Rick and Morty, 100 minus 90 years, forever and forever

It’s been 10 years since Rick and Morty premiered on Adult Swim, and in that time it’s grown to reshape all of pop culture in its image through its idiosyncratic blend of dark humor, irreverent creativity, and well-written characters. Co-created by Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon, the animated sci-fi sitcom about the multidimensional misadventures of an alcoholic mad scientist and his hapless adolescent grandson has become one of the most important animated shows since The Simpsons in its heyday.

After nearly 70 episodes, the influence of Rick and Morty’s humor and writing on video games, movies, and TV feels too vast to chart. Hell, there’s even a Rick and Morty anime spinoff on the horizon. But perhaps the place we can feel the reach of Rick and Morty most clearly is its measurable impact on yet another pop culture juggernaut: the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Of all the trends in popular culture that can be accredited to Rick and Morty’s success, none are more apparent than the popularization of its central conceit: the multiverse. Similar to how the Wachowskis’ The Matrix helped to popularize simulation theory, the concept of a hypothetical set of infinitely variable universes formed the crux of Rick and Morty’s earliest adventures and helped to elevate the show from its origins as a crass parody of Back to the Future.

Image: Adult Swim

“We definitely don’t start with the multiverse anymore,” Harmon told Polygon in an interview about the writing process behind Rick and Morty season 7. “There was a peak there where it became such a fun thing that was irresistible to writers old and new, where a lot of [Rick and Morty] pitches would start with, ‘Let’s say there’s a blank Rick and he’s having a blank Rick party and blank Rick shows up.’ Marvel’s dug into this, as well they should, because the comic books invented this stuff; we just lifted it from that and Gwyneth Paltrow in Sliding Doors.”

While Harmon is correct in attributing the popular origin of the multiverse as a storytelling device to the likes of Marvel and DC Comics, Rick and Morty is responsible for introducing the term into the broader lexicon of popular culture, and for it becoming the new backbone of the MCU.

When Rick and Morty premiered in 2013, Marvel Studios was just bouncing back from the first “phase” of the Marvel Cinematic Universe with the release of The Avengers. In 2019, just months after the release of Avengers: Endgame, the capstone to the MCU’s decade-spanning storyline known as the Infinity Saga, Rick and Morty debuted its fourth season, the first to premiere following the show’s highly publicized 70-episode renewal order from Adult Swim. Both franchises were major cultural touchstones in their own right, but with the MCU’s largest crossover event behind it, Marvel Studios would find the future of the series in Rick and Morty, both in concept (that of the multiverse) and through its stable of writers.

Image: Adult Swim

In the decade since Rick and Morty has been on the air, several alumni from the series’ writing staff have been recruited to work on multiple TV shows and movies within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and even spearheaded the next major era in the franchise dubbed, you guessed it, the Multiverse Saga.

Jessica Gao, the writer behind the Primetime Emmy Award-winning episode “Pickle Rick,” went on to become the showrunner and creator of Marvel streaming miniseries She-Hulk: Attorney at Law; Jeff Loveness, the co-writer of the the Primetime Emmy Award-winning “The Vat of Acid Episode,” served as the writer for 2023’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania; and Michael Waldron, who worked as a writer on the fourth season of Rick and Morty, has since gone on to create the Marvel streaming series Loki and write the script for 2022’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and he is currently tapped to serve as the writer for 2026’s Avengers: The Kang Dynasty and 2027’s Avengers: Secret Wars. The connections between the popularity of Rick and Morty and ubiquity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe go back even further than that, though, with none other than series co-creator Dan Harmon having contributed uncredited script analysis and dialogue work during the production of 2016’s Doctor Strange.

Image: Adult Swim

Rick and Morty’s impact on culture can be felt far beyond the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Writers from the show have gone on to write for shows like Invincible and Star Trek: Lower Decks and movies like Renfield. Unfortunately, the show’s co-creator, Justin Roiland, who was dismissed from the show earlier this year following allegations of domestic violence, is perhaps the alumnus that has left the biggest impression on pop culture so far. Along with providing the iconic voices for the show’s lead characters for its first six seasons, he also co-created Solar Opposites, provided voices for video games, and even helped make a few games himself. Outside of movies and TV, the series even has a mountain of promotional tie-ins with brands ranging from Pringles and Wendy’s and games like Death Stranding and God of War Ragnarök. And of course, who could forget the infamous McDonald’s Szechuan sauce debacle of 2017?

Despite this long list, that’s only scratching the surface of Rick and Morty’s broader impact. to actually encapsulate the entirety of how Rick and Morty has extended beyond its own series to gain a foothold in nearly every part of mainstream media would be daunting and fill a book. But the fact that it now has the biggest movie franchise of all time twisted around its finger seems like a good start.

But what’s most impressive about the series might be that, 10 years into its run, it refuses to get stuck in its own groove. As Harmon said, while the rest of the world is just catching up to multiverses, Rick and Morty is on to something new, figuring out how best to shape the future of its own universe and, in doing so, potentially another decade of pop culture along with it.

Party Limit Begone is exactly how it sounds

Choosing your party before venturing forth is a fundamental aspect of playing an RPG, but that doesn’t make picking favorites any less excruciating in Baldur’s Gate 3. What if you like more characters than the game lets you play with? What if you want to see what everyone has to say? What if you’re role-playing a non-hierarchical band of polyamorous adventurers? Apparently, lots of people are having this dilemma — which might explain why Party Limit Begone is one of the most popular PC mods for Larian Studios’ hit game.

As the name suggests, the mod allows you to ignore the four-character party limit in Baldur’s Gate 3, upping your choices up to a whopping 16 characters (or eight if you’re in multiplayer). If it sounds bananas, that’s because it is. Players on social media are sharing playthroughs that highlight just why people love the mod so much, and it’s opened the door for all sorts of absurdities. Want to play as a giant band of nudists? Go right ahead; only god can stop you now.

Before we get to the silly stuff, let’s talk about the useful things that come with downloading this mod. Using the mod allowed player Cayt Landis to see all the party banter at once, which is huge in a dialogue-heavy game. Because the game introduces new characters throughout your playthrough, it’s very easy to stick to people you already like and know how to use. You’re probably not going to switch out your romantic interest, for example, even if it means missing out on other characters. And so, the mod lets you appreciate everyone to their fullest in ways that would normally take dozens of hours to see.

Also, you’re supposed to be traveling with your entire group anyway — that’s why you can visit them at camp. There’s no denying how handy having no party limit is, especially when it comes to sorting through BG3’s enormous inventory, Landis says. No more having to wade back to camp to figure out who is carrying what!

You might think that 16 is an untenable number, but people are actually taking advantage of the expanded limit. Landis told Polygon that they did a full playthrough with all party members on board, and while they admit that “it was a bit much,” they also say that they’d do it again on a new playthrough.

X (formerly known as Twitter) user Maz loves the mod so much, they’d go so far as to say that this was the way BG3 was meant to be played: It grants all the characters more nuance.

“For example, we know Shadowheart and Lae’zel aren’t the best of friends, but other characters such as Wyll and Astarion might chip in with their personal feelings during their chats,” Maz said in a DM. “Also, having all the party members means you can see the choices to agree and disagree with throughout the game and shapes them as characters even more.”

“I feel like I got a lot more conversation interjections and obviously much more party banter,” Landis wrote. “There are many times when three of the companions all talk together and I was able to have all of those conversations without switching anyone out. I think it was really helpful for allowing me to experience more of Halsin, Jaheira and Minsc as well.”

At least one player says that using the mod made a (spoilery) narrative payoff all the more powerful, as it allowed them to get maximum revenge on a boss.

While there are obvious benefits to using the mod, we can’t discount one of the biggest reasons it’s exploded within the fan base: shenanigans. What if you’re just a bunch of little guys running around? What if you command a whole gaggle of gays? Now you can make a full band of musicians! The possibilities are only limited by your imagination. You could, for example, choose to command an army of tieflings who unleash hell on their racist-ass world.

According to players who have used it, Baldur’s Gate 3 handles the new limit remarkably well for a game that wasn’t built with it in mind. One of the big exceptions is game difficulty, which makes sense: The game isn’t expecting you to bring a battalion into battle. For some, this might simply be a matter of upping the difficulty to match your party, or changing it to “Balanced” to account for the higher number. But based on posts I’ve seen online, some players actually welcome the change in a game that’s notoriously difficult. Landis likens the experience to having a more accessible story mode that lets them focus on what’s happening, rather than the combat. Plus, there’s something undeniably satisfying for some players in decimating the enemy before they even have a turn.

And when you do run into issues, they tend to be funny. A self-identified Astarion simp on X noted that he once experienced a moment when everyone failed the Perception check, and it only endeared the characters more to him.

“Like alright I guess we’re ALL dumbfucks then, rad,” he said of the moment, which remarkably wasn’t ruined. “Come along, My motley crew of dipshits.”

Players who spoke to Polygon did note that they occasionally encountered technical issues that rendered party members invisible or inaccessible, but nearly everything had a workaround — or a patch to address it, in due time. Sometimes, though, hiccups are as excruciating as they are hilarious.

“It’s all fun and games until you have 9 people in your party and you have to jump,” wrote X user Juniper, who appended a skull emoji to the anecdote. “For some reason half the time 2-3 always wanna stay behind.” It’s also pretty common to have a bunch of characters blocking doors, which can at times make getting around a living hell.

But these headaches are worth it for moments that would normally be impossible in the base game. Landis recalls a time with the mod where they tried to visit a brothel with their romantic interest, Gale. Because Landis was playing with the entire team, the game couldn’t recognize who was actually there, rendering Gale ineligible for the sexy romp. It was as if Landis got a free pass to cheat, they recall.

“[It] allowed me to have a whole romance scene with Halsin and Astarion, even though I was dating Gale,” Landis wrote in an email. “Gale didn’t register that it had happened though. I don’t think that worked as intended but it was pretty funny.”

You can download the Party Limit Begone mod via Nexus. A caveat: There are specific portions of the game that are hard-coded to only allow you the set party limit, but the mod description page points out a particular instance when this happens — and how to avoid other common issues.

The story of Korean dramas’ crossover moment, and the shows to watch that explain it all

For some Americans, Korean dramas came out of nowhere. Between 2019 and 2021, viewership numbers for TV series produced in South Korea went up a staggering 200% in the U.S. When Squid Game hit Netflix in September 2021, one in four Americans watched it. It wasn’t just a K-drama hit; it became the streamer’s most-watched series of all time.

But Squid Game isn’t a total anomaly. The Korean series is one chapter in a larger story with its own name and history: a seismic, ongoing shift in the global entertainment landscape known as Hallyu. The term comes from a Chinese phrase meaning “Korean wave,” and it refers to the phenomenal international success of Korean cultural exports. Hallyu is a challenge to the decades-long domination of the global pop culture market by English-language, American-made media. K-dramas built the foundation of this disruption.

Prior to the development of the internet and the streaming technology that would eventually come with it, Korean TV was accessed almost exclusively by Korean Americans in major U.S. cities through a few broadcast stations, cable channels, and Koreatown video rental services. That began to change in the 2000s, when populations outside of Korean American communities started to find and seek out K-dramas.

This is the story of the slow, steady integration of Korean dramas into the U.S. “mainstream” — a journey tied to development of the internet and streaming video technology, and spearheaded by a woman-dominated fan culture.

The frontier era (2002-2009)

Graphic: Pete Volk/Polygon | Source images: MBC, Mel Haasch for Polygon

In the aughts, the Korean Wave was already crashing on international shores, though mainly in other Asian countries. There were virtually no efforts from major American media companies to bring K-dramas to that market. But a few smaller endeavors began to capitalize on the growing, underserved market and found success. In 2003, California-based YA Entertainment became America’s first official importer and distributor of Korean TV dramas outside of Korean diaspora media, bringing K-drama DVDs into major American retail chains. A five-year survey the company conducted in 2008 found only 5% of the K-drama fans surveyed described themselves as Korean, signifying that the popularity of this TV format in the U.S. had already spread beyond Korean American neighborhoods and populations.

Meanwhile, on the internet, K-drama growth was largely fan-driven. Before there were legitimate streaming sites for watching K-dramas, there were illegal streaming sites that catered to the growing audience interested in Korean and other Asian dramas. Websites like mysoju.com and DramaCrazy.net were popular sources of K-drama content — though they relied on unlicensed videos hosted on platforms like Veoh or YouTube, where they could be taken down for copyright violations at any time.

If K-drama fans weren’t streaming, they were torrenting. Popular blogging site LiveJournal became an online hub for English-speaking fans of Korean and other Asian dramas, looking to share torrents and discuss their favorite series. On this internet frontier, pockets of English-speaking Korean drama fandom began to grow and gather, supported by bilingual fans who took the time to subtitle their favorite TV series for viewers who didn’t speak Korean.

Here are some of the dramas that defined this era.

Winter Sonata / 겨울연가 (2002)

Where to watch: Viki

For many, the proper start of the Hallyu. The 2002 drama starring Bae Yong-joon and Choi Ji-woo as lovers torn apart by fate became a cultural phenomenon in Japan, as well as in other countries in Asia, spurring international interest in Korean dramas and laying the foundation for the export of more K-dramas around the world.

Jewel in the Palace / 대장금 (2003)

Where to watch: Viki

Based on a true story, Jewel in the Palace captured the hearts of global audiences, especially in East Asia, with its women-centric tale of the Joseon dynasty’s first female royal cook.

Full House / 풀하우스 (2004)

Where to watch: Viki

Not to be confused with the American sitcom. Starring K-pop idol Rain and future The Glory star Song Hye-kyo, Full House is considered a pioneer of the K-drama rom-com.

Coffee Prince / 커피프린스 1호점 (2007)

Where to watch: Viki

Starring future Train to Busan lead and forever K-drama heartthrob Gong Yoo, the show follows an unexpected (for them) romance between a young food empire mogul and a young woman who dresses as a man to get a job at a coffee shop. Gender-bending and genre-blending, Coffee Prince is modern-day Shakespeare.

The little streamer era (2009-2018)

Graphic: Pete Volk/Polygon | Source images: HB Entertainment, Mel Haasch for Polygon

With the rise of streaming technology came the further growth of K-drama fandom in the U.S. But it wasn’t until 2009 that U.S. fans were offered a legal alternative to the roughly two dozen unlicensed streaming sites that existed for K-drama fans on the internet: DramaFever. Launched by Korean Americans Seung Bak and Suk Park, it became the first legitimate online streaming site for K-dramas in the U.S., tapping into a market that saw almost 6 million unique users watching Korean dramas on illegal video streaming websites in North America every month.

As Sangjoon Lee and Abé Markus Nornes wrote in Hallyu 2.0: The Korean Wave in the Age of Social Media: “[DramaFever’s] business model was the first attempt to incorporate dispersed online fan communities, Asian-American youths, ‘baby boomer’ consumers of YA Entertainment DVDs, yuhaksaeng [students studying abroad], and potential users scattered online.”

In June 2010, DramaFever launched its own channel on Hulu, eventually brokering deals with YouTube and Netflix as well. That same year, K-drama-centric streamer Viki launched, with an army of fan subtitlers who continue to serve as the backbone of the community today. In 2014, an estimated 18 million Americans — over 58% between the ages of 16 and 24, and more than 88% of them girls or women — were watching K-dramas. More than half of them were watching via DramaFever. In 2018, DramaFever unexpectedly and abruptly shut down after being bought by Warner Bros., rocking the K-drama fan community and marking the end of an era.

Boys Over Flowers / 꽃보다 남자 (2009)

Where to watch: Viki, Netflix, Tubi

Fully a product of its time, Boys Over Flowers is a bit of a cringe-watch today. But when it first aired, the Korean interpretation of the much-adapted Japanese manga series was all anyone in K-drama land could talk about, introducing a wave of new international viewers to K-drama and making Lee Min-ho into a household name.

Playful Kiss / 장난스런 키스 (2010)

Where to watch: Viki, Tubi

While Playful Kiss flopped domestically, it was so popular outside of Korea that it was granted a rare second season, distributed exclusively on YouTube.

Secret Garden / 시크릿 가든 (2010)

Where to watch: Viki

A stuntwoman and a department store CEO fall in love in this body-swapping romance starring future Crash Landing on You star and forever Hallyu hunk Hyun Bin. This is the first series on our list to be written by Kim Eun-sook, who also penned hits The Heirs, Descendants of the Sun, Goblin, Mr. Sunshine, and The Glory.

The Heirs / 왕관을 쓰려는 자, 그 무게를 견뎌라 – 상속자들 (2013)

Where to watch: Viki, Netflix, Tubi

The Heirs (also known as Inheritors) follows an ensemble of young, extremely rich students at an elite high school as they prepare to take over their family conglomerates (as you do). The Heirs was co-produced by DramaFever, marking the company’s expansion from solely a distributor to also a producer of K-dramas.

My Love from the Star / 별에서 온 그대 (2013-2014)

Where to watch: Viki

An ancient alien temporarily stranded on Earth falls in love with a Hallyu star in this fantastical romantic comedy written by future Crash Landing on You scribe Park Ji-eun. My Love from the Star was so popular in China, it led to a spike in sales of chicken and beer across the country and was a topic of discussion at China’s National People’s Congress. An American remake of the series got pretty far in development at ABC before getting shelved.

Signal / 시그널 (2016)

Where to watch: Paramount Plus, Tubi

Two police detectives use a walkie-talkie that connects them through time to track down a killer in this loose adaptation of the 2000 Hollywood flick Frequency. Arguably the most successful K-drama adaptation of American source material, Signal was written by Kingdom scribe Kim Eun-hee, and became one of Korea’s highest-rated TV dramas ever.

Descendants of the Sun / 태양의 후예 (2016)

Where to watch: Viki, Hulu

This series stars Song Joong-ki (in his comeback project after mandatory military service) as an elite special forces member and Song Hye-kyo as a cardiothoracic surgeon, who fall in love in the fictional war-torn Mediterranean country of Uruk. The series was released simultaneously in China, and was viewed over 1 billion times on Chinese streaming service iQiyi. A year later, China would begin an unofficial boycott of Korean cultural content following the deployment of a U.S. missile defense battery system on Korean soil, effectively cutting off one of the biggest export markets for Korean TV.

Goblin / 쓸쓸하고 찬란하神 – 도깨비 (2016-2017)

Where to watch: Viki

A warrior born centuries ago, Gong Yoo’s Kim Shin was transformed into a dokkaebi, a goblin-like figure from Korean myth, and cursed with immortality. He is left to walk the Earth until he meets the Goblin’s bride, who can pull the sword from his chest and bring an end to his immortality. Enter Ji Eun-tak (Little Women’s Kim Go-eun), an orphaned high school student who can see ghosts. Goblin (also known in English as Guardian: The Lonely and Great God) was a genuine Hallyu phenomenon, introducing another wave of international fans to K-dramas.

Sky Castle / Sky 캐슬 (2018-2019)

Where to watch: Viki, Netflix

The highest-rated Korean cable TV show in history at the time of its broadcast, Sky Castle brings us into the desperate, cutthroat world of wealthy Korean parents trying to ensure their children’s place at one of the country’s top universities.

The Netflix era (2018-2021)

Graphic: Pete Volk/Polygon | Source images: Netflix, Mel Haasch for Polygon

The seismic impact Netflix made on the international K-drama scene cannot be understated, as it brought a much broader global audience into the K-drama fold. The streamer launched in Korea in 2016, but the company wouldn’t release its first “Korean original” until 2018. Netflix’s interest in the region as a less expensive source of high-quality TV drama, film, and reality series has only grown since then, making it more difficult for domestic studios and streamers to compete. In 2023 (notably right before the WGA strike), Netflix announced it would be investing $2.5 billion in the production of Korean films, dramas, and unscripted (aka reality) shows over the next four years.

During this time period, Viki continued to be a go-to streamer and community platform for K-drama fans, especially in the absence of DramaFever, providing not only an extensive library of series, but also a thriving fan community.

Mr. Sunshine / 미스터 션샤인 (2018)

Where to watch: Netflix

Korean superstars Lee Byung-hun (Squid Game’s Front Man) and Kim Tae-ri (The Handmaiden) lead this gorgeously shot sageuk, or historical drama. Director Lee Eung-bok teams back up with writer Kim Eun-sook (Goblin, Descendants of the Sun) to tell a romantic if not always historically accurate tale about a country on the verge of Japanese annexation at the turn of the 20th century. Netflix reportedly invested three-quarters of the 40 billion won ($30.8 million) budget for this one, which ran for 24 episodes on Netflix and Korean network tvN.

Kingdom / 킹덤 (2019-2021)

Where to watch: Netflix

Zombies, not on a train but in a fictional version of the Joseon dynasty. Billed as Netflix’s first original Korean series to be released exclusively on Netflix, the series has spanned two seasons and one spinoff film thus far.

Hotel Del Luna / 호텔 델루나 (2019)

Where to watch: Viki, Netflix

One part historical epic and one part dark fantasy romance, Hotel del Luna stars K-pop darling and future Broker actress Lee Ji-eun (aka IU) and was written by Hallyu superstars the Hong sisters, who also penned K-drama classics like My Girlfriend Is a Gumiho and my beloved Alchemy of Souls.

