Month: April 2024

The Optimism of Thunderbirds (1960s)

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The 1960s TV show Thunderbirds fascinated me as a child. Though it first aired long before I was born, and I have long since grown up, Thunderbirds still resonates with me in a way other sci-fi shows do not. There are many reasons: the machines, music, suspense, heroism, special effects. But above all this, it is Thunderbirds’ optimism for the future of humanity and its endorsement of an ambitious pursuit of technological progress that distinguishes it from sci-fi of recent decades and imbues it with a lasting appeal that persists to this day.

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My Childhood in Miniature – Thunderbirds (1960s) Review

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It is an inevitable fact of the universe that every kid who watches Thunderbirds is seized by an overwhelming desire to possess replicas of the five Thunderbirds and pod vehicles.

Thunderbirds is about an organisation called International Rescue and their efforts to save people from disasters with a fleet of ingenious machines. The story is set in the near future from a 1960s perspective, where everything has a charming retrofuturistic aesthetic. There are five flagship machines—the Thunderbirds—plus a fleet of smaller machines that Thunderbird 2 carries in its cargo pods.

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“30 Seconds of Fun” is a Brilliant Focusing Principle

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Jaime Griesmer’s “30 seconds of fun” quote still holds true.

Jaime Griesmer was a designer for Halo 1 and 2. His job was to tune many of the mechanics in both games. He worked on the weapons, vehicles, characters, AI, controls, camera, multiplayer, single-player difficulty, “all the stuff [he] called ‘sandbox gameplay'”.

In an interview for Halo 1, he said his famous statement: “In Halo 1, there was maybe 30 seconds of fun that happened over and over and over and over again. And so, if you can get 30 seconds of fun, you can pretty much stretch that out to be an entire game.”

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Will GTA 6 Include a Remastered Los Santos and Liberty City?

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GTA 6 will be the third game in GTA’s HD universe. Liberty City and Southern San Andreas (which I’ll just call Los Santos for convenience) are the latest and more detailed reimaginings of the same cities Rockstar has done twice before. With remastered textures and GTA 6’s cutting edge graphical tech, Liberty City and Los Santos would not seem out of place alongside GTA 6’s Vice City.

Rockstar has not confirmed any plans to combine all these maps into one world—but there are clues that they’re at least thinking about it.

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