“Who would possibly want to play Little House on the Virtual Prairie? A surprising number of people. Your task is to tend crops, raise livestock, befriend the local townspeople, marry a village lass, and raise kids. For gamers desensitized by one too many frag sessions, playing Harvest Moon is like spending a rejuvenating weekend with Thoreau at Walden Pond.”

That’s how I described an entry in Natsume’s pioneering Harvest Moon series. Few people loved that series more than Eric ‘ConcernedApe’ Barone. “Harvest Moon had this way of truly immersing you in pure video game magic,” he said when I interviewed him for Game Developer in 2016. “I played a lot of great games as a kid, and soaked everything up.”

Barone spent four years crafting his own unique take on the farm sim, developing it almost entirely by himself. When he released Stardew Valley ten years ago, its success quickly dwarfed the Harvest Moon franchise that inspired it.

Barone’s game has gone on to sell over 50 million copies, spawning tie-in merch, a concert tour, and endless imitators and homages and mods. He has continued to expand and improve the game, recently announcing a 1.7 update. Through it all, Stardew Valley still feels like a labor of love driven by the vision of one individual, even though there’s now a team of people working on it.

“To me, that's the point of ‘indie’,” he told me in 2016. “It's more personal, there's no focus-tested communication strategy designed to maximize sales. I'm not trying to generate hype or be some PR mouthpiece.”

If you want to hear Barone’s current thoughts on the game’s legacy and its future, there’s a 10-year anniversary video on YouTube. If you want to revisit what was going through his mind during that first flush of success, read on.

The 4 years of self-imposed crunch that went into Stardew Valley

Is crunch time still unconscionable even when it’s self-imposed? You have to wonder when you hear about one 28-year-old Seattleite's grueling four-year quest to make the ultimate farming sim.

"On average, I probably worked on it 10 hours a day every day of the week during development," says Eric Barone. "Now that the game is out, I'm probably spending more like 15 hours a day on it."

He’s talking about his one-man labor of love Stardew Valley, which began as an homage to the classic franchise Harvest Moon. Eventually, Barone dreamed of creating the ultimate apotheosis of Harvest Moon—a game that was equally soothing and idyllic, but vaster and more ambitious than anything Natsume ever dreamed of.

“My experiences playing Harvest Moon are priceless and have had a deep impact on me, and I wanted my own game to have that kind of power,” says Barone. “However, I know that to make a great game you can’t just create ‘art’... the game needs to be fun.”

The first step was admitting that the game he idolized could be improved upon. "The gameplay in Harvest Moon was usually fun, but I felt like no title in the series ever brought it all together in a perfect way," says Barone. "My idea with Stardew Valley was to address the problems I had with Harvest Moon, as well as create more 'purpose' with tried-and-true gameplay elements such as crafting and quests."

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Players eventually discover a deep crafting system, as well as dungeons and mines beyond the sprawling farmland and the well-populated town. Bored picking vegetables? Go slay some monsters or forge something from precious metal.

It’s an ambitious project, especially since Barone was only 24 at the time he announced it on Steam Greenlight. “I’ve always been obsessed with creating stuff,” he says, “For as long as I can remember, I spent my spare time doodling, making music, writing... basically all the different aspects of making a game. I just didn’t know at the time that I would find a way to combine all those things to bring a cohesive vision to life.”

He created every bit of the game's art and graphics and code, and it has a lovely retro aesthetic that suggests...well, it suggests a creator who immersed himself in a 20-year-old franchise for most of his twenties. "At some point, I got older and lost touch with the games 'scene;'" he says.

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There's no time to keep up with everything happening when you're pouring 70 hours a week into your raison detre. "In many ways, I think I'm stuck in the past," adds Barone. "But it's a past where game worlds were creative and magical... a celebration of that special, overwhelming feeling of wonder that we experience as children."

His passion project was released on February 26th, and it's already a massive hit. It's received excellent reviews and over 300,000 sales (according to SteamSpy). Part of this might be credited to his attentiveness to his fan community. He sought feedback on the game concept via Steam Greenlight, then refused to do an Early Access campaign or accept money till it was feature complete.

All the while, he kept fans informed of how he was progressing via Reddit and Twitter. Now that the game is out, he has ratcheted up his dedication, attempting to patch away every flaw that players have discovered. And he promises expansions and updates galore

Barone has amassed so much goodwill that even people pirating his game are posting on the torrents about how the fully intend to buy it someday. Other fans responded by buying extra copies to give to anyone who can't afford the game, or was planning on pirating it. 

"My strategy with the community is simple: no strategy at all!" says Barone. "I think that, as an indie developer, you should just be yourself and be a real human. I try to act online like I do in real life: treat everyone with respect, and be as honest and straightforward as possible." 

The only dark cloud hanging over this pastoral paradise are misgivings about just how much time Barone spends on the game. In this post-EA Spouse world, it's hard not to wince when you hear about someone has condemned himself to years of perpetual crunch. What drives him to do that?

"It's both passion and discipline," says Barone. "I think it's a lot easier to stay driven when you're doing your own project, knowing that there are no limits to how far you can go."

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"I'm choosing to do this much work because I want to be an indie game developer and see my project come to fruition," he adds. "While those developers at EA were, in effect, forced to work against their will. I don't think it's right. You should be free to work yourself to the bone, but not to force someone else to do that for you."

“There were times during development that I didn't feel like working, that I even wanted to quit entirely," he concedes.

"Looking back, I think the development was characterized by phases of insane productivity followed by phases where I hardly worked at all," says Barone. "I'm not sure if there was any technique to it or if it was just a quirk of my brain chemistry. I did always have a ridiculous amount of faith in myself and in the game, and yet I knew that I was still a nobody and the only way I could change that was to work super hard."

"It does help if you can absolutely convince yourself that you're destined for greatness," says Barone. "It's not even an ego thing—it's just a way to prevent doubt and insecurity from hindering you."

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On , charts the family tree of the cozy farm sim, from its roots in Harvest Moon to the trunk of Stardew Valley to the endless branches of imitators and mods. “The most popular mod for Stardew Valley is called Stardew Valley Expanded, which adds new characters, areas, items, among countless other tweaks to the game’s design. It has been downloaded over 20 million times on Nexus Mods. At some point Expanded’s creator, FlashShifter, had his car stolen and, in a fit of desperation, reached out to Barone and asked if he’d be willing to pay him for work. Barone hired him, and Flash wound up becoming an actual developer on Stardew Valley itself.”

On , describes her experience logging nearly 700 hours of playtime in Stardew Valley. “The best part is that these hours are most definitely not the final figure. Stardew Valley’s solo developer Eric ‘ConcernedApe’ Barone keeps pushing content updates for the game, which reliably land every couple of years or so, bringing major additions to the universe, new content, and challenges.”

At , explains how Stardew Valley exemplifies the creative principles of industrial design icon Dieter Rams. “The game's design allows for a lot of player customization: from your farm layout to your character's appearance to the relationships your character builds with NPCs. So many ways to personalize your experience and make the game feel like your own.”

At , talks about revisiting the game and finally hundred percenting it. “This is my tenth Stardew farm, and just this week, for the first time, I finally achieved perfection! Until this update, there just wasn't enough late-game content to keep me invested to check off every single task in the game.”

At The Cookbook Test, has a review of The Official Stardew Valley Cookbook. “In terms of fitting the spirit of the game, the book's a success. It incorporates characters, quotes, and visuals from Stardew Valley throughout, and it doesn't really seem to ‘break character’ - it restates most of the tone and lore of the game, albeit without really building anything new”

At , praises the beautiful blocky aesthetic of the game. “ConcernedApe (creator of Stardew Valley) put so much thought into the gameplay and environment that [Mustard] find themselves taken aback by what this game offers.”

Cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1970s adaptation of the novel Dune collapsed under the weight of its own ambitions before it got off the drawing board. But the sketchy outline that survives, which was lovingly presented in the 2013 documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, captures the imagination in ways that few finished works of science fiction manage.

Frank Herbert’s best-selling 1965 novel Dune seemed at first glance to be unfilmable. It delves into the complexities of a distant desert planet’s ecology, bureaucracy, and religion, culminating in a war to control a resource called “melange” that is simultaneously a fuel for interstellar travel and a consciousness-expanding drug. Oh, and the characters ride around on sandworms that are thousands of feet long.

Only a lunatic would dare to try turning that dense, weird tale into a movie. (Especially in the pre-Star Wars era, before there were any big budget special f/x-driven blockbusters set on alien worlds with their own convoluted religions and technologies and warring factions.)

So yes—only a lunatic would dare to adapt Dune. No one should’ve been surprised when Jodorowsky optioned the book in 1973, because he was (and is!) a lunatic. The shamanistic Chilean director had made the film El Topo (1970), which is credited with creating the “acid Western” subgenre. The film was brutally violent, mystical, and often nonsensical. It was also a surprise hit.

The film had a profound impact on other filmmakers like Sam Fuller, Nicolas Winding Refn, and David Lynch. It even crossed into other media: Goichi Suda claimed it was the inspiration for his game No More Heroes, which became a divisive cult hit in its own right. Roger Ebert was an early champion of the film. “Jodorowsky dazzles us with such delicate mythological footwork that the violence becomes distanced, somehow, and we accept it like the slaughters in the Old Testament,” writes Ebert.

He followed with the surreal and psychedelic spiritual allegory Holy Mountain (1973), which was produced by Beatles manager Allan Klein and backed by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Jodorowsky administered psilocybin mushrooms to the actors on set to ensure that they were in the proper frame of mind to help realize his vision.