Crash Landing on You / 사랑의 불시착 (2019-2020)

Where to watch: Netflix

For many modern K-drama fans, Crash Landing on You was their gateway. With the final episode of the romantic drama dropping on Netflix in mid-February 2020, all 16 episodes were available to watch once COVID-19 pandemic stay-at-home mandates took effect. Fans around the world fell for this story about a South Korean entrepreneur (Son Ye-jin) and a North Korean military captain (Hyun Bin) falling in love after the former is swept by a tornado into the DMZ while paragliding. The Hallyu magic around this show only grew when, following the show’s release, the two leads announced they are in love IRL, got married, and had a baby.

Itaewon Class / 이태원 클라쓰 (2020)

Where to watch: Netflix

Itaewon Class stars future MCU star Park Seo-joon as a Count of Monte Cristo-like character with a bad haircut who opens a restaurant and bar in Seoul’s trendy Itaewon neighborhood as part of an epic plan of revenge, and ends up creating a found family in the process. The series featured one of K-drama’s first positive examples of trans representation on screen.

It’s Okay to Not Be Okay / 사이코지만 괜찮아 (2020)

Where to watch: Netflix

With imaginative visuals and a focus on mental health, It’s Okay to Not Be Okay became one of the breakout dramas of an emotionally tough 2020.

Sweet Home / 스위트홈 (2020-)

Where to watch: Netflix

An adaptation of a Korean webtoon, supernatural horror drama Sweet Home became the first K-drama to break into the Netflix top 10 in the U.S. The story follows Cha Hyun-soo (Song Kang), a high school student with suicidal ideations, who finds himself caught in the middle of an apocalypse. A second season of the drama is slated for the end of 2023, with a third season also on the way.

Sweet Home is also notable for its webtoon source material. Webtoons are a type of mobile-friendly digital comic that originated in Korea in the late 1990s, and have grown to become globally popular; the platform WEBTOON, for example, pulls in 85 million monthly active users, and calls itself the world’s largest publisher of digital comics. Sweet Home is based on a story created for WEBTOON, and is one of many K-dramas that started its narrative life on a webtoon platform.

D.P. (2021-2023)

Where to watch: Netflix

This two-season Netflix K-drama starring Jung Hae-in follows a team of Korean military police whose job it is to catch military deserters. D.P. would prompt a discussion about issues of bullying and hazing in the Korean military, in which every able-bodied Korean man must serve.

The big streamer era (2021-)

Graphic: Pete Volk/Polygon | Source images: Disney, Mel Haasch for Polygon

When DramaFever abruptly closed in 2018 shortly after Warner Bros. bought the company, one industry source speaking anonymously to Digiday said, “This is a big boy’s game now.” And it is. While streamers like Rakuten’s Viki, which cater specifically to audiences interested in Korean and other East Asian media, are still a big part of the K-drama game, “mainstream” streamers like Apple, Disney, Amazon, Paramount, and Netflix have caught on to the potential of the Korean TV industry.

Dr. Brain / Dr. 브레인 (2021)

Where to watch: Apple TV Plus

Dr. Brain, a webtoon adaptation about a man who tries to solve the mystery of his family’s deaths by “syncing” with the brains of dead people, is not very good. However, it’s notable as the first K-drama produced for Apple TV, which launched in Korea with the Dr. Brain premiere.

Snowdrop / 설강화 (2021-2022)

Where to watch: Disney Plus

Set in 1987, during Korea’s student-led pro-democracy movement, Disney Plus’ first K-drama tells the story of a romance between a college freshman and a North Korean spy. K-drama star Jung Hae-in and Blackpink’s Jisoo couldn’t save this drama, which was plagued by claims of dangerous historical revisionism even prior to its release.

All of Us Are Dead / 지금 우리 학교는 (2022)

Where to watch: Netflix

In one of Netflix’s most-watched TV shows of 2022, teenagers at fictional Hyosan High School try to survive ground zero of a zombie outbreak. And it’s good!

Extraordinary Attorney Woo / 이상한 변호사 우영우 (2022)

Where to watch: Netflix

Extraordinary Attorney Woo, a legal drama about an autistic rookie lawyer, was no stranger to the position as the most-watched Netflix series in the world during its run, sparking a broader conversation about representations of autism on screen.

Semantic Error / 시맨틱 에러 (2022)

Where to watch: Viki

Queer characters and relationships are still rare in Korean entertainment, especially as a central element of a story, which makes Semantic Error — arguably Korea’s first BL, or boys’ love, success — such a big deal.

The Glory (2022-2023)

Where to watch: Netflix

Hallyu legend Song Hye-kyo stars as Moon Dong-eun, a woman who devotes her life to getting revenge on the rich kids who severely bullied her in high school. The Glory, which pulled from real-life stories of school violence in Korea, broke into Netflix’s top 10 in the U.S.

Moving / 무빙 (2023)

Where to watch: Hulu

Disney finally gets it right with Moving, a big-budget adaptation of Kang Full’s webtoon about superpowered teens and the superpowered parents who are trying to protect them from government exploitation. It’s been a massive success: The finale was shown in movie theaters in Korea, and the series became Disney Plus’ most-watched series — of any language or genre — in Korea, Japan, Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, demonstrating just how powerful the Korean TV industry has become on the global stage.

The director digs into his new dialogue-free movie Silent Night, and how his crew went rogue to add doves

It’s been a long road back to Hollywood for John Woo. His last American movie was the Ben Affleck-led sci-fi movie Paycheck, a commercial success largely rejected by critics. That was 20 whole years ago. In 2023, though, one of action movies’ greatest minds has returned stateside with Silent Night, a largely dialogue-free revenge thriller that sees the legendary director reinventing his style once again.

Woo hasn’t been gone since Paycheck, just gone from Hollywood and working in China. His output in that time has included a few historical dramas (highlighted by the epic two-part Red Cliff) and the action thriller Manhunt. While there have been some gems in there, Woo told Polygon that since Paycheck, he hasn’t been happy with the limited projects available to him.

“In China, all I could do [were] historical movies,” Woo says. “In America, since I’d been established as a big-budget movie director, there’s a lot of cool scripts of little productions [I want to direct], but they’ll never come to me. So I was so frustrated, and I was so limited. All I could do was a big commercial action movie. I never got a real script.”

Woo has been waiting for the right project for his next step, and he found it in Silent Night. Robert Archer Lynn’s script featured no dialogue, which immediately appealed to Woo as a challenge, letting him reinvent the way he thinks of his movies. Woo grew up as a fan of silent cinema, especially Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. But he told Polygon he intentionally avoided using those moves as reference points in favor of relying on his instincts.

The movie’s gimmick provided some limitations and obstacles, but Woo was most interested in trying to make an action movie that felt more grounded than the melodramatic, highly stylized action he is known for.

“[It was good] to try something new,” Woo says. “I did a really big change [to] my style. It doesn’t look like much of a Hollywood movie. All the action sequences, I brought a more realistic [approach]. And some of the action is not over the top, and all the action works for the character and the human story.”

Photo: Carlos Latapi/Lionsgate

That story follows Brian Godluck (Joel Kinnaman), a father whose young son is killed on Christmas Eve, an innocent bystander to a drive-by shooting by local gang members. Chasing down the culprits, Brian is shot in the throat, losing his ability to speak. A year (and a training montage) later, Brian is ready to enact vengeance.

While Woo is trying a different, more grounded approach for Silent Night, his connection to the emotional elements of his stories is still very present. Brian’s wife, Saya (Catalina Sandino Moreno), also grieves the loss of their son, and Woo’s camera (and the movie’s silence) gives that pain focus. Brian wants to communicate his anger but does not know how, especially without the use of his voice.

The movie’s most effective emotional beats come in its dream sequences, where Brian imagines that he’s playing with his son, or lying in bed, before waking up to stark reality. The lighting abruptly changes in those moments, with colorful toys and lights quickly replaced by the dull tones of life without their son. These moments were initially going to be flashbacks, but Woo and Kinnaman came up with the dream-sequence idea together, which allowed the scene changes to happen in-camera for greater effect.

“In the script, it had a flashback,” Woo says. “He was playing with toys with his son. It was pretty boring to see, and then Joel Kinnaman, he turned to me and said, ‘What if I dream that I’m sleeping next to my son?’ So I took out all the flashbacks, and I said, ‘OK, let’s do it all in one shot.’”

Woo had Kinnaman lie on the bed and close his eyes as the camera pushed into a close-up. Then, Brian’s son (Anthony Giulietti) gets into bed with him, and the camera pulls out to see both of them. Finally, the camera pushes into one more close-up, and when it pulls back, his son is gone. “The dream is over,” Woo said.

“I really like to see how actors feel in a certain scene,” he says. “I like to combine their idea and their feeling fully into the scene.”

Image: Lionsgate

Those dream sequences aren’t the only stylish one-take scenes; it is a John Woo movie, after all. Silent Night shines in the action sequences, which there are plenty of in the back half of the movie. Two in particular stand out: a close-quarters fight with a gangster in a garage, and a fight against a whole bunch of gangsters while Brian travels up a staircase in their base of operations. Both were shot mostly in one continuous take.

“It looked so real, so powerful,” Woo says of the garage scene. “Only in my Hong Kong movies had I used a similar technique, but for a Hollywood movie, first time for me.”

The staircase sequence was a particular challenge because of how narrow the location was and how many extras were involved in the shot, which sees Brian fight through four floors of stairs. Woo says his team only had one day to rehearse and one day to shoot the sequence.

“The stunt team was so excited, they had never tried it before,” Woo says. “And Joel Kinnaman, he’s a real good actor. He’s not the superhero type or super fighter type, so he looks so real. So our action looks so real as well.”

While Woo may have perfected the one-take action sequence in the legendary hospital sequence in Hard Boiled, it’s not a technique he repeatedly leans on in his movies. But the action master has clearly been thinking about it: He told Polygon he’s sick and tired of fight sequences that use lots of jump cuts and shaky camera techniques.

“It’s hard to read what they’re doing, how they’re fighting,” Woo says. “They try to get the feeling, but the feeling is not enough. It looks fake to me. They are using this kind of technique because an actor couldn’t fight. That’s the only impression they give to me. I like long-take fights, because it makes the audience feel it’s a real thing, and there’s real impact.”

Photo: Carlos Latapi/Lionsgate

While there are recognizable Woo calling cards (including Scott “Kid Cudi” Mescudi dual-wielding pistols, at Mescudi’s specific request), Silent Night approaches John Woo action from a different vantage point. Without dialogue, the movie leans into other elements of sound design, with multiple big car wrecks and big shootouts that have immensely satisfying pops of sound.

But the big John Woo calling card on everyone’s mind is the doves. Doves appear in many of Woo’s movies, and it seemed like this movie might be too serious to include that light touch. That was Woo’s intent, but his crew had other plans, and they went semi-rogue on the director.

“I tried [not to have doves], to do it a bit different,” Woo says. “But my team, my crew, they weren’t happy about it. So my art department, they make fun with me. In one shot on the street, they drew my picture and a dove on the wall. Because they all miss it, and they all wanted to have it. It ended up in the movie [anyway].”

Silent Night is in theaters Dec. 1.

Niantic and Punchdrunk spent years designing a gamified theatrical experience that never happened

Every night at 9 p.m., a pay phone would ring on a street corner in Mexico City. If someone picked up, they’d hear a question:

“Who is the mother of all wisdom?”

If they answered correctly — “memory” — a car would pull up. If they got in, a driver would take them on a tour of the city, telling stories about her daughters when they were young.

After an initial stretch, the passenger would realize they’re traveling in circles. The car’s radio would rewind and its clock would jump back in time. The passenger would see a woman outside on one loop, then see a younger version of her the next. The passenger would see someone who resembles the driver on one loop, then notice it was just a mannequin the next.

Eventually, the car would shake, the radio volume would escalate, and an otherworldly character would possess the driver in an all-consuming moment, after which the driver would regain consciousness and take the passenger back to the phone where they met.

Back on the street, the player would pull out their cell phone and return to the game that led them there, hunting for resources, looking for hidden objects, and trying to find other portals into this secret world.

Emphasis on “would.” Codenamed “Hamlet,” this theoretical project was a collaboration between Niantic, the tech-focused Google spinoff known for mobile sensation Pokémon Go, and Punchdrunk, the art-driven immersive theater company behind risqué Macbeth retelling Sleep No More. The two had grand visions of games that could fuse theatrical performance with modern technology and bring Punchdrunk’s storytelling to the masses, populating the world with actors and wild scenarios.

The two groups announced plans in 2020 to develop multiple games together, but they never got the first one out the door. In 2022, they stopped production on Hamlet and went their separate ways.

To find out what happened, Polygon spoke to eight team members who worked on the game at Niantic, each granted anonymity because they did not have permission to discuss it. Polygon also interviewed Niantic CEO John Hanke prior to the company’s recent restructuring, former Niantic executives Greg Borrud and Eric Gewirtz, and Punchdrunk founder and artistic director Felix Barrett.

People described Hamlet as a rare experiment that, at times, felt magical to play, but one that ran into real-world complications regarding scale, safety, and struggles to mesh the two companies’ artistic visions.

Punchdrunk’s Luddite roots

Twenty years before announcing its Niantic partnership, Punchdrunk was a small theatrical startup in London — an “almost deliberately Luddite” one, according to Barrett in a 2014 Wired Business Conference interview. “We were scared of any technology, because we wanted [our work] to be as analog as possible.”

In the early 2000s, the company made its name embracing the up-close, physical, and sometimes uncomfortable experiences people can have at a show. At Sleep No More, which debuted in its best-known form in New York in 2011, attendees wear masks, wander freely through a six-story hotel, witness a murder, get trapped in an asylum, and watch a rave-themed orgy.

Punchdrunk evolved as a company over the years, taking on different shows, divisions, and partnerships — some of them focused on new technology. At one point, Barrett said in the Wired interview, the team spent two days on an island in the “middle of nowhere” playing mobile games, researching how their mechanics could apply to Punchdrunk’s work.

Punchdrunk would go on to work on a mobile app called Silverpoint in 2015, a narrative match-3 puzzle game with a few levels that played out live in London. The app was a small project done in collaboration with Absolut, but in the Wired interview Barrett discussed the potential for something bigger.

“In this digital age, buying a theater ticket and going to something for three hours feels slightly outdated,” Barrett said in 2014. “Whereas the model where you subscribe and you pay weekly and you live inside the show for six months, or your life becomes the show, it feels like — what I’m interested in the next tranche of work is that sort of magic hour, the dusk between the fictional and real, where you almost become your own avatar. You become the star of your own film, and you, rather than going into a building or a theater to go into a show, what happens if the show comes to you?”

A series of experiments

When Niantic announced its Punchdrunk partnership six years later, the marketing line rang a familiar bell:

“Recently, we’ve asked ourselves: What if we were the lead characters in an epic adventure movie? Our new collaboration with Punchdrunk might be the answer.”

Hamlet was to be a realization of Punchdrunk’s long-held plan. A Punchdrunk show, broken into pieces and doled out to players over time — in this case, using Niantic’s technology with a story loosely tied to Punchdrunk’s then-upcoming show in London, The Burnt City. The show, which debuted in 2022, is structurally similar to Sleep No More but based on Greek mythology and the fall of Troy. “Gods and mortals rise for a party at the end of the world,” as Punchdrunk described it.

“The idea was, can we make an experience that has some of that magic of that live theater experience, immersive storytelling, that’s accessible to more people by using devices to expand the reach beyond just a physical installation and actors and a couple hundred people per night?” Hanke told Polygon.

The concept was unproven, but Niantic was in a position to take risks. Thanks in part to Pokémon Go’s success, the studio was on a yearslong shopping spree, acquiring more than 10 companies and signing deals with some of the world’s biggest brands. At the time it announced the Punchdrunk deal, Niantic had more than 10 games in development.

On Hamlet (which went by titles such as “Tracelight” and “The Trust” during development), neither company rushed into production. By the time Niantic and Punchdrunk went public with the partnership, they’d been experimenting with ideas for a couple of years. A Niantic team in Los Angeles and a Punchdrunk team in London ran through dozens of concepts and prototypes, trying to figure out how a crossover between theater and games could work. The studios experimented with audio-only gameplay concepts, where a player would stick their phone in their pocket and control the game by walking, guided by audio in their earbuds based on their GPS coordinates. They also played with releasing a game under the guise of a wellness app called The Meadow, which players would download and start to use before a member of a secret society would break in and ask them for help, transforming the app into a game.

One of the main concepts the teams came up with was setting up interactions with paid actors, letting players experience the sorts of scenes they might come across in a Punchdrunk show. The game would direct a player to a certain location, where they would stand and wait for an actor to approach and act out a scene for them.

Another idea that gained traction was a card collecting system based on an in-universe spin on tarot cards. Team members described it as a geocaching-based game of hide-and-seek: Players would hide physical cards behind bushes, inside mailboxes, or under benches, then offer hints to direct other players toward them. Once those players found the cards, they’d scan and re-hide them.

Over time, these experiments solidified into a game that used a map similar to that of Pokémon Go, with various points of interest and a resource called Tracelight to collect. Actor interactions and the card concept stuck around as central features, though the cards became digital objects instead of physical ones. Niantic planned for the game to be the first use case of its Visual Positioning System technology that would allow players to place cards in precise locations, tying the game to one of the company’s tech initiatives and one of its steps toward building a “real-world metaverse.”

All of these ideas fed into a story Punchdrunk was piecing together, in which players were members of an organization called The Trust. Many of the narrative elements changed over time, but on a basic level, The Trust spent its time investigating a dark alternate world underneath our own called The Lowlands. As players collected cards and different types of Tracelight, they could light up The Lowlands and catch glimpses of the world and characters underneath, with certain actor interactions and big in-person events (such as performances of The Burnt City) representing stronger connections between the two worlds.

In an internal world-building document viewed by Polygon, Punchdrunk laid out a deep backstory detailing thousands of years of history and a series of elaborate concepts for how bigger narrative events could work, such as the pay phone sequence.

In another example in the document, a player would track down a shipping container in a remote desert near Salt Lake City and meet a security guard, who would then take them to his bed in a hidden part of the container and tuck them in, at which point the player could summon a character from The Lowlands to receive a blessing.

In another, a large group of players would gather at an abandoned swimming pool in Moscow for a party, and actors would pull aside certain Trust members to tell them secrets about 49 maidens trapped in The Lowlands.

Most of these were high-concept ideas for how scenes could look rather than how scenes actually played out in playtests, which tended to be more focused. But across tests in London, San Francisco, and Los Angeles over the course of development, team members said that even the smaller narrative moments proved exciting.

“I remember testing a part of the game in Los Angeles,” wrote Barrett in an email interview with Polygon. “I had to hand over a covert package to a stranger — a kind of classic spy story trope. It was happening in the real world with a soundtrack playing in my ears. I was driven to this stranger by the app and the game engine. I had never met the person — and suddenly, I arrived at a location and made the handover while the soundtrack got ever more dramatic. The euphoria I felt was incredible.”

Barrett referred to the musical component as “soundtracking your life.”

“I remember as I approached a real location in the game, the soundtrack built and built, and it felt like I was in a film.”

Development challenges

Despite Barrett’s excitement, a crossover between theater and games was never going to be easy. On a structural level, the teams needed to figure out not only how to design the game but how to build it to work consistently. They also needed to find the right balance of how players would spend their time when not involved in the big showpiece moments. People speaking for this story listed many challenges unique to the concept, with some of the biggest not having clear solutions.

One major concern was player safety, a consideration in many Niantic products. Pokémon Go, for instance, has famously led players into traffic and toward a dead body. Punchdrunk has run into issues with keeping its actors safe as well — a 2018 BuzzFeed News story reported instances of sexual assault from audience members at Sleep No More.

For Hamlet, safety became a particular concern due to the types of interactions the game would set up. With players acting as members of a secret society, meeting people on the street, and searching for hidden objects, there was concern that what made the game unique and interesting also made it high-risk.

“Unfortunately, when you make the real world a game, people start treating other people like NPCs,” said one team member. “It gets ugly.”

The teams had various strategies planned to keep players and actors safe. Players would stand in specific positions, such as holding their hand over their heart, to signify they were participants, and actors would be the ones to approach players rather than the other way around. But there would always be variables the teams couldn’t account for.

“I think that the experience of playing this game would be really different for different kinds of people,” said another team member. “You know, it was different for the men who were playing it. It was different for the people of color who were playing it. It was different for the women. A lot of people, even on the team, were sort of raising these red flags of like, ‘Hey, I’m a woman, and I don’t know if I’d feel comfortable just waiting in a spot for someone to come and whisper in my ear.’”

Multiple Niantic team members said that things generally went well while Niantic and Punchdrunk were testing the game. But team members worried about what would happen when the companies wouldn’t be able to monitor these events as closely. And if the companies swung the design too far toward making it safe, one team member said, they risked filing off much of what made it interesting.

“There were ways to make it less immersive in the Punchdrunk sense, and sort of really over-index on the safety aspect,” the team member said. “But I think that that would have sort of taken away from the spirit of the Punchdrunk-ness of it all.”

Team members also pointed to legal risks if things went wrong, as well as screening and management challenges for overseeing actors all over the world.

