future, we could go to the Middle Ages. There’s another story that lines up right next to it, it’s just that this one has to be successful before we can do that next one.”

In his conversation with Polygon, Bachman floated the potential of future storylines exploring a steampunk version of 1920s Chicago. “That would be an awesome era to explore because Genndy lived in Chicago and I love that Roaring ’20s aesthetic. And I’d love to be able to explore across Europe, you know, this fantasy version of Europe and into Asia and the Middle East. It would be amazing to be able to play with the terrains of those different locations.”

Whatever the future might hold for Unicorn: Warriors Eternal, Tartakovsky remains committed to pushing not only the boundaries of what audiences expect from him as a creator, but his own artistic aspirations. “I do want to push myself,” Tartakovsky says. “Even going from Samurai to Primal, I was like, OK, he’s not going to have any sword action; the fight has to be in a caveman style and he’s going to rely on a spear. I don’t want to repeat what I’ve done before.”

Unicorn: Warriors Eternal is available to watch and stream weekly on Adult Swim and HBO Max.

How do you make the Bourne movies into great theater? Keep the screen.

The spy story has infiltrated every medium, but rarely do audiences see covert agents slip onto a spotlit stage. That’s not to blame playwrights; with all due respect to the hit Broadway version of The 39 Steps, a farcical rewiring of both an early-20th-century espionage novel and Alfred Hitchcock’s own 1935 man-on-the-run adaptation, the theater doesn’t exactly demand the stealth and physical brutality required of 00-agents. And as we know, Cirque du Soleil is firmly on team Avatar, so those acrobats haven’t been any help telling spy sagas on stage.

Polygon is diving into the world of espionage throughout fiction and pop culture history with Deep Cover, a two-week special issue covering all sorts of spy stories and gadgets.

This is what makes The Bourne Stuntacular such a revelation. Flying somewhat under the radar at Universal Studios in Orlando — the attraction was set to launch pre-pandemic and eventually popped up in the fog of June 2020 when parks began to reopen — the stunt show adapts the visceral thrills of the Jason Bourne movies through a melding of technology and practical effects that’s performed eight times a day. Even compared to legendary shows like Disney’s Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular and the Waterworld Stunt Show, there’s nothing quite like it. And that was the goal from the very beginning, when park creatives began poring through the Universal license library looking for inspiration for a new show.

“We wanted to do a little more than what traditional stunt shows were,” Deborah Buynak, senior vice president at Universal Orlando Resort, tells Polygon. “We wanted to be able to travel to different locations. When doing stunts, you’re usually locked into the architecture and the scenery of a set. Whereas if we were moving to different locations, once we can change up that architecture, there’s so much you can do. It’s not the same fistfight over and over again. It involves travel, it involves different buildings that you can swing off, jump off, and have different types of fights going on.”

Like the shaky-cam legacy of the Bourne movies, the Stuntacular needed to deliver hard-hitting verisimilitude at a global scale, in a package that was full of spycraft mumbo jumbo. Even for a theme-park stage show, that started with a story, which, according to Buynak, emerged through constant back and forth between writers, action designers, and technicians who brought years of stage R&D to the fold. Bourne film producer and Steven Spielberg confidante Frank Marshall assisted in the development of the Stuntacular, allowing the creative team to lift and remix elements from the original movies.

Photo: Universal Studios

The Stuntacular really begins before the show starts. Guests in queue are first ushered into a large standing room area dominated by a large screen that sets up the “story” of The Bourne Stuntacular. On screen is actor Julia Stiles, reprising her role as Nicky Parsons, a former logistics coordinator for Bourne’s former employers and currently one of Bourne’s few allies, who congratulates the guests on their recruitment as part of the CIA’s “situation analysis team.” Parsons gives a quick overview of Bourne’s backstory from the movies before getting to the point: Bourne is on the run (again), and it’s up to the guests assembled to monitor his movements and figure out why. To do this, the guests are ushered into an “observation room” (ie. theater) to observe Bourne’s actions “in real-time” using “enhanced virtual surveillance” technology (i.e. the Stuntacular show).

As Buynak puts it, there is no linear path to creating a show like the Stuntacular, in which so many elements need to coalesce. Like in a film, all the elements — practical effects, stunt work, set builds, video shoots — were outsourced to various companies then funneled together in a warehouse in Los Angeles where the creative team could rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. And from the very beginning there was a variable, there was an X factor to making it all work, or rather a question that would help the show level up: How could the Stuntacular feel more immersive?

“We knew that we wanted to change viewpoints, like you were watching a movie,” Buynak says of the question that popped up early. “But if we move the camera point of view, could we also move the point of view from the audience of this practical set, that’s going to sit in front of a screen? A screen could help us take us to these different locations.”

The big twist of the Stuntacular is that instead of a static backdrop, Bourne’s new adventure plays out in front of a giant 3,640-square-foot screen. At 130-feet wide and 28-feet tall, it’s one of the largest structures ever built for a Universal show and takes advantage of technology that is hush-hush. When I ask if the tech is comparable to Industrial Light & Magic’s Stagecraft tech, used in tandem with the Unreal Engine to create digital filmable backdrops on recent projects like The Mandalorian, Buynak simply grins and “similar to all that.” However it’s truly done, what’s obvious is that the digital backdrop takes the action off the rails. And watching the show, you feel it.

Image: Universal Studios

Here’s a taste: The Stuntacular opens with a scene of Bourne earning a living as an underground prize fighter in Tangier, Morocco before being tipped off by CIA agent Andrea Dixon that the agency has traced his location and dispatched assets to neutralize him. Bourne eludes his would-be assailants, averting gunfire and climbing over rooftops and hanging off of ledges before sneaking away. The scene shifts to Bourne infiltrating the Security of Defense’s house, wherein Bourne dispatches with a Black Ops team before leading a cop car on a high-speed chase through downtown Washington, D.C., eluding his would-be captors once again. Ducking into an industrial building, Bourne fights off a team of security guards before riding an elevator to the upper levels of the facility, dodging gunfire and eventually escaping.

The show then jumps to Dubai, wherein Bourne is seen fighting a would-be assassin, drowning them in a nearby pool before throwing them off the ledge of a skyscraper. From there, he spars with a sniper dangling by a wire from the helicopter as it bobs and weaves between skyscrapers and a nearby oil rig, then lands on a moving sports car, whose driver fires on the car’s tires. We won’t spoil the end, but more things go boom.

The Bourne Stuntacular is a genuinely stunning experience. Sean Lyle, who portrayed Jason Bourne on one sunny afternoon earlier this spring, steps on stage as a character defined on-screen by Matt Damon, and finds his own take on every fist fight, shootout, death-defying escape and thrilling chase sequence — it’s a legit performance. But the screen is the real star of the show: convincing visual effects technology combined with inventive physical setpieces and cleverly timed pyrotechnics combine to create a cohesive experience.

Part of this is just the unfathomable amount of work going into every second of the live performance. On top of the digital backgrounds, the team at Universal employs a projection mapping system that allows another layer of effects to drape over the action, requiring actors to hit precise marks, sometimes with vehicle props. It takes 13 technicians manning 70 “enable buttons” for all the effects and cues in the Stuntacular to be pulled off with maximum safety.

But brutality is still key. Buynak says the Universal team worked with Bourne Supremacy and Bourne Ultimatum stunt coordinator Jeff Imada to create continuity in the fight styles and parkour moves of the franchise. The really, really hard part of doing so had nothing to do with making contact, but slowing down the action. In the D.C. sequence, a cop car (completely digital) pursues Bourne (real actor), who hightails it on a motorcycle (real prop) before leaping to safety on a lamp post (real lamp post). The drama then downshifts speed, as the street backdrop curves along a Z-axis to reveal a different vantage point. Mind you, the actor is flipping in slow motion.

“What it takes for the performers to maintain that slow motion,” Buynak says, “while using the strength of their body to hang, lift, and spin off the light post — that is almost more difficult for them than going full speed because they’re fighting against their own muscles and their own body to hold themselves in a slower state of movement than if they were to just let momentum swing them.”

The IMAX-worthy spectacle of the Stuntacular is only rivaled by the unlimited possibilities of the technology and stunt manpower that brings it to life each day. And like anything empowered by digital tech, it seems ripe for an evolution. While Buynak says there are no plans to change the Stuntacular in the immediate future — in post-pandemic time, the show they’ve toiled over is just finding audiences for the first time, even three years later — but could the show get a sequel? Or would we call it a remaster?

“All those things you talked about, does it make it possible?” Buynak says. “Absolutely.”

Walt Disney may have hated it, but like Cruella de Vil, he was wrong

1. Every kid exposed to Disney films has one they fixate on. For some, it’s The Little Mermaid, or Beauty and the Beast, or Sleeping Beauty.