The film didn’t receive a wide release until decades later, but it caused a stir at Cannes, and cemented Jodorowsky’s reputation as a fearless and transgressive visionary. “A plumply overripe fruit of the counterculture, dripping with the juices of spiritual rebellion, semi-comic posturing, consciousness-raising and all-around freakiness,” writes Peter Bradshaw in a retrospective Guardian review. “Hardly a moment passes in this movie without a situationist display of outrageousness.”

Jodorowsky moved on to his next challenge: adapting Frank Herbert’s novel. Like Tolkien or Manson, the book had already amassed a huge and devoted following of zealous young fans. In the 2013 documentary, the director, who was 84 at the time of filming, proclaims that he wanted his Dune to be the equivalent of an LSD trip that would “give a mutation to young minds.”

The director assembled a team of “spiritual warriors” to help realize his vision. Orson Welles, David Carradine, and Mick Jagger signed on to act. Pink Floyd would provide the soundtrack.

French comic book artist Jean “Moebius” Giraud storyboarded the voluminous screenplay, which changed the plot of the novel completely. (“I was raping Frank Herbert,” says Jodorowsky. “But with love.”)

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Most of what survives of the project is concept art, and it is astonishing. The costume designs by Giraud put the gaudiest finery of glam rock to shame.

The spaceships, designed by sci-fi illustrator extraordinaire Chris Foss, resemble candy-colored tropical fish.

The architecture and structures look like the nightmarish visions of H. R. Giger. (Because it is: Jodorowsky tapped the artist years before his work on Alien.)

Giger’s conception of the sandworm is far more menacing than any other version I’ve seen.

But what really gives us the clearest sense of the scale of Jodorowsky’s vision are Giraud’s shot-by-shot storyboards of the entire film. Dan O’Bannon, who created the amazingly clever and resourceful effects for John Carpenter’s Dark Star, was tapped to make these images real. (O’Bannon would go on to write Alien, and help create Heavy Metal, Total Recall, and Return of the Living Dead.)

The documentary animates the storyboards to recreate several scenes from Jodorowsky's Dune. The opening sequence is a tracking shot longer and more ambitious than anything in Cuarón’s Gravity.

The project was shelved in 1975. The documentary doesn’t dwell too much on why Hollywood moneymen didn’t fund the actual production of the film, because—duh.

Jodorowsky had already burned through millions of dollars without a frame of footage to show for it, and had even agreed to pay Salvador Dali $100,000 per minute to appear in the film. The director did himself no favors when he answered concerns about the film’s length by thundering that he would make it 20 hours long, if need be.

The 2013 documentary records Jodorowsky’s crushing disappointment when the wheels came off of the production. It also captures a hilarious moment of schadenfreude when the director recounts how his jealousy and despair gradually turned to delight as he watched David Lynch’s 1985 adaptation, which was a critical and commercial bomb. “It’s terrible!” he cackles.

Jodorowsky has since been dismissive of Villeneuve’s Dune adaptation.

“I saw the trailer. It’s very well done,” he said. “We can see that it is industrial cinema, that there is a lot of money, and that it was very expensive. But if it was very expensive, it must pay in proportion. And that is the problem: There [are] no surprises. The form is identical to what is done everywhere. The lighting, the acting, everything is predictable.”

Easy to dismiss that as sour grapes, but hard to argue that Jodorowsky’s version would have been anything but predictable.

The documentary makes you ache to see what the Chilean visionary might have created. But in the end, it seems perfectly fitting that the most mind-blowing sci-fi flick ever undertaken only exists in our imaginations. Watch it before you see Dune: Part Three.

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The Jodorowsky Dune storyboard script, with stunning artwork by Jean Giraud, Chris Foss, and H.R. Giger, is available in its entirety here on the Internet Archive. If this article interests you at all, you will have a blast flipping through all 448 pages of it.

In a story as bizarre as anything Jodorowsky ever dreamed up, a bunch of crypto morons spent $3M to buy a physical copy of these Dune storyboards. They believed (falsely) that ownership would give them the rights to make their own series of NFTs and an animated film based on Jodorowsky and Giraud’s work, and on Herbert’s underlying book. Read a wrap-up of the whole ridiculous saga in this Esquire piece by , and don’t stop before you read the jaw-dropping updates at the bottom.

Frank Pavich, who directed the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, gave more of the backstory on the famous filmmaker’s abortive project in this 2023 New York Times piece. In that piece, he also asked Midjourney to conjure up images from the (nonexistent) 1976 Jodorowsky-directed version Tron. “To what extent do these rapidly generated images contain creativity? And from what source is that creativity emerging? Has Alejandro been robbed? Is the training of this A.I. model the greatest art heist in history? How much of art-making is theft, anyway?”

Jodorowsky and Jean “Moebius” Giraud would go on to work together on many graphic novel projects, including stories that the filmmaker had given up on realizing in cinematic form. has an appreciation of the pair’s magnum opus, The Incal, here on his site , as well as info on his follow-up work, made with Jodorowsky’s blessing. wrote an interesting appreciation of Giraud that covers his collaborations with Jodorowsky here on .

Holy Mountain is Jodorowsky’s most challenging work. attempts to explain it here on .

republishes a V Magazine interview with Jodorowsky at : “Art is not a business,” he says calmly, without a hint of question, “art is art. If you make money, fantastic. Money is not happiness but without money you are not happy. So then you do the work, and if you have money, fantastic, but if you make the work to have money, it’s like a dog dancing for a stick.”

republishes an article from Art in America in which Jodorowsky recommends seven things he enjoys, including zen koans, Wittgenstein, Celtic harp music, and … feet?! (“I also put perfume on my feet to write. I spiritualize the feet. The hand can indicate and caress but the feet have the same sensibility as the hands.”) Read it at .

recently posted the first installment of a lengthy interview with Jodorowsky pegged to the “monograph Art Sin Fin, a two volume, 1000+ page survey of his work in painting, comics, poetry, tarot and filmmaking, touching on his interests in Eastern Mysticism and Jungian philosophy.” Read it at .

Emma & Hanna of mount a spirited defense of the David Lynch adaptation of Dune, with a focus on photos of the hot male stars of the film gussied up in stillsuits and other BDSM-inspired costume finery. Hard to argue with that.

Perry Simm wandered the streets of his small Midwestern hometown bearing witness to the misery and deprivation all around him. As Perry passed a boarded-up museum, he remembered how the government had promised that the Plan for Renewed National Purpose, enacted three decades prior, would usher in a new Golden Age. Instead, that package of social and economic reforms had triggered a societal collapse.

Poverty was endemic. Jobs were impossible to find, and only the rich could afford medical care. The Border Security Force was ubiquitous, assaulting anyone who could not show proper ID.

The prison was well over its maximum capacity, now that any young person could be summarily sentenced on the suspicion of a violation of the Uniform Morality Code. “America First” trade policies and severe cutbacks in foreign aid had destabilized international relations. Vast consolidation of power in the executive allowed a quasi-fascist leader to treat any citizen he didn’t like as a terrorist.

The marquee above the movie theater touted new releases like Gutsplosion, Gringo Wars, and Let’s Kill Some Slants—popular culture reduced to simplistic bigotry and brutality masquerading as humor. The tech industry was scrambling to do damage control about a spike in suicides caused by “joybooths” that provided such intense neural stimulation that people lose touch with the real world around them.

That’s a description of the game world of A Mind Forever Voyaging, an unprecedented computer game created four decades ago by Steve Meretzky. It was a text adventure, meaning that the story was told entirely through words. (The only images were the box art and the printed manuals and other materials that come with the floppy disc the game was stored on.) But it was one of the era’s most ambitious games.

The designer of the game was profoundly unhappy with the direction his country was heading. He felt that the Reagan administration’s economic policies, rhetoric, and crackdowns on civil liberties would all have terrible long-term consequences for America.

Meretzky had previously been known for the quirky humor and deviously clever puzzles in his work. But he wanted to try something different—something that had never been done before. He tried to express his political views through a bleak and somber science fiction narrative.

A Mind Forever Voyaging portrays the ruinous effects that a set of government policies had on a single town over the course of several decades. The game was released in 1985, the same year that Reagan took the oath of office for a second time after winning reelection by the most lopsided electoral college margin in history.

The game was a sales disappointment for Meretzky’s employer Infocom. It never the sort of cultural impact of other 1985 releases like Super Mario Bros, The Bard’s Tale, Ultima IV, or even Where in the World Is Carmen San Diego. At the time, didn’t even impact the political conversation.

But now, four decades after its release, A Mind Forever Voyaging is widely regarded as a trailblazing masterpiece. (If you want to check it out, Archive.org has a playable version available here.) Moreover, it offered a concrete example of how a game could deliver pointed social commentary at a time when few people thought games were capable of that. And it did so in a way that only a game could, letting players uncover its message by exploring its world and engaging with its mechanics and systems.

“I wanted to make a political statement, which hadn’t been done in this medium before,” Meretzky told Newsweek reporter Bill Barol at the time of the game’s release.

“To a very large degree, he succeeded,” declared Barol. “Writer Steve Meretzky has used the [game’s] expanded memory to breathtaking effect, creating a richly imagined anti-Utopian futureworld … A Mind Forever Voyaging isn’t George Orwell’s 1984, but in some ways it’s even scarier.”

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THE GOLDEN AGE OF INTERACTIVE FICTION
The 1980s are often remembered as the dawn of the home video boom, the Decade of Greed, a second Gilded Age, the rise of the yuppie, the age of deregulation, the beginning of trickle-down economics, and the MTV era. But for many geeks, it was also the Golden Age of the text adventure. At a time when graphics were still rudimentary, text-only games offered some of the most sophisticated interactive experiences you could find.