“Both Niantic and Punchdrunk’s development teams worked closely with experts in trust and safety, focused on safety by design, and leveraged learnings from multiple products built by both companies,” wrote a Niantic spokesperson in response to questions sent by Polygon. “An internal red team helped test safety scenarios and discover potential risks in order to ensure that the right protections were in place for players. This was done jointly by both Niantic and Punchdrunk, and we indeed had thorough safety playbooks designed to keep our players safe.”

Asked about a moment the companies tested where a player tracked down a parked car, opened the door, and went inside, the Niantic spokesperson wrote that it was only meant for internal testing, utilized a Niantic employee getting into another employee’s car, was monitored by staff, and “was not part of any actual or intended gameplay for the final product.”

“The number one challenge was always safety,” wrote former general manager of Niantic’s Los Angeles studio Greg Borrud in an email interview with Polygon. “We were always looking for ways to push the limits while still keeping safety at the forefront. We knew we had to test the boundaries to see where they were during development. But we also knew we had to reel things back in as we looked to put a live product out there.”

The start of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 brought a new layer of safety concerns. While the pandemic presented challenges for companies around the game industry, the majority of those centered around how teams worked behind the scenes. For Niantic — as well as Punchdrunk and much of the theater industry — the challenges extended to their output, with the companies relying on getting people out of their homes and interacting with others. In response, Niantic set up ways for Pokémon Go players to play from home, and Punchdrunk delayed the theatrical launch of The Burnt City.

For a project like Hamlet, this presented a number of questions. Could Niantic and Punchdrunk still encourage players to go outside? Could they still set up in-person narrative events?

“Where with Pokémon Go, you worried about people walking into traffic and trying to get Pokémon while falling off cliffs, we had to worry about that and also the heightened level of sensitivity just being in public,” said one team member.

Hanke said that on the development side, COVID also made it harder to conduct playtests, which slowed progress on the game. “Sometimes you just need to get a bunch of people together and try stuff and be able to iterate quickly, and we were in a mode where it was a lot of pre-planning,” he said.

Beyond safety concerns, Hamlet also struggled with scale. The game’s base concept required a roster of trained, paid actors in any city where the game was running. That would also require a team to manage those actors and extensive work to adapt the game’s real-world elements to specific locations — costs that wouldn’t decrease as the game spread to different cities.

“A lot of things were very surprising and interesting and on the spot,” said a team member. “But the amount of overhead and coordination that requires per player would [make for] an incredibly boutique experience that wouldn’t be able to scale to a free-to-play-style product.”

Switching from physical cards to digital cards was a step toward making the game easier to manage in different locations (though Niantic’s Visual Positioning System brought its own costs and challenges), and the teams explored ways of making actor interactions simpler and cheaper over time, but compared to other Niantic games where most things were automated, Hamlet added an extra layer of costs.

Hanging over many of these challenges were differences of opinion between Punchdrunk and Niantic. These varied by person and over time, but six people who spoke for this article said the companies often clashed while working on Hamlet, noting that the two never fully got on the same page, which they said slowed progress on the game.

Conceptually, Hamlet was supposed to blend Punchdrunk’s experiential ideas with Niantic’s game design knowledge, but the six people said finding common ground between those two proved difficult, with Punchdrunk getting frustrated that its ideas were watered down or not taken, and Niantic getting frustrated over Punchdrunk’s lack of game development experience and frequent iteration. Four Niantic team members said Punchdrunk was great at dreaming up big ideas for when everything played out the way it was supposed to, but didn’t always have answers for what to do when things didn’t go according to plan.

“Setting a mood is not the same as making a thing where you have to do things, and you’re building up and there’s choices and there’s a story,” said one Niantic team member. “[...] So trying to do something that is Niantic-like, that goes on forever, that has a game-like element, was not in their wheelhouse.”

The team members also pointed to philosophical differences between the companies, noting that Punchdrunk pushed to make things more risky and uncomfortable, while Niantic tended to be more technical and practical.

“I think part of the Punchdrunk formula was very much wanting to push people outside their comfort zones,” said a Niantic team member. “And that was sort of the experience that they wanted, which didn’t entirely line up with the experience that Niantic wanted, which eventually became more like, ‘We want this to be available for everyone.’ And that sort of became a difficult design tradeoff where the more you make it accessible for everyone, the less you can push people outside of their comfort zones.”

Borrud described the differences as “a natural tension between what was a game and what was a performance.” Borrud, Hanke, and Barrett all pointed to the physical distance between the London and Los Angeles offices as a key barrier for a project that required extensive creative collaboration and in-person testing.

“With something this experimental I think we would have been better served by having the entire team all under one roof,” wrote Borrud.

“When we were in the room together the creative sparks flew,” wrote Barrett, “but having to be mainly online with an eight-hour time difference made everything slower and more difficult.”

The final months

By early 2022, despite more than three years of work, former Niantic head of development of games Eric Gewirtz described the game as still being in preproduction.

Niantic and Punchdrunk had taken a number of steps to overcome the various challenges, bringing in a team from Niantic’s London office (which addressed some of the time zone issues), developing a set of moderation tools (which addressed some of the safety concerns), and adding forms of digital storytelling, like prerecorded audio clips, robot calls, and an online ARG (which addressed some of the scale challenges). The teams also continued to iterate on the design and pulled back on some of the game’s more ambitious narrative elements, but they hadn’t gotten to a place where everyone involved was confident in what they had, and they hadn’t produced a lot of content beyond an initial onboarding sequence.

Niantic and Punchdrunk were working toward debuting the game in London, with plans to roll out in other locations like New York and Los Angeles later. During internal testing, some of which took place around shopping district Covent Garden, the staff ran players through different sequences, such as an onboarding sequence where the game would call players and ask them a series of questions.

“Where I think we hadn’t quite found the secret sauce and the magic yet was in the moment-to-moment gameplay,” Gewirtz said. “There were these really epic, magical experiences that would happen that were kind of charted out, but in between [during] the hours of gameplay, it was challenging to keep the players engaged and occupied.”

Some team members were also concerned that, years into development, certain safety issues hadn’t been resolved, referencing discussions like whether actors would have access to player phone numbers (ultimately, they would not) or how closely actors would have been able to track individual player movements.

The teams had set up a number of safeguards to log communications between players and actors and built a feedback system to allow players to report unusual or inappropriate behavior, with Niantic’s trust and safety and legal teams involved in the process. Players would also have had to agree to terms and conditions saying they were of age (“we knew this would always be an adults-only game,” wrote Borrud) and they would have had options to turn off certain aspects of the game, such as being able to receive calls. But some team members remained nervous that they couldn’t anticipate every scenario.

At one point when testing the game in London, Gewirtz was searching for an actor in the middle of the day when the game directed him down an alley. As he started walking in that direction, he discovered a woman defecating in front of him.

“I was like, OK, I think I’m going to go down a different alley,” he said.

The story became a popular anecdote among the Niantic staff, getting passed around and twisted like an urban legend.

“It was just funny that it happened to me because I was really in the moment right there,” Gewirtz said. “I was listening to the audio. I was really kind of getting immersed in the quest, in the adventure, and that really just pulled me out of it.”

“It was a stark reminder that there are things we can control and things we can’t control when you have any type of thing happening in the real world,” wrote Borrud. “Even a place as controlled as Disneyland has things they can’t control when it comes to guest behavior. I don’t have a good solve for those variables yet. But it was something we talked about quite a bit and was a reason we started to move the core gameplay closer to known ‘Points of Interest’ and tailor the initial experience to a specific neighborhood that we knew intimately. Ultimately, though, we also had to acknowledge that there was no way we would be able to control the real world.”

Calling Hamlet off

On June 29, 2022, Bloomberg reported that Niantic had stopped production on Hamlet along with three other projects, cutting approximately 85 to 90 jobs, or about 8% of the company. The news followed Niantic’s struggle to diversify its portfolio beyond Pokémon Go, with games such as Harry Potter: Wizards Unite and Catan: World Explorers underperforming, as well as its March 2022 acquisition of AR tools company 8th Wall, which Niantic called its “largest acquisition to date.”

According to Hanke, Niantic stopped production on Hamlet because it didn’t see a way to make the math work when hiring actors and customizing the game to multiple locations for a wide release.

“We were still struggling to achieve our vision for the product, or bringing that excitement of live immersive theater into a broader setting,” said Hanke. “And when we looked at the numbers of the way that we got there, the way that we got where we did was going to be really expensive, and it was going to be something that we were going to have a hard time doing outside of very specific kinds of cities.”

“We got an experience in London that we were reasonably happy with that did some interesting things,” said Hanke. “[...] I think I would’ve been happy to launch it in London, save for the fact that we just didn’t have a plan to expand it beyond London that made financial sense.”

Prior to shutting down the project, Niantic went through extensive discussions about how to monetize it, looking into releasing it as a free-to-play game, a premium game, a subscription game, an app tied to tickets to The Burnt City, or a game featuring paid street performances. But the game’s unique elements presented heavy upfront costs.

Six developers said they were not surprised that Niantic and Punchdrunk moved on from Hamlet, saying it always felt like a pet project or something the companies were doing for prestige or to reach into other markets, rather than a straight attempt to make a profit.

Multiple team members also mentioned that Punchdrunk was hit particularly hard by COVID and its lingering effects on the theater business.

“Punchdrunk […] were really pushed to the limit to get their play done and launched, coming out of COVID,” said Hanke. “It was very, very challenging for them. So there were kind of bandwidth constraints on their side that kind of made things extra challenging. So when we wound it down, they were able to really just focus on getting the play done, which was — obviously that was the existential thing for them that had to happen.”

“The truth is that two years of working at distance with all the restrictions of COVID took some of the momentum out of it all,” wrote Barrett. “It meant we couldn’t travel literally and figuratively as far as we wanted to.”

Staff also heard mixed messages on the game’s release date. An early plan to release the game alongside The Burnt City hadn’t worked out, and as time went on Hamlet ran into multiple internal delays. One Niantic team member said that, just before the game got cut, they heard it was supposed to be two weeks out from release, which they called a “pipe dream.”

“I mean, it never would have been finished, is kind of my take on it,” said another Niantic team member.

Borrud estimated that, by mid-2022, the teams were four to six months away from being able to bring in an initial small batch of public players, though he added it’s “hard to really say if we would have been ready for that initial cohort.”

“We were ready to try to get there and evaluate along the way,” he wrote.

Moving on

On June 29, Niantic announced another round of layoffs, this time closing the Los Angeles studio where the majority of Hamlet had been built and cutting approximately 230 jobs, or about 25% of the company.

In a statement, Hanke laid out various challenges facing Niantic, such as a crowded mobile market and changes to the mobile advertising industry, noting that employees should “expect a more direct and results-based culture” going forward. As part of a shift in direction, he wrote that Niantic would be scaling back spending on mobile game investments in favor of supporting current games, such as Pokémon Go, and focusing on technology and content for mixed-reality hardware and the future of augmented-reality glasses.

A few months later, on Sept. 24, Punchdrunk held The Burnt City’s final performance in London. In a statement released alongside the announcement of that performance, Barrett wrote that the show “has propelled us forwards and we want to keep that momentum,” adding that Punchdrunk will use the same location as a long-term home for other projects. “We’re fairly sure that The Burnt City will be the last new mask show the company makes, and what comes next will be different and unlike anything we have done before,” he wrote.

On Nov. 8, Punchdrunk announced that Sleep No More’s New York run will end in January 2024.

Speaking prior to Niantic’s directional shift, Hanke said that he hopes Niantic can return to a project like Hamlet in the future, noting that recent advances in artificial intelligence could reduce the operating costs by helping customize the game to different locations or replacing live actors with digital ones.

Barrett agreed AI would have helped Hamlet scale more affordably, though he was less enthusiastic about the prospect. “Sad to say but it is probably true,” he wrote. “I am very resistant to the idea of AI replacing actors and people, however, there is no doubt that some of the time we spent trying to [automate messages], for example, AI would have helped us solve much faster.”

Barrett wrote that Punchdrunk will “absolutely” return to a live video game concept like this in the future. “To my mind, still, no one has created a major crossover video game/theatrical project,” he said. “We truly believe that is the future of shows. We see it in audiences, especially younger ones who have grown up with video games and it feels inevitable that this future is coming.”

“I loved the idea,” said Hanke. “I loved the experience of building it. It was heartbreaking that it ultimately didn’t work out as a project that we could continue to invest in. I hope we’re able to come back to the concept. […]

“I think it’s inevitable that it’s going to happen, but there are definitely some unique challenges there.”

The writer-director talks ‘forbidden secretions,’ internet fame and fandom, and what we all want from celebrities

As the environmental, political, and above all, economic tension between the ultra-rich and the rest of the world continues to grow, it’s a topic that keeps driving dark, memorable movies — from Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winner Parasite to 2022’s The Menu, Pig, and Triangle of Sadness to a sub-track at the 2023 Fantastic Fest film festival, including this year’s Nick Stahl movie What You Wish For and the blistering Brazilian movie Property. Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, which played as a secret screening at Fantastic Fest, seems to fit the bill perfectly as well: It follows an Oxford freshman, Oliver (Barry Keoghan, sure to turn up in awards-season conversation again) as he awkwardly infiltrates the social circle of his ultra-rich classmate Felix Catton (Priscilla co-star Jacob Elordi). What follows is part horror movie, part classic Gothic novel, as Oliver hungers to be like Felix — or just to be Felix.

But in an interview after Fantastic Fest, Fennell told Polygon she doesn’t entirely see Saltburn as yet another eat-the-rich exercise.

“I think I consider it more ‘Lick the rich, suck the rich, and then bite the rich, and then swallow them,’” she said.

Image: Prime

Saltburn is an intoxicating experience: a visually rich, caustic crime thriller in the vein of The Talented Mister Ripley. Oliver, whose background takes a while to fully unfold within the film, is obsessed with the luxury, comforts, and casual arrogance of Felix and his wealthy family. But as they spend more time with Oliver, embracing his attractiveness and cleverness and welcoming him into Saltburn, the family estate, they also drop hints that he’s probably just the plaything of the season, likely to be discarded out of boredom.

Fennell’s movie — her follow-up to the challenging, much-discussed revenge story Promising Young Woman — isn’t entirely sympathetic toward Oliver, who’s clearly grasping and needy as well as ruthless. At the same time, it isn’t fully on board with Felix and his superficial, selfish family members, either.

“It’s really about having sympathy with everyone, always,” Fennell says. “Certainly for me as a writer and director — and for the actors, too — it always has to be an exercise in empathy. None of these people thinks of themselves as a bad person. It was the same with Promising Young Woman. It’s not interesting for me to make things that make moral judgments about people — all I’m interested in doing is understanding. So for me, the first thing about the Catton family was that we understood why Oliver would be, against his better judgment, completely and utterly beguiled.”

As Fennell has explained in other interviews, Saltburn is a movie about fame, fandom, the internet, and parasocial relationships, about the kind of connections people make from a distance and build into elaborate, often unhealthy fantasies. Part of drawing that line was making Felix the kind of superstar who would earn a fandom: He’s handsome, charming, and skilled at everything he tries, but he’s also surprisingly kind.

“It’s the thing about Felix — we think we’re going to hate him, we assume we’re going to hate him,” Fennell said. “And then the moment we meet him for the first time, it’s impossible to resist. They’re all impossible to resist. The world is impossible to resist. It was important that we understood from the get-go why, against our better judgment, we would all want to be at Saltburn, and would do anything to get in and anything to stay.”

Image: Prime

Both Saltburn and Promising Young Woman are about toxic hunger, about a protagonist so monomaniacal about getting something that they’re willing to cut any moral corners to get there. In terms of other connections, though, Fennell says her own obsessions may be showing in the new film.

“You’re always trying to do something new and make something different, but you can never get too far away from yourself,” she says. “I think certainly I have a preoccupation with genre, and the way we use it as filmmakers and experience it as cinema goers. Promising Young Woman was looking at the specific genre of the female-lead revenge movie. Saltburn is looking at the Gothic country-house tradition. Promising Young Woman was looking to subvert the genre, and that’s exactly what I’m hoping to do here.”

The reason Saltburn feels like so many classic British stories about class, Gothic manors, and dark secrets is because Fennell wanted the movie to be a recognizable world, a genre exercise where viewers think they know what the rules are, and what’s coming next.

“It’s only with that familiarity that you can really apply pressure, and dig into the genre,” Fennell said. “So stylistically, I’m always going to be preoccupied with where a movie exists in the world of movies. You can’t pretend a movie exists outside of the world.”

As far as other comparisons to her work go, Fennell notes that both Promising Young Woman and Saltburn are thwarted love stories. “They’re stories about what we do with love that can’t be, for whatever reason, that can’t carry on in the form it starts in. With Promising Young Woman, it was the love story between Cassie and Nina, and it was a love story with Ryan, Bo Burnham’s character — both of them loves that kind of can’t work out. And Saltburn is a movie about loving someone, and loving his world — a world that’s never going to love you back. What do you make yourself into? What do you do to yourself when that becomes apparent? How do you get that love?”

It may seem a little counterintuitive to compare internet fame with Gothic novels like Brideshead Revisited, Wuthering Heights, and Northanger Abbey. But Fennell thinks of these books and online obsessions as closely connected.

Image: Prime

“There is always a tension, always, between ourselves and other people,” she said. “If the Gothic tradition is about an outsider being introduced to a world which is both desirable and frightening — that’s absolutely what we’re doing with the internet, and our relationship with the world of fame and beauty.

“Online, fame isn’t just about people anymore. It’s about their wardrobes, the way they organize their wardrobes, the labels they put on their drawers, every detail of people’s lives. It’s their food, their clothes, it’s everything. I think we are absolutely, now more than ever — and particularly post-COVID — in this kind of voyeuristic, sadomasochistic relationship with these things. I certainly, myself, feel a new desire post-COVID to touch.”

Referencing one of the more visceral and much-described scenes in Saltburn, where Oliver licks Felix’s bathwater out of the drain, Fennell said, “I think it makes sense that this film is preoccupied in many ways with the stuff of human secretion, in whatever form that is. There’s a transgression now, post-COVID, to touching and feeling, and getting intimate, in ways that may be surprising. And I think that’s absolutely what the Gothic tradition was always about. It was about introducing people, but particularly women, to this idea of the transgressive desire, and the things that maybe weren’t within reason. They’re outside of reason, they become completely all-consuming.”

Saltburn is in theaters now.

‘This is the thing I love about fellow horror directors — we always have that perfect kill in our back pocket’

Tonally speaking, the sublimely messy, moderately silly, extremely gory horror movie Suitable Flesh is all over the place. Some of the violence is deadly serious, and some of it is designed to induce shocked, delighted giggles. It starts out deliberately paced, and doesn’t hit manic speeds until the final act. And that, according to director Joe Lynch, is all entirely intentional.

“Life is not tonally consistent,” he told Polygon at the 2023 Fantastic Fest, shortly after the movie’s Texas premiere. “Stories that derive from our lives are not tonally consistent. I might be having a horror movie of a day when you’re having a romantic comedy of a day. We’re still living in the same world. That’s what excited me about this.”

“Tonally inconsistent” is usually a negative critique of a film, but for Suitable Flesh, the shifts come with the territory. Heavily modeled after the similar horror-to-comedy-to-horror shifts in Stuart Gordon’s Lovecraft-based horror classics Re-Animator and From Beyond — and written by the same screenwriter, Dennis Paoli — Lynch’s film is meant to tap into, and even push beyond, a particular giddy breed of cult horror movies that have largely fallen out of favor in a move toward immersive horror realism.

Photo: RLJE Films/Shudder

“I’ve always had a little Stuart Gordon on my shoulder, going, Hey, push that further! or Maybe too much?” Lynch said. “That was always permeating my head. Whenever I was coming up with an idea, or being slavish to the script, it was always there in the background.”

[Ed. note: Mild spoilers ahead for one of the movie’s more over-the-top kill scenes.]

That “push it further” ethos gets particularly strong during a late-film chase sequence involving protagonist Elizabeth Derby (Heather Graham), a psychiatrist trying to protect herself from an occult body-stealer who’s proved extremely difficult to kill. At one point, she hops in her vehicle, sees her tormentor behind her in the backup camera, puts the car in reverse, and guns the engine. The audience only sees the antagonist through that backup camera as the car smashes into him.

Then she pulls forward… and reverses, hitting him again. And again. It’s grisly, but the way Lynch extends it from desperation move into repetition gag makes it a real laugh-out-loud moment.

Image: RLJE Films/Shudder

“The Smashening, as we called it,” he said, when asked how that sequence came together. “This is the thing I love about fellow horror directors — we always have that perfect kill in our back pocket, where we go, God, I would love to employ this idea.”

Lynch says the reverse-cam moment has been with him since he bought a car with one back in 2007. “I was at the dealership, I’m sitting in the back, the dealer is giving me a test drive, and I’m looking at the backup cam, thinking, I would love to kill someone with this. How cool would that be? […] I held that in my back pocket for over a decade, praying that no one would ever use it, and no one did. Or at least none that I saw. And I watch a lot of movies.”