2. But for me, I watched One Hundred and One Dalmatians one million times. I spent hours playing with friends, pretending to be characters from the movie. I’ve never met anybody who imprinted on it in the same way.

3. And that means that, simply by laws of nostalgia, I know a lot of things about this movie that most people don’t — because I just think it’s neat!

4. Which is ironic, because Walt Disney abhorred the design of the film from top to bottom.

5. On its premiere in 1961, the success of One Hundred and One Dalmatians rescued Disney’s animation studio from potential shutdown after the financial failure of the lavishly rendered Sleeping Beauty.

6. One Hundred and One Dalmatians was the first Disney animated feature to be written and storyboarded by one person, animator and writer Bill Peet.

7. Peet cut his teeth at Disney animation doing menial animation work on Donald Duck shorts.

8. Peet nearly quit before he was promoted to the story department in time to work on Pinocchio.

9. Peet did quit just a few years after One Hundred and One Dalmatians came out, after arguing with Walt during the production of The Jungle Book. He went on to be a successful writer and illustrator of children’s books, including The Wump World.

10. The Wump World follows an innocent society of capybara-like animals called Wumps, whose home is colonized into ruin by wasteful alien invaders who get back in their rocketships and find another planet to despoil the moment they have exhausted all the resources.

11. In the final moments of The Wump World, the Wumps emerge from their hiding places and wander lost among the abandoned and inhospitable concrete wasteland, until they joyfully happen upon one last unspoiled remnant of their planet.

Image: Bill Peet

12. The final image of the book is of a Wump looking at a small shoot of green that has cracked through an asphalt road.

13. The Wump World doesn’t have anything to do with One Hundred and One Dalmatians, but I loved it.

14. I had no idea it was Peet’s work until I decided to write 101 things about One Hundred and One Dalmatians.

15. In One Hundred and One Dalmatians, Peet breaks with Disney tradition of the time by eschewing a storybook opening, featuring live-action footage (or very occasionally, as in Pinocchio, a short animated sequence) of a book opening.

16. Instead, he wrote and storyboarded a fully animated opening-credits sequence, in which bouncing Dalmatian spots illustrate each layer of the film’s collaborative production, and each group of artists gets to display their work as their names are showcased.

17. Dalmatian spots form musical notes during the credit for the film’s music. A quick animation of Pongo’s head accompanies the names of the directing animators. A loop of dogs runs to honor the character animators, letters twinkle in the names of the effects animators, Pongo and Perdita appear on a city street for the names of the layout technicians, color washes across the background for the names of the color stylist and background artists. And a fully colored and detailed background location with foreground animation goes with the art direction and production design credit.

18. Peet’s credit is his own handwritten signature, reflecting that he penned the film’s story by hand on legal paper because he didn’t know how to use a typewriter. Afterward, serif letters and typewriter sound effects display the name of Dodie Smith, author of the original novel, The Hundred and One Dalmatians.

19. Peet was apparently quite pleased at Smith’s positive reaction to his adaptation, judging by how prominently her quotes are featured on his still-running website.

20. Smith first wrote The Hundred and One Dalmatians in Women’s Day magazine as the serialized story “The Great Dog Robbery” in 1956.

21. Smith also wrote a sequel, The Starlight Barking, in 1967, which would have been a quite a movie.

22. Smith took a hard turn into full fantasy with a story about Sirius, the spirit of the Dog Star, casting every living thing in the world except dogs into an unbreakable sleep and endowing all dogs with psychic powers and the ability of fast travel.

23. Then at midnight Sirius appears before every dog in the world to offer them an escape into space so they will no longer be threatened by nuclear war.

24. Pongo is chosen to decide for all dogs, and he declines, arguing that friendship with kind humans is a better dream for dogs than eternal freedom and bliss among the stars.

Image: Disney

25. Sirius commends this decision and returns everything to normal. Pongo allows that dogs may someday all go to the stars when they are no longer content with humans.

26. Before she turned to novels, Dodie Smith was a respected playwright in an era where that was particularly difficult for women.

27. When reporters discovered the identity behind her male pseudonym, one newspaper ran with the headline “Shopgirl Writes Play.”

28. I had no idea Dalmatians was even based on a book until I was in middle school, and found a 1976 reprinted paperback in the back room of a building at horseback-riding summer camp.

29. There is a connection between horses and dalmatians. Let me explain it, because 101 facts is a lot of facts to come up with, and I’m beginning to get worried.

30. The breed’s origins stretch back to the 1300s, in the Dalmatia region of what is now Croatia. Though dalmatians have seen use as hunting and guard dogs, they’re most famously associated with firefighting.

Image: The Saturday Evening Post

31. That’s because back when fire engines were drawn by teams of horses, dogs were needed to run alongside the carriages.

32. Why? Because back then, firefighting companies were private enterprises that competed to be first to a fire, and thereby get the insurance payout for putting it out.

33. Those companies needed guard dogs on their carriages — even while putting out fires — to prevent theft and sabotage of their equipment or horses by rival companies.

34. That’s probably the limit of the number of horse facts I can fit into this, a collection of 101 facts related to the Disney movie One Hundred and One Dalmatians.

35. Smith populated The Hundred and One Dalmatians with information from her own experience with keeping dalmatians — at one point, she and her husband Alex Macbeth Beesley owned nine of them.

36. Pongo is named for Smith’s first pet dalmatian.

37. The idea for her book reportedly came to her after a friend commented, “Those dogs would make a lovely fur coat.”

38. I think we can all agree that that’s a buckwild thing to say to someone who loves an animal so much that they have nine of them.

39. Understandably, there are a lot of little bits in the book that were left out of the Disney film: Cruella’s husband and her pet cat; different names and professions for the Darlings; a subplot where the dogs destroy Cruella’s closet full of furs.

40. But most notably, the film excises two whole adult dogs. Rather than Pongo and Perdita, Pongo’s partner is named Missus.

41. Perdita is an abandoned, liver-spotted Dalmatian whose puppies were recently purchased (by Cruella, natch) and taken away.

42. (In real life, dalmatian spots can be black or brown, with the color being called “liver.”)

43. No liver-spotted dalmatians appear in the movie version, One Hundred and One Dalmatians, as it would have been more annoying to render them.

44. (I’ll come back to that.)

45. In the book, Pongo and Missus’ humans adopt Perdita to help feed their enormous litter of 15 puppies.

46. Which makes sense if you think about it: Fifteen is just a tremendous amount of mouths for an animal with eight nipples to feed.

47. At the end of Smith’s novel, Perdita is reunited with her puppies and their father, Prince, who is also adopted by her humans, thus making the final tally 97 puppies and four adult dalmatians.

Image: Disney

48. For my money, the best idea Smith put into The Hundred and One Dalmatians that made it to Disney’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians is the fictional television program, What’s My Crime?.

49. It’s not the only fake TV show in the movie: Bill Peet also tossed in an Adventures of Rin Tin Tin-like series Thunderbolt the Wonder Dog, about a heroic German shepherd fighting bandits in the American Old West.

50. An episode of Thunderbolt putting the puppies in a mesmerized state is a significant plot point of One Hundred and One Dalmatians.

51. It’s an interesting detail to consider, with both the book and movie made in the 1950s, the first decade in which many parents would have watched their children grow up in front of a TV set.

52. Brothers Jasper and Horace Badun, Cruella’s hapless henchmen, are particularly obsessed with What’s My Crime?. In both the book and the movie, it buys our heroes precious time when they put off killing the puppies for an hour in order to watch the latest episode of this must-see TV show.

53. What’s My Crime? is a contemporary goof on the at-the-time-very-popular panel game show What’s My Line?

54. What’s My Line? ran on CBS for all of the 1950s and most of the 1960s, spawning a concurrent British version as well.

55. The gist of What’s My Line? is that a panel of celebrities had limited time to guess a guest’s unusual profession.

56. Panelists could ask as many yes or no questions as they wanted, but if the answer to any of the questions was no, their turn would end and the next panelist would take over.

57. This tried-and-true format has been mimicked in shows like Front Page Challenge, To Tell the Truth, and Nickelodeon’s Figure It Out.

58. As a kid, the first time I saw an episode of Figure It Out, I immediately thought, “Oh, it’s like that show What’s My Crime? is based on,” and felt very smug that I knew this.

59. This fact tells you a lot about what I was like as a teenager.

60. Another fixture of my childhood, comedian Groucho Marx, was an infamously disruptive panelist on What’s My Line?.

61. The British host of What’s My Crime? certainly has the Groucho mustache and glasses thing going.

62. Of course, the twist of What’s My Crime? is that the guests are all convicted felons, and celebrity panelists have to guess the unusual crime they committed.

63. In the book, the Badun henchmen are particularly chipper about the idea of murdering and skinning 99 dalmatian puppies because they think it’ll make them a shoe-in to appear on What’s My Crime? and have their 15 minutes of fame.