Text-based games, which also went by the highfalutin name of “interactive fiction,” describe a setting and scenario for players with words. It’s up to the players to fill in the graphics in their heads. A text parser allowed players to type in simple commands and tell the game what action they wanted to perform and where they wanted to go.

“In the early 1980s, speaking to your computer in plain English sentences seemed like the most magical and advanced thing you could do,” says Meretzky.

“Text adventures in general were very popular back then,” says Gary Whitta, a huge fan of the game. He’s a writer on films like Rogue One and Book of Eli as well as games like Prey (2006) and Forspoken and several entries in Telltale’s Walking Dead series. “But strangely, for games that relied entirely on text, most made very rudimentary use of it. Infocom was the only company actually paying attention to crafting evocative prose, to telling a story as vivid as anything you’d read in a novel. I never thought the term they used, ‘interactive fiction,’ was hyperbole at all.”

The text games created by the company Infocom quickly set themselves apart with their mix of good writing, clever puzzles, and quirky humor. With Infocom games, it was fun to simply type in a nonsensical command or even just a piece of profanity, just to see if the Infocom designer had anticipated it and written a wry response. (They often had.)

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Infocom was founded by a group of MIT programmers who had created Zork, a sprawling mainframe text adventure that became a campus sensation before being broken into commercial installments for early home computers. The company released fantasy games, detective games, absurdist comedies, kid-friendly titles, historical adventures, and science fiction. Its releases were all packaged with “feelies,” physical versions of items from the gameworld that provided clues or helped players get acclimated to the setting.

“I grew up with the Infocom games in the 1980s,” says Whitta. “As both a gamer and an avid reader I absolutely loved them because they scratched both itches at the same time. Each one was a genuinely immersive and literary story that also happened to have a game woven into it.

Infocom also had a deviously clever sideline in selling books that accompanied each of their games. Invisiclues offered hints to help you solve the excruciatingly difficult puzzles that blocked your progress. (It was a bit like a glazier throwing rocks through your windows, then offering a discount on the repair.) They were an enormous success in their own right, selling over half a million copies by 1984.

The technical constraints of making text adventures in the 1980s were mind-boggling. Developers didn’t simply have to create an entire 20-30 hour gaming experience that only employed words, they had to squeeze it all into impossibly tiny file sizes. “It was a huge deal when we went from 128K to 256K,” recalls Meretzky. “Nowadays, the sig file in my emails is larger than that.” Designers would inevitably hit the size limit at some point in development, and after that, every new word added to a game meant that another word would have to be deleted somewhere else.

Even so, the genre offered a lot of creative freedom to developers, and many developed their own distinct authorial voice. “I loved writing text adventures because I could do the whole game by myself,” says Meretzky. “Nowadays, game design is much more about managing a team with a whole bunch of different specialties. The ability to control everything back then was intoxicating. And the entire Infocom line gave all of the authors leeway to explore what they wanted to.”

Meretzky quickly made a name for himself with science fiction games. His first release Planetfall in 1983 was an immediate hit, and it still has a devoted following. You play as a lowly starship janitor marooned on an alien world, who befriends a childlike robot companion named Floyd. Floyd eventually sacrifices himself to save you. “I thought that if I stranded the player on a deserted planet, I could devote a lot more of the very limited text and code to creating one believable, realistic character that the player could form an emotional connection with,” says Meretzky. “It clearly worked. I hear people say that the death of Floyd is a keystone emotional moment in the history of games.”

His next game, Sorcerer in 1984, featured several ingeniously innovative puzzles. “I’m very proud of a time travel puzzle where you get to meet yourself,” he says. “It creates this tiny time loop where you encounter a slightly older version of yourself, and then a little later you encounter a slightly younger version of yourself who’s doing all of the things that you did a few turns earlier. That was really fun to design and write.”

Meretzky’s third game, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, was released the same year. It was immediately Infocom’s biggest hit. For many, it’s become synonymous with text adventures. The game was an adaptation of the satirical sci-fi novel of the same name, made in collaboration with author Douglas Adams, and it manages to capture the sprung logic and sly wit of the book. (You can try it here.) “It was the number one computer game on the sales charts for the better part of a year,” says Meretzky.

By the time he was in his late twenties, Meretzky had become a standout star within his company and his industry. He was newly married and doing work that gave creative satisfaction. There was plenty for him to be happy about in 1985, but the lopsided Reagan reelection weighed on him. “It was so disheartening,” says Meretzky. “I thought his agenda was horrible in countless ways.”

“Reagan was creating a huge budget deficit to give tax cuts to the wealthy. Trickle-down economics was really just a con, a way to transfer money from future generations to a few people in the present day. And at the same time, Reagan was coddling the religious right and eroding the separation of church and state.”

Fresh off the enormous success of Hitchhiker’s Guide, Meretzky began to conceptualize a game with a public policy angle. “I thought, what if I could make people realize the horribleness of Reagan’s policies?” he says. “Text adventures tend to soak up all of your attention, even when you aren’t playing them. Like, you’re driving around town or mowing the lawn, but you’re thinking about a puzzle you can’t beat, or some solution you haven’t tried yet. If the games could do that with puzzles, maybe I could harness interactive fiction to get inside people’s heads and change their minds about political ideas.”

Infocom allowed him to run with the concept, despite its uncommercial nature. “There was discussion internally of whether a game with such a strong political bias was a bad idea,” says Meretzky. “Dave Lebling, who was sort of the office conservative back then, was the biggest defender of it. His take was that someday he might want to write a game with political content, and he didn’t want anyone telling him that he couldn’t.”

As with all Infocom games, you started playing A Mind Forever Voyaging long before you inserted the floppy disc into your computer. The feelies included with Meretzky’s game featured a map of the town of Rockvil, South Dakota, where the bulk of the game takes place.

There are almost 200 different locations you can visit, including a bookshop, a museum, a high school, a liquor store, a Chinese restaurant, a university, a city hall, a zoological garden, an airport, a bar, and a church. “That’s something I’m sort of good at, creating geography,” says Meretzky. “Rockvil is a fictional place, but in a very specific nonfictional location, right on the Little Sioux River.” (The town was named after Meretzky’s wife, Betty Rock.)

Another feelie that came with the game is a 5200-word short story written by Meretzky. It outlines the life of Rockvil resident Perry Simm, tracing his development from age four to age 20. Along the way, it introduces details about the near-future time period—the game is set in the year 2031.

At age 20, when Perry’s life finally seems to be falling into place after a somewhat tumultuous childhood, he faces the biggest existential crisis imaginable: he learns that he’s not really a person. Perry Simm is actually PRISM, an artificial intelligence who’s been living a simulated life inside of a virtual version of Rockvil. PRISM exists within a series of computers at a research facility.

“Imagine yourself in the same circumstance,” Meretzky writes. “You have spent 20 years living a normal, unsuspecting life. You are YOU. Then suddenly, one day, the universe around you is torn away, and you learn that your whole life has been a charade, a carefully calculated scientific experiment. Perhaps, at this very moment, you are a normal human being, sitting in some comfortable armchair reading this story. But – perhaps you are not. Imagine the shock; imagine the terror.”

Insert the game disc into your computer, and you learn more about why PRISM/Perry was created. Researchers needed a sophisticated AI that thinks and perceives like a real human in order to allow them to test out possible future scenarios. In particular, they want to simulate the effects of the ambitious political program proposed by a charismatic right-wing populist senator named Richard Ryder. (See what he did there? Richard Ryder = Ronald Reagan.)

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Ryder’s sweeping reforms include a 50% cut in tax rates, a massive rollback of regulations and foreign aid, a restrictive trade policy, a concentration of power in the executive branch, and a return to traditional values in education. Scientists program these policies into their simulated version of Rockvil, then let the simulation run until a decade has passed. PRISM will then be able to explore the simulated city as the human Perry Simm, and observe what effects the policies had after 10 years.

Puzzles are the lifeblood of text adventures, but there are almost no puzzles in A Mind Forever Voyaging. Instead, your goal is to simply notice things. Gameplay is centered around recording events that demonstrate how the city of Rockvil has changed. There are specific tasks assigned to you, but they mostly involve everyday activities—reading a newspaper, going to a movie, eating at a restaurant, visiting a courthouse or a church, riding public transit, or going home to your family. (At this point in his simulated life, Perry has a wife and child.) Once you have provided the scientists with sufficient data, they are able to run the simulation further, and you can visit Rockvil 10 more years into the future. Then 10 more years after that, and so on.

It’s noteworthy that Meretzky managed to make observing the long-term effects of policy central to the actual gameplay of A Mind Forever Voyaging, because games that riff on real-world events often tend to do so on a surface level. For instance, the classic 1980s arcade brawler Bad Dudes is ostensibly about the two bad dudes rescuing President Ronnie from the clutches of the evil DragonNinja. (Win the game, and Ronnie invites you to join him for a celebratory burger.) With just a few minor tweaks, you could change the story of Bad Dudes to be about two badass Greenpeace activists who rescue Shamu from the clutches of the evil WhalerNinja. But the real subject matter of the game would be the same — you run around kicking and punching scores of henchmen.

A Mind Forever Voyaging required you to get to know the town you live in. The more you explore Rockvil, the more it begins to feel like a real place. And Meretzky allows enough nuance that the changes to Rockvil don’t seem so bad at first. Oh sure, the underprivileged people on the bad side of town seem to be having a hard time, and you hear rumblings about prisons being filled to capacity. But the scientists are initially convinced that the Plan for Renewed National Purpose will prove to be beneficial. And the myalar fashions in the feelies look quite stylish.