Lynch pushed to keep the scene as one unbroken take, in spite of suggestions that he should cut back to the movie’s antagonist for response shots. “I had just finished Wrong Turn 2,” he explained. “And I got really jazzed over seeing the audience reaction to one of that movie’s kill moments, a longer take. In Wrong Turn 2, I split someone in half, and their intestines fall out of their genitals, and then the two halves of the body get dragged away, in a very long take. Feeling the audience react, and then react again and then react again — it isn’t fast. It lingers. There was something about that. I couldn’t cut away if I wanted to do that backup-cam shot. Some of the producers were like, You can cut away, come on, you can cut. I’m like, No, you have to let that sit there, and you got to watch it all happen in real time.”

Lynch describes the process of getting the shot as a pretty comical affair that involved a lot of screaming. “I had to have our star in the shot. I did not have the money for stunt people, and I wasn’t gonna be able to grab Heather’s face with CG and stick it on someone. It had to be Heather behind the wheel. And she’s a New Yorker — she’s like, ‘I know how to drive, but not well. So as long as you walk me through everything…’ So there’s behind-the-scenes footage of me standing off-camera, going ‘BACK UP! GO FORWARD! STOP! BACK UP! GO FORWARD AGAIN!’ I’m screaming it, and everyone’s like, What the fuck is going on? It took us about four takes to get that right. On the fourth take, the camera broke. She was hitting it that hard.”

Image: RLJE Films/Shudder

The footage seen within the dashcam, on the other hand, was shot on a different day. “I would take the unfortunate person that had to be in that moment, and use a GoPro camera and shove it into their face, then pull it out again. It was a whole process,” Lynch says. But once we put that all together, with the sound effects and everything, it actually played. It is the best feeling in the world to be in an audience and hear them go, Ohhhh, and then Oh my God, again? And then Jesus Christ, oh man!”

For Lynch, the extremity of sequences like that reverse-cam attack were the primary reason the opening of the movie had to have a completely different tone. “I hate the term ‘slow burn,’” he said. “But I think you need to earn that last third of the movie. If we had tried to use that kind of tempo all the way through, the audience would have been exhausted.

“I think these days with film, people don’t want to invest as much. They like short-form content, they want the ‘30 seconds, then someone gets kicked in the nuts’ action. And it’s like, Exposition? Out the door. Character development? Meh, I don’t need it. We wanted it to feel a little more classical. And some people really dig that escalating ride up the roller coaster before you plummet down.”

That may leave viewers a little baffled during the opening character-building and psychoanalytic sequences in Suitable Flesh, especially if they come in expecting wall-to-wall violence. “I knew I had to build up to that,” Lynch said. “It felt more gratifying. If we had a lot of crazy slaughter and gore and stuff like that early on, I don’t think that would have worked as well. I’m very pleased we pulled it off — it seems like people are digging it. I swear to God, the best thing I can think of is if someone gets in their car and sees their backup camera and thinks of that moment, I’ve done my job.”

Suitable Flesh is available for rental or purchase on Amazon, Vudu, and other digital platforms.

Russell T. Davies’ run on Doctor Who was the stuff of TV and internet legend

Russell T. Davies’ return to Doctor Who as showrunner is the kind of Hail Mary thrown out by a franchise dangerously close to drowning. He left at the top of his game, handing the keys to Steven Moffat, who built up the show to a frenzied peak during Matt Smith’s run. The show broke viewing figures in 2012, and also finally broke through as a bona fide phenomenon in America thanks to a heavily marketed partnership with BBC America. While RTD (as he’s known by fans) saw further success with critically acclaimed shows like A Very English Scandal and It’s A Sin, Chris Chibnall’s tenure at Doctor Who was much less successful, and the show reportedly came close to being canceled as Jodie Whittaker’s run as the first female Doctor was poorly critically reviewed, and saw ratings go into free-fall.

That was when I imagine RTD went into Supernanny mode. In my head he tells the BBC, “You guys are in a crisis, I’m on my way.” The news that he would be coming back to the show in time for the 60th anniversary made many fans who had dropped off in past years perk up and begin to pay attention again — including me. I may have begun watching the show as a teenager during the Eleventh Doctor’s first series in 2010, but Davies’ run from 2005 to 2010 is forever the era of my heart. So it feels particularly notable that he’s bringing David Tennant and Catherine Tate with him, as the Fourteenth Doctor and crowd favorite companion Donna Noble. Nostalgia is being used as a shameless marketing tactic, but it’s doubtful anyone will complain when longtime fans are being catered to so directly.

As anticipation for this comeback grows, fans are wondering what to expect from the era being dubbed “RTD2.” Davies’ first era defined what Doctor Who could be in the new millennium. Could it possibly strike the same chord again as it did when we were young? And what exactly was that chord, for that matter?

Image: BBC

When Davies relaunched the show in 2005, it was after nearly two decades of hiatus, during which Doctor Who had become consigned to the dustbin of — well, not history, but fan conventions and spinoff comics. It was RTD’s vision that helped the show regain its popularity and influence.

In his doorstopper book, The Writer’s Tale, Davies describes in exhaustive detail the process of scripting, filming, and releasing Doctor Who. In over 600 pages of late-night email conversations with Doctor Who Magazine staff writer Benjamin Cook, picking up in 2007 as he begins to write Series 4, he goes in deep on his creative philosophies, methods, and ideals.

“​​Truth, in writing, is the only important thing,” he told Cook, when asked about his writing process. “That’s what it’s for. The whole time, every day, all these pages, all my life, means sitting here looking for something — some line, some insight, some microsecond — that makes me think: yes. Yes, that’s true. That’s real. I recognize that. I know it.”

That humanistic approach defined his era of the show, and set up NuWho (as fans call it) on the whole as a show that would have, as its heart, the personal.

The world that RTD depicted in his first run on Doctor Who was our world, plus. Harried mothers, bad boyfriends, everyday heroes and cowards. His career origins in children’s television and soap opera writing meant that he began with character, and built from there. His worldbuilding was great, and showed off his true love of the show’s mythology, but that came second to the people who inhabited his worlds. From the hymn-singing drivers of “Gridlock” to the fearful medical students of “Smith and Jones;” from the worried family of “Turn Left” to the comical tourists of “Voyage of the Damned,” RTD’s characters weren’t always serious or realistic, but they were believable.

Many of the villains of the first series, starring Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor, had suffered in some way — some due to the horrors of the Time War that had also destroyed the Doctor’s people. Others, like the evil skin-flap Cassandra, were one-dimensional (literally) in their first appearance, only to go on to reveal hidden depths in a later episode. Cassandra’s tragic death in series 2’s opener “New Earth” is a perfect example of Davies’ sentimental sensibilities, and provide a contrast for his broad, often bawdy sense of humor, as exhibited by the laugh-out-loud body-swapping interplay between Cassandra and Rose in that same episode.

Because of Davies’ generosity of spirit as a writer, fans were able to perhaps more easily imagine themselves as a Rose or Martha than the chosen-one-esque “Girl Who Waited” Amy Pond or the effortlessly chic “Impossible Girl” Clara Oswald of Moffat’s era.

With its everyday heroes and sympathetic villains, RTD’s era of Doctor Who set the stage for the kind of expansive fan involvement which led to an explosion of Doctor Who fandom online for a new generation. Fans who had been a little too young for LiveJournal flocked to Tumblr, where they could easily share the gifs, graphics, memes, and artwork that became the hallmarks of a new visual fandom culture.

It was this platform, combined with the openness of RTD’s vision of the world of Doctor Who, which allowed fans to so easily picture that world expanding to include others that they were obsessed with at the time — leading to the rise of that iconic fandom phenomenon: Superwholock.

Graphic: Emily Heller, Zosha Millman/Polygon | Images: BBC and The CW

Many people, including myself, joined Tumblr in order to discuss Doctor Who, and to fangirl over the Tenth Doctor, who had by the end of his run become a bona fide fandom sex symbol. I remember the first blog I followed on Tumblr in 2010 was called davidtennantseyebrows — one of dozens of popular blogs devoted to each of his beloved body parts. The reason Sherlock and Supernatural made it into the tripartite canon was simply because they were the most popular on Tumblr at the same time as Doctor Who’s peak around 2012, and each had an easy overlap with Doctor Who. Supernatural and Doctor Who had fighting monsters in common, and Doctor Who and Sherlock shared British origins and a showrunner in Steven Moffat. A Superwholock blog might have had as their “main” or favorite one out of the three shows, but post content relating to all three.

It quickly became an aesthetic affiliation which a fangirl (usually a girl) could easily define themselves by in order to attract fellow fans — and in fact, still do. Over on TikTok, former Superwholock are posting slideshows of their Tumblr days alongside updates of where they are now, like a Manhattan barista who once had a TARDIS birthday cake. Exclamations of solidarity and “I miss those days” fill the comment sections. In the constant battle of cringe and cool online, Superwholockianism is in a state of semi-reclamation. To identify as a former Superwholock is to admit to having, at one point, possessed an earnest enthusiasm so large and unruly that it spilled over the boundaries of one franchise to encompass multiple fictional worlds.

The visual signifiers of Superwholock, the posters and themed cakes and cringey Hot Topic T-shirts, are what gets remembered; but do we remember how the idea of the crossover made us feel? The possibilities were overwhelmingly awesome. Sherlock in the TARDIS! The Doctor in the Impala! Imagine! Superwholockers’ famous lengthy crossover URLs and obnoxious gif threads stood in for a truly immense depth of passion. Fans drew connections between the shows and vividly imagined them with elaborate fanvids. We just felt so much: like three smaller waves, combining when they meet to form one of a larger amplitude. That kind of enthusiasm does have a childish element, we can recognize as much now — but it was also maybe more than we’ve felt for any single franchise since then.

The news of RTD’s return stoked a long-buried fire in fans who remember feeling this way. The Doctor would be the first to say you can’t change the past, but you can always try again, and do it differently, and better. Davies had always had a huge blockbuster vision for the show. But with the new partnership between the Bad Wolf production company, the BBC, and Disney, he’s now being given a bigger budget, which comes with more freedom to let his imagination run wild, not only on the flagship show itself but across a potential spread of franchised spinoffs.

One of the things that charmed watchers of RTD’s first go-round was the scrappy low-budget aspect. Reading The Writer’s Tale, one gets a sense of the immense technical and bureaucratic difficulties involved in dealing with these restrictions. Still, Davies’ talent as a writer and showrunner meant that he usually could rise above, and produce something even more incredible out of necessity. Restrictions can force the grounding of the show in emotional truth, which doesn’t cost anything extra. Some of the run’s all-time best episodes, like the single-set stunner “Midnight,” came about because of on-set budget constraints; and cheesy, bad practical effects are part Doctor Who’s eternal charm, and have been since 1963.

But the show is certainly no longer the inexpensive cultish reboot it was when RTD’s first era premiered. His upcoming 60th anniversary specials look to be incredibly cinematic and slick, surpassing even his first exit, the Tenth Doctor’s regeneration special event “The End of Time.” That was a big-budget, cinematic swing, which took a chance and just managed to stick the landing — can he repeat the feat? And, having done so, can he bring the show back down to Earth? So much depends on his ability to pull it off: bring back old viewers, charm new ones, give David Tennant’s Fourteenth Doctor a satisfying beginning and end, introduce Ncuti Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor, and most importantly prove that Disney’s investment was the right choice. It’s certainly not guaranteed — after all, sometimes things that are expensive are worse.

In The Writer’s Tale, Davies says, “Writing isn’t just a job that stops at six-thirty. (Well, bad writers can do that.) It’s a mad, sexy, sad, scary, obsessive, ruthless, joyful, and utterly, utterly personal thing. There’s not the writer and then me; there’s just me. All of my life connects to the writing. All of it.” One can only hope that above all else it’s this fundamental passion, which is what helped his debut era of Doctor Who define what fandom felt and looked like to a generation of teenagers, remains the driving force behind what’s to come.

Doctor Who’s first anniversary special, “The Star Beast” will air on Disney Plus on Nov. 25. New specials will come out on Saturdays until Dec. 9.

With over 1.8 million unique downloads, the mod has a thriving community of its own

Devin Hedegaard first saw Stardew Valley in passing in 2017. “I had recently graduated college and moved back home with my parents to find a job,” he says. “My brother was playing some farming pixel game on his PlayStation 4.”

Fast forward six years, and Hedegaard is better known as FlashShifter, the developer of the incredibly popular mod Stardew Valley Expanded. With dozens of new characters, including six new marriage candidates; changes to the map, including a whole new continent to explore; and countless additions to events, crops, fish, furniture, and more, Expanded revitalized the game for many who had already put hundreds of hours into their farms and communities. With over 1.8 million unique downloads on Nexus Mods, it’s far and away the most popular content mod for Stardew.

It began, of course, with Hedegaard himself sinking that much time into the game. After seeing his brother playing, he noticed it again when browsing the Nintendo eShop. He knew it was somewhat like Harvest Moon, a series he loved, and it wasn’t expensive. “So I decided, why not try it out?” he says. “Little did I know that it would be the equivalent of Alice falling down that rabbit hole.”

After 100% completing the game, Hedegaard turned to modding for a fresh experience. “I wasn’t done yet. I wanted more,” he says. So he turned to the abundant number of mods on Nexus Mods, finishing the game again, but with numerous mods installed. But even that wasn’t enough. “I still wanted more, but there wasn’t anything left,” he says. “So I started teaching myself how to make my mod.”

Hedegaard had graduated with a degree in accounting. He had no experience in the many, many skills he would need to create Stardew Valley Expanded. “I taught myself how to code, how to script, how to do data arrays, how to do pixel art,” he says, not to mention how to troubleshoot for and connect with the community that grew around the mod, which he never expected to get so popular.

Understandably, not all of these skills came at once. After teaching himself online and asking for advice in Stardew modding Discord channels when he got stuck, the first version of the mod was released in 2019 after “roughly five months or half a year” of development. It added more than 30 new character events, three new map locations, changes to some areas of Pelican Town, and a new farm map.

Image: FlashShifter/Nexus Mods

Nowadays, Hedegaard describes it as “very bare bones,” but at the time, the Stardew Valley community seemed to disagree. “I got like 4,000 or 5,000 downloads within one day,” says Hedegaard. “Out of the blue, it blew up.” Although Stardew already had a very healthy modding community, Expanded was the first big expansion mod, and players who wanted more content for one of their favorite games jumped at the opportunity he had provided, even if it wasn’t yet what it would become.

As Hedegaard tells it, he wasn’t planning to continually update Expanded after its original release — that came after the incredible response from fans. But for others, 1.0 already seemed like a foundation that was ready to be built upon. “I feel like a lot of the buildings and a lot of the changes to the map that are still in the mod now were there, but there just wasn’t much purpose to them back then,” says Nathan Hardaker, better known in the Expanded Discord server as owner and moderator n8wes.

“But even then […] it really revitalized my love for the game,” says Hardaker. “I had already played Stardew Valley a lot. I had played through it a bunch of times. [Expanded] gave me more reason [to keep playing] with different things I could do.”

A key goal for Hedegaard, both in the early release and throughout development, has been to capture the feeling Hardaker describes. “Something I hear a lot from the community is that Stardew Valley Expanded blends in very well with the vanilla [unmodded] world,” he says. “And that was my goal all along. You should be able to encounter something and if you haven’t played vanilla Stardew Valley in a long time […] I want you to question yourself, like, Was that always in the game?”

This is exactly the experience I had with the mod, having not played Stardew much for several years. Some aspects, like a vineyard, community garden, and unfamiliar NPCs, were clearly new additions. Hedegaard’s stated goal on Expanded’s Nexus Mods page is to “give the player the magical feeling they had when they first played Stardew Valley,” and stumbling into these definitely felt like the same kind of delightful surprise provided by a first-time playthrough of the base game.

But other aspects had me questioning my memory. For example, Expanded fleshes out the Joja route, giving a stronger sense of presence to the capitalist corporation threatening Pelican Town. But repeatedly running into Joja manager Morris confused me — I thought I recognized him, but not much. Was he an entirely new addition? It turns out Hedegaard simply took the existing character and gave him a routine that regularly brings him into town, relationships with the villagers, and, if you’re interested, even events for befriending him.

Image: FlashShifter/Nexus Mods

As with vanilla Stardew, there’s something for everyone in the mod, but these sorts of character expansions and additions seem to be a community favorite. Anime fan Sophia in particular inspires plenty of fan art and cosplay. But, as Hardaker points out, these characters often weren’t in the original version of the mod. Once Hedegaard decided to continue development after its initial success, adding additional marriage candidates was something he wanted to learn how to do, but also one of the additions that took the most effort.

As the mod added more and more updates, Hedegaard initially worked on it alongside an accounting job. But after around six months, he decided to open a Patreon account and a PayPal donations page. Although Expanded is free to download and play, Patreon supporters get benefits like behind-the-scenes content and early access to releases (which Hedegaard also uses as an opportunity to bug test new builds). He now works on the mod full time.

As Expanded grew in popularity, it also started to spread online. A subreddit and a Discord server were created in 2019 and 2020, respectively. People often joined to ask for hints on unraveling Expanded’s secrets, which is how moderator Hecate originally found her way into the server. But she soon stayed for the community. “Everybody in the Expanded Discord is very nice and very friendly,” she says. “When the community is welcoming, you want to stick around and help out.”

The server now has around 19,000 members. “It’s sometimes like herding cats,” Hecate says, without any negativity. Expanded requires downloading multiple frameworks, which is a somewhat arcane process for inexperienced modders, and issues can arise with incompatibilities or other unexpected factors. Newcomers looking for help often aren’t aware of all the server etiquette, such as posting in the right channel, but moderators and other community members still try to help out. “I’m learning so much on how to handle the issues that pop up when it comes to like the game breaking or the mods breaking and figuring out what needs to be fixed,” Hecate adds.

Hardaker adds that the server tries to help out anyone who’s new to modding, whether they’re trying to run Expanded or not, so that they can have the same experience of finding even more Stardew Valley. “There’s a great community here, and there’s so much more you can do with the game once you get into it.”

Activity in the server waxes and wanes depending on whether the mod or the base game has recently been updated, but the moderators also work on keeping people engaged through contests and events. Most recently, a pair of artists each won a $50 Steam gift card for creating an autumnal banner and server icon.

As well as developing its own community, Expanded also appears to have grown the Stardew modding scene as a whole. Though it was the first big expansion mod released on Nexus, it certainly wasn’t the last. Nowadays, mods like Ridgeside Village and East Scarp add their own bevy of new Stardew experiences. They also have their own bustling communities, although there’s overlap as players can run many of these mods simultaneously. “It’s amazing seeing all of these same people posting in different Discords,” says Hecate.

Expanded is open-source, and Hedegaard encourages other modders to learn from his work. “I’m always 100% OK with that,” he says. “I’m happy to help people […] because I referenced other mods to make my mod [originally].” He’s also upfront about the fact that Expanded is fanfiction — something anyone can participate in. “Some people are like, ‘Oh my God, it’s just like vanilla, it’s incredible, it’s perfect’ — [but] it’s fanfiction! […] I think it’s pretty freaking good, but it is fan-made, at the end of the day.”

Image: FlashShifter/Nexus Mods

Currently, Hedegaard is in a self-described “crunch” working on the next update, which aims to coincide with core Stardew Valley’s as-yet-undated 1.6 update, which has some key behind-the-scenes changes designed for modders but requires a lot of migration work for existing mods. “This update, for the short run, it’s gonna suck,” says Hedegaard. “But for the long run, the modding community needs this update.”

Stardew Valley 1.6 will allow Hedegaard to add features he’s been planning for years, making the next Expanded update a big one. Hedegaard references the teaser he posted on Twitter that shows new animals, crops, and more. These things could already be added to Stardew, and other modders have done so, but they require specialized dependency frameworks, which was a huge commitment that Hedegaard couldn’t sustain. From 1.6, that will no longer be the case.

Hedegaard is also working on the 2.0 version of Expanded, which has also been teased but somewhat pushed back by the plans surrounding the 1.6 base game update. Expanded 2.0 will add another new location focusing on magic. But even with a big addition like that, it’s tied into the existing content for seamless scaling. “Anyone that knows me on the server knows I’m a big fan of [Expanded NPC] Camilla, who is a witch […] but right now she doesn’t really have all her story fleshed out yet,” says Hardaker, who is unsurprisingly looking forward to what might be in store for her in the 2.0 update.

Hedegaard says that the hard work on the game is fueled by the community. “It honestly pushes me to keep going forward and keep creating,” he says. “I don’t want to burn myself out, of course, but just knowing there are so many people out there that […] appreciate what I do, I just want to fulfill everyone’s dreams of making the favorite game in the world even better.”

‘People were just an expense. They don’t necessarily care about the human impact’

Developers at Palia studio Singularity Six were still celebrating a successful early access launch when a surprising announcement was made: The company was laying off around 10% of its workers. Though the game is a cozy life simulator, layoffs were something that was “not so cozy,” as a Singularity Six leader had said in a previous meeting, according to two workers.