64. People say that Disney movies are sanitized, but folks, my childhood Disney favorite had a television show about extra-fucked-up crime, and it features a tense sequence in which two men attempt to beat 99 puppies to death with a fireplace poker and a broken-off chair leg.

65. According to press materials created for the 1979 re-release of One Hundred and One Dalmatians, the 101 dalmatians that appear in the film share 6,469,952 individually rendered spots.

66. There was an entire department of animators set aside in the movie’s production structure whose job was just to draw spots on dogs.

67. The major technical advancement that made it financially and logistically possible to draw 6,469,952 black spots for 113,760 frames of cel animation was the Xerox camera.

68. The first commercially available Xerox photocopier debuted on the market in 1959. It could make seven copies in 60 seconds, and it weighed 650 pounds.

69. Mickey Mouse co-creator Ub Iwerks modified a Xerox camera to copy pencil drawings onto animation cels, thus eliminating the need for all the blacks of a drawing to be inked onto cells by hand.

70. The tradeoff was One Hundred and One Dalmatians’ signature uneven linework, a product of how the animators’ pencil lines were transposed to film, rather than being reproduced by the smooth lines of the inkers.

71. As the process could only produce solid black lines, dalmatians were a perfect subject.

72. “Technically, One Hundred and One Dalmatians is a zine,” I once provocatively declared to my friend, an animation professor, in order to make him furious.

73. Like many Disney films, Dalmatians made use of filmed live-action reference for character movements.

74. Cruella De Vil herself was modeled by character actress Mary Wickes, who is perhaps best remembered for playing Sister Mary Lazarus in Sister Act and Sister Act 2.

75. The Xerox technique also allowed Dalmatians to use live-action footage in place of animation for some of its most technically difficult scenes: the car chases involving Cruella’s monster of a jalopy plowing through heaping snow.

76. Animators constructed perfect little paper models of the vehicles involved in Dalmatians’ climax and filmed them moving, crashing, and plowing through drifts of sand to simulate snow.

77. Then, using a Xerox camera, the live-action footage was transferred directly to animation cels for coloring and compositing into backgrounds.

78. Other elements of photography were incorporated as well: Look at Jasper and Horace’s newspapers in this shot.

Image: Disney

79. Cruella De Vil is rare among Disney villains for having no supernatural powers — and for being motivated not by power or revenge, but simply by wanting to have a puppy-skin coat.

80. Cruella’s name was likely inspired by Dodie Smith’s own Rolls-Royce towncar — or “sedanca de ville,” a term coined in the 1920s by the Spanish distributor of Rolls-Royce. (In the book as well as the movie, she has an obnoxious car.)

81. Most translations of Dalmatians attempt to keep the pun in her name by using a homonym for devils, hell, or evil. But in Dutch, her surname simply remains “de Vil,” as the Dutch verb “villen” means “to skin.”

82. For a Disney villain, she has an unusually distant and impersonal relationship with the films’ protagonists, since she obviously can’t have a conversation with our canine heroes — she doesn’t even know they’re sentient.

83. And yet her anthem “Cruella De Vil,” by composer and lyricist Mel Leven, is objectively an all-time banger.

84. Overall, Dalmatians is barely a musical. There are really only one and a half songs in the movie. (Two and a half, if you count the Kanine Krunchies jingle.)

85. The musical elements of the film are all diegetic, owing to Peet’s adaptation of Roger from a “financial wizard” to a struggling songwriter.

86. In Dodie Smith’s Dalmatians, Roger is so good at accounting that he wiped out the British government’s debt, and as a reward, was given a lifelong exception from paying taxes.

87. Longtime Disney composer George Bruns opted for a soundtrack that emphasized contemporary jazz for Dalmatians, rather than a full orchestra.

88. Dalmatians was the first Disney movie set in the same era in which it was made since 1941’s Dumbo — another production that followed a streak of Disney flops, was simplified in order to cut costs, and wound up keeping the studio alive with its overwhelming success.

89. Dalmatians’ realism and its commitment to a temporary setting was the root of Walt Disney’s personal disappointment with the film, according to veteran Disney producer Don Hahn.

90. “Walt was a romantic,” Hahn said in a short 2008 documentary about the making of Dalmatians. “I know he really loved the style of the Peter Pans and the Cinderellas and the Snow Whites and the Pinocchios. I think Walt probably mourned the fact that he was losing this lush, beautiful, tapestry look to his films.”

Image: Disney

91. As technology that could automatically take a paper drawing and transfer it to an animation cel developed in fidelity and flexibility, the process became central to Disney’s production.

92. Disney’s inking department, a highly skilled, largely female workforce, was subsequently let go.

93. But Walt Disney disliked the sketchier look of One Hundred and One Dalmatians, and the concurrently produced The Sword in the Stone, so intensely that he never allowed their art director, Ken Anderson, to take that role on another film.

94. You know, I also really loved The Sword in the Stone as a kid.

95. In the late 1950s, Walt Disney was spending less and less time directly involved in animation, focusing on the difficult task of getting Disneyland off the ground.

96. Disneyland is a good metaphor for Walt’s twin obsessions: nostalgia for an idyllic small-town American past and a fascination with futurism in all forms.

97. A setting neither futuristic nor nostalgic; a story attributed to a single artist rather than Walt’s company or team; a film that directly showcased and credited the work of animators in both its credits and by directly transferring their hand-drawn lines to the screen... there was precious little of Walt in Dalmatians for Walt to recognize, and a whole lot of other people.

98. We’re 99 facts in, and I’m not sure I could tell you why One Hundred and One Dalmatians was THE Disney film that captivated me as a kid.

100. Maybe the perfect Disney movie is simply the one you saw for the first time at just the right moment, which is mostly when you’re 5 years old.

101. Walt may not have picked Dalmatians, but it sure picked me.

Dredge is the latest in a burgeoning genre

Cozy games are hard to define. There’s no one aesthetic line that’s threaded throughout the entire genre. There are qualities we’ve come to associate with cozy games, sure — soft colors like in Little Witch in the Woods, farming or life simulation as in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and very little violence, like how Potion Craft is mostly brewing potions. But those qualities aren’t actually requirements; cozy games are more about how they make you feel. You know it when you see it.

And now, the subgenre of cozy games is delving into new territory: the dark cozy game. Cozy game expert Kennedy Rose, who goes by Cozy K online, sees the burgeoning subgenre as a response to an increased interest in coziness in gaming. “[It] allows for the subgenres within cozy games to blossom even more,” she told Polygon. “Yes, we want to unwind with some cozy task management mechanisms, but maybe we also want to uncover a horrifying mystery while we do so.”

It may seem like a cozy dark game complicates the idea of a cozy game: How could a game like Dredge, which delves into psychological horror, be considered a cozy game? But Dredge is much more than the mangled, grotesque fish that players pull up from the depths and the red-rimmed eyes of the fisherman protagonist from his nights without sleep. It’s in the slow, methodical pattern of Dredge’s gameplay and the nature of fishing itself. These qualities fit in between the game’s other themes — the mysteries and horrors of the sea — to different degrees throughout the game. There are monsters to be found — or to find you — and consequences for spending too many nights without sleep. Hallucinations can do actual damage; unknowable sea monsters can tear your ship apart. Almost in spite of itself, Dredge has a warmth to it that pulls it into the cozy genre. It’s the loop of its simple fishing minigame that leads into a cargo hull-sized game of Tetris. It’s the fishmongers and fellow seafarers who buy your fish and fix your ship. These are the elements of community and consistency that keep Dredge from getting too dark.

“Cozy gamers [...] want something that’s entertaining and engaging but not something that brings us to that high-stress, competitive state that some games might,” Rose said. “That may look like an island full of cutesy animals or a dark boat expedition with mutant fish.”

Image: Klei Entertainment

New Zealand-based Dredge developer Black Salt Games didn’t necessarily plan for the game to feel cozy; developer Alex Ritchie told Polygon that uneasiness and curiosity were the two feelings he wanted to carry throughout the game. “If you had asked during development whether I thought Dredge would appeal to [fans of] cozy games, I probably would have said no,” he said. “Now, though, I think you can get that experience from it.”

The repetitive structure of fishing, both in games and in real life, always pulls Dredge back from the edge when it veers too close. It’s also a pastime that developer Joel Mason happens to enjoy. Similarly, Dredge developer Michael Bastiaens added that it’s easy to get pulled out of the game’s quieter moments, but that it’s the “tension and fear,” perhaps, that makes the cozier and more mundane bits feel more impactful.

The dark cozy game genre can be traced back years or decades; Don’t Starve may just be the original example, depending on who you ask. The 2013 survival video game from Canadian studio Klei Entertainment is notoriously hard. Its aesthetic absolutely says cozy with its muted colors and cute cartoon world, but the gameplay is uncompromising; cozy in Don’t Starve is more of a mindset. When you get used to failure — or you use one of Don’t Starve’s creative modes — you can fall into the feeling of coziness. It’s a game that’s definitely more dark and fundamentally hard than cozy, but that doesn’t diminish the warmer aspects of playing it.