.The evidence to the contrary becomes increasingly apparent as your proceed through subsequent iterations of the town. Infrastructure crumbles, poverty skyrockets, airport security becomes ludicrously stringent, and police raids become commonplace. Within a few decades, the town of Rockvil is an Orwellian nightmare. A couple of decades after that, it’s a post-apocalyptic hellscape.

Ultimately, the political message of the game is about as subtle as a jackboot to the skull by a member of the Border Security Force. “There’s no question that it’s polemical, and like all true science fiction, it uses some very outlandish conceits to illustrate and comment upon some very relevant and contemporary issues,” says Whitta.

“As social commentary, the game’s a bit of a mixed bag,” writes Jimmy Maher, a historian of computer games who’s written extensively about A Mind Forever Voyaging on his site The Digital Antiquarian. “It’s at its worst when it merely cribs from classic dystopian literature like 1984, and at its best when it tries to seriously explore the potential ramifications of the Republican positions of its day.”

Still, some of the least subtle moments of the game are among the most memorable. “There’s a scene where Mitchell, your son within the simulation, has joined the church, which at this point has become a cult-like arm of the government,” says Meretzky. “He comes into your home with church police and levels accusations at his mother, your wife, Jill. I’ve heard many people say that this moment was particularly horrifying for them.”

It unfolds like this:

The ten years since you last saw him have left scant change on the face of your son. "Mitchell!" you yell, and take a step toward him, but a blow from one of the cops sends your frail, old body flying against the wall.

“She is the one.” The voice is Mitchell’s, but the tone is cold, unrecognizable, sending shivers through you. “She spake against the Church; she tried to poison the mind of a child too young to know the Truth.” The thugs grab Jill, who reaches toward Mitchell, tears of terror streaming down her face. Totally unresponsive, he turns and walks calmly out of the apartment.

As Jill is dragged, screaming and crying, through the front door, you try to follow, but a cop pummels you in the stomach with his club. You fall to the floor, retching, as the apartment door slams closed, shutting you off forever from the son you cannot understand and the wife you will never see again.

Ultimately, the game has a happy ending. (I won’t spoil it, but reaching it does involve solving a puzzle.) “You manage to singlehandedly defeat and discredit the evil senator who tried to get his policies in place,” says Meretzky. “And when you do, one final simulation becomes available—ten years further into the future, but it’s a good future now. Instead of everything going wrong, everything goes right.” Perry Simm is an elderly man living in a utopia brought about by progressive political policies. War is obsolete, the human lifespan has been extended, crime and poverty are almost nonexistent.

“The ending of the game is a thing of beauty,” says Maher. “It’s a fervently imagined dream for the better world that could be if we would all wake up and start looking forward to a brighter future instead of back to some fabled past.”

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Infocom believed that what Meretzky had created was more than just a game—it was a piece of interactive literature. To stress the seriousness of its ambitions, they held a press conference for A Mind Forever Voyaging’s release at the lavishly appointed Trustee’s Room at the New York Public Library. (To underscore how seriously Infocom wanted the game to be taken, an afternoon tea service was provided to the assembled press, complete with “traditional tea cakes, scones, biscuits, etc. … along with tea, coffee, port sherry, and scotch on the rocks--Perrier will be available.”)

Meretzky preserved the note cards with his prepared talking points for the event. He wrote about not wanting to be typecast after working on the hugely successful comedy game Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. He wrote about wanting to push the envelope of what interactive fiction could do, and insisted that it couldn’t simply mean a smoother interface or a larger vocabulary. He believed that Infocom had to push the envelope of ideas and help the medium mature. Meretzky felt he had a:

“responsibility to use my talent & position to bring serious projects into the field; projects with ‘conscience’; even if controversial. I think I’ve at least partially achieved these goals in A Mind Forever Voyaging.”

Meretzky himself desperately wanted to see the game’s pointed message spark some real controversy. “I was hoping I’d get dragged in front of a congressional committee,” he says. But no outcry greeted its release. Apart from a rave writeup in Newsweek, and rapturous notices in some enthusiast magazines, it did not spark much of a reaction at all. “Sales were somewhat disappointing,” says Meretzky. “Fifty thousand was kind of the goal, but it ended up moving thirty or forty thousand.”

The core fanbase for Infocom games was nonplussed with A Mind Forever Voyaging as well. “Many people in our player community did not like the lack of puzzles,” says Meretzky. “They complained that it was too easy, too different, or just not what they wanted.”

The Impact of A Mind Forever Voyaging

It’s impossible to say if Meretzky’s trailblazing game is directly responsible for broadening the possibilities of what interactive entertainment can express. But it’s unmistakably true that it was unheard of in 1985 for a game to offer a sharp political critique, and nowadays it isn’t. Indie games like Disco Elysium and Papers, Please and This War of Mine foreground political systems and ideology. And players regularly debate the social commentary woven into the themes and plotlines in Watch Dogs, Far Cry, Bioshock, and The Last of Us.

It’s easier to see Meretzky’s influence on specific game developers. Sam Barlow, the brilliant creator of games like Telling Lies and Immortality, is a big fan. He gushes about it at length on the podcast My Favourite Game. “It anticipates so many things!” he says. “You have the freedom to go anywhere in this whole simulated city—it has an open world approach to its progression.” The game was clearly an inspiration for Barlow’s award-winning Her Story, in which the progression is also built around exploration and observation.

Gary Whitta encountered the game in his early teens, and was also profoundly influenced by it. “I think of it as a classic not just as a computer game but within the wider pantheon of science fiction,” he says. “So many of Infocom’s games seemed to harken back to a golden age of literary science fiction in their ambition and execution, but AMFV was absolutely the high point for me.”

“As a kid it was probably one of the first really high-level, intellectually stimulating works of true sci-fi I had experienced in any medium,” he adds. “I credit a lot of my own ambition to become a writer to my experience with that game.”

Whitta was so entranced by A Mind Forever Voyaging that he even wrote a film script based on it. “I think part of the appeal was the challenge; like a lot of very heady, high-concept sci-fi novels, it’s not immediately apparent how it would translate from a textual into a visual medium. So I thought it would be a good exercise to take a real crack at it. I reached out to Steve Meretzky for his blessing, and he wound up giving me so much more than that. He sent me his original design notes and diagrams that he had used when creating the game, and eventually gave me notes and feedback on the finished script. I’ll always be grateful to him for that.”

“I’m still fighting to get some kind of screen adaptation going,” says Whitta. “As a piece of socio-political science fiction, I think it’s more relevant now than at any time since it was first created during the Reagan years.”

Some details feel uncomfortably current. In A Mind Forever Voyaging, the Joybooth Manufacturers of North America—whose devices are tied to tens of thousands of youth suicides—align themselves with Ryder’s regime as part of a public relations crusade to protect their business. It’s difficult not to see a parallel in the way today’s tech giants seek favor with political power, even as the societal costs of their platforms mount.

What Meretzky took away from the underperformance of A Mind Forever Voyaging

Meretzky only made one explicitly political game. “I never really tried to do that again,” he says.

For his next release, he decided to instead court controversy a little more brazenly. His next game was a romp called Leather Goddesses of Phobos. It was a highly sexualized sendup of classic sci-fi serials of the 1930s. It pushed the envelope in a different direction, allowing players to opt for Lewd Mode, which featured more profanity and risqué situations.

The game was a big hit, selling twice as many copies as A Mind Forever Voyaging. And it’s also seen as a classic and a touchstone by fans of interactive fiction. Meretzky later made a sequel called Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2: Gas Pump Girls Meet the Pulsating Inconvenience from Planet X!

He would go on to make many more acclaimed and popular games, including the Spellcasting 101 series. The protagonist is the young boy Ernie Eaglebeak, who is locked away in the attic by his cruel stepfather until he breaks away and becomes a star pupil at Sorcerer University. (It seems to have served as an inspiration—direct or indirect—for that Hogwarts-based book franchise by She Who Must Not Be Named.)

Meretzky has since worked for game companies like WorldWinner, Playdom/Disney, GSN, and King. He’s currently VP of Design at PeopleFun, which makes popular mobile games like the anagramming puzzle title Wordscapes. He shares his insights about the state of live service games every year on a panel at the Game Developers Conference. (At the latest one, a few weeks ago, he announced his impending retirement and received a standing ovation from his industry peers.)

“It’s interesting,” says Meretzky. “The early part of my career was very focused on games with storytelling and narrative, but the second half has been more about designing game systems and economies. I’ve had several forays back into the core game world, but the majority of the time now, I’m designing stuff aimed at a casual audience.”

He says he’s not interested in pursuing another political game at the moment, even though he feels that the current White House occupant makes Ronald Reagan look like FDR. “So many of the things I was worried about in the 1980s have come to pass,” he says. “All of the warmongering and trickle-down economics produced exactly the sort of results I was afraid of. And the whole Trump thing is massively demoralizing, particularly at my age. The day Obama left office was the peak of what the world will achieve in my lifetime. People certainly won’t repair all of the damage that will be done by the Trump administration before I die.”

It’s a tough time for the games industry, and developers who aren’t struggling to find work are driven to distraction by the state of the world. “What I would say to them is that what we do may seem trifling, but it really is important, particularly at a time when so many people are so dispirited,” says Meretzky. “People can’t spend all of their time discussing politics and fighting evil. They are still going to need distractions and downtime. And we provide that. I think that’s a pretty damn important function at any time, but it’s especially important now.”

POSTSCRIPT
In the course of reposting this 2017 article in 2026, I sent a few follow-up questions to Meretzky. I updated a few quotes in the piece above based on his responses, but here is the full exchange.

Q: What all are you doing these days?