Singularity Six is just one of the dozens of game companies that laid off workers in 2023, and its workers are among the thousands of people who lost their jobs this year. Only days after ringing in the new year, layoff announcements started rolling in: Wizards of the Coast canceled multiple projects and laid off a dozen people; game engine maker Unity Technologies cut 300 people; Microsoft laid off a staggering 10,000 people, which impacted both Starfield’s Bethesda Game Studios and Halo Infinite’s 343 Industries. The bad news just kept coming as the year progressed, as studios both big and small axed jobs — Digital Extremes, Epic Games, Telltale Games, BioWare, Bungie, CD Projekt Red, Ascendant Studios, Electronic Arts, Embracer Group and Volition, Amazon’s games division, and too many more.

Though there isn’t clear data on how 2023’s disastrous layoffs compare to other years, game developers Polygon spoke to agree: This has been one of the worst years for workers in a long, long time. (Polygon interviewed more than a dozen game developers for this story.) Unofficial trackers suggest more than 7,000 video game workers have been laid off in 2023; for comparison, another community-driven list suggested there were roughly 1,000 in 2022. The nearby tech industry has seen a 716% increase in layoffs announced year over year, too, according to research firm Challenger Gray & Christmas.

“This is not just one individual company,” video game producer Shayna Moon told Polygon. “This is our entire industry. The current situation is not debatable.”

“Paired with tight economic conditions, the impact of layoffs has been amplified by reduced hiring and increased job competition,” said International Game Developers Association executive director Dr. Jakin Vela in an interview with Polygon. “This has been one of the most volatile periods in the games industry in the last 15 years.” Vela said that the IGDA is “deeply concerned” about the layoffs.

But why have there been so many layoffs this year? Studios have provided similar kinds of statements about laying off workers: We’re very sad to see our employees go, but we’ve had to make hard decisions during this economic downturn. Sometimes an executive will blame it on a lack of sales or player numbers, like a dwindling player base for Destiny 2 or poor sales with Immortals of Aveum, which was out for mere months before Ascendant laid off half of its staff. Epic Games, which cut its workforce by 800 people, pointed to overspending. “For a while now, we’ve been spending way more money than we earn,” CEO Tim Sweeney said. Regardless of the details that led to this moment, the current picture is clear: Thousands of people have lost their jobs, plunging a massive group of people into instability and flooding the market with lots of qualified, established game developers looking for work.

Image: Ascendant Studios/Electronic Arts

“Many factors have contributed to the significant amount of layoffs developers have faced in 2023,” Vela said. “For example, large investments in games in 2021 and 2022 encouraged expansion at an accelerated yet unsustainable rate.” During that time period, video game companies had benefited from pandemic-driven interest in gaming, driving sales to everything from consoles and games to accessories, increasing profits.

Aubrey Quinn, senior vice president of communications for the Entertainment Software Association, agreed: The industry expanded in 2020 and 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic, adding up to be worth $56.6 billion in 2022, she said. That’s a level of growth that no other entertainment industry has matched. “What we’re seeing now is that the market is stabilizing,” Quinn added.

Vela highlighted that struggling companies have it way easier than the individuals they’re laying off: “Now that investments have slowed down, companies have readjusted their spending to accommodate tighter budgets. Additionally, the industry is facing rising costs due to inflation and increased interest rates. Worse yet, the current economic conditions are most disruptive for individuals who don’t benefit from major tax incentives or breaks that companies may have.”

The precarity of the industry, coming off several years of massive success, has created a crisis for game developers. In 2022, the industry was trending slightly downward revenue-wise, according to Reuters, but it’s expected to grow again this year. That may come as a relief to executives and stockholders — but the industry’s workers still suffer.

A lack of transparency leads to far more pain

“Layoffs suck — I don’t care who you are,” said Take This clinic director Dr. Raffael Boccamazzo. “Whether you’re the person who’s been laid off, whether you’re the person who has to deliver the news, or whether you’re somebody who still remains at the company with added pressures. They have negative effects [on people].” Often, Boccamazzo said, the negative impacts of layoffs come down to the “perception of justice” in terms of how the layoffs are handled.

A company that’s transparent with its employees ahead of layoffs — or one that lets employees know layoffs may be coming, but that the company is trying to mitigate the loss — leaves people in a better position in terms of their mental health. The alternative, said Boccamazzo, is much worse: “You go to work thinking it’s a regular day like anything else, swipe your card, and you can’t get into the building,” he said. “Both result in layoffs, but both have the potential to result in very different mental health outcomes, both in the people who are laid off and the people who remain, because of that perception of justice and dignity.”

Image: Epic Games

For many of the developers Polygon spoke to, the lack of clarity and communication around layoffs has made a bad situation even worse. On Sept. 28, Fortnite and Unreal Engine maker Epic Games announced it was laying off more than 800 employees — 16% of the company. The night prior, current and former Epic Games employees told Polygon, a mystery meeting got added to everyone’s work calendar. There was no information included, except for a directive: Cancel any meetings that conflict with this one, because this one is mandatory. “I jokingly messaged my team and was like, ‘I don’t feel good about this meeting. Is this how we find out we’re all getting fired?’”

Another former employee said they started to panic when they first saw the meeting and its accompanying email; however, other team members didn’t assume it was a layoff, and posited the meeting might be about Epic Games’ ongoing legal battles. “Thursday rolls around — a totally normal day,” the former employee said. “I have my morning meetings, my standup. No one knows what the meeting is about, but everyone thinks it’s fine. There was not a singular whisper from my experience about layoffs.”

Right before the meeting began, though, the truth became clear. Epic Games suddenly shut down the entire company’s Slack workspace, which is its primary communication method. Then, the calendar event’s title was changed: It was officially a meeting about layoffs. “I was the only one who received that email,” the worker said. “The people who were with me did not. I just stared at it and started crying.”

The toll of crunch culture

Working in the video game industry is notoriously difficult. Some companies demand “crunch” time, where people work even longer hours in the lead-up to a project. The industry has also been grappling with a pervasive culture of sexism and gender discrimination, as well as its overall lack of diversity across gender and racial demographics. The game industry is also typically referred to as a “passion industry,” because people who make games often love the games they make; companies can and do exploit that passion for profit.

Doing work in creative and other “passion” industries can feel so personal, because making art is personal. It makes a job feel like more than just a title, but like a defining part of a person. That culture of dedication to the craft of making video games makes it easy for developers to get wrapped up in their work, making a layoff even more demoralizing.

“Some people are even questioning their identities,” Boccamazzo said. “There’s so much passion that goes into making games. I’ve been around a lot of creative professions, and I think the passion that goes into making games is unique. It becomes a part of [people’s] identities — they make games, they’re a game dev. And so the loss of the job is not just the loss of a job and financial stability, it’s also a threat to self-identity in a lot of cases.”

Workers at both Immortals of Aveum developer Ascendant Games and Palia studio Singularity Six reported crunch hours leading up to the games’ releases — after which point they were unceremoniously laid off. It felt like a betrayal, for some developers, that their company had treated them in such a way so soon after they had completed all that work. It didn’t help, either, that days after laying off nearly half its staff, Ascendant Games patted itself on the back for its successes during Epic Games’ Unreal Fest, workers said. Loyalty to a company doesn’t make workers immune to layoffs; BioWare, for instance, laid off 20-plus-year veterans earlier this year. (Some of those 50 laid off employees are now suing the company for adequate severance pay, tied to their tenure.)

Two Epic Games employees laid off in October found it particularly painful when they saw that, weeks after they were laid off alongside hundreds of others, Epic Games was boasting about its record-breaking player base — 44.7 million players logged into Fortnite on Nov. 4.

“Painful would be the word, to see people out there celebrating this product that just screwed you over,” one former Epic Games worker said. “I wasn’t on the Fortnite team, but I can’t imagine having to see a thing you actually worked on, that you were just snatched away from, being praised and celebrated for breaking records. And here you can’t find a job. It speaks to how little the people that are actually doing the work matter.”

Game developers are on a never-ending job hunt

As thousands of newly laid off developers are flooding the job market, the competition for remaining jobs has intensified, especially in the generally tumultuous time period after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. “People are dealing with inflation, we’re dealing with other economic factors,” Moon said. “People are getting cut into shark-infested waters.”

One game developer who got laid off from Sega earlier this year told Polygon that he has since applied to more than 600 jobs — roughly three per day since he was let go eight months ago. He says there are times he spends all day applying for jobs. “I’ve never been unemployed before,” he said. “It’s a very traumatic experience — and I had it better than a lot of people. I had a cushion. I was given severance.”

And that isn’t a unique experience. Other developers told Polygon they’ve submitted dozens to hundreds of applications since getting laid off; applying for work is a full-time job. So many of these job applications go unanswered, while a lucky few get pulled into second- and third-round interviews. Several of the people Polygon spoke to have found new jobs, but the majority are still looking, and they expect to be continuing to apply into next year as hiring slows down for the holidays. One developer told Polygon that they’ve never been looking for a job at the same time as so many of their friends before.

“It feels like there’s thousands of us competing for a handful of jobs,” a former Epic Games employee told Polygon. One person laid off from Volition, which shut down its entire studio, said he got a rejection from one job within a speedy 10 minutes. “I was like, Oh,” he said.

There isn’t comprehensive data on how layoffs are distributed across fields within the video game industry, but community management is one area that appears to have been hit hard. A laid-off community manager who worked for an independent company told Polygon that community management can be seen as entry-level work, underpaid and underappreciated like QA workers often are. “It’s usually seen as a good way to cut costs when layoffs come around,” she said — fewer salaries to pay while still keeping game development on track. Beyond job positions, women and other marginalized people are often disproportionately impacted by layoffs in the tech industry, according to analysis reported by Axios.

If this is unsustainable, then what’s next?

Video game workers are paying for the mismanagement of leadership; video game executives aren’t seeing the same hits to their jobs and compensation. For instance, Electronic Arts laid off more than 700 employees in March as $1.3 billion in gross profits were reported in the previous fiscal quarter; even CEO Andrew Wilson said at the time that EA was “operating from a position of strength” as he takes home an estimated $20.7 million in total compensation in 2023. (That number, however, is down from the more than $39 million he received in total compensation in 2021.) Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney’s salary isn’t public, but he’s estimated to be worth almost $10 billion, according to Bloomberg’s billionaire index, thanks to Epic Games stock. It’s safe to say Sweeney is not living paycheck to paycheck.

The game industry’s growth over the past few years inevitably had to slow, but during that time, executives clearly incentivized short-term profit over long-term stability and the value of their workers. “A lot of reckless expansion of game monopolies has caught up to [the industry],” former Volition mission designer Alex Cline told Polygon. “Embracer owns a large part of the industry. Tencent owns a large percentage. We have huge consolidation of labor and IP. When you’re trying to get as much money as possible — if that’s ultimately your fundamental goal — then you’ve got to remove some expenses there. People were just an expense. They don’t necessarily care about the human impact.”

Photo: Gritchen/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images

Most of the people Polygon spoke to for this story said that something needs to change. Several pointed to collective action on the part of workers, whether that means unionizing or pulling together to demand change in some other way. Unions can’t prevent layoffs, but they could help workers in securing more transparency at work. And if layoffs do happen, a union can be there — with legal support — to ensure that compensation and severance are adequate. The way forward for the industry, said workers, is to think about people over profit.

Though the game industry is a relatively young one, the systems in place have a deep chokehold, and change isn’t going to happen overnight. Change is coming — there are many more unions in the industry now, and even more incoming as workers organize themselves. That may not be much help to the people already laid off, but it brings hope for the future.

“The saddest thing I noticed is people who are younger and haven’t gone through this before who think this is their fault,” one former Singularity Six worker said. “It’s not their fault. They didn’t do anything wrong. There wasn’t anything better they could have done. They didn’t fail in some way. There’s nothing wrong with them — they’re not ugly and they’re not unpopular. This is just investors and other people who depend on investors throwing darts at a board. They just happened to land on those numbers. That’s it.”

Sometimes a story writes itself

In 1972, early into his tenure at Sesame Street, Norman Stiles thought up a pun. The former Merv Griffin comedy writer had spent his first year penning scripts around the kids program’s strict curriculum, but he was always encouraged to craft new ideas for characters. After conceiving The Amazing Mumford with a couple of colleagues, he received another jolt of inspiration: What if Count Dracula taught… counting?

“I thought it would be funny, but I didn’t really know what to teach with it,” Stiles says. “To just teach counting would be boring.”

That’s when Sharon Lerner walked by Stiles’ office. The curriculum specialist worked as a liaison between the research and entertainment departments, making sure segments accurately and engagingly conveyed their simple educational lessons. Stiles quickly called her over and shared his vision, knowing he needed something beyond wordplay. She came up with an easy solution: enumeration.

We're spending a week diving deep into the stories behind your favorite vampires. Who says we only get to celebrate vampires at Halloween?

“That was really the key to making The Count work, because now it was, ‘He counts things,’ and counting things is an endless thing,” Stiles says. “His obsession with counting things gave him a kind of comedic power the same as Cookie Monster. Instead of ‘I want to bite your neck,’ it’s ‘I want to count your neck.’”

After a successful pitch to Sesame Street co-creator Jon Stone and head writer Jeff Moss, Stiles still had to sell puppeteer Jerry Nelson on the character. In between episodes being shot, he nervously approached the set of Hooper’s store (“I was relatively new,” Stiles says) and explained the concept, suggesting a puppet in the mold of Bela Lugosi who couldn’t resist counting. “He said, ‘Sure, I love it,’” Stiles recalls. Soon, Nelson convened with Jim Henson to get the Muppets creator’s blessing. “Norman’s writing this character, can I do it?” Nelson asked, as he recalled in an interview with Muppet fan site ToughPigs, before breaking into a Transylvanian accent.

It wasn’t long before The Count made his Sesame Street debut, counting blocks with Bert and Ernie in front of a blue backdrop near the start of the show’s fourth season. With slicked black hair, thick eyebrows, a monocle, a razor-sharp nose, a furry goatee, and a dark green cape, he counted up six blocks and exited stage left to a thunder clap and menacing organ music. Over the next decade, “Count Von Count,” as he was officially identified, became a Sesame Street staple, evolving throughout the years into a gentler fanged monster who lives inside a Gothic castle with pet bats and occasional love interests. To this day, he might just be the friendliest — and least bloodthirsty — vampire in the pop cultural canon.

Photos (clockwise): PBS/Everett Collection; Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images; Richard Termine/CTW/Everett Collection; Bryan Bedder/Getty Images

Photos (clockwise): The Count talks to a group of kids on Sesame Street; Norman Stiles, creator of The Count; The Count counts; The Count puppeteer Jerry Nelson with the cast of Sesame Street

Of course, it took a little time to earn that designation. As Stiles remembers, every segment of the show needed to have a button — a punchline or action that would effectively conclude a sketch. To solve this for The Count, the writing team initially decided to insert a lightning strike and clap of thunder once he counted up to the “number of the day.” But the idea was short-lived. “I think there was some input from outside that said some children were frightened by that, and so if that was the case, it wasn’t essential,” Stiles says. “He’s happy enough and it’s fun enough without it.”

Still, some viewers protested, sending letters accusing Sesame Street of providing a platform for, as one angered parent wrote, an “agent of the devil.” (“I didn’t know the devil used puppets, but you never know,” Stiles laughs. “They’d have to be fireproof, I guess.”) According to Stiles, Henson never worried about these accusations, and never thought about softening The Count’s features or changing up his voice — the adult concerns, the team realized, were tethered to Dracula’s frightening history, which young viewers had never seen before.

“The sound of thunder and lightning can be frightening for kids, but they have no previous context or knowledge that Dracula is supposed to be scary and drinks your blood,” Stiles says.

Photo: PBS/Everett Collection

Once Stiles and Nelson established a template for The Count, the rest of the writing team took turns creating new scenarios and situations for him. After stepping away from the show at the end of the sixth season, Stiles returned to Sesame Street in the 1980s and found his puppet had retained his signature quirks but grown into a magnanimous figure, inviting kindergartner viewers inside the home of his spooky castle and helping his Countess understand that “20-something” wasn’t an actual number. “What’s great is the characters evolve and they stay in character but you’re looking for more situations,” Stiles says.

The best Count sketches often played on the theme of, as Stiles says, “counting begetting counting.” He remembers a bit he wrote in which The Count begins counting flowers. “And he said, ‘You know why I love to count flowers? Because I’m allergic to flowers. Now I get to count sneezes. One sneeze, two sneezes…’”

In that way, The Count felt a little more human and a little less mythical, as worthy of compassion despite his otherwise sinister connotations. Around the same time, other pop culture vampires, such as Count Chocula, showed up on kids television, further accentuating them as humorous creatures as opposed to strictly horror figures of the night. Stiles says he wasn’t influenced by anything beyond “Count Dracula counting,” but the Muppet’s goofier qualities eventually paved an alternative interpretation of the bloodsuckers. “He was an influencer in some ways,” Stiles says.

More than 50 years since his debut, The Count’s presence on Sesame Street has shrunk and morphed a bit (he’s now counting the U’s in “YouTube”), but he continues to be a valuable enumerating and emphatically laughing educator. Stiles can’t quite comprehend the Muppet’s legacy, but knows its decade-spanning and transcendent appeal comes down to the universality of counting and sharing in his love. “Numbers are so important in our lives,” Stiles says. “He’s just such a joyful, happy guy going about his life. He doesn’t hurt anybody and doesn’t force anybody to count.” At a certain point, however, you just can’t help but count along with him.

After the release of 40K, Games Workshop set its sights on a new prize: the music industry

Had you been at Slaughterhouse Studios when Brian May arrived one summer day in 1990, you may have thought you’d stumbled into an alternate timeline of British rock music. The Queen maestro had traveled to the outskirts of Hull in the U.K. to lay down some riffs on a couple of new tracks. Yet rather than shredding to Freddie Mercury’s wails demanding that Scaramouche do the fandango, May was putting the final fuzzy touches on grimdark tales of stranded Space Marines and gigantic robotic Titans, conjured straight from the sci-fi world of Warhammer 40,000.

He’d been invited by D-Rok, a newly formed heavy metal rock group that was in the process of recording its debut album. It was something of a concept piece, with each song peppered with lyrical references to Games Workshop’s tabletop wargame, and its cover art an illustration of a troop of Space Marines. But this was no fan project. D-Rok was both a bona fide rock outfit and thinly veiled promotional vehicle, the first group signed to Games Workshop’s then-fledgling and ultimately ill-fated in-house music division: Warhammer Records.

Image: Games Workshop

Games Workshop had first dipped a toe into musical waters a few years before, in 1987. John Blanche, the art editor of the company’s promotional magazine, White Dwarf, and a longtime Warhammer illustrator, had persuaded local Nottingham thrash metal band Sabbat to partner with the mag for a one-off single. He’d provide the page art, he suggested, and the band would handle the tune. The result was “Blood for the Blood God,” a satanic paean to Warhammer’s Khorne that was printed on vinyl flexi discs and tucked between the magazine’s pages. “The mag just gave Martin [Walkyier, Sabbat’s singer] a big pile of books and he wrote the song from that,” guitarist Andy Sneap told Metal Forces magazine at the time. “It’s not your usual horror-type metal and the lyrics fit in very well with our imagery.”

Two years later, the game’s artwork would again spring Warhammer into the world of rock with death metal band Bolt Thrower. As fans of the game, they had asked to use a piece of official Warhammer art for the cover of their sophomore album. Games Workshop agreed and ended up handling the LP’s entire sleeve design, as well as lending it the name of a recent Warhammer rulebook: Realm of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness.

Like the flexi disc, it was a bit of an extravagance, but the company was by this point riding a wave of excitement and success following the release of the first edition of Warhammer: 40,000 and its many subsequent supplements. Hopes for the new franchise were high, and by the dawn of the ’90s, Games Workshop was used to taking big swings in offbeat marketing campaigns. It had licensed comics and novels, published White Dwarf for the better part of a decade, and even dabbled in several fresh IPs. The music industry, company management thought, could be yet another avenue to grow the brand.

“A lot of Warhammer fans were metalheads and were into rock music,” said Andy Jones, a former Games Workshop employee, in a recent interview with Polygon. He was the man tasked with setting up and managing Warhammer Records.

“Also with role-playing games, there seemed to be an association, certainly with the imagery,” Jones added. Warhammer’s gothic ultraviolence was clearly gelling with the studded leather getups of Britain’s burgeoning metal scene. And with Games Workshop embracing what Jones describes as an “entrepreneur spirit” where “anything was possible,” the idea of following up these musical dalliances with a full-blown record label seemed less like pivot than a natural next step.

“We hadn’t got a clue about making a record, or what that involved,” says Jones. “We just thought, Well, how difficult can it be?”

The plan was for Games Workshop to foot the bill on recording and production costs, handle album covers, and organize distribution through a larger label that would put the albums on the shelves of record stores. The bands, meanwhile, would deal with “all the music industry stuff,” as Jones puts it, like organizing tours.

Image: Games Workshop

“It didn’t quite work out like that, and that was probably us being very naive as much as anything,” says Jones. But it was that cavalier attitude that landed D-Rok the use of Brian May for an afternoon. May’s son would regularly visit the Games Workshop store in Hammersmith in London. A few phone calls, and May was invited to the Warhammer design studio, where he was introduced to the band and offered to play on their upcoming project.