Rose emphasized that cozy really is what you make of it. “Some people find farming simulations to be the peak of coziness, while others get stressed out by the fast-moving days and endless to-do lists,” she said. “Really, whatever game makes you feel cozy is a cozy game.”

Developer Infinite Fall’s 2017 game Night in the Woods may have defined a more traditional take on the dark cozy game than the likes of Don’t Starve, however. The setting of Possum Springs and its beloved Maple Street oozes with nostalgia, despite being fictional, offering the kind of comfort that makes the game easy to fall back into even years after you last closed it. But, like Dredge, Night in the Woods has an edge in its themes of mental health struggles, death, and the decay of late-stage capitalism; the contrast of the coziness and darkness makes Night in the Woods into something more as a whole.

Image: Bad Viking/Iceberg Interactive

In the years since Night in the Woods was released, and even before that, the dark cozy genre began to fully emerge. That’s easily seen with the likes of Cozy Grove, the 2020 mix between Don’t Starve and Animal Crossing: New Horizons; Ori and the Blind Forest, a creepy-cute 2015 platformer from Moon Studios; and, perhaps the most fully realized example of the genre, Strange Horticulture.

Last year’s Strange Horticulture settles the player into a tiny plant shop with a purring cat. Playing as a new shopkeep, you must label and learn about plants, then sell them to the people of Undermere, a dark and rainy town at the edge of a forest. The twist is that Strange Horticulture’s plants, as you may have guessed from the title, are quite strange: Some will lure people to their deaths, and others can be used as incense that screams while it burns. It’s a slow game that moves forward with each new customer and the ring of the counter bell. There’s an element of mystery to Strange Horticulture, a curious pull that’s similar to that of Dredge. The way Strange Horticulture’s cozy and dark elements weave themselves into a nest is both comforting and unnerving — it’s a feeling that feels good to sit inside, with no need to unravel it.

“It makes perfect sense to me that this combination works,” Ritchie, the Dredge developer, told Polygon. “But I’ve never really examined why. I think it boils down to this: You need proper contrast to make any experience meaningful. You can’t make something seem loud if it’s never been quiet, and like in art, ‘complementary’ colors are the ones that contrast the most. A cozy game where you know it’s not always cozy makes the comfortable parts even more meaningful.”

Koji Kondo’s legendary compositions have never been bound by the video games

Whether it’s sound effects from Super Mario Bros. and Street Fighter popping up in Charli XCX and Flying Lotus songs, or hip-hop producers flipping samples from Donkey Kong and Chrono Trigger to make beats for Drake and Wiz Khalifa, the influence of video games on modern music is hard to escape. But few series have had as profound of an impact on a generation of musicians as The Legend of Zelda, largely thanks to the musical magic of series composer Koji Kondo.

In 2023, Polygon is embarking on a Zeldathon. Join us on our journey through The Legend of Zelda series, from the original 1986 game to the release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and beyond.

As Nintendo’s in-house composer since 1984, Kondo is responsible for almost all of the mainstay melodies you’d associate with Nintendo, whether that’s the iconic Super Mario Bros. theme or the legendary overture accompanying Link’s adventures through Hyrule. If you grew up playing video games during the ’80s and ’90s, it’s possible you’ve spent more time listening to Koji Kondo than any other band or artist.

“It’s difficult for me to imagine how different my life as a musician would be had it not been for Koji Kondo’s influence,” composer and orchestrator Eric Buchholz tells Polygon.

While Kondo’s melodies mainly act as background music in Super Mario Bros., they serve an actual purpose in The Legend of Zelda, where music answers your biggest problems. Need to change the time of day in Ocarina of Time? Play “The Sun’s Song.” Need to stop an ominous moon from crashing into Clock Town and destroying Termina in Majora’s Mask? Play “The Song of Time.” Need to escape from a nightmare in Link’s Awakening? Collect eight musical instruments and play “Ballad of the Wind Fish.”

Photo: Iam8bit

It’s this connection between music and the Legend of Zelda games that resonated with a generation of young players, such as Buchholz, who went on to become musicians. Buchholz’s introduction to the series came when he was digging through the carts at a local flea market and stumbled upon a copy of Link’s Awakening.

“At that age, I was also developing an interest in music, so you can imagine my great delight to have found a game where the primary objective is to collect various musical instruments to perform a world-ending melody on top of a mountain,” Buchholz says. “Of course, the score for Link’s Awakening was not composed by Koji Kondo, but it did draw inspiration from the musical foundation he laid in A Link to the Past — a legacy that has been drawn from and built upon ever since it was written.”

Like many musicians, Buchholz has played a part in building on Zelda’s musical legacy with his own arrangements, notably his Hero of Time album. It’s what Buchholz describes as his “love letter” to Kondo — an orchestrated retelling of the music from Ocarina of Time, with 21 tracks performed by the Slovak National Symphony Orchestra. It spans a variety of musical themes in the game, and the series writ large, from “Zelda’s Lullaby” to “Gerudo Valley.”

“These themes can now be used to imply deep lore connections across games in a franchise, or simply to invoke feelings of nostalgia for players of previous games,” Buchholz says.

Image: Nintendo via Polygon

Dan Reynolds, lead singer of the pop-rock band Imagine Dragons, grew up playing the Legend of Zelda games. He believes it’s the interactive and repetitive nature of video game music that makes music in the medium so powerful, especially when, as Link, you’re actually playing it. So, it was a dream come true for him and the rest of the band when they were offered the opportunity to join Koji Kondo on stage at The Game Awards in 2014 and play a nostalgic tribute to the games.

“Koji Kondo wrote the soundtrack to our childhood, so when Geoff Keighley suggested the idea of a collaboration, it was an immediate yes for all of us,” Reynolds said over email.

For many people, hearing someone play “The Song of Storms,” “Zelda’s Lullaby,” or “Dragon Roost Island” can transport them back to their childhood. This sense of nostalgia is incredibly powerful, and it’s the same emotion the Dutch DJ Hardwell mines to get people moving at electronic music festivals around the world.

Hardwell managed to get his hands on his favorite Zelda song after he was asked by Nintendo to remix a song of his choice for The Game Awards in 2015. Most of his fans play video games, he says, so they feel an instant connection with the song when he plays it live.

Image: Sweet Valley/Turntable Lab

It helps, of course, that there’s also a huge link between EDM and video game music. Some of the genre’s biggest names have made remixes of Zelda tunes, whether that’s Deadmau5’s “You Need a Ladder” or Zedd’s The Legend of Zelda mix, while others, such as Steve Aoki, partner with gaming companies to make music for trailers and perform virtual concerts in Green Hill Zone.

“It’s like a perfect marriage,” Hardwell explains. “There’s no doubt that [The Legend of Zelda] subtly influenced my early creative process without me even realizing it at the time.”

You only need to listen to the opening seconds of the electronic music duo Sweet Valley’s album Eternal Champ to hear just how much of an influence Ocarina of Time has had on member Joel Williams. The album starts exactly the same way as the game, with the sounds of Epona galloping across Hyrule Field building into a hip-hop beat using samples from the file select theme.

“I played that game religiously as a kid, and every so often, I will revisit it as an adult; the opening horse galloping SFX and strummed chords teleport me back to my childhood every time,” Williams says.

It’s perhaps appropriate that Ocarina of Time has been so widely sampled and remixed. It’s a game largely about nostalgia, where Link uses music — most of which was introduced in earlier Zelda games, such as Link to the Past — to navigate two worlds: the dark one of his adulthood and the innocent surroundings of his youth.

Image: Nintendo via Polygon

If you’ve ever recognized a video game sample in a song before, you’ll appreciate how it can immediately create a sense of affinity and familiarity with an artist, even if you’ve never listened to their music before. As Williams says, there’s something “very cool” about hearing Skull Kid’s menacing laugh from Majora’s Mask in Burial and ASAP Mob tunes, or the flutter of Navi’s wings over persistent Heys in Rejjie Snow and Chance the Rapper tracks.

“It’s music crossing realities,” Tim Summers, a lecturer in music at Royal Holloway University of London and the author of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: A Game Music Companion, says. “It’s adding another level of meaning to what you’re doing and a whole new way of experiencing music within the games.”

Summers points to the music creation in Ocarina of Time (which allows you to improvise songs with the titular instrument) and Majora’s Mask (which does the same with a handful of different instruments) as examples, explaining how not being confined to the specific notes within the game’s melodies provides players with the opportunity to experiment.

“The fact that you can pitch bend and have access to a full chromatic set of notes — there’s no purpose for that,” Summers says. “In fact, it’s all the better because it doesn’t have a purpose. It’s there for you to play with.” And there’s been plenty of playing, from the arrangements of Toto’s “Africa” on Deku pipes to Ocarina renditions of Howard Shore’s “Concerning Hobbits” from The Lord of the Rings.