I’m working at PeopleFun, a mobile game studio that specializes in word games. The last game I released was Wordscapes Solitaire, which you can find on both the Apple and Android app stores. It involves clearing tableaus of cards, as in most solitaire games, except that you clear them by making words rather than stacking cards by suit or rank. There’s also an interesting meta-game called the Library of Lost Words, which is essentially a system for collecting tens of thousands of unique words.

Q: I interviewed you about the resonance of AMFV in the early days of Trump’s first term. How do you see the relevance of the game in this current moment, which is somehow even more dire?

In talks that I gave during the presidency of Bush-the-Lesser (2001-2009), I’d talk about how I wrote AMFV to show Reagan as a fanatic-coddling deficit-exploding warmonger, and I was so successful that we’ve never had a president like that since. Always got a good laugh. But of course, having Bush-the-Lesser back now would be a huge improvement, right? So, while I see AMFV as more relevant than ever, I also see my efforts as more useless than ever...

Q: A Mind Forever Voyaging centers on an AI used to simulate political futures. How does that premise feel now, with the rise of generative AI?

In the backstory that accompanies the game in the AMFV package, I deal with the issue of creating artificial consciousness; how scientists had created computers with far more power than a human mind, yet had never achieved consciousness or self-awareness, and how that was finally achieved with PRISM by “raising” the artificial intelligence just like an infant, mirroring the experiences of a human baby through to adulthood. So here we are, with massively capable AI, but still no consciousness in sight or any clear theories on what might achieve that.

Q) You’ve had tremendous hits, and games like AMFV that are widely viewed as underappreciated masterpieces and milestones that inspired other groundbreaking designers. Any thoughts on the value of the former versus the latter?

Better both than one or the other! But better either one than working on a game for a year or more only to have it killed, and no one other than perhaps a smattering of testers ever sees it, which is just a heartbreak.

Q) I quote you saying games can be a welcome relief in dark times. Where are you seeking relief these days?

My weekly board game group is a big help. Also scotch. Actually, those two things are often paired. Also, late night comedy shows — Daily Show, Kimmel, Colbert, Seth Meyers... And being able to participate in things like “No Kings” marches is a great outlet. It’s always great to see the enormous turnout and know that millions still care about what’s going on.

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READ MORE:

• Meretzky has released his archives from the development of A Mind Forever Voyaging and you can dig through nearly five hundred pages of his notes, code, press clips, and other material at Archive.org.

• ’s newsletter has several posts that explore Meretzky’s career. One gives an overview of his Infocom games, one is a deep dive on two humorous sci-fi text adventures, and another explores some of his interesting post-Infocom work from the 1990s.

• ’s project and the accompanying book are absolutely worth your time, and the lengthy essay on A Mind Forever Voyaging is particularly good.

• The Digital Antiquarian published an excellent three-part deep dive into A Mind Forever Voyaging that starts here.

• The 2010 documentary Get Lamp by the inimitable tech historian Jason Scott is a fantastic overview of the past and future of interactive fiction, and Meretzky is a central figure in it. The game designer also makes a cameo in MC Frontalot’s epochal music video celebration of text adventures “It is Pitch Dark” around the 3:30 mark. (Thanks for the reminder.)

• When I worked at Wired magazine, we did a feature where we asked a bunch of great science fiction writers for their six-word stories, in the manner of Hemingway’s famous “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” I made sure that we reached out to Meretzky. He submitted several options, all of which were absolute bangers. You can see every participant’s six-word stories here, but Steve’s contributions are all below.

  • Wasted day. Wasted life. Dessert, please.

  • He read his obituary with confusion.

  • Leia: “Baby’s yours.” Luke: “Bad news…”

  • I win lottery. Sun goes nova.

  • Time traveler’s thought: “What’s the password?”

  • Parallel universe. Bush, destitute, joins army.

  • Dorothy: “Fuck it, I’ll stay here.”

  • Steve ignores editor’s word limit and

I initially wrote a version of this piece for Wired magazine, and that’s included in the anthology Mad Science: Einstein’s Fridge, Dewar’s Flask, Mach’s Speed, and 362 Other Inventions and Discoveries that Made Our World. You can read the story as an 8-page zine below or scroll down further to read it in standard article format. And if you’d like to own a physical copy of my crude Photoshop hackwork, or of some other recent Pop Cultural Precursors articles that have been zine-ified, you can get them here.

Let me know which version you prefer in the comments, and please be sure to like, share, follow, subscribe—all that jazz.

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TEXT VERSION OF THE ARTICLE

The 21st Annual MileHiCon, a sci-fi and fantasy gathering in Denver, played host to a truly epochal moment in the history of geekdom: the birth of robot battles as a spectator sport.

For yea, the idea of automatons fighting to the death, which had been foretold by the Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots in 1964, actually came to pass in Colorado in late October of 1989.

The year before, MileHiCon had hosted the Critter Crawl, a sort of beauty pageant for windup toys and remote-control gizmos, But no official winner was declared, and there were no prizes.

“This year, all of that will change radically and violently,” wrote event organizer Bill Llewellin in a pre-convention mailing. “The winner will be the last critter standing (rolling, crawling) on the field of combat.”

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What he proposed was an event dubbed the Critter Crunch, in which competitors would face off on a folding table provided by the Executive Tower Inn. “Some potential entrants are discussing critters capable of significant mayhem,” warned the mailer. “So don’t get too attached to your entry.”

(Imagine a time when contestants actually needed to be warned that their robots might be damaged in combat!)

There had been public displays of robotic mayhem before: Survival Research Laboratories’ performance art pieces had featured automatons that spit fire and blew up. But this was an actual invitational sporting event

Llewellin devised the parameters of the game, with input from fellow members of the Denver Mad Scientists Club. (Their standard uniform was a white lab coat and a hard hat.)

They codified 11 rules, a sort of Magna Carta of mechanical warfare. (No, scratch that, it was bigger than the Magna Carta: It was like a real-life version of Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics.) The rules were revised and expanded over the years.

It was decreed that combatants must be neither heavier than 20 pounds nor bigger than 12 x 12 x 12 inches, though they “may deploy appendages beyond these dimensions.

“The Crunch attracted “five or 10” competitors, according to Llewellin. He himself fielded a fearsome forklift creature named Fluffy Bunny that upended numerous opponents before being outmaneuvered by a tiny Radio Shack radio-controlled car. (The lack of weight classes made for some chaotic David-and-Goliath matches.)

The ultimate winner was Mad Scientist member Pat Thompson’s Thing One, a 19-pound behemoth armed with a can of Silly String that it sprayed at foes — and the audience.

The Critter Crunch gave birth to an array of robot fighting leagues worldwide, as well as a series of TV shows and videogames. The event showed that you didn't need a lab, a DARPA grant, or a Hollywood FX shop to stage robot battles — just curiosity, a toolbox, and maybe a can of Silly String. The ethos found its way into BattleBots, Robot Wars, high school robotics leagues, FIRST Robotics, VEX competitions, university engineering programs, Ultimate Fighting Bots, and the modern maker movement.

The Crunch also added real world texture to mecha-inspired visions of sci fi robot combat in movies like Real Steel and Pacific Rim. And it reminded us that bots aren't simply toys or industrial helpmates. They are dangerous and terrifying creatures that will someday conquer and enslave mankind.

Theda Bara’s film persona, established before the US entry into the First World War, was that of an irresistible seductress who lured unsuspecting men to their doom. They were powerless against her hypnotic eyes, her long dark hair, her molten passion. They gave up their lives, their reputations, and their careers for her, and she left them with nothing.

“The Arch-Torpedo of Domesticity”

She sparked outrage, fear, and revulsion as well as fascination. “What mid-country wife, seeing her susceptible spouse off for New York would be will­ing to venture his integrity and affection against an assault by Theda Bara, the arch-torpedo of domesticity? Alas, none!” wrote Photoplay, America’s first major film fan magazine. “This pretty woman has become the symbol against which every woman’s fist is raised, the terror of the flat­housewife, the Ishmaelite of femininity.” Like the biblical Ishmael, who was cast out and forced to wander the wilderness, Bara was an outsider. She portrayed a series of defiant, unrespectable women who refused to play by society’s rules.

In addition to being the first cinematic vampire, Bara was also the first person to have their life story rewritten to fit with their onscreen image. In the Golden Age of Hollywood, the phony bios were as carefully and artfully crafted as the films themselves.

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The Misogynist Origins of the “Vamp” Archetype

Several fictional works in the 1800s had popularized the idea of the vampyre or vampire as an undead, predatory villain. But by the end of the 19th century, the word came to be more commonly associated with a bewitching, seductive young woman. That’s because of Philip Burne-Jones. In 1897, the British Pre-Raphaelite artist painted an image of a woman gazing triumphantly at a man’s unconscious body. The man’s shirt is open and his throat and chest are exposed. Burne-Jones titled it “The Vampire.”

The writer Rudyard Kipling was Burne-Jones’ cousin. When “The Vampire” was displayed at the New Gallery in London, he was convinced to pen a promotional poem for the 1897 exhibition catalogue. You can read the whole thing here.

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“We called her the woman who did not care”

“The Vampire” begins:

A fool there was and he made his prayer
   (Even as you or I!)
To a rag and a bone and a hank of hair,
(We called her the woman who did not care),
But the fool he called her his lady fair—
   (Even as you or I!)

Oh, the years we waste and the tears we waste,
   And the work of our head and hand
Belong to the woman who did not know
(And now we know that she never could know)
   And did not understand!

A fool there was and his goods he spent,
   (Even as you or I!)
Honour and faith and a sure intent
(And it wasn't the least what the lady meant),
But a fool must follow his natural bent
   (Even as you or I!)

...the fool was stripped to his foolish hide,
   (Even as you or I!)
Which she might have seen when she threw him aside—
(But it isn’t on record the lady tried)
So some of him lived but the most of him died—
   (Even as you or I!)