Though no sooner had May noodled in the studio and D-Rok released its 1991 debut, Oblivion, than the newly minted record label encountered a problem: It needed more bands.

“The idea was that we could use our imagery with bands who were into our stuff,” says Jones. “We didn’t really want to just slap Warhammer and 40K imagery on any old rock. We wanted there to be a personal connection.” But without music industry connections, the well of potential talent quickly dried up, and the label was left to look around the local Nottingham music scene for acts. There, a former music journalist who’d been brought onto the label as its only A&R representative (standing for “artists and repertoire,” basically talent acquisition), and was all but single-handedly managing its day-to-day runnings, picked out rock group Wraith.

Image: Games Workshop

Image: Games Workshop

“I’d heard of Games Workshop, and their figures and that kind of thing. But I wasn’t majorly interested [in Warhammer],” said Wraith guitarist Gregg Russell in a recent interview with Polygon. Given the chance to finally bag a record deal, though, the band quickly signed on the dotted line.

“It was a completely different contract compared to normal record label contracts,” said Russell. “Everything they did was different to most other labels.”

In large part, that was because Warhammer Records seemed to have no problem throwing money around. The label paid for every part of Wraith’s promotion, right down to the gas money it used on tour, and even shelled out for the band to be photographed by Ross Halfin, a legendary rock photographer who’d snapped the likes of Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, and Metallica. The company paid for Wraith to record its first LP, 1992’s Danger Calling, in London’s Easy Studios, where members of Thin Lizzy and Motörhead would hang about in the daytime, while its second album was put down in Birmingham’s Rich Bitch Studios, a favorite of Black Sabbath.

After each release, Warhammer Records took out ads in big music magazines like Kerrang! and Metal Hammer, and organized for Wraith and D-Rok to appear at gaming conventions and Games Workshop stores up and down the country. More bizarrely, it paid royalties to the bands from their very first album sales — before the label had even recouped its costs.

“It was very laid-back,” said Russell. “They gave us free rein on anything we wanted to do.” That is, almost anything. One of the specifications of their contracts was that bands had to use pre-approved artwork. “That was the main clause, that all the imagery had to be Warhammer-related.”

Image: Games Workshop

For the boys in Wraith and D-Rok, that hadn’t been a problem, and Warhammer Records had even managed to stick a picture of a Space Marine biker on the cover of heavy metal legends Saxon’s 1992 album Forever Free after it landed the record’s U.K. distribution rights by chance. But the limits of the clause were tested when it signed its final act: punky pop-rock group Rich Rags. Another band that had no previous interest in Warhammer and was signed through a personal connection, it was only after they finished recording their debut album that they read the small print of their contract.

“We hated all of it. All this Dungeons & Dragons and fairies and orcs. This was not us,” Rich Rags singer Ian Hunter told Polygon. Informed there was no room to negotiate over the artwork, they were left to rummage through the Warhammer archives for an album cover.

“We ended up finding a couple of images that we thought maybe we could work with,” Hunter said, “but we were straight away told we can’t use those because it’s got to be something that’s current and reflect some of the games Games Workshop was producing now.”

Image: Games Workshop

Eventually, Rich Rags settled on an illustration of a horde of alien Genestealers and titled their album Psycho Dead Heads from Outer Space. They hoped to lend the record an air of ’50s B-movie nostalgia — and thereby obscure its connections to Warhammer.

“We had to absolutely compromise,” Hunter said. “It was the worst thing because everyone who knew us went, ‘Love the album, fucking hate the artwork. What were you thinking?’”

The relationship between the band and label only turned more acrimonious when Games Workshop delayed the album’s launch by several months in 1993, after the band had already arranged a monthslong tour across nightclubs up and down the country. With no new record to promote, press coverage was poor, audiences were thin, and Rich Rags’ patience dried up.

“We suddenly realized that what Warhammer Records was really about was promoting their brand,” Hunter said. “They’d set it up to be a shop window for Games Workshop.”

The band folded shortly after the mismanaged tour, and enthusiasm for Warhammer Records inside Games Workshop evaporated with it. The A&R rep who’d been hired for his industry connections had already left, and the company suddenly found itself beholden to scrutinous shareholders when it transitioned to become a publicly traded corporation that same year.

“Tom Kirby took over as the CEO and, in retrospect, quite sensibly stopped us doing a bunch of crazy things like running record labels,” Jones said.

In the years since, the few albums put out by Warhammer Records have become collector’s items among fans. Meanwhile, D-Rok’s songs appeared in the odd Warhammer video game, and Wraith continues to occasionally perform to this day.

Brian May, though, remains best known for his other work.

‘We’re really happy we got to have him as our Hellboy’

It’s certainly not every day that a developer announces they’re making a new game set in the universe of Hellboy, Mike Mignola’s long-running supernatural-action comic series. For Patrick Martin and Adam Langridge, co-founders of U.K.-based game studio Upstream Arcade, it was a dream come true.

“I remember back in the mid-noughties when I was at Lionhead, I was always dreaming of making a game in the style of Hellboy,” Langridge told Polygon. “It’s been percolating in the background for a long time and leaped out more than once, particularly with our previous game, so it’s a real honor and a privilege to have finally made it happen.”

That previous game was West of Dead, a twin-stick roguelike shooter where players assume the role of an undead gunslinger who journeys through the depths of purgatory hunting wendigos, witches, and all sorts of other nefarious supernatural oddities. That game shared a lot in common with Mignola’s distinctive art style, particularly in its emphasis on stark lighting, jagged shadows, exaggerated silhouettes, and muted color palettes; so much so, in fact, that when Martin and Langridge were speaking with various publishers early on in West of Dead’s development, they were offered the opportunity to work on a Hellboy game proper.

Image: Upstream Arcade/Good Shepherd Entertainment

“While we were working on that game, we got to speaking to Good Shepherd Entertainment,” Martin told Polygon. “They took a look at the visuals for West of Dead and went, ‘Hmmm, have you ever thought about doing an actual Hellboy game?’ at which point we obviously melted completely at the prospect and got busy working on a pitch with them.”

In the midst of finishing West of Dead, Upstream Arcade pitched its idea for a Hellboy roguelike brawler to Dark Horse Comics, who gave the team permission to begin production. “We were completely blown away by the opportunity and really thankful to Good Shepherd for getting the deal sorted.”

Image: Upstream Arcade/Good Shepherd Entertainment

After work on West of Dead was completed, the team immediately started on Hellboy Web of Wyrd. Creating a game in the established canon of the Hellboy comics, with its vast and tangled timeline of events stretching back to thousands of years before the beginning of Hellboy’s own adventures on Earth, would be a daunting task for anyone. Luckily, Martin and Langridge knew exactly where they wanted to set the game. “As part of our pitch for Hellboy Web of Wyrd, we identified an area in the timeline of the comics [where we] felt that there was a little bit less known about him,” Martin says. “We didn’t want to replicate a story that had already been told, and we didn’t want to mess with the timeline or spoil anything for anyone who hasn’t read the comics.”

That decision led the team to set Hellboy Web of Wyrd in the late ’80s, with Hellboy being dispatched by the BPRD to an abandoned occult mansion in Argentina known as the Butterfly House to recover a lost agent and investigate the source of a psychic disturbance. What he finds is the Wyrd (pronounced “word”), an alternate dimension that spans across all space and time and that’s populated with a host of supernatural threats.

“The editors at Dark Horse were very good at guiding us into what was available and what wasn’t,” Martin says. “Mike [Mignola] himself was very encouraging. He’s happy to admit that when it comes to Hellboy, the comics are for him, the films are for the film people, and the games are for the games people. He said, ‘Hellboy is like my baby who’s grown up and gone to college,’ and he can’t quite tell them what they want to do anymore when he goes off to do these things. Because of that, it allowed us to shape a story that works with the game that we were trying to make.”

Image: Upstream Arcade/Good Shepherd Entertainment

Part of that freedom in shaping the story for Hellboy Web of Wyrd was casting someone to play their particular rendition of the character. When it came to the decision to cast Lance Reddick in the role, Martin and Langridge credit their publisher for making the connection. “There are already certain voices that the public readily identify as Hellboy,” Martin says. “Good Shepherd really realized the opportunity here to make this game’s Hellboy our version of Hellboy, and they hit on Lance Reddick as a choice early on. I can’t really speak to the process because we weren’t too involved in that, but we were just in awe. Mike got to meet him as well at the recording sessions; I think they hit it off very well.”

For Martin and Langridge, Lance Reddick’s performance as Hellboy was an essential part of differentiating their take on the character from past incarnations. “The description that I always think of with Hellboy is that he regards dealing with werewolves and really scary stuff a lot like a plumber looking at a blocked sink or something,” Langridge says. “He’s always grounded, a little bit worn out and slightly wry. Lance’s take on that was just absolutely spot-on. We’re really happy we got to have him as our Hellboy. I think he brought his own flavor [to] a lot of the key elements of the character.”

Reddick’s death this past March from heart disease was a shock to both fans and colleagues, including the team at Upstream Arcade. “It’s very hard to talk about him in the past tense because we’ve been hearing his voice so long during production,” Martin says. “I feel like a part of him sort of lives on through his performance. It was a privilege to work with him.”

Some developers aren’t so sure about the technology

Microsoft is imagining a world in which a game developer can sit down at their computer, pull up an artificial intelligence-powered design “Copilot,” and enter a brief prompt to quickly produce everything from scripts and dialogue to quest lines and NPC barks.

But there are big questions that remain: What’s the problem these AI tools are looking to solve? For some developers, there isn’t one. AI is a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist, one writer with 10 years of experience in the video game industry told Polygon. (The writer was granted anonymity, as they were not authorized to speak to the press.) And could AI actually create interesting content, when it can only really retread data it has scraped? Video game executives seem to think so; in a survey of 25 gaming executives, Bain & Company found that leadership believes “more than half of the video game development process will be supported by generative AI within the next five to 10 years.” The people who actually make games aren’t so sure.

On Monday Microsoft announced its partnership with Inworld, an AI game development company that’s creating AI tools, including an “AI character runtime engine” that’ll essentially give NPCs endless dialogue and quests in real time. Microsoft says these tools are assistive, a way to “empower” developers in the game design process; Inworld said these tools could “reduce the time and resource constraints” to ship games faster, with “more expansive and immersive worlds and stories,” according to their respective posts on the subject. (Representatives from both Microsoft and Inworld declined to be interviewed for this story.)

Video game studios both big and small have begun experimenting with generative AI tools like the ones Microsoft and Inworld have proposed: Ubisoft announced its Ghostwriter tool in March, used to generate “first drafts of barks,” like when a character shouts “Grenade!” or “Fire in the hole!” in a multiplayer shooter, for instance. High on Life developer Squanch Games used AI art for set decoration and voice acting. CD Projekt Red used AI to recreate a voice actor’s voice after death, with family permission. And there’s only more buy-in expected, as companies like Riot Games and Nexon America look to hire AI specialists to build out their own internal tools.

AI as a concept is nebulous to pin down; it means something different to most people you’ll ask. But it’s safe to say that game developers have used AI before, to create dynamic NPC reactions in combat, for instance. But generative AI is something entirely different, with different applications. “AI in general has been utilized by game developers since the dawn of the medium, but usually in terms of things like enemy behavior or procedural generation,” narrative designer Anna Webster told Polygon, adding that generative AI is doing the same things writers are hired to do — that writers enjoy doing, and are trained to do proficiently.

“What they’re hawking in this case is generative AI. That is, something which can supposedly come up with content to support those working creatively. You know, the thing that humans genuinely enjoy doing,” she told Polygon. “I’m not sure why I, or anyone for that matter, would want to give that part of my job to a machine.”

The only people who are interested in making bigger video games on shorter timelines are in leadership, several game developers told Polygon.

“AAA and AAA-plus is getting really expensive, by virtue of more assets, more content, bigger world,” the writer with 10 years of experience said. “And you need to fill those worlds. Who’s going to do that? It requires an army of designers, an army of writers. If you could somehow cut that aspect of time, effort, and the human beings paid to do that, you’ve got yourself a big money split and money saver there.”

A tool like Inward AI’s Copilot creates more content — quests, lore, dialogue, the stuff a studio already planned on creating but for “cheaper and faster,” as New York University associate professor Julian Togelius put it to Polygon. But Microsoft’s runtime AI does something entirely different and completely new. It adds generative functionality into the video game itself, creating a “forever game” with endless content possibilities. That, he said, has potential for “redefining” how games are made; “This is very interesting and might make completely new types of games available,” he said.

A forever game would capture player attention and hold on to it for as long as possible. AI would make that dream a closer reality — and executives wouldn’t need to spend on human labor. Not to mention the AI could respond to player feedback in real time. While the idea of AI characters is interesting to some developers Polygon spoke to, these tools leave more questions than answers: Do we need a forever game, anyway? Can it actually create a great experience? Generative AI works here, very simply put, by learning from a pool of text data and using predictive text to generate responses to queries or prompts. It can only retread ideas that already exist — it’s what it’s pulling from, without any human spark.

“You’re going to have a small pool of information to draw creativity from. It’s going to start feeling the same. It’s the same gray sludge repeated endlessly,” the writer with 10 years of industry experience said. It’s bad for writers that create the stories for video games, but could end up being bad for the players, too.

The way generative AI learns — with that massive dataset — is an unanswered question, too. As in other industries, developers are questioning whether creators whose copyrighted work was scraped by an AI could claim that AI’s output. “This is not clear, but I think the problem can be solved by new models that are trained on licensed or Creative Commons work,” Togelius said. Webster described the output, trained on copyrighted work or work from artists and writers that haven’t consented, as “the absolute worst kind of chicken nugget” — a piece of work created from blended-up, dubious parts. “[And it’s] a chicken nugget that is in potential violation of intellectual property and copyright law.”

Togelius told Polygon that using generative AI to create dynamic NPCs won’t actually be faster or cheaper, but it has the potential to inspire entirely new types of video games. “If you want to do something like [large language model]-driven NPCs, you’ve got to design from the ground up for that. That’s a much harder way of using AI, but I argue, more interesting.” There are also other applications beyond generating content for generative AI — he pointed to how programmers could use it to generate code, or to learn to code.

Matthew Seiji Burns, who created Eliza, a visual novel about an AI therapy program, has played around with the tools and is open to the possibility that generative AI could be useful in the future. He’s not opposed to it, but right now, he said, game developers are just wondering what problem it’s trying to solve — again, beyond executives looking to make bigger games for cheaper.

“I’ve played with them quite a bit,” Burns said. “We’re interested in it, right? Like, if someone said, ‘Oh, here’s a tool that lets you do your job easier, and makes it more fun and takes away the drudge work, and you can concentrate on being creative,’ that sounds great, right? But we’ve been trying all these tools, and we’re not seeing the amazing benefit the hype is kind of promising.”

These questions aren’t too different from the ones being asked in other parts of the industry, like video game performance. Video game performers, including voice actors and motion capture artists, with Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) are currently in negotiations with a group of video game companies to secure AI regulations, among other things. Sara Secora, a voice director and actor who’s acted in Genshin Impact and Fallout 76, told Polygon that voice actors are looking to be able to consent — or not — to AI being used to replicate their voices.

“The scary thing is people stealing our voices without consent,” she said. “Every single job we’ve worked on for video games or animation, we’ve signed full perpetuity buyouts, which gives [companies] full rights over content, meaning they own it. They can feed it into a machine and do whatever they want with it.”

Some actors signed those rights away years before generative AI was even used in this way. “We did not know this was coming,” Secora said. “Now we have a new language, the [National Association of Voice Actors] rider and other things to help protect us.” And that’s on top of the AI protections SAG-AFTRA is looking to secure for voice actors. (TV and film actors just ended their 118-day strike after reaching an agreement with Hollywood production companies.)

It’s a fight that the Writers Guild of America took on earlier this year after it went on strike for 148 days for a new minimum basic agreement that guarantees regulations on the use of AI, documenting the restrictions and rules with precise language. The new contract isn’t a restriction on the use of AI, but focuses on how AI is trained and how writers are credited and compensated. It’s a guideline that video game writers may look to in outlining how regulations could be imposed on generative AI use in the video game industry, though the industry does not have an industry-wide union like Hollywood writers do.

For now, game developers that spoke to Polygon have a lot more questions than answers. There is one answer, though, that game developers think is obvious: Invest in the developers you have, and bring new voices in.

“Game developers are already some of the most creative people on the planet,” Burns said. “The problem isn’t thinking of new ideas. Every game designer has a million ideas, and many could be right. Saying that game developers could be made more creative by AI is weird to me. If executives truly wanted more creative work in games, they should invest in game developers themselves — the new voices and human perspectives we haven’t seen before.”

A family’s shared supernatural obsession takes on a new dimension after a life cut short

I often joke to my friends that I’m a second-generation vampire nerd. My mom filled our home with Anne Rice, Vampire: The Masquerade, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, plastic fangs, Gothic art, and ironic pins declaring a willingness to suck blood. I was destined to become a vampire-loving geek — the first Halloween costume I chose myself was a Nosferatu-inspired black dress, ghost-white face paint, a trickle of blood applied by Mom, and red-pink hair to complete the look (I was 5). For years, talking about my vampiric lineage was a fun explanation for my growing fascination with Twilight. But in 2010, after losing my mom to AIDS-related complications, the inherited vampire obsession became a lens, one that helped me understand how she dealt with a world hostile to her existence.

We're spending a week diving deep into the stories behind your favorite vampires. Who says we only get to celebrate vampires at Halloween?

My mom’s fascination with vampires predated her diagnosis, but not by much. She wrote her master’s thesis on the literary treatment of vampires in the 20th century. It was 1988, and only one professor in the department at Winthrop University believed vampires were worthy of literary study (an unbelievable claim today, given the continued relevance of Anne Rice’s work). Vampires became my mom’s safe space, and she cogently argued her points anyway, during a time when her own future seemed so uncertain. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, HIV was often a death sentence.

Her own fear of stigma and discrimination means I’m not completely sure when she contracted HIV. Her first husband, Peter, died of AIDS-related complications in 1991, but I only found out about her status by accident, and just two months before her death. So I never outright asked why she loved vampires; at the time, it would’ve been like asking a flower why it loves the sun. Her small smiles turned conspiratorial whenever we’d find a new vampire novel in a store, and her eyes were focused and attentive when I ranted about how much I loved Jonathan Lipnicki in The Little Vampire. The outright contempt she had for glittering vampires gave way to rants about the meaning of “creatures of the night,” full of gesticulations making her seem much taller than 5-foot-3. Vampires became a language in our home to explain fears, anxieties, dreams: I told her once I wanted to live forever, and she asked me if I thought I’d be lonely. The way she buried herself in every form of vampire fantasy she could find after losing Peter, and then my father, Geoffrey, passing away a few short years later, has led me to believe that their mythical tales were her way out of reality.

One world I keep returning to is the role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade. My mom, Geoffrey, and my godparents regularly played Dungeons & Dragons, but her fascination with the Vampire: The Masquerade drew her into online RPG forums and a larger community of like-minded vampire enthusiasts. Vampire: The Masquerade’s story extrapolates from our known world, embracing the dark, horrific aspects and encouraging players to embrace sex, violence, and danger as elements to play with rather than shy away from. The game has a confrontational streak; in the most recent edition of V:TM, released in 2018, its “Mature Content Warning” actually names AIDS first in a list of “darkness[es] in the real world.” My mom struggled to talk about her diagnosis, and these online communities, I think, gave her a space to sit with her feelings in ways she couldn’t otherwise.

Mom’s laptop went with her everywhere. Everyone knew she journaled most days, but she wasn’t forthcoming with the content. But toward the end of her life, I think part of her felt compelled to leave a piece of herself behind, as I inherited over 100 pages of role-playing-based fanfiction in a black 2-inch three-ring binder. The short-lived Kindred: The Embraced, a Vampire: The Masquerade TV series, was her backdrop. In a series of role-playing fanfic stories written back and forth through AOL chat, my mom recast herself as Julian Luna, one of the show’s protagonists (although pointedly gave him Geoffrey’s birthday: Aug. 14). Her online role-play partner inhabited the Kindred character Cash, a Gangrel vampire in Kindred. They both alternated voicing Morgaine and Joe, original characters created by my mother. In exchanges between vampire lovers pulled from both the television show and her own life, there are lines here and there that feel like her trying to rewrite her own life. “He’s never felt so vulnerable,” she writes, “and paradoxically never so free.” The risque text lines up with another moment from my own memory. When I was in my teens, I admitted to her that I was feeling embarrassed over reading and enjoying Twilight slash. She reassured me: imagination is a good thing.

Photo: Courtesy of Eliza Alexander Wilcox

For my mom, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was major, and she hosted regular watch nights during its original run at our house. When Sarah Michelle Gellar walked into Sunnydale High for the first time in 1997, my Mom was two weeks shy of 37 and twice a widow; the premiere was only two years after Geoffrey died from AIDS-related complications. Most weeks, I stayed at my grandparents’ for a night to let her socialize, but on Buffy nights when I was home, my mom’s voice flew over my head — she sat on the couch, and I laid on the floor in front of the TV. Every episode was the The Rocky Horror Picture Show: She wolf-whistled when Spike sauntered on screen and chimed in on the believability of Giles’ historical rant. I was fascinated with Willow and Tara, naming two hamsters after them, which tickled her. I’ve dedicated many hours trying to wrestle those memories out of my brain, commit them to paper, and to try and make sense of them knowing now how much weight she carried then. I always come back to her feelings toward Angel and Spike.

Spike was a Billy Idol vampire fantasy come to life, and Mom loved Billy Idol. “Dancing with Myself” played on every car ride, becoming the first song I fully memorized, and the song whisked her back to memories of bouncing around the college concert scene with Peter. That love for Billy casts Spike in a fond light for me. His demeanor, his complicated relationship to love and sex, and his desire in his human life to make beautiful art in a horrifying world remind me of her. Spike, too, makes meaning for himself as life, as he knows it, is ripped away due to government intervention. There is not a simple one-to-one analogy, but the desire to annihilate vampires through government intervention resonates with a fear and isolation my mom faced.

My mom was a queer woman with AIDS. She spent her days working for a newspaper and unable to escape the reality that many saw AIDS as a moral punishment for their sexuality. AIDS became attached to gay men in ways that created shadows for a woman like her to hide in — even if it meant being forgotten there as well. She formed and lost her relationships with two queer men, and found herself parenting a child she was terrified would be taken away from her if people knew her HIV status. Her heteronormative privilege from her marriages only lasted if she never lived openly and got treatment. It’s hard not to see Spike’s willingness on the series to undergo experimentation to become part of Buffy’s world as an echo of my mom’s fears of being open with her sexuality and status: Would she have been told her existence was dangerous to me and become a medical guinea pig to quell the unease?

Rewatching the show after its initial run, she also volleyed criticism at Angel and his pained pining for Buffy. Her mouth would turn down, and she’d roll her eyes, perched in the left corner of our overstuffed couch and balancing a Dell laptop on her knees, likely on chat with her friends. I never got the fascination with Angel, so her disdain for him made sense to me — but I wonder if her dislike of Angel-Buffy grew from a season 1 sex-soul change. After the “true happiness” of having sex with Buffy, Angel transforms to Angelus, a mindless, bloodthirsty fiend with no regard for anyone or anything but his own sadistic pleasure. The choice sparks debate, even now, about how it portrays sex and love, and I see my mom struggling to enjoy a plotline geared around equating sexual desire with a demonic transformation.

But I worry most that she believed she was Angelus, and I was an innocent mortal caught in the fallout. I hope she knew that I could never fear her. I wish she’d seen that her death wasn’t going to save my world.

Rewatching the famous episode “The Body” now feels like an eerie prediction of the night my mom died. After a night out with friends for the first time in a month, my mom died quietly in her room, shortly after 10 p.m. that night. In “The Body,” Buffy discovers her mother, Joyce, lying in her bed, prone after an aneurysm. I came home to my own mom, too, alone in her room, gone in all the ways that mattered. The episode pierces the vampiric fantasy with the quiet tragedy of mundane human death, and it’s one of the few pieces of media that captures the utter everyday tragedy of the hours after someone is gone.

Vampires began for my mom, I think, as a way to never think about those hours, having lived them after losing Peter and Geoffrey. Now, sifting through my memories with my mom, holding the plastic fangs that used to sit on her bookshelf, paging through her Vampire: The Masquerade playbooks, it all grounds me as I work through what these stories can and should mean. I rewatch Buffy and picture her scowling, followed by her familiar laugh. I write about New York by Night and wonder how she’d compare Julian Luna to Aabria Iyengar’s Margot Fuego: Which Ventrue vampire would she like more? Every bookstore visit is an opportunity to find new vampire stories, each one letting me believe there’s one more message from her waiting for me if I just look hard enough.

My mom cannot sit next to me, physically, but there is a sureness in me that she sits somewhere close. When I’m ready to see where the next vampire story takes me, I know she’ll be with me.

Climate change is making real life a horror film for everyone, bloodsuckers included

Climate change is full of spooky phenomena (see zombie fires, ghost forests), but the widest-reaching is “global weirding,” a term coined by Hunter Lovins that takes an expansive look at the Anthropocene, the current era of human-caused environmental change. Global weirding is about how the world won’t just get warmer, but the knock-on effects will be dynamic, varied, amplified, and downright weirder.

We aren’t talking enough how this will affect vampires. After all, climate and vampire stories are both about Victorian creations that haunt us long after they should be dead — one just centers on industrial capitalism, and the other a less explicit bloodsucker.

We're spending a week diving deep into the stories behind your favorite vampires. Who says we only get to celebrate vampires at Halloween?

As more and more vampire media is developed and set in the present day, the warmest years on record, we need a definitive guide to how vampire strength and behaviors could change as their world gets weirder.

Dr. Scott Coffin — an environmental toxicologist and California EPA scientist who appears to not be a vampire despite the name — is already thinking of some knock-on effects. Global food insecurity, for example, “could reduce the availability of garlic,” while desertification would decrease forest cover and make hunting humans harder, and result in “less wood for making stakes.” Yet it seems like vampires may most significantly be altered by smoky sunlight, wildlife changes, and microplastics.

Darkness takes hold

For more than a century, most vampires have been nocturnal creatures. Whether light makes them sparkle or turn to dust, vampires tend to avoid daylight hours, only hunting humans at night, under clouded sky and midnight gaslamp. But how will that change as blood-red wildfire smoke covers entire skylines for days, like we saw in across the East Coast this summer? Ditto for more frequent storm clouds, rolling blackouts, and potential geoengineering projects. As global weirding continues to snowball, opportunities for feeding will only increase.

According to planetary scientist Sanaz Vahidinia, who has studied light scattering in different environments, aerosols like soot (from fires) or sulfates (from geoengineering projects) dampen the light level, which creates darker conditions, though they also let different light wavelengths through. We can see this with wildfires coloring skies orange in increasing frequency as climate change has worsened. It’s complex, and ever-changing.

“Light is constantly interacting with your environment and yourself,” she told Polygon. Although vampires like darker skies, Vahidinia questioned how they would react to different colors or levels of haze — perhaps a vamp would be able to walk under an orange sky, but only get an appetite once the moon is showing. If they like the dampened light, she suggested they could work together on stratospheric aerosol injection, using their wings to distribute sulfates high up to increase aerosols’ dampening effect and, potentially, help cool the climate.

Thankfully, Earth could be in a worse position. Vampires could get a lot stronger under other atmospheric conditions. Vahidinia specifically called out the thick atmosphere of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.

Picture this: Next time you awaken to a warning about Canadian wildfire smoke drifting toward you, it comes with an estimate of vampire activity you can expect to accompany it. Vahidinia considered vampires creating new migratory behaviors, like birds flying south in autumn, asking “if vampires would concentrate in areas where you would have longer and intense wildfire events, like California.”

Vahidinia suggested those finding themselves in such situations stay inside. “You have to stay indoors anyways, because you don’t want to be breathing that.” Being at home has other anti-vampire benefits. “I would plant a lot of garlic around the house,” she added.

When wildfire smoke covered New England so deeply that people had to light candles at noon to see, locals declared it doomsday. That was in 1780. After Mount Tambora, an Indonesian volcano, erupted in 1815, ashen clouds led to “the year without a summer,” a moody, strange year during which Mary Shelley created Frankenstein and the beginning of Gothic horror. Smoke clouds create spooky environments, and these events are coming multiple times a year rather than once in a generation.

Bats, rats, and vampire fish

If you’ve entered an American cave recently, you may have been asked to follow decontamination procedures when leaving, from scrubbing your shoes to inspecting your bags for “stowaway bats.” This has been to reduce the spread of white-nose syndrome, a fungal disease that is killing bats in unprecedented numbers (as high as 99% of some bat populations). Caves are going quiet and hibernating bats are convulsing in their sleep from the disease. There’s no way this would not touch vampire populations.

Although WNS hasn’t been tied to climate change, it’s an example of a disease that might appear or worsen as the world gets weirder: Fungal diseases are great at that. This fungus is hard to remove, and remains on clothing and other surfaces for several years. To slow the spread, vampire communities could consider new occult rituals of quarantining and decontamination, closed-border bat caves like an isolationist cave network for Idahoan vamps, or encouraging nudism in vampires, as some capes or corsets could harbor fungal spores. City vampires and country vampires might schism in their public health strategies. We saw something similar in early COVID-19 mitigation, and WNS is more lethal.

The other forms a vamp might take (rat, wolf, moth, owl) are under fewer direct and intense threats, and though there’s the haunting specter of habitat removal and intense temperatures, global weirding and urbanization can bolster some of these pests. It’s easier to blend into a swarm of flies if a hurricane has left corpses out to rot, and it’s easier to become the leader of a feral dog pack if your suburban hunting grounds have been abandoned. “More people, more trash, more trash, more pests,” rodentology expert Bobby Corrigan told Heathline, discussing booming rat populations.

The scariest bloodsucking pest is bolstered by global weirding: the lamprey! It’s time for me to link to my favorite map, the Blood Map from a 2014 Ecosphere paper. Showing that Lake Superior lamprey blood consumption has increased by 10% in recent decades as the lake has warmed, it’s a vibrant and memorable graphic to see that, yep, bloodsuckers can prosper in the Anthropocene. As climates change, we might get fewer bat-vampires and more lampires, traveling from waterbody to waterbody, draining the lives of fish and other exposed bodies. Lampreys are already nicknamed “vampire fish,” after all.

Mmmhmm, microplastics

Pollution particles have rightfully been called invisible demons — miniscule specks of microplastics are now present in the deepest water, human placentas, foods, clothes, and even clouds. Plastics last for centuries (like vampires) and have questionable health effects on humans (also like vampires), and there is so much we do not yet know about the thousands of different types of microplastics and plastic additives. But if humans are wearing nylon, breathing air, and eating food, we’re ingesting these compounds, and if a vampire eats us, then that vamp is sucking up invisible demons.

If The Minderoo-Monaco Commission on Plastics and Human Health’s findings were applied to once-human vampires, we could see them suffer from endocrine disruption, altering hormone development and function, cardiovascular diseases leading to heart failures or strokes, and neurodevelopmental and behavioral abnormalities, including anxiety, aggression, and memory issues. These are just a sampling of the many, many health impacts.

As vampires traditionally cannot give birth and do not age, it’s difficult to say how several health impacts of plastic use would affect them, whether in decreased fertility, premature birth, or cancer. Cancers could accelerate in vampire bodies, like they do in The Vampire Diaries, and reproductive impacts could damage a vampire’s ability to transform others into vampires. The effects of plastics would be especially pronounced if the vampire lived in areas of plastic production, like the Texas and Louisiana coasts — the same locations found in Anne Rice vampire novels.

Let’s not forget that humans will be the first impacted by these health impacts. Brian Bodenbender, a Hope College professor studying discarded waste, told Polygon that pollution creates the “potential for humans to become more toxic, so vampires could risk [losing] their food source. As if humans aren’t toxic enough already.” Coffin goes one step further: “It’s possible that with increasing microplastics exposure, in combination with myriad known (e.g., smoking, air pollution, endocrine disrupting chemicals, etc.) and unknown risk factors, human reproduction may fall to unsustainable levels within the next 25 to 100 years.” Though he said this potential has high uncertainty: “Eventually, this may make prey more difficult to find for vampires, and they may need to be conscious about their consumption to maintain viable ‘crop’ for the future.”

It would be hard for vampires to hunt down “free range” humans for blood, such as those isolated from civilization, because microplastics have simply infected nearly every landmass and ecosystem. Instead of trying to find the best blood, a vampire might help secure a plastic-free feeding zone another way, like swallowing oil executives until plastic production stops, or using their centuries of wisdom to expand reverse-osmosis plastic-filtering technology.

So far, there is no evidence that microplastics biomagnify up the food chain, but they do accumulate in someone’s body. Those effects might be especially pronounced with a centuries-old creature. Next time you cut a vampire in half, don’t expect just gore, but the infinitely more terrifying seepage of plastics: bottle caps, nurdles, floss, and Dasani scraps oozing out of their insides. There are far too many real-life examples of this in fish.

It’s terrifying to think that such small objects like plastic fishing nets can indirectly kill an immortal being. It doesn’t feel right, or well-paced, to have a vampire survive hundreds of years of vampire hunting to suddenly get a stroke and croak from too much exposure to invisible chemicals. It’s the same feeling as seeing our planet get damaged from those same pollutants. Climate change does not conform to narrative arcs, it’s not satisfying, and it’s killing more forms of life in more ways than you could ever imagine. If vampires were real, they might just be another weird casualty.

Jane Wu’s career of designing fights and spectacle pays off in the Netflix adrenaline rush

Jane Wu understood the journey of a young warrior slashing her way through a male-dominated hierarchy of power. Though Amber Noizumi and Michael Green (Logan, Blade Runner 2049) co-created the new Netflix series Blue Eye Samurai, they found the hard-R animated epic’s soul in Wu, a storyboard artist, director, and martial artist whose unsung role in blockbuster action over the last 20 years made her an obvious choice to oversee the series’ direction. Blue Eye Samurai follows Mizu, a young woman of mixed race in 17th-century Japan, who masquerades as a male samurai to find four white men hiding out in the country — and the one who’s likely her father. Wu’s ascent in the action and animation industries wasn’t as bloody as Blue Eye Samurai, but it was as rigorous.

“It was so eerily relatable how Mizu felt as a woman going through Edo Japan, when women were really seen as decorative things,” Wu tells Polygon. “I absolutely related to the anger she felt. I was able to channel that anger. And it was very cathartic.”

Wu’s frustration with the “bro club” of Hollywood action work comes out in full force in Blue Eye Samurai, which rewires razor-sharp swordplay for the John Wick era. Mizu slices arms, bounces across mountains, and tears herself apart on her quest to find answers. It’s genuinely astonishing, and when Wu’s name pops up in the credits as supervising director, it’s obvious why. Wu’s CV is littered with milestone projects, having storyboarded for the better-than-anyone-would’ve-expected animated series Jackie Chan Adventures and Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot to Game of Thrones and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. The filmmaker hit my personal radar when I discovered she choreographed all the best moments in The Avengers’ Battle of New York. Marvel knew it had to be in the Jane Wu business, recruiting her eye for Thor: The Dark World, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Age of Ultron. Her style — which combines a knowledge of physics and fluidity, a wry comic timing, and her training in the martial art wushu — nearly got her jobs directing Chinese blockbusters, although COVID-19 threw a wrench in those plans. She doesn’t have any regrets, though — she’s exactly where she wants to be.

While Wu’s fingerprints are all over modern action, Blue Eye Samurai finally puts her name in the spotlight in a major way. She didn’t waste the opportunity. Wu says she funneled two decades of dealing with workplace microaggressions right into the show’s action, which hits hard.

“And the hits have to hit hard,” she says. “That’s part of my martial arts background and having watched so much action in my upbringing, from Hong Kong cinema. I appreciate a good hit. I want you to feel it. That’s the whole idea of what we do when we tell stories — I want you to feel it.”

Image: Netflix

Wu had an immediate, clear vision of how she would approach Noizumi and Green’s personal-yet-classic samurai saga. During her time on Marvel movies and Game of Thrones, she saw live-action filmmaking lean so hard on special effects that it almost became a form of animation. So with Blue Eye Samurai, Wu wanted to work in reverse and create “animation with a live-action attitude.” While live-action references and rotoscoping have been part of the animation methodology since the early days of Walt Disney, Wu aimed to create a pipeline that hewed closer to how she approached work on a giant movie like The Avengers.

The result was a “manifesto” for Blue Eye Samurai: Any shot or sequence in the series would be considered from a live-action point of view, from camera lenses to set construction and “actor” choreography. Much like how Roger Deakins elevated the Pixar filmmaking style with WALL-E, Wu wanted the entire production to feel prepped to shoot in live action. That required extensive pre-visualization of the entire series and the creation of digital proxy sets, which allowed Wu and the creative team to “location scout” for the various set-pieces.

“I got this idea through Mizu’s character. She is biracial. So I wanted this production, and when you’re looking at it, to feel like it’s a great blend of both animation and live action. I wanted to show that there is strength in that diversity,” she says.

Images: Netflix

With all of the shoot mapped out, Wu then teamed with action choreographer Sunny Sun to stage each of Blue Eye Samurai’s battles in practical environments. During the more demanding days of COVID, Sun bubbled with a team of stunt performers at a facility in China for two weeks, working out the moves for each fight and taping them for reference. Wu says this is common practice for giant blockbuster movies, but a level of prep work rarely seen in animation. It helped that she could also wield a sword if the animation team at France’s Blue Spirit ever needed a closer-up point of reference.

There are episodes in which Wu broke the manifesto to blow the audience back in their sofas. The series’ sixth episode finds Mizu fighting her way through an aggressively defended fortress full of traps that would make Jigsaw salivate. Wu says it was an homage to Enter the Dragon, gaming, and anime — sources of inspiration that revel in boss fights. But the fantastical are few and far between in the series; for the most part, even the goriest pangs of violence in Blue Eye Samurai followed the rules, all while satisfying Wu’s dreams. In one of the early episodes, Mizu finds herself taking on 10 fighters in a dojo. The sequence was a perfect place for the director to vent.

“I didn’t want this to be another kind of, like, ‘I hack at you, you hack at me’ thing because that’s just so boring,” she says. “I wanted something that would even wow our stunt community. So we talked a lot about Mizu and her character because she doesn’t talk very much and the other 10 dojo students were mouthing off at her. So I said, ‘Let’s rip out their teeth. Let’s injure their mouths because she wants them to shut up.’ And who doesn’t wince at teeth being knocked out?”

Wu can’t help but laugh at her own flex and all of the show’s elegantly constructed bursts of rage. Even the first season’s overarching plot, depicting the arrival of European guns to Japan and the disruption of honorable fighting, mirrors her own experiences. “I grew up in Asia,” she says, “and Western culture was always bombarding us, telling us that our Asian culture wasn’t as important or wasn’t as fun. So it was kind of the arrival of that bombardment.”

With Blue Eye Samurai, Wu gets to push back, and in a style she’s been honing for years in service of others. Now it’s her turn.

“It’s all a long revenge for me,” she says with a smile.

Blue Eye Samurai season 1 is streaming now on Netflix.

His best-known role of Chandler on Friends laid the groundwork for Perry’s unique, awkward blend

Norm Macdonald, that mordant rapscallion, once relayed a story about Matthew Perry saying that he had invented a new kind of comedy with Chandler Bing; Macdonald, in that wily way of his, responded: “You invented sarcasm?”

Funny as Macdonald’s retort was, Perry’s claim wasn’t wholly without merit. It isn’t the incessant sarcasm that makes Perry’s performance special in the annals of American sitcoms, though. It’s the vulnerability, the willingness to look stupid and be a loser emasculated by ’90s standards — he kissed a guy, he has a gay “quality,” he didn’t touch a breast until he was 19, he’s a poor athlete, and during a bout of fisticuffs with a pair of bullies on the West Village streets he trips over a little girl’s jump rope — and still find the decency in the sweater-vest-wearing jester’s heart.

Niles (David Hyde Pierce) from Frasier is the decade’s other great wimp, but he is a rarefied fancy-pants, erudite, maybe effeminate but uproariously libidinous for a Daphne; he’s a success story. J.D. (Zach Braff) from Scrubs, which debuted in 2001, is the progeny of Chandler, with repeated references to his unmanly physique and doofiness. Chandler and Perry’s other characters are men with a particular piteous kind of imperfection. His best roles are imbued with a malaise and awkward, anxious tendencies, but they’re never hopeless.

Photo: NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images

When I found out that Perry had died far too young at 54, I felt an inordinate amount of sadness for this man I had never met, yet who felt like a longtime friend. I knew his secrets; in a way, he knew mine. I’ve seen Friends five times, initially as a bit, an ironic gag with which I could annoy my friends, and then as background din instead of music while I wrote, and, at some point, to my shock, with increasing and sincere fondness. And I related in my own ways to Perry’s personal tribulations, having known a life of emotional lability and false palliatives. Friends offers its fair share of genuine, tender, even tragic emotions (Tom Selleck’s storyline, with that last beautiful, heartbreaking dance at the end of season 2) and laughs (Joey stealing Chandler’s catchphrase while garbed grotesquely in all of Chandler’s clothes, a big bulbous Italian American goofball doing lunges commando).

But the character who became immediately beloved to audiences, equipped from the beginning with endless witticisms and quips and charmingly cheesy puns and occasionally clever comebacks, is Chandler Muriel Bing (blessed with a Pynchon-esque name), one of the post-Reagan years’ enduring icons, played indelibly by Perry at the young, scary age of 25 when the show debuted in 1994. Each character has an elevator-pitch personality. But Chandler? An awkward guy who tells jokes? He defies easy succinct description. We don’t even know what his job is. Matt LeBlanc’s Joey Tribbiani is maybe the funniest character, thanks to LeBlanc’s skillful timing, inflection, and enunciation; his jokes are skillful and flow naturally, elevating even listless lines with life, the emotive control of his facial movements as his eyes go wide in delayed surprise. But it’s Chandler who, more than anyone else, makes Friends unique, since the show often hits the same story beats as other sitcoms of the ’90s.

In the season 2 episode in which Mr. Heckles dies, what Chandler finds in the slovenly shambles of the hermit’s apartment and his book of grievances is a horrible glimpse into his future. Perry, petrified of failure as he would later explain in the Friends reunion, brings a pathos to the episode while ultimately finding the potential to change his life. Without this epiphany, would be have had the courage to commit to Monica? To adopt children? Perry’s unique approach engraved Chandler into the cultural consciousness because he takes the mistakes and misfortunes of the funny man seriously. Chandler’s discomfort at his jokes falling flat reflects Perry’s fear of faltering and leaving viewers unamused.

In later seasons, his performance becomes less loud and more mature, even as his body was battered and bedraggled by substance abuse struggles. It’s as if Perry despaired about his own life, and channeled his energy and soul into the character for which he would be remembered, a character who had been with him since he was 25. His performance is tinctured with traces of pain and sadness and a desperation to be liked from season to season. There’s self-doubt, not ego, imbuing each line.

Perry had his misfires over his career (the nadir of his oeuvre probably being the limp, lazy The Odd Couple) but he was at his best when he allowed his characters to be as flawed as he was, pathetic, even (save for The Ron Clark Story, in which he is utterly altruistic). The Whole Nine Yards features a frantic, frightened Perry opposite Bruce Willis, who plays a retired hitman and genial next-door neighbor; Perry is miserable and symbolically castrated by his virulent, chain-smoking Canadian wife (a fiendishly nasty Rosanna Arquette), who tries to hire Willis to kill her loser of a dentist husband. Go On, a very cleverly cast tragicomedy, lets Perry be tender, tragic yet hopeful, as a man grieving the loss of his wife with the help of a support group comprising a motley assortment of eccentrics. He played Ted Kennedy, no stranger to tragedy and guilt, in The Kennedys: After Camelot, a serious, somber, empathetic kind of tortured turn that hints at a new career path he will now never get to take. His final film role, in 2009’s 17 Again, is a quintessential dweeb ambling through a life rife with regrets, and who turns into Zac Efron at the apogee of High School Musical mania, with his abs and shiny hair. Even in The Simpsons’s “Treehouse of Horror XII,” the sci-fi smart robo-house that Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie move into offers a list of options for voice. Perry’s is one, saying, of course, his famous “Could I be…” And they keep on scrolling, instead choosing Pierce Brosnan (whose tux Chandler wears in season 7).

Photo: Muse Entertainment

Photo: Kevin Winter/Getty Images

Photo: Justin Lubin/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images

Perry’s brand of comedy was the flustered failure, and his forays into drama were modern men afflicted with inner anguish; he brought to both a singular woebegone quality, the crestfallen character who not may not like himself, but tries to be better. And it’s not just characters he was hired to play: the characters he wrote, the people he created, are mired in the same melancholy. His 2016 play The End of Longing, which he wrote and starred in, concerns a bibulous, broken man having an existential crisis, struggling to find meaning in the mundanity of his existence. It’s even in guest roles on shows like Scrubs, where he plays an air traffic controller who finds out his father isn’t really his biological father, and must decide whether he will give the man a kidney. (He does.)

Despite all the floundering, Perry’s characters are often likable enough for people to help him. Go On may be the first work of his to feature a literal support group, but he has supportive consorts throughout his career, a lonely soul who isn’t alone. You see the seeds of these characters in Chandler, who messes up — a lot — but he’s rarely as vindictive or manipulative as the others can all get (Ross goes ballistic after the “we were on a break” fiasco sent the country into a frenzy right there in their living rooms, and Monica’s shrill bossiness grows less amusing during wedding planning). He even professes guilt when he does mess up, by, say, kissing Joey’s girlfriend — which he does because he’s wildly in love with her — and even lets himself be entombed in a packing crate just to prove how sorry he was to his best bud. His friends forgive him, help him, sigh when he cracks a joke, bust his chops, but never abandon him. Through it all, he tries to learn and change… as much as a wimpy, porn-loving manchild can change.

Though Chandler will always be what he’s inextricably known as, for my money, Perry’s best performance was as Matt Albie, a writer with a maelstrom of pain deep within that he tries to ameliorate with pills and perfectionism, in the too-short-lived Aaron Sorkin show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. The poignancy of Studio 60 is in the minutiae and details of the fleshed-out, uniquely complicated characters, the quotidian tribulations of entertainers whose personal lives are anything but funny; it’s a human drama with minor stakes, maybe, but profound, painful, pleasurable, life-altering to the people experiencing it. Albie wants to make serious, respectable art with his sketch comedy show; a torch still burns in his heart for his ex; he is crippled by self-loathing.

Something similar could be said about Perry, who wanted so badly to be famous, but didn’t like what happened when he got his wish. “Hi, my name is Matthew, although you may know me by another name. My friends call me Matty,” Perry’s 2022 memoir Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing begins. “And I should be dead.” This is how the actor, an icon of ’90s entertainment, introduces himself: a moribund, unfettered confession. You feel such quivering anguish in Albie, and the same hope for betterment and perseverance that Perry displays in the book. Albie, like Perry, desperately wants his art to be respected. In the end, both succeeded.

Yuri Lowenthal talks vocal stress, AI, and the possible strike

Yuri Lowenthal is one of gaming and animation’s most prolific and hardworking voice actors. With hundreds of credits stretching back over two decades — the man’s resume is so big it needs its own separate Wikipedia page — we’ve rarely gone a year without the pleasure of hearing his instantly recognizable performances, most recently as Peter Parker in Spider-Man 2.

But what goes into these many roles, and what does voice acting look like as technology rapidly advances toward the stuff of dystopian science fiction? Lowenthal spoke to Polygon about his most recent video game roles, as well as a possible voice actor strike and the importance of nailing down considerations for AI usage and worker health in the Screen Actors Guild’s ongoing contract negotiations with major studios.

Of course, I couldn’t open my conversation with Lowenthal without asking about his returning to the role of Peter Parker in Spider-Man 2, released in October. He’d yet to crack open his early copy of the game when we spoke a few days before its arrival on PlayStation 5, explaining that his self-admitted lack of skill often keeps him from spending too much time with the action-heavy projects to which he lends his voice.

“You know, famously, I’m not great at playing video games,” Lowenthal told me over a video call, rarely dropping his trademark grin. “I famously 3%-ed the original Spider-Man game and then walked away out of frustration. I’d much rather just watch YouTube playthroughs or cinematics all strung together than actually play it. I’m more [into] these days, like, story-based, on-rails [games], maybe a couple of easy puzzles. Cool atmosphere, cool story, not something where I have to learn complex mechanics to fight off things that are trying to kill me every 30 seconds. I just don’t have it in my heart anymore.”

Lowenthal shared that his young son’s recent interest 2018’s Spider-Man gave him a chance to return to it and get farther than he did before, swapping controllers with the 7-year-old whenever either of them would get frustrated.

Despite donning Spider-Man’s virtual spandex a mere five years ago — for comparison, his time as Naruto anti-hero Sasuke Uchiha in both the anime and its various movie and video game spinoffs began in 2005 and continues to this day — Lowenthal’s confidently boyish personality has become almost as synonymous with the web-spinning crimefighter as on-screen actors like Tobey Maguire and Tom Holland. His intimate knowledge of the character, combined with the comfort of working with Spider-Man developer Insomniac Games all these years, means he feels comfortable going off-script on occasion, though even he’s been surprised by the lines they use from recording sessions.

“Every now and then, something shows up in the game I had no idea they were going to use,” Lowenthal said. “Most memorably in that first [Spider-Man] game, I made a joke just for the room, basically. It was an ad lib on a sort of Western-themed quip or joke, and I said, ‘Yippee-ki-yay, mother spider,’ just as an alt, which I assumed they would burn. And then somebody sent me a clip [of the voice line] in the finished game. I had no idea that it made it in. I’ve gotten to a place in working with Insomniac where somebody will say, ‘Did you make this up?’ And I’ll listen to it and be like, ‘At this point, I have no idea.’ Maybe that’s what they wrote, maybe that’s one I came up with. We’re all in the same groove now and we record so many lines that it’s hard to keep track.”

A couple years into recording for Spider-Man 2, Lowenthal was offered the role of Smoke in Mortal Kombat 1, which was released in September. I was curious what he thought of the fighting game franchise’s modern reliance on “stunt casting,” or casting a mainstream celebrity to drum up attention. Mortal Kombat 1, for example, features movie star Megan Fox in the role of fan-favorite character Nitara, while leaving the vampire’s grunts and screams to veteran voice actor Cristina Vee.

Taking care not to disparage anyone involved in the Mortal Kombat 1 situation, Lowenthal admitted he’s of two minds when it comes to stunt casting. His knee-jerk reaction is to wonder why any studio would take an on-camera actor over an established voice actor. But on the other hand, he understands that convincing the entertainment industry’s money people to finance a project becomes much easier if you can point to the casting of a widely known film actor. Sometimes, Lowenthal added, it can mean the difference between something getting made and not getting made.

“As an example, I got to work on a show that was also a game that was also a one-off movie called Afro Samurai,” Lowenthal said. “And if Samuel L. Jackson had not said, ‘I want to be Afro Samurai,’ that never would have gotten made. But because he said yes to that, and it got made, I got to be a part of that, so it’s also hard for me to just sort of write it off and say, ‘Leave it to the voice actors, we’ll take care of it, you’re stupid to hire movie stars.’ That’s not always the case. And to go even deeper, they wanted a movie star for my part in Afro Samurai, but they hadn’t locked down the deal yet. They brought me in to do scratch tracks for that actor, but then the deal fell through and I got to be a part of Afro Samurai, which is still one of my favorite projects ever.”

The ins and outs of the entertainment business loom large in many video game performers’ minds these days, due to ongoing negotiations between SAG-AFTRA and a group of major studios that includes Insomniac Games and Warner Bros. Games, which published Mortal Kombat 1. Voice actors represented by SAG-AFTRA authorized a strike in September, and as of now, union reps are still trying to hammer out a fair contract for members covered by the interactive media agreement.

While “artificial intelligence” is a bit of a misnomer, AI usage forms the crux of SAG-AFTRA’s concerns. The rapidly improving technology is getting to the point where, if allowed to run rampant, voice actors may be called in to do a single job and then watch as an algorithm mimics their tone, inflection, and cadence without the need to continue paying or ask permission from the human being behind the original performance. Lowenthal equated it to being “puppeted” and emphasized the need for consent from all parties, even in the case of not-for-profit fan works, to prevent exploitation.

“If we could work [AI] out, I think pretty much everything else is in a pretty good place,” Lowenthal said. “None of us are anti-technology or think we can stop any of that stuff. It’s just that the technology could easily be used to exploit the people who helped develop it, namely the actors. And with the current temperature of corporate greed, I think that could easily happen, even if a lot of people are well-meaning. We’re trying to open a dialogue between the companies that are creating and using the AI and actors to establish some best practices, some protections, some guidelines now so that, going forward, we can avoid the whole exploitation thing.”

It remains to be seen if voice actors will go on strike, but they’re no strangers to withholding their labor if it means better working conditions. During the last round of negotiations, SAG-AFTRA went on strike against a similar group of video game developers and publishers for over a year starting in late 2016 when an agreement couldn’t be reached on a new contract. And while compensation was the chief concern at the time, the striking voice actors also got employers to make a commitment to work with the union on the issue of vocal stress.

Talking doesn’t sound all that exerting, Lowenthal explained, but when a voice actor spends hours recording, it can really do a number on their vocal cords, and the strain only increases when they’re asked to grunt or scream. Most jobs now limit sessions to four hours, and if things get intense, they may take a break at just two. It’s all about ensuring voice actors don’t injure themselves and employers get the best performances possible —common goals that are more easily achieved when studios bring in folks familiar with the art form.

“In the case of Spider-Man 2, there was symbiote stuff that’s not normal Peter Parker Spider-Man, and I was really pushing because I really wanted it to sound different,” Lowenthal said. “I really wanted people to see the difference between regular old friendly neighborhood Spider-Man and ‘with great power comes no responsibility’ Spider-Man, and once or twice I hurt myself. Kris Zimmerman, the voice director at Insomniac, and everyone at all levels, they were always trying to protect me. But every now and then I’d get excited and wouldn’t even know how hard I’d pushed until later that day and probably should have called it an hour before we called it.”

Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment

Enthusiasm-related vocal injuries aside, one thing that Lowenthal made explicitly clear over the course of our conversation was just how important Peter’s journey with the symbiote was to everyone who worked behind the scenes on Spider-Man 2. Taking on the alien parasite doesn’t automatically flip a switch in Spider-Man’s mind from good guy to jerk; rather, it influences him subtly over the course of the story, which naturally called for Lowenthal to adjust his performance from moment to moment depending on where in the script they were. And since big projects like these are often recorded out of sequence, it was necessary to develop a shorthand; Peter’s early experiences with the symbiote, for example, were compared by those in the studio to the initial stages of substance abuse.

“Every now and then I would do something and Kris Zimmerman would be like, ‘That’s Pete later on down the line,’ or she would confirm with a writer or a producer in the session [about where we were at] in the game. Sometimes we would have to go back [with the understanding] of, you know, Peter’s just tried cocaine for the first time and so things are still happy. He’s super excited and he’s having a good time.”

I haven’t played much of Spider-Man 2 yet (sorry, Yuri), so it’s hard to square the endlessly optimistic actor I spoke to last week voicing someone who, in his words, loses his humanity and becomes “part animal, part creature.” Maybe that’s why Lowenthal is the perfect Peter Parker and, ultimately, what makes the character’s journey so impactful. When I asked him if he had anything else he hoped to impart about the ongoing contract negotiations and a potential strike, Lowenthal remained steadfast in his union’s goals while also reserving empathy for those who may not understand why drastic measures are sometimes the only way to improve working conditions.

“We still don’t know exactly how that’s going to play out, but there are certain things that we’re fighting for right now that we know if we just sort of lay down and take it, like we have in the past on certain technology-based things, we’ll never get it back,” Lowenthal said. “This is where we take our stand and hopefully everybody can come to some sort of agreement. I know it’s complicated. It’s easy to sort of pass judgment on one part of the negotiation, not knowing from the inside how things work. Trust me, none of us want to strike. Striking hurts everyone and everything. We only do it when we feel like it’s of the utmost importance to creating a sustainable future for what we do.”

Artificial intelligence is making it easier for creators to recreate others’ content

In mid-September, YouTube announced a collection of new artificial intelligence tools coming to the platform. The tools touch basically every part of the content creation process, from generating topics to editing and even generating video footage itself through the Dream Screen feature. But even as AI features have caused an uproar in so many other creative industries, the response to YouTube’s new suite of tools has been muted. Instead, YouTubers are sharing other concerns about the ways generative AI is already affecting the platform.

It’s been a watershed year as generative AI tools have made it easier to create images and text, all generated from internet scrapes of others’ art and writing. Artists and writers have typically pushed back, citing issues like copyright and their own work being undermined — in September, high-profile authors including George R.R. Martin and Jodi Picoult filed to sue OpenAI for scraping their books. And then there’s generative AI’s issues with hallucination and inaccuracies.

On the other side of the coin, these tools have been used by many people, either experimentally or professionally. Prizes have been won by AI art, while some news sites cut their staff and put out AI-generated articles. AI has also become a cornerstone of TikTok, particularly AI-powered filters. Creators use the Bold Glamour filter to apply makeup, a Ghibli filter to look like characters from the studio’s films, and even pay a fee for filters that generate themed avatars — like the hugely popular ’90s high school photo filter.

Maybe it’s the fact that YouTube’s tools aren’t available to the general public yet. But the quiet reception still seems to buck the trend. On the YouTube Creators account on X (formerly known as Twitter), the announcement only picked up a few hundred likes, doing similarly to engagement-bait tweets like “how do you make your audience feel seen and heard?” On the main YouTube account, it performed worse than a tweet reading “stars are kinda just sky rocks.”

On the platform itself, it’s difficult to find videos discussing the tools at all, despite a thriving community of YouTubers who explain how to use AI tools in making videos — just not the ones announced by YouTube. Instead, these videos focus on explaining existing tools to generate scripts and voice-overs, and to create and edit together images for the video visuals. YouTube’s new tools basically give creators an in-house option for much of this: Creators will be able to generate video prompts and script outlines, automatically edit clips together, and create AI-voiced dubs into other languages.

The main potential draw is that these AI tools would generate content based off of creators’ own historical output. For example, YouTube says the “insights” tool will be personalized so that new video ideas will take into account what a creator’s audience is already watching, something that other text generators can’t do without access to YouTube’s data. It also aims to recommend music for videos, including royalty-free music that hypothetically should help creators know what won’t get them troublesome copyright strikes.

But existing creators don’t seem particularly interested one way or the other. “No one’s heard of it yet,” says Jimmy McGee, a YouTuber who recently made a video titled “The AI Revolution is Rotten to the Core.” As the title might suggest, he’s not a huge fan of YouTube’s proposed tools, but he says it’s “strange” how they’ve been received.

He thinks it may be that these tools are mainly geared toward creators, and viewers may not notice if, for example, a video is edited with the help of AI. He doesn’t think the more obvious tools, like the melty generated visuals of Dream Screen, will take off in the long run. “People will get sick of those quick enough that it’s not really a problem,” he says. But the other tools might lead to longer-term issues in the creator space.

Viewers might not immediately notice if AI software is used to edit videos, but McGee worries that it will undermine those who actually use it. “It’s going to de-skill newer people on YouTube,” he says. Although he finds it unlikely that it will replace professional editors in its current form, it will prevent newer creators from growing their skills. YouTube is billing the feature as an easier way in for people who might not be as confident in their skills yet. It’s also aimed toward Shorts, YouTube’s vertical-video spinoff, so it might make things easier for those who only have their phones to edit on. But McGee thinks that relying on it may end up discouraging video creators in the long run as they struggle to grow creatively.

“I think the more decisions you can make in your video, the better the video can be,” says McGee. “Maybe it won’t be [at first], but the ceiling is higher. That’s what worries me. If someone goes in earnestly trying to use these tools, it’d be very sad to see them give up.”

That potential pitfall depends on whether YouTube’s tools stick around. Parent company Google has a habit of shuttering things — including features it has hyped up a lot more than this one. And generative AI is currently running at a loss for most companies. “We’re probably going to see a decline in its popularity pretty soon,” says media and fandom critic Sarah Z. “[In the meantime] I hope these tools are helpful to creators and serve as a way of empowering them to better execute videos that serve their visions rather than a way to undercut creators.”

But some creators already feel undercut by AI on the platform. Just before YouTube’s tool announcement, creator Abyssoft released a video about a potential case of plagiarism. In it, he detailed the similarities between a previous video he had put out and a video uploaded by a different channel and speculated on how AI could have been used to perform the theft, including using speech-to-text programs and AI voice-over software.

Contacted for comment, Abyssoft pointed out that this is already a widespread issue on the platform. In May, science communicator Kyle Hill spoke out against YouTube channels using AI to create unverified but attention-grabbing content on the site. These videos are often misleading and in some cases appear to copy topics that Hill himself had made videos on.

In his video, Abyssoft says that he isn’t sure what the solution to these issues is. But one thing he suggests is that YouTube should disclose when AI is being used in video creation. He’d also like to see “a punishment or strike system for people that fail to disclose and are proven to be using AI.”

This would be easier if it were YouTube’s own AI tools that were being used; the platform would already be aware. In response to a request for comment on whether Google was considering implementing this feature or any additional measures to avoid plagiarism and misinformation on the platform, Google policy communications manager Jack Malon stated that all content is subject to the existing community guidelines, and that these are “enforced consistently for all creators on our platform, regardless of whether their content is generated using artificial intelligence.”

Although Abyssoft considered some of the other generative AI tools as potentially useful, like the music tool helping creators avoid copyright issues, he continues to fear what easy access to AI tools might do to YouTube creators. “AI facilitates plagiarism in a way we haven’t seen before, and with a bit of effort it will soon become undetectable,” he says. “Competing in a sea of faceless AI channels will be a tough challenge for creators who make a living this way, as their upload cadence will be greatly outpaced by the AI.”

However, he doesn’t think that AI will necessarily produce interesting videos. “I’m assuming the tool that suggests video topics is only going to suggest ideas that it thinks will do well in the algorithm,” he says. “Things will get incredibly formulaic if [it’s] relied on too much.”

He does acknowledge that channels with technical content, such as his own speedrunning history videos, have the advantage of research and understanding that can’t be carried out by AI. McGee similarly feels somewhat protected by his own style. “My videos are messy and I like them that way,” he says. “I can make all the melty, weird visuals myself and make something I’m actually proud of.”

But other channels might not be able to survive. “Someone that covers current news will see AI upload videos before their editing is finished, since it can just scrape whatever articles have been published for the day and render out a video and voice-over in less than an hour,” says Abyssoft.

YouTube’s tools haven’t yet launched beyond a few test countries, so it’ll be some time until we see the impact they’ll have on the platform. But while creators have concerns that they might add new issues for both existing and upcoming video makers, they also have prior concerns about the use of AI that they feel aren’t being addressed by the platform. It seems to be these that are holding creators’ attention, not any new announcements.