Outside of the game, arrangements such as Dr. Pez’s epic Ocarina of Time prog-rock concept album, Ro Panuganti’s Bollywood spin on “Gerudo Valley,” and August Burns Red’s metalcore medley of NES-infused blastbeats and breakdowns prove the adaptive and versatile nature of the music in The Legend of Zelda is another huge part of its charm.

Photo: Iam8bit

“It transcends so many different styles,” Dustin Davidson, bass player for August Burns Red, says. “If you look at the evolution of music in the [Zelda] games, you see it go through different instruments, and then you look at how it’s been transcribed, whether it’s as a metal song, acoustic guitar, or piano — there are arrangements for all of these different instruments.”

OverClocked ReMix is a video game music fan community started in 1999 that releases remixes and arrangements of video game music. Its community manager, Larry Oji, says that Zelda series arrangements count for 7.6% of its total catalog spanning 4,200 tracks. Some of the most popular include a “Song of Storms” interpretation by Big Giant Circles and the Legend of Zelda Rabbit Joint Cover that everyone’s mistaken for a System of a Down song at some point. (Thanks, Napster and Limewire!)

“As of today, the two most-arranged themes on the site are from Zelda — the original title theme, and then ‘Zelda’s [Lullaby]’ from Ocarina of Time,” says OverClocked ReMix’s founder, David Lloyd. “Both are featured in multiple Zelda games, so it makes a certain degree of sense that they’d end up appearing more often, but it also speaks to the music’s enduring popularity.”

It’s impossible to pin the infectious appeal and success of Koji Kondo’s music in The Legend of Zelda to a single factor. This music means so much to so many people, who have interpreted it and experienced it in so many different ways.

To some, such as Davidson, the ongoing appeal of Zelda’s music is that it will always remind them of family. “It played such a big role in my upbringing because it was a way to bond with my mother and my brother. That’s why I ended up getting Zelda tattoos.”

To others, such as Hero of Time composer Buchholz, it laid the foundations of a successful career in music.

“It’s mind-blowing to think about all the different directions my life could have gone if it weren’t for the influence Kondo’s music had on me growing up.”

MMOs were fertile grounds for exploitation along both signals intelligence and human intelligence lines

It sounds like the plot of a Bush-era young-adult spy thriller: as millions of players raided their way through Azeroth from 2006 to at least 2013, Western intelligence agencies like the NSA and the British Government Communications Headquarters were working out ways to surveil and build informant networks to keep tabs on suspected Islamic extremists in World of Warcraft.

WoW wasn’t the NSA’s only target: Together with GCHQ, the NSA also turned its eye toward social MMO Second Life, Microsoft’s original Xbox Live chat service, and other popular “Games and Virtual Environments.”

Polygon is diving into the world of espionage throughout fiction and pop culture history with Deep Cover, a two-week special issue covering all sorts of spy stories and gadgets.

We know this today because of former NSA contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden, who worked with newspapers The Guardian and The New York Times, as well as investigative nonprofit ProPublica, to release a trove of classified documents from the agency in 2013.

According to the leaked documents, MMOs were fertile grounds for exploitation along both signals intelligence and human intelligence lines. In one such document, GCHQ claimed that it had found clear evidence of suspected terrorists logging into WoW and Second Life, correlating usernames and IP addresses to targets, and according to the joint news report, the British spy agency had even used an informant in Second Life to bust an online crime ring.

At the time, the story was a bombshell, prompting companies like Linden Lab, the maker of Second Life, and Blizzard, the developer of World of Warcraft, to deny that any government surveillance was happening with their knowledge.

Looking back on this story almost a decade later, three questions remained unclear: How did the NSA do it? Why did it care? And what did it accomplish?

Eyes in the sky

The story of NSA analysts snooping on Alliance guild meetings begins not with World of Warcraft or even video games at large, but instead — as many stories of international espionage do — with the Cold War.

After World War II, the United States entered into an agreement with the U.K. and commonwealth countries Canada, Aotearoa, and Australia, to automatically share all SIGINT data the constituent nations collected with each other. The UKUSA Agreement, colloquially known as the “Five Eyes,” established a network of listening posts at various points around the world, all pointed in the Soviet Union’s direction.

As nations began deploying satellites and computer networks emerged, these listening posts became digital information collection centers. One of the many programs created during this period of technological shift was called “Echelon,” and its explicit goal was to monitor satellite communications networks.

Thanks to the documents Snowden leaked, we have at least one idea of how Echelon was used. By 2006, at the height of the war on terrorism, Echelon was collecting large quantities of data from around the world every day. Some of the data being scooped up came from WoW, namely “country and time zone data, local IP addresses and realm server addresses,” according to the leaked documents linked above. GCHQ and the NSA trained an open-source packet sniffer called SNORT to separate that data from the rest of the information pile they pulled in. This method reportedly allowed the agencies to identify “accounts, characters, and guilds related to Islamic Extremist Groups, Nuclear Proliferation and Arms Dealing,” according to a particular leaked NSA document titled “Topic: Exploiting Terrorist Use of Games & Virtual Environments.”

In this document, released in 2007, the NSA recommended broader interagency cooperation. By the next year, the office of director of national intelligence Mike McConnell would be sending Congress a brief 15-page report of its own detailing data mining projects to be carried out by ODNI’s research division, IARPA. One of these projects, Project Reynard, aimed “to identify the emerging social, behavioral and cultural norms in virtual worlds and gaming environments” and “apply the lessons learned to determine the feasibility of automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world.”

This research project lasted from 2009 to 2012 and included work from Stanford University, Lockheed Martin, and the Palo Alto Research Center. According to the ProPublica report on the Snowden leak, researchers involved with the Reynard Project were asked not to speculate on how their research would be used.

Shadows in the dark

Spying on online games intuitively seems kind of silly. For most players, the virtual worlds they visit in their downtime or as a hobby are escapes from the pressures of reality, not doorways through which that reality can seep in. The idea that terrorists would be using those spaces to recruit, propagandize, and plan real-world attacks doesn’t inherently make a lot of sense, even in a “purely” social sim like Second Life. As King’s College cybersecurity researcher Timothy Stevens notes in his 2015 paper “Security and surveillance in virtual worlds: Who is watching the warlocks and why,” contemporary news reporting on so-called terrorism in online games along these lines was met with “hostility and derision from the online commentariat.”

“This scepticism was well founded: establishing direct connections between acts of ‘virtual’ vandalism and actual terrorism was as absurd as it was unsubstantiated,” he wrote. “Why would a jihadist group form a recognisable entity in a quasi-public space to wage an insurgency against the ‘government’ of Second Life, let alone to pursue more nefarious ends? What was the basis for ‘expert’ claims that terrorists were using virtual worlds for training and recruitment?”

In the mid-2000s the United States and its allies — including the U.K. and some of its commonwealth states — were chest-deep into waging the war on terrorism and everything that entailed. For the U.K.’s part, in 2005 suicide bombers carried out a coordinated attack on London’s transit system, killing over 50 people and injuring hundreds more on the London Underground and bus system. Even if all there had been was a vague rumor that suspected terrorists were using these games and virtual spaces to organize, GCHQ, to say nothing of the NSA, was likely to check it out.

According to Stevens, the absurdity is the point. Spy agencies know that suspected extremists operating online are both tech-savvy and aware of good operational security practices. But games, places where nothing is inherently supposed to be taken seriously except maybe in the context of the in-world lore and story, are also places where one might inherently let their guard down. According to one of the Snowden documents linked above, NSA analysts wrote, “These applications and their servers however, are trusted by their users and makes an connection [sic] to another computer on the Internet, which can then be exploited.”

In short: While many see MMOs as sites separate from their daily lives, where they play and fight and occasionally get rewarded for their efforts with treasure, the intelligence community saw (and potentially still sees) MMOs themselves as the treasure, to be continuously plundered for fresh data on potential targets. The IC doesn’t see the “magic circle” of Azeroth or Eorzea or Linden World as a barrier, but rather, as a veil from the public’s critical gaze.

While the most damning revelations from the Snowden leaks — like the fact that Microsoft had been a participant in the PRISM program and GCHQ had considered spying on people through their Kinects — caused a long-term uproar, the forays into direct online game surveillance were taken less seriously, like in this clip of then-Daily Show host Jon Stewart making fun of the government for spying in WoW. Even as follow-up reports came out, like one detailing possible NSA/GCHQ surveillance in Angry Birds, it seemed like public outcry over this died as quickly as it erupted.

Whispers in the crowd

Image: Blizzard Entertainment

While civil libertarians might balk at such flagrant exploitation of a public space and personal data, according to Stevens many members of the intelligence community fall into a “realist” position — where the “Internet’s basic characteristics” are “dangerously inimical to state interests” and “the global village becomes a virtual battlespace” — and thus are more likely to look past those issues, provided said exploitation produces results.

Did the programs get results, or was it a “virtual waste of time,” as one NBC headline called it in 2013?

We asked the NSA and GCHQ for comment, as well as various companies who publish MMOs and virtual world games. Six companies got back to us with a variation of Blizzard’s own statement to ProPublica and company from 2013: “We are unaware of any surveillance taking place. [...] If it was, it would have been done without our knowledge or permission.” One company, Square Enix, did not respond to our request for comment.

While no new documentation has come to light concerning attempts by spy agencies to snoop on games, researchers like Stevens believe surveillance has continued.

“We can be certain that all virtual environments, of which MMOs are a small subset, will be subject to increased surveillance and monitoring in the name of security, particularly for the purposes of counterterrorism and domestic counter-subversion,” he wrote. “However MMOs evolve they are unlikely to be ignored by an intelligence community armed with research funds and powerful ‘big data’ analytics.”

What is also certain is that there is now a much larger “attack surface” for intelligence agencies to go after: more network-connected devices, more online games, bigger, more diverse audiences. If MMOs were enticing to spy agencies in the mid-2000s, they certainly haven’t become less so in 2023. And as Ben Egliston wrote at Wired in 2022, it’s never been easier for companies to collect mountains of player data independent of any government, down to special tools in the game engines themselves.

Watchers in the night

So what did happen in the decade between the Snowden leaks and today? In short: The world changed. While most conventional war still takes place along battle lines drawn by former Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump, online the overriding threat has shifted away from a focus on foreign terrorism and toward domestic extremism. Researchers like Alex Newhouse, deputy director of the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at Middlebury, have been studying right-wing accelerationist networks as they extend to platforms like Roblox.

“The overall environment that we’re observing in the threat landscape is that there are a number of users who are using the social features of Roblox to basically create and propagandize elements that are associated with accelerationist violence,” he tells Polygon. He cites an example of a Roblox group taking on the name of a 1970s-era white power paramilitary organization, as well as groups affiliated with Patriot Front and Atomwaffen Division.

“One of the surprising aspects was just how robust all of these networks are; they’re pretty big,” Newhouse says. “They have a lot of propaganda built for the Roblox platform. They’re really creatively using the different features of Roblox to do certain things. And the content moderation evasion tactics are really, really well developed.” In response, Newhouse says, Roblox has invested heavily in its trust and safety moderation teams.

Roblox is a member of several tech industry organizations, like Tech Against Terrorism, the Christchurch Call, and the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, according to the company’s vice president of public affairs, Remy Malan. “We maintain a number of dialogues with people who study and track trends, and this helps us be informed on what’s happening in the real world,” Malan tells Polygon. “Because our view is if things are happening in the real world, then we need to be vigilant about people trying to bring those things onto Roblox itself.”

Additionally, Malan says the company invests resources into app moderation, chat filtering, and its reporting system, as well as regular training for the trust and safety team on new trends to be on the lookout for.

A spokesman for VRChat mentioned a similar system in place for its virtual world in an emailed statement, where a trust and safety team “uses a number of detection methods and investigative tools (both proactive and reactive) to locate and — when appropriate — remove extremist content from the service.”

And in a similar vein, a spokesman for Linden Lab, creator of Second Life, wrote: “Privacy and security are cornerstone values of Second Life. Over the past decade, we’ve enhanced our account security posture in numerous ways to prioritize the safety of our residents. Those enhancements include establishing increased identity verifications methods (including ‘Know Your Client’ procedures to better verify individuals during financial transactions), implementing enhanced identity verification methods, making improvements to our in-house tools to faster expose account threats, monitoring new behavior markers, using artificial intelligence to determine potential threats in real-time and implementing MFA (multi-factor authentication) across all accounts.”

And if the government comes knocking? Roblox VP Malan says, “If we get a subpoena request or other legal notice, then we’ll look at ‘can we comply with that,’ but we don’t do anything different than any other private entity would do.”

Ghosts in the machine

Image: Roblox Corporation

There’s something jarring, knowing that for at least a few years (and probably still to this day), the United States and the U.K. turned the eye of their surveillance apparatus onto the activity of random gamers; that money was spent and grants were doled out for research on the ways gamers interacted with each other and how they conceived of themselves in virtual space, which was then likely used to improve intelligence analysis on those games for that apparatus.

Playing online games often comes with a set of unconscious assumptions on the player’s part. One such assumption is that there is an inviolable “magic circle” where the “real” world can’t be permitted to penetrate, lest the illusion of the game be broken. We hear this the most when someone demands that critics and developers “keep politics out of my games!” Building on that assumption is one where there is an “imagined community” of gamers that transcends national allegiances and circumvents sociocultural problems like racism and colonialism — that is to say, while inside the magic circle, all players are unified by whatever goal the game has set for them.

And maybe most fundamentally, there’s the pervasive techno-libertarian notion that anything online — including and maybe especially games — is by necessity a site of unmitigated individual freedom, especially from government interference. Anything that rubs against those assumptions creates a kind of cognitive dissonance, where such violation of the game space is simply too ridiculous to be possible.

At the same time, it seems as though surveillance and data collection, by corporations as well as governments, has become thoroughly normalized. We have become used to the idea that someone, somewhere has been snooping around in our digital wake, to the point where a common joke on social media involves the teller’s personal FBI or NSA agent in the punchline. Our ironic reaction to this “panopticism,” as Michel Foucault put it, doesn’t make us immune to its effects.

“What [the NSA] will argue is that they don’t use this for nefarious purposes against American citizens; in some ways that’s true,” Edward Snowden said in an interview with Last Week Tonight’s John Oliver one year after the NSA leaks. “But the real problem is that they’re using these capabilities to make us vulnerable to them, and then saying, ‘While I have a gun pointed at your head, I’m not going to pull the trigger. Trust me.’”

We would do well not to forget the gun, much less the fingers on the trigger.

A wave of online interest and fan creations has given the watch a new life

For many, From Russia With Love is the ideal James Bond experience. It’s got the early-1960s vibes that the franchise thrived in, and it catches Sean Connery at perhaps his highest level of comfort with the character before he began a slow dip into aloof boredom. Its villains are a wonderful gaggle of terrorist weirdos and its globe-trotting antics feel pushed by a narrative instead of becoming a vaguely Imperialist travel ad. It wouldn’t take long for the Bond series to escalate its fantastical elements, but in From Russia with Love, they feel fairly reined in, with the most outlandish thing perhaps being henchman Red Grant’s ability to take a fistful of brass knuckles to the gut and not even flinch.

And it’s with Red Grant that Bond has the best fight scene of the series to date. In the close quarters of a room on a train car, Grant (played with creepy intensity by Robert Shaw) and Bond throw down. The battle apparently took three weeks to film with Connery and Shaw doing most of the stunt work themselves. It rides the line between being highly stylized (cinematographer Ted Moore makes brilliant use of the shadows of the train car contrasting with the lights passing by the window) and brutal, and in the end, Bond prevails by strangling Grant to death with his garrote wire watch — a gadget that has taken on a life of its own in the years since, leading to DIY creations and a lingering cultural status.

Polygon is diving into the world of espionage throughout fiction and pop culture history with Deep Cover, a two-week special issue covering all sorts of spy stories and gadgets.

It’s a gadget that, like the movie, feels pretty grounded, especially in comparison to what’s to come in the franchise. According to Fangoria editor-in-chief and James Bond superfan Phil Nobile Jr., it’s that borderline tangible relationship with reality that makes it memorable. “A good Bond gadget is a bit of a moving target (since Bond’s world is generally set ‘five minutes from now,’ and real-life tech is frequently catching up to the movies), and a good gadget has to thread the needle of being both fantastical and theoretically possible,” he wrote to Polygon.

The garrote wire watch has gone beyond being just a memorable Bond gadget and into another realm of cultural consciousness. It’s also appeared in films like Brian De Palma’s Blow Out and was even wielded by former President George Bush in The Simpsons, but its greatest legacy has been perhaps that people don’t just wonder if it could be real, but if it has been real already. There are homemade ones with questionable efficacy and a cursory Google search will lead you to forum threads of people inquiring about them: “Was this ever really a thing?” “Where can I buy a piano wire watch?” “Is/was garrote wire actually used?” A few pose ethical concerns and perhaps legal ones that... won’t be shared here.

There are few weapons in the wide arsenal of 007 and his villains that attain this level of materiality. Especially when you consider where the series went from there, incorporating all manner of vehicles and secret weapons to dazzle audiences. It’s much more realistic to consider what would go into the existence of a garrote wire watch than, for example, the invisible car in Die Another Day.

Image: Eon Productions

So wondering if a James Bond gadget has existed isn’t totally unfounded. The series’ creator, Ian Fleming, worked for Britain’s Naval Intelligence Division during World War II, and the real-life espionage knowledge that he obtained there made for gripping fiction when filtered through the hypermasculinity and anything-goes adventures of Bond. And in the early days of the 007 films, much of the crew had experienced life during World War II and the spy-ready atmosphere of the ensuing Cold War.

Director Terence Young had been a tank commander. Cinematographer Ted Moore and art director Syd Cain served in the Royal Air Force. Screenwriter Richard Maibaum had been a captain in the Signal Corps. From Russia With Love, on a very formative level, was associated with men who had a real-life connection to the World War II technology that Fleming drew his inspiration from. Even the character Bond himself is hinted to have served in World War II, an aspect that ages him a bit, and thus helps provide some generational conflict between Bond and Grant, with the latter constantly riling the spy with accusations of “old man.”

But how much factual basis did a garrote wire watch actually have? Alexis Albion, curator at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., recognizes that the garrote by itself is a mainstay of military combat. “Garrotes have been around for centuries,” Albion says. “But where we really see examples of this in relation to the movie is in World War II. There was a special group that was created by Winston Churchill called Special Operations Executive, as he wanted to ‘set Europe ablaze’ by sending operatives behind enemy lines. They would’ve done covert operations and sabotage and anybody who would’ve been trained there would’ve used a garrote.”

However, concealing a garrote within a watch seems to be a fictional step. “I have never seen anything where it was a garrote concealed within a watch,” Albion says. “I’ve never seen that personally.” That doesn’t mean that a watch hasn’t been used for espionage, though. “We’ve got a number of watches used for concealment purposes, but not as a weapon,” Albion says. “Mostly as surveillance of some kind, like we’ve got watch cameras and audio devices.”

That also doesn’t mean that a garrote hasn’t been used as a concealed weapon before. In fact, one notable example finds it to be a hidden part of a tool that contains a number of uses. “It was called a Peskett and it was a kind of multipurpose weapon used for close combat. It has three ways of using it as an offensive weapon,” Albion says. “There’s just a dagger. And then on one end, there’s a sort of a large, heavy ball that could be used to bludgeon someone. And the garrote wire was wound up inside the ball and could be pulled out of it.”

By combining the watch, a common but fairly technical device, with a garrote wire, which is about as low-tech as one can get and extremely deadly, we end up with a pop culture weapon that doesn’t just represent From Russia With Love but why we enjoy James Bond in the first place. As Albion says, we like him because we can identify with a human character rather than “something that’s too technology-based.” It’s attainable even if the reality of being a spy is far beyond the reach of most of us. “That’s sort of the appeal of the spy in general, which is the sense that we all have that ordinary exterior, but underneath we could be secretive,” she says.

In short, the garrote wire watch was the perfect finish to the brawl between Grant and Bond. “The train sequence is undeniably epic, and 60 years later feels almost punk rock in its execution,” Nobile says about the iconic fight at the end of From Russia With Love. “The ugly, dirty grappling that mainstream audiences had never seen before — it’s all brutal and unexpected. The series has been trying to top this scene for decades, and it never has.”

So perhaps the garrote wire watch owes its fascination not just to the fact that it seems almost too simple to not be real, but that the fistfight it followed has a lot of the touches of a real-life encounter. It begins the film as a cool new gadget, but its use in the climax of combat melds it with the very visceral ugliness and realistic scrambling that the scene captures. Unlike many Bond devices to follow, it becomes a part of the scene rather than a tool of escapism. It finds the human element, which, in a series that features jetpacks, explosive pens, and submarine cars, continues to stand out.

Crafty ‘SNET’ tech opened the door for Game of Thrones and World of Warcraft

For many years in Cuba, getting online to watch a show or to download the latest game meant using tools and methods reminiscent of spycraft and espionage. It went a bit like this: An information broker known as a paquetero sits in his cramped, street-facing office, surrounded by monolithic PC towers, kept cool by a couple of overworked desk fans. He looks up as the PC in front of him pings, alerting him that a 1 TB data file called a paquete has finished downloading. He pops a thumb drive into the PC’s USB slot and begins copying over the paquete’s contents. In a desk drawer, dozens of dozens more hard drives sit, waiting to be formatted, filled with the paquete’s data and doled out.

Just as the copy completes, the office door opens and a middle-aged woman walks in, a shopping bag full of the day’s groceries slung over one shoulder. The paquetero barely glances up as he snatches the freshly copied thumb drive and hands it over to the woman, who exchanges it for a small bundle of bills. The exchange is wordless, perfunctory. The woman hefts her bag slightly higher on her shoulder before turning and walking out into the blinding sunlight and sounds of the street. Later, maybe after dinner, she uploads the paquete to her pillar, the central node of her local network. From a Wi-Fi transponder strapped to a pole 15 feet above the roof of her local network administrator, the paquete unspools the lengthy list of contents out into the neighborhood, its terabyte of pure data floating invisibly out, ready to be plucked.

Polygon is diving into the world of espionage throughout fiction and pop culture history with Deep Cover, a two-week special issue covering all sorts of spy stories and gadgets.

Somewhere within that invisible net, perhaps in an apartment a few blocks away, a teenager excuses himself from the dinner table and makes his way into his bedroom. There, he hops down in front of his PC and logs onto a TeamSpeak chatroom buzzing with activity. The freshly uploaded paquete sits at the top of the list, and he opens it, scrolling down a few pages until he finds something that interests him and sets it to download.

This process may have all the trappings of the illicit side of the internet, and feel like a peek into its dark underbelly, where men in dark suits and slick haircuts exchange precious secrets stolen from corporations or the government. But the paquete contains nothing more or less than a curated snapshot of the internet. It’s news websites, photo journals, games, movies, and the latest TV series from around the world. The young man browsing its contents has as much likelihood of grabbing an episode of Game of Thrones as downloading the latest Taylor Swift album or that year’s FIFA. Though the mode of accessing the information may exist through a framework of murky legality, hacked-together hardware, and mysterious actors, this isn’t a spy story, or not the typical one. Rather, it’s a story about access, by whatever inventive means necessary.

SNET, short for “Street Network,” was a phenomenon in Cuba that lasted from the early 2000s to 2019, when the Cuban government outlawed and replaced most of the infrastructure in favor of its own. SNET originated in Havana, and soon more Cuban cities including Matanzas and Pinar del Río had their own massive mesh networks, modeled on Havana’s original SNET.

Connecting to the internet has become easier and more affordable in Cuba, but in the first few years of the millennium it was an irregular and inconsistent venture. Web searches would as soon return 404s as they would provide useful results. Online gaming was a non-starter and there was not even a question of streaming the TV shows and movies taken for granted by the rest of the world.

In spite of this, people still found ways to do things on computers, especially when it came to things like video games. In an unreleased interview for the 2020 documentary “The Street Network,” one SNET user, Ander, noted: “Even though this country has been kind of cut off from general population, from general culture, it’s got a very, very — I would say, huge gaming community. Everyone, I mean, everyone waits for the E3 conferences and they just download them or get them on the [paquete] because they want to see what’s coming, you know? They always want to keep updated.”

[Ed. note: Emile Bokaer, one of the co-authors of this story, directed The Street Network.]

Friends often brought their computers to the same house and played games together. Sometimes these LAN parties would even burst from the bounds of one apartment and, through ethernet cords strung between windows and over air shafts, extend out into neighboring homes. But these parties, for the most part, were forced to remain local, shut off from the outside world thanks to the United States’ blockade and Cuba’s resultant limited access.

Photo: Tijana Petrovic/Dogpatch Films

SNET was born out of this craving for access and connection, for what had previously been denied. It bypassed government restrictions, not out of some clandestine effort to steal secrets or access forbidden information, but to gain the kind of access denied to them by normal means. “I’m proud of SNET because it’s a true Cuban innovation,” Cuban economist Ricardo Torres proclaimed in The Street Network. “Our system is very much top-down, and this is essentially the opposite: This is a bottom-up way of doing something that is of interest to the people.”

Getting access to the network was not illegal, though anyone using it had to be cautious about their behavior so as not to violate local laws or upset the authorities. As such, SNET had to operate under the radar, invisible to most unless you knew precisely which threads to pluck, which people to ask about. The key to getting access to SNET was in finding your local administrator, an SNET user who looked over a local chunk of the network, someone who handed out login privileges — and revoked them for users who broke one of the network’s rules. These administrators might have also helped you figure out what kind of hardware you needed to get online, might have even organized a local pool so that others could help contribute funding to get you online. The admin was also responsible for maintaining the rules of SNET, which were robust and well enforced.