The painting and the poem captured the public imagination, reproductions spread widely, and the phrase “a fool there was” entered the vernacular. They both appeared months after Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published. But Burne-Jones and Kipling’s riff on vampires had a far greater and more immediate impact on the culture than that genre-defining novel.

The commonly understood meaning of the word “vampire” came to be a sultry, predatory femme fatale who bewitched men and drained them of their life essence—and their folding money. That sense of the word survives in the shortened form “vamp.” Of course, adultery that leads to the male fool’s ruination is always and only the fault of a woman. The misogyny of the “vamp” archetype is self-evident.

“He was hers, soul, and body, and brain...”

A novel inspired by the poem was produced in 1909, and its prose is even purpler than you might imagine. Here’s an excerpt:

“Kiss me, My Fool!” The scarlet roses at her breast moved a little. Her lips were parted... Her eyes were on his...

He cried, thickly, agonizedly: “I’m free of you! Free, I tell you! I’m going back to wife—to child—to home—to honor! I’m free!”

Her lips curved. Her breast heaved. Her arms glowed. And her eyes were on his... He came a step nearer—another step—yet another... He was nearer, now... She leaned back a little, in the great chair...

He was not a man, now. He was a Thing, and that Thing was of her. Hands hung slack, loose, at his sides; jaw drooped; lips were pendulous. Only, in his eyes was that light that she, and she alone, knew how to kindle... He was hers, soul, and body, and brain...

A stage adaptation of the poem by the same author was a smash hit on Broadway, and in 1915, the producer William Fox acquired the rights to turn that play into a film. The film version of “A Fool There Was” was a smash hit. It would also spawn the first cinematic sex symbol, whose fame was fed by the first modern movie studio publicity campaign.

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Manufacturing the first cinematic star persona

The incomparable humorist S.J. Perelman wrote a piece for the New Yorker in the 1950s about the indelible impact that Bara’s scandalous onscreen image had on popular culture, and on his 11-year-old self:

I accidentally got my first intimation of Miss Bara from a couple of teachers excitedly discussing her. “If you rearrange the letters in her name, they spell ‘Arab Death,’” one of them was saying, with a delicious shudder. “I’ve never seen an actress kiss the way she does. She just sort of glues herself onto a man and drains the strength out of him.”

“I know—isn’t it revolting?” sighed the other rapturously. “Let’s go see her again tonight!”

Needless to add, I was in the theater before either of them, and my reaction was no less fervent. For a full month afterward, I gave myself up to fantasies in which I lay with my head pillowed in the seductress’s lap, intoxicated by coal-black eyes smoldering with belladonna. At her bidding, I eschewed family, social position, my brilliant career—a rather hazy combination of African explorer and private sleuth—to follow her to the ends of the earth. I saw myself, oblivious of everything but the nectar of her lips, being cashiered for cheating at cards (I was also a major in the Horse Dragoons), descending to drugs, and ultimately winding up as a beachcomber in the South Seas.

The fact that Theda Bara’s name was an anagram for “Arab Death” was deliberately injected into the national conversation by Fox Film publicists. Those publicists also concocted Bara’s Egyptian heritage out of whole cloth. It was a foundational example of Hollywood Orientalism: borrowing vague “Eastern” mystique to make a white woman from the Midwest seem more dangerously alluring.

In fact, the publicists are the ones who bestowed the name “Theda Bara” on her.

Bara was born Theodosia Goodman in Cincinnati. (She was named after Aaron Burr’s ill-fated daughter.) Her father was a Polish immigrant who became a tailor, and her mother was a salesgirl who rose to become co-owner of Dunkelmeyer & DeCoppet Wigmakers. People who knew Theodosia growing up said she was a “nice Jewish girl.” She caught the acting bug, and after an unsuccessful attempt at a career on the stage in New York City, she shifted her efforts to the city’s nascent film industry. She lied about her age to secure a contract with the newly formed Fox Pictures, claiming she was 22. When the filming of A Fool There Was commenced, she was actually 29.

Filming A Fool There Was was a miserable experience for Bara. This was long before the era when stars received private trailers and attentive assistants. Her contract required her to supply her own costumes—a typical arrangement at the time. Primitive film stock required her to cake her face in thick yellow makeup and brown lipstick to have the desired skin tones on screen.

She later recalled the humiliation of filming in a public street, dressed in gaudy gowns with panther skin and gold leaf, over-emoting wildly through all of that heavy clown paint. (Karina Longworth’s You Must Remember This podcast episode about Bara has great insights into the production process and the acting style of the era.)

Bara is listed in the credits as simply “The Vampire,” occasionally shortened in the title cards to “The Vamp.”

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“Kiss me, my fool!”

The high point of the film is when Bara is accosted by a former lover: he gesticulates wildly to express his anguish and rage and despair, and then he produces a gun and points it at her. The Vampire looks at the gun, chuckles mirthlessly, and swats it away with a flower she clutches. Then she fixes her hypnotic, kohl-rimmed eyes on her prey, moves her face towards his, and mouths the immortal line, “Kiss me, my fool!” He instead points the gun at his own head and ends his misery. Minutes after his suicide, The Vamp is seducing another unwary victim by wantonly flashing some hot, hot ankle. (Watch the clip below.)

The film ends with The Vampire’s latest victim reduced to a pitiful husk. His hair has turned white; he’s lost his career, his family, his reputation, and his self-respect. The man’s ever-faithful wife attempts to free him from the clutches of the foul temptress, but the rescue efforts are in vain. With a sexual aggressiveness that would have been shocking and unprecedented to the audience of the time, The Vampire darts forward and kisses her escaping prey like she is sucking the last remnants of his soul from his body. (Watch the clip below.)

Soon after, he collapses to the floor. The intertitles give us a few final snippets of the Kipling poem: “The fool was stripped to his foolish hide… some of him lived but the most of him died.” Bara recreates the pose from the Philip Burne-Jones painting that inspired the film, and gloats over his motionless body as she dribbles rose petals on his face.

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The Media Campaign Behind “The Vamp”

Bara was brilliant in A Fool There Was; the movie surrounding her towering performance was unremarkable and stagy. But the way that film was marketed was revolutionary. The fledgling Fox Film Corporation tasked its new publicity department, staffed by former New York World reporters, with fabricating an exotic backstory for the Polish-American actress who’d had a brief and unsuccessful theater career in New York.

At a press conference for A Fool There Was in January 1915, the assembled journalists were told that Bara was the Serpent of the Nile, born in the Sahara to a French actress mother and an Italian sculptor father, and raised “in the shadow of the Sphinx.”

“Thus she became a professional sorceress”

The publicists said she had been a star of the stage in France, forced to flee to America due to the outbreak of WWII. They wrote that she was the reincarnation of Circe, Delilah, and all of the wickedest women in myth and history. They hinted that Miss Arab Death possessed supernatural powers and arcane talismans that helped her cast a spell on her victims…and the viewing public.

Photoplay reported that Bara:

“opened her destructive eye on an oasis in the Sahara, where her father was engaged in painting desert pic­tures … Later she followed in her mother’s footsteps, and appeared in the classic drama in England. Her personality and appearance led her directors to cast her for roles which—for want of a better term—we may describe as ‘vampire parts;’ thus she became a professional sorceress.”

The Washington Times also printed the fanciful biography as fact.

The motion picture patrons of Washington have recently had opportunity
to see one of the most famous or French actresses, Theda Bara, In the
part of the “vampire” woman in the film production of “A Fool There Was,”
… But few of the picture patrons know that Miss Bara has for several seasons been considered one of the greatest actresses on the European stage, and for some time
was the leading woman at the Théâtre Antoine in Paris, where plays filled with
thrills were produced for literary and artistic Europe … She is strikingly beautiful, with brilliant dark eyes and the rich coloring that goes with the pure brunette type. She has been for years known as an interpreter of dramatic masterpieces that were regarded as extremely difficult or impossible for any other actress.

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“Never have I gazed into a face portraying such wickedness and evil”

A Fool There Was became a tremendous box office hit. Almost immediately, Bara became one of the biggest stars of the silent era, and touched off the stratospheric rise of Fox Film, which would later become 20th Century Fox. Her fame was rivaled only by Charlie Chaplin and that goody-two-shoes Mary Pickford. Bara was happy to play along with the vamp image, wearing veils and black clothing and slathering on makeup.

Bara played along with the invented backstory dreamed up by studio publicists. For press events, Fox encouraged her to use an exotic accent and profess her interest in mysticism and the occult. Bara would laugh uproariously when she encountered the latest bit of invention printed about her in the papers—one item described a 2,000-year-old emerald ring supposedly given to her by a blind, wizened old sheik.

The studio hired Emily H. Vaught, New York Society Phrenologist and Physiognomist, to determine the screen star’s character based on the shape of her head and her facial features:

I write this with a photograph of Theda Bara, the William Fox “Vampire,” before me. Never in all my experience as a professional character reader have I gazed into a face portraying such wickedness and evil—characteristics of the vampire and the sorceress.

Theda Bara belongs to what we term the wide-faced, muscular type of people, whose bones are slender and small, and who are governed by the same muscular system as the serpent. They are sinuous like the serpent, and, as if the characteristics of a reptile were not enough, they have a feline temperament, deliberately taking pains to inflict suffering on others.

No publicity stunt was too on the nose for the Fox publicists staging The Vampire campaign. Bara even posed with skeletons for publicity photos.

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“Her hair is like the serpent locks of Medusa, her eyes have the cruel cunning of Lucretia Borgia”

The screenwriter and early film critic Louella Parsons’ initial review of A Fool There Was in the Chicago Record-Herald was all dudgeon and disapproval.

“The picture is appalling in its grewsome unreality. In the first place no steady-going, level-headed business man, with sweet wife and adorable “kiddie” would be led astray by a woman so palpably common. A more subtle. refined character might appeal to his senses, but never could this coarse creature lure a man away from his home … Theda Bara, the vampire, while very handsome gave almost too harsh an impersonation to this unpleasant character ... it makes you unhappy and irritated to think that such a seemingly strong man could leave his wife and child for such a creature.”

But Parsons was on hand to see Fox’s ludicrous Chicago press event, and she was also invited to interview Bara “out of character.” The columnist quickly saw the value of playing along with the studio’s invented backstory, in a way that let her play her own role—that of the clever truth-teller who was in on the joke.

Parsons would go on to become one of the foremost film columnists in the country, and one of the most powerful women in Hollywood. Here is how she later wrote about Bara, clearly delighting in the awfulness of an onscreen image that had recently revolted her. She’d learned to stop hectoring and love The Vampire.

“Her hair is like the serpent locks of Medusa, her eyes have the cruel cunning of Lucretia Borgia . . . and her hands are those of the blood-bathing Elizabeth Bathory, who slaughtered young girls that she might bathe in their life blood and so retain her beauty. Can it be that fate has reincarnated in Theda Bara the souls of these monsters of medieval times?”

“Scientists have questioned this most extraordinary of women to secure fresh evidence to support their half-proved laws of transmigration of souls, but the result has only been to prove that, though Miss Bara is the greatest delineator of evil types on the stage or screen today, she is in real life a sweet wholesome woman who detests the abnormal.”

The September 1915 issue of Photoplay published “a visit with Theda Bara, tender-hearted vampire.” Dubbing her “purgatory’s ivory angel,” it laid out exactly how the enthusiast press would debunk her vampire origin story while also reveling in it.

“I prefer to disbelieve those stupid people who insist that Theda Bara’s right name is Theodosia Goodman, and that she is by, of and from Cincinnati,” wrote Wallace Franklin in Photoplay. “To those persons I put my fingers in my eyes and wink my ears. I wish to believe, I am going to believe, I do believe that Allah is Allah and that Bara is Bara … I see no reason for disbelieving what it most pleases me to believe.” (I’ve included full text of this article at the end of this post.)

“She is the only human sort of Woman the Ameri­can public wants”

Bara does the interview straight, as Theodosia Goodman, not as the daughter of the Sphinx. The actress confesses to the Photoplay interviewer that she is about to turn 30—a surprising confidence, as just months before she had lied about her age to William Fox and claimed she was in her early twenties so that she would not be rejected as over-the-hill.

Many have argued over whether Bara’s persona was that of an empowered and sexually liberated proto-feminist (or more plausibly) an appallingly sexist embodiment of slut-shaming. In the Photoplay interview, Bara is admirably clear-eyed about the fact that what she likes about her onscreen image is that it allows her to play the kinds of interesting, meaty roles that were extremely scarce for women at the time. “Oh, please, please don’t call me a ‘Vampire!’” she tells the interviewer, preferring the word “adventuress” for her onscreen identity:

“I like the adventuress be­cause she has color and intensity. Do you under­stand? I can make some­thing out of her; she stands forth vivid and liv­ing. She is the only human sort of Woman the Ameri­can public wants; they must have colorless hero­ines or sugary-sweet hero­ines playing white little parts in white little love stories. Understand me—I’m not saying that American women are like that; they are warm wonderful vital things: but people seem to want heroines and not women. Therefore I choose to play wicked women because when photoplay women are good and real they often cease to be women. Isn’t that odd?”

The Vampire would go on to crank out ten movies before the end of 1915. Production schedules were tighter back then and the performers were made of sterner stuff. (She says she often wept with exhaustion on set in the Photoplay interview.) The titles of her films released that year say it all: Destruction, Carmen, The Devil’s Daughter, The Galley Slave, and the admirably blunt Sin. A news item promoting that film refers to Bara as “the world’s vampire … with the wickedest face on the shadowy screen.”

Bara made scores more films over the next few years, often wearing outfits onscreen that even today would be considered revealing. The titles and subject matter also got even more daring: The Forbidden Path, When a Woman Sins, The Tiger Woman, Her Double Life, The Siren’s Song.

I can’t resist, here are still more film titles: The She-Devil, The Unchastened Woman, The Vixen, When Men Desire, and The Eternal Sappho.

She was such a box office draw that she negotiated a contract that earned her the then-unheard-of sum of thousands of dollars a week. She also increasingly bridled at being typecast, and demanded the chance to occasionally play a good girl, and the producers had no choice but to acquiesce to keep their star happy. But those films always disappointed, either because the public didn’t want them or because the studio refused to promote them.

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Bara’s Career Decline and the Rise of Bloodsucking Undead Movie Vampires

In 1922, F. W. Murnau’s German Expressionist masterpiece Nosferatu would establish the paradigm for the movie vampire as we now know it. The film wasn’t screened in America until 1929 due to a lawsuit from Bram Stoker’s estate—the film was clearly an unlicensed adaptation of the novel Dracula, with character names and locale changed. But by the mid-1920s, Bara’s film career was over. A more slender flapper-style female form was in vogue, and audiences became accustomed to more subtle characterizations. The histrionic acting style of the early silents that Bara excelled at was passé.

Bara was still an icon, famous for her pioneering star persona even if she wasn’t making hit movies anymore. In June 1923, Bara guest edited an issue of the film enthusiast magazine Movie Weekly.

The magazine includes an article titled “Why I Don’t Want Bara to Return to the Screen—By Her Husband.” Bara married Charles Brabin, who had directed one of her films. He continued to direct films, but she retired, and spent the rest of her life as a Hollywood socialite, joking about her scandalous legacy. There’s also an article about her post-film career life, and one in which an amateur character expert explores how “Theda Bara’s Face Tells Why She Was a Vampire.” (I’ve included several pages of this article at the end of this post.)

Sadly, few of Bara’s movies survive. Early silent films were ephemeral and disposable, and after a brief run most silver nitrate reels were melted down for reuse, or to recover the silver. Those nitrate reels were also highly flammable, and most of Bara’s remaining films were destroyed in a 1937 fire at the Fox vault.

The real tragedy is that such a trailblazing figure is virtually forgotten today—not because she lacked impact, but because the medium itself was so new. Film was still finding its form, her acting style feels alien to modern eyes, and most of her work was incinerated like a vampire exposed to sunlight. Unlike her immortal screen persona, our cultural memory of Theda Bara was all too ephemeral.

READ MORE:

• But one of them that did survive is her star-making turn as The Vampire in A Fool There Was. of shares the whole thing here.)

• of Stolen Holiday writes about Bara’s persona and filmography here.

• of has an essay on Bara’s career here.

• of has more backstory on the Kipling poem “The Vampire” and the painting that inspired it here.

• Filmmaker writes about William Fox and the origin of Fox Pictures in his newsletter The Crack of Dawn. Read it here.

• of writes about the 1937 Fox vault fire that destroyed most of Bara’s film legacy here.

• of has a fascinating piece about the preservation of nitrate films here.

• The audio used in the video clips above are from “The Vamp” by Green Bros. Novelty Orchestra. (1919 Edison Cylinder Recording) You can find it here.

• SOURCES:

  • The full text of the novel A Fool There Was is on Project Gutenberg, and it’s even more over-the-top than you think.

  • The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William Fox by Vanda Krefft (2017)

  • Vamp by Eve Golden (1996)

  • Theda Bara: A Biography of the Silent Screen Vamp, with a Filmography by Ronald Genini (1996)

  • An Empire of Their Own How the Jews Invented Hollywood by Neal Gabler (1989)

  • The You Must Remember This podcast has a great episode on the original vampire. “Theda Bara, Hollywood’s First Sex Symbol” (2014)

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And as promised, here is the full Photoplay article about Bara from September of 1915. (Full isue available here.) Excerpts from the 1923 issue of Movie Weekly guest edited by Bara follow.

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And here are excerpts from the 1923 issue of Movie Weekly guest edited by Bara. (Full issue available here.)

When zombies initially shambled into our pop cultural consciousness, they reflected something slightly different: exoticism, colonialism, and one globe-trotting writer’s own morbid, insatiable appetites.

The journalist and travel writer William Seabrook introduced the term “zombie” to America after he learned of the mythical creatures during a visit to Haiti. He would go on to become a self-confessed cannibal who wrote about the smell, taste, and texture of freshly cooked human flesh with the relish of a restaurant critic.

His life story is fascinating—if you can stomach it. [This is an updated version of a previous post.]

Seabrook was a bohemian, an occultist, a sadomasochist, and an amateur anthropologist who mixed high-minded literary aspirations with a knack for lurid sensationalism. In 1929, he released the book-length travelogue The Magic Island, in which he described Haitian culture and religious rituals

Seabrook prided himself on transcending the bigotry, conventionality, and superstitions of his upbringing in the Reconstruction-era South. He wanted to write about voodoo as dispassionately as he might write about Protestantism. But his book-length investigation of “black sorcery” seems incredibly racist and condescending in a modern light. (His writing in the book was accompanied by a series of illustrations by Alexander King that now seem equally offensive.)

“Endowed by sorcery with a mechanical sem­blance of life”

Here is how Seabrook says that the supernatural phenomenon of human reanimation was explained to him during his time in Haiti:

While the zombie came from the grave, it was neither a ghost, nor yet a person who had been raised like Lazarus from the dead. The zombie, they say, is a soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical sem­blance of life—it is a dead body which is made to walk and act and move as if it were alive. People who have the power to do this go to a fresh grave, dig up the body before it has had time to rot, galvanize it into movement, and then make of it a servant or slave, occasionally for the commission of some crime, more often simply as a drudge around the habi­tation or the farm, setting it dull heavy tasks, and beating it like a dumb beast if it slackens.

Note that the idea of zombies as cannibals with an insatiable hunger for human flesh is completely absent from this formulation—that’s a more recent invention, with no connection to Haitian lore.

“Dead bodies walking, without souls or minds”

In The Magic Island, Seabrook explains what the actual dietary needs of the original zombies were reputed to be. He shares the story of a Haitian couple, Joseph and Croyance, who command a group of field workers that are “not living men and women but unhappy zombies who [they] had dragged from their peaceful graves to slave in the sun.” Croyance must prepare tasteless meals for them because zombies immediately die if they taste salt or meat. One day she takes pity on the “poor dead creatures who should be at rest,” and decides that it might cheer them to see the crowds and processions in the city during a religious festival.

So she tied a new bright-colored handkerchief around her head, aroused the zombies from the sleep that was scarcely different from waking, gave them their morning bowl of cold, unsalted plantains boiled in water, which they ate dumbly uncomplaining, and set out with them for the town. Croyance, in her bright kerchief, leading the nine dead men and women behind her, past the railroad crossing, where she murmured a prayer to Legba, past the great white-painted wooden Christ, who hung life-sized in the glaring sun, where she stopped to kneel and cross herself—but the poor zombies prayed neither to Papa Legba nor to Brother Jesus, for they were dead bodies walking, without souls or minds.

In town, Croyance slipped up and mistakenly fed salted pistachios to the zombies. The seasoned food broke the spell that had suspended them in an unnatural state between life and death; they all cried out, and then they each began to trudge towards the graveyards in their home villages. “No one dared stop them, for they were corpses walking in the sunlight, and they themselves and all the people know that they were corpses.”

When they reached their destinations, each of the zombies fell to the ground and immediately transformed into a pile of rotted flesh.

Seabrook records that he had several supposed zombies pointed out to him, but he eventually concluded, “Zombies were nothing but poor, ordinary demented human beings, idiots, forced to toil in the fields.” When the book was published, he felt that he had delivered a serious ethnographic study. But he was canny enough and cynical enough to play up the most exotic aspects of Haiti at every turn. And doing so helped to guarantee massive sales.

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The mythos of voodoo and the idea of corpses reanimated by means of dark magic immediately struck a chord in American popular culture. Within a few years of the publication of The Magic Island, zombies had become a staple of the horror genre.

The spread of the zombie contagion

Many were eager to exploit the sudden fascination with the walking dead. A Broadway production called Zombie opened in early 1932. This “play of the tropics” was supposedly so bad that it closed almost immediately. It was restaged out of town as a comedy rather than a pulse-pounding thriller.

In June 1932, the pulp magazine Strange Tales Of Mystery And Terror published a short story “The House of the Magnolias.” It transplanted the zombie mythos to a plantation outside of New Orleans, with black zombies toiling through the night in the fields. A visitor took pity on them and fed them salted candy, releasing them from their cursed existence. But before these zombies returned to their graves, they took revenge on their slave master, burning the plantation house to the ground.

The original zombie mythos and the earliest zombie stories in American pop culture focused on the metaphor of slavery and forced labor. In July of 1932, White Zombie, the first zombie horror flick, was released. Bela Lugosi portrayed a voodoo priest named Murder Legendre who created an undead workforce to toil in his sugar mill.

Seabrook himself was obsessed with captivity and subjugation throughout his life. He used a portion of the wealth that his zombie book brought him to hire women who would allow him to strip them naked, chain them up for days at a time, and force them to eat table scraps from the ground like an animal. He believed that the deprivation allowed them to enter a heightened psychic and spiritual state—it was all just part of his questing exploration of the outer limits of mysticism, you see. (He even wrote a book about it.)

The idea of zombies as violent creatures driven by an insatiable desire for human flesh wasn’t established until the 1968 release of Night of the Living Dead. The director George Romero never intended for his reanimated corpses to be seen as zombies, and the z-word is never used in the film. But the impact of this grisly low-budget masterpiece on the horror genre was so immense that cannibalism quickly fused with the Haitian mythos. Dead people attacking and devouring living people became the core trope of zombie lore.

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But William Seabrook got to cannibalism first—decades before the Romero film’s release.

“No other man has written so fully, so amazingly, of cannibalism.”

In 1930, Seabrook published the book Jungle Ways. Ads for it ran in distinguished publications like The New Yorker, and they read:

A new book by the author of “The Magic Island” carries its own assurance of compelling interest. But “Jungle Ways” goes startlingly further. In fact, it goes further than Seabrook himself or any other civilized writer has ever before dared to go in presenting the unexpurgated truth about the intimate life and customs — religious, magical, moral, sexual, and social — of the real savage. Its quality of excitement, both from a scientific and a human point of view, also rests heavily on its value as pure literature. Morand, Cocteau, Maurois say that not four living Americans can write as well as William Seabrook. “Jungle Ways” is a profoundly brave and wise exploration into the primitive and ecstatic elements of life, by one of the most distinguished literary figures of the day.

Seabrook as a student of life has the gift of identifying himself with the people he observes, of submerging himself in ways of life fantastically different from our own. He is incapable of “traveling” a country. He lives it, absorbs it, and refuses to be dogmatic about what he has seen and understood … With the permission of the French Government, he lived for several months alone with the Gueré cannibals, His facts, observed at first hand, are authenticated by French official documents. And it can be stated without reservation that no other man has written so fully, so amazingly, of cannibalism.

In Jungle Ways, Seabrook wrote openly, unashamedly—boastfully even—about eating human flesh. The writer’s fascination with the “exotic” rituals of African people (and the confidence that the book-buying public would reward him handsomely for doing so) compelled him to seek out a tribe that was reputed to have engaged in ritualistic cannibalism.

Seabrook wanted to explore the outer edges of human behavior, shatter taboos, and épater la bourgeoisie. And did he ever.

“I should like very much to try it myself, just once.”

While researching the Guere tribe in French West Africa, he concluded that cannibalism was unthinkable in Western cultures that “believe that in the essence of a man there is something holy which other animals have not.” But the Guere, like many cultures around the world, believe that everything has a soul and that it’s therefore unavoidable to eat things that contain the divine spark. Seabrook records his personal eureka moment about cannibalism:

I was compelled to say finally, “I can’t seem to think of any reason why you others shouldn’t eat it if you like it.” And I added, “As a matter of fact, I should like very much to try it myself, just once.”

“If you like it.” He reduces the practice to a mere food preference, as if these people were choosing between trout and pork chop on a restaurant menu.

For the Guere, cannibalism wasn’t a matter of sustenance. It had been part of an elaborate series of rituals that only took place in the context of a vanquished opponent in war. The Guere refused to let Seabrook, who had no connection to their culture or their beliefs, take part in their practice. In fact, they insisted that the practice had been discontinued long before his arrival.

At one point, the Guere gave in to the writer’s unceasing pestering and went through the motions of serving him a cannibal feast. The writer later deduced that they used subterfuge, feeding him ape meat.

But Seabrook didn’t let this deter him.

“The meat of a freshly killed man, who seemed to be about thirty years old”

In Jungle Ways, the writer claims that he later managed to obtain some cuts of human flesh—small chunks of meat suitable for stew, “a sizeable rump steak, also a small loin roast.” He assured his readers that it was the result of an accidental death, “the meat of a freshly killed man, who seemed to be about thirty years old—and who had not been murdered.”

Seabrook was cagy about how he acquired this corpse flesh, and he insisted that it would be “unfair, unsporting, and ungrateful” to reveal the identity of whoever hooked him up. He would later reveal in his 1942 autobiography that an acquaintance obtained it for him from an internist at the Sorbonne who had access to the facility’s morgue.

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In Jungle Ways, the writer explained how he prepared these cuts of human meat for consumption, spitting the loin roast, grilling the rump steak, and mixing the stew with rice.

He described the sensory experience of the cooking process at length:

The raw meat, in appearance, was firm, slightly coarse-textured rather than smooth. In raw texture, both to the eye and to the touch, it resembled good beef. In color, however, it was slightly less red than beef…the aroma was wholly pleasant, like those of beefsteak and roast beef, with no special other distinguishing odor…the fat was sizzling, becoming tender and yellower. Beyond what I have told, there was nothing special or unusual. It was nearly done and looked and smelled good to eat.

“It was like good fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef”

Seabrook was determined to dine upon these pieces of a former person. And not just dainty little nibbles! “It would have been stupid to go to all this trouble and then taste too meticulously and with too much experimental nervousness only tiny morsels…I had thought about this and planned it for a long time, and now I was going to do it.”

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The writer records that after he took his first bite, he was pleased and relieved to discover that he had no physical revulsion or moral compunctions about what he was doing. “It had no weird, startling, or unholy special flavor.” He went on to describe the taste and texture of human flesh in exacting, appalling detail.

“It was like good fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef... It was mild, good meat with no other sharply defined or highly characteristic taste such as for instance, goat, high game, and pork have. The steak was slightly tougher than prime veal, a little stringy... The roast, from which I cut and ate a central slice, was tender, and in color, texture, smell as well as taste, strengthened my certainty that of all the meats we habitually know, veal is the one meat to which this meat is accurately comparable…A small helping of the stew might likewise have been veal stew, but the overabundance of red pepper was such that it conveyed no fine shading to a white palate.”

Of course, of course, he brings race into it again. And it’s so telling that a little bit of cayenne overwhelmed his gringo honky senses, but the moral issues of what he was doing never gