In Lesson One, we learned that the first step in the execution of an Atari BASIC game is usually drawing the playfield, which had to be done pixel by pixel. We plotted 50 random stars as a start, leaving Space Assault’s playfield somewhat less than exciting. Let’s continue by drawing the game’s only weapon, the mighty Fission Gun Tower…
Our bailiwick here at We Are The Mutants is the often weird pop culture of the Cold War period. From our perspective, “Energy Warning,” the eleventh track on Scottish electronic music duo Boards of Canada’s landmark 2002 LP Geogaddi, is an artifact of a future time. But Boards of Canada’s own artistic and indeed ontological territory is the lost, forgotten, and abandoned…
By Brother Bill
This timeline attempts to chronicle key events from the original Land of the Lost series, which ran for three seasons from 1974-1976. Key events include the introduction of a new character or location, any traveling through time and/or space via time doorways or other paranormal means, events that altered the geography or climate of the Land of the Lost itself…
By Brother Bill
Three hominid creatures, possibly mankind’s evolutionary ancestors, creep through the brush in a primeval forest, drawn by an otherworldly sound. They come upon an obelisk standing in a clearing, its symmetrical perfection defying nature. They are awestruck. They want to touch the smooth surface but are afraid…
By K.E. Roberts
In the summer of 1965, as the first U.S. troops put boots on the ground in Vietnam, a gathering swell of young, educated, dissident Americans discovered a then obscure epic fantasy written by an Oxford don—a devout Catholic and World War I veteran—between 1937 and 1949…
By J.G. Newman
Spacewar! (1962) was the first video game the way that Little Richard was the first rock star. Both wrote a fairly complete rulebook for a future worldwide obsession, yet were known to such niche (or, in Richard’s case, unfairly marginalized) audiences that they now play footnote to the Pongs and Presleys of history…
Upon first coming across them, it is barely possible to believe that Warning is not simply a superhumanly dexterous hoax, so perfectly engineered do they seem for the purposes of titillating the psychological taste buds of anyone who grew up in the incipient Star Wars era nurturing an unsophisticated love of horror, the occult, cosmic electronica, and sci-fi…
By K.E. Roberts
John Carpenter wrote the original script for Escape from New York (1981) in 1974, inspired by Death Wish, Michael Winner’s film from the same year—specifically its seedy portrayal of New York “as a kind of jungle.” Both Death Wish and Escape from New York did extremely well commercially and launched their respective genres, the citizen vigilante film and the dystopian actioner…
As a child, I spent a lot of time in the manageable, organized worlds that board games offered. Rules, a sense of order and fair play, and brightly-colored game pieces and boards appealed to me: they were a safe haven from the uncertainty of the outside world…
When someone chooses a computer to purchase today, they usually consider only what the computer can do based on available software. They’re thinking about what games they can play, what kinds of entertainment media they can enjoy, and how fast they can access the web. But in the 8-bit home computer boom of the late 1970s and early 1980s, choosing a new computer was based largely on what kind of software you wanted to create yourself…