SNET may have carried the promise of personal liberation and free access to information, but in reality, it was a tightly controlled system with a big list of bannable offenses. There were some common-sense measures in order to keep the network from getting overburdened and bottlenecked: You were only allowed to download files at certain hours of the night and early mornings, for example. According to Ander: “You can play from morning to 2 a.m., but from 2 a.m. till morning it’s downloading time. And you’re not allowed to download during playing time, or you’ll get banned. We’ve gotten banned a few times because we were downloading a movie or show that we loved, and we forgot to pause the copy. At first it’s not much, maybe 45 minutes or so — just so you don’t do it again.”

Violating the download schedule was only considered a “minor offense.” The network’s most stringent rules were reserved not for its practical side, but its political one. On SNET, you were not allowed to talk about politics of any kind. On a positive note, you were also not allowed to be openly racist, homophobic, sexist, or express any other sort of bigoted view. Transgressing any of these rules was quickly and severely punished: banishment from SNET’s walled garden, with the only recourse being to beg the admin to be let back in.

All this self-policing was there due to the network’s liminal legal state. There was an unspoken understanding that SNET was allowed to run largely at the government’s discretion. The government was aware of everything that happened on SNET, the files in its directories, the chatter in its forums, the timelines of its ersatz social networks. Everyone on SNET operated with the understanding that they could be under surveillance at any time. Everyone acted like a spy with an obvious and ever present tail. As a result, with the inescapable understanding that everything you did was happening out in plain sight, users all had to act the part of the model citizen, had to always be on their best behavior, without a rebellious bone in their body. It was a tense arrangement, a form of freedom without truly being free. SNET was a glimpse of access from under a powerful, ever-watchful eye. The behavior of SNET users may have been technically clandestine, underground and under the table, but it was at the same time very public, hypervisible, with a sanctioned structure, carefully protected and kept in line by its vigilant administrators.

Photo: Tijana Petrovic/Dogpatch Films

In 2019, the Cuban government passed an act that made the long-range transmitters that allowed SNET to connect its various clusters across the island illegal. Without any ability to connect over long distances, the network was crippled, diminished down to its cantonized local clusters. The government claimed that SNET’s antennas would interfere with its own newly built infrastructure, meant to improve digital connectivity to the island. And, in the past few years, getting online through the government’s public service provider has become far easier and more reliable.

But for many of SNET’s original users, the network meant something more than that basic need to be online. SNET represented a collective effort to find connection and to gain access to more than what they had originally been dealt. Describing the experience of playing multiplayer games for the first time, Ander said: “It was something that was completely new, that was mind-blowing, sharing that experience, not just playing a game where you’re the hero and you’re just doing it on your own. It’s like you actually need people to help you win and that is really interesting and helps you connect with people in a different way.”

For most outside of Cuba, the internet has, for many years, been taken for granted. It does not hold the status of a rare treasure, a human right that had to be fought for, downloaded illicitly and snatched in bits and pieces, like crumbs fallen from an overladen table. Nowadays, the internet is often looked at skeptically, as something more full of bad than good, a cacophony of misinformation, propaganda, and battles between obnoxious, hyper-privileged power brokers. Particularly for those with enough privilege to work remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic, the internet began to feel something like a cage, trapping us within doomy timelines and tiny Zoom windows.

SNET showed that this doesn’t have to be the only way. SNET was a triumph of collective action. It represented a need for access, a need so great that people took action on their own. They pooled their funds, strung up wiring, and fastened antennas to their roofs. Once online, they persevered despite their vulnerable legal status and being under heavy surveillance. So much was sacrificed just so they could gain access to the soccer scores of their favorite teams, the latest episodes of their favorite shows, and the newest installments of their favorite video games, like World of Warcraft, called “El WOW” by its devoted Cuban players. All this to be able to partake in the artistic and creative output of the rest of the world — and to partake in what was happening within Cuba’s borders as well.

SNET served, in its structure of connected clusters and data transmitting pillars, as something that allowed Cubans to connect with one another. As Idania del Río, founder of the Cuban fashion brand Clandestina, put it in The Street Network, “With increased internet access — beyond rum, tobacco, ‘la mulatta,’ son and salsa music, baseball, all of which is great… We’re getting to know more what Cuba really is, through its people.”

Alias, Kim Possible, Perfect Dark, and others all landed on a similar concept around the same time — we dig into how that came about

In the early to mid-2000s, the coolest main character was a female spy. TV brought Alias’ Sydney Bristow to young adults and Kim Possible to kids. Charlie’s Angels was rebooted for film. And in games, Joanna Dark became the heroine of Perfect Dark, the spiritual successor to GoldenEye 007. The era was swimming in female James Bonds. Even Die Another Day got in on the trend, introducing Halle Berry as Jinx, Bond’s NSA counterpart.

The genre was open for reimagining, at a time when representations of women on screen were moving away from damsels in distress and into action heroines and protagonists. We recently spoke with some of the key figures involved to find out more about how the trend came about, and how its legacy has continued.

Polygon is diving into the world of espionage throughout fiction and pop culture history with Deep Cover, a two-week special issue covering all sorts of spy stories and gadgets.

Jeff Pinkner, writer and executive producer on Alias, credits the moment the show was in more than anything else. Although he says the Alias writing team didn’t set out to make a show about female empowerment, he points to a media shift happening after the male-centric spy stories of the ’60s and ’70s.

“It was overdue,” says Kim Possible co-creator Robert Schooley. With a few decades of distance from the peak of Cold War-era espionage media, the team was keen to subvert their old tropes. The over-the-top, fantastical villain schemes, like shark tanks and mountain lairs, could stay, but Kim, as a fresh face for a new generation, wouldn’t be shy about saying how played out they were.

“We looked at the spy and hero characters [we had] when we were growing up and it was the ‘Jims,’” says Schooley. In other words, alongside James Bond, Star Trek’s James T. Kirk and The Wild Wild West’s Jim West were the blueprint. Schooley and co-creator Mark McCorkle were also tasked with creating a series for the Disney Channel, whose audience was primarily female. (The show’s blend of action and comedy ultimately made it popular among boys as well, boosting the Disney Channel’s overall male audience.)

“[Our daughters] didn’t have that kind of character where the action part is ludicrously easy for her,” says Schooley. In gender-swapping the classic hero, they wanted to create a girl who could do anything, but to keep it grounded away from supernatural abilities. “The spy genre dovetailed nicely,” says McCorkle.

In particular, the action-oriented, espionage-in-name-only antics of James Bond became the basis for many of these early-2000s properties. Kim Possible’s cartoon nature and younger target audience allowed it to be more comedic, but Pinkner says Alias, too, avoided emulating real spycraft. It was “meant to take place 3 feet off the ground,” he says.

As for why this Bond-inspired revival included so many women, the 2000s were an era when the landscape was beginning to open up beyond Bond girls or femme fatales. As McCorkle puts it: “The world was just sort of ready for female characters that could kick butt.”

Both Pinkner and Schooley bring up Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which premiered in 1997 and had a huge influence on pop culture in multiple ways. A major one was the wave of evil-fighting heroines that followed in Buffy’s wake. The show was a direct influence on Kim Possible, according to Schooley, while Pinkner says it opened the door by directly being about “female empowerment.” Although Buffy may not have been a spy herself, the path was paved for the action-oriented female agent.

Buffy was also notable for its grounding in its heroine’s emotional life, and there was a similar move toward focusing on these spies’ interiority. With Kim Possible and Alias, the high school and college settings respectively allowed for an exploration of the spies’ personal lives. In Kim Possible it also played into the subversion of the earlier spy media. Everyone at Kim’s school knew if she had disarmed a nuclear bomb over the weekend — she didn’t need to keep it a secret, but equally, it wasn’t going to earn her any social cred. “They treat it as no big deal,” says McCorkle.

On the other hand, Sydney’s double life in Alias and the connections between her family and her job allowed for a nuanced exploration of her character. “I’m shockingly, incredibly capable, and valuable, and important,” says Pinkner, summarising the character’s arc, “[but] I’m a person who’s not in control of my own life.” Digging into that tension gave Alias its emotional center.

In games, too, there was the idea of giving female heroines more complexity. In an interview with Eurogamer, Perfect Dark animator Brett Jones said the team was trying to create a less “two dimensional” Lara Croft. And it circles back to the reimagining of James Bond — Rare’s earlier game, GoldenEye 007, didn’t exactly need to give Bond much emotional depth.

Female spies continued to pop up after the mid-2000s and may even be going through a resurgence in film now, thanks to the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s fleshing out of Black Widow in the past few years, along with stand-alone movies like Atomic Blonde and Red Sparrow. But as Pinkner points out, Alias was “notable” at the time for its female lead — something that is now “just part of the landscape, which is as it should be.”

The sudden concentration of female spy characters was something of a “lightning-in-a-bottle” moment, says McCorkle. “Sometimes storytellers have that idea that happens to scratch an itch that the audience didn’t know was there. […] For those of us who benefited from [the trend], you can only call it a happy accident.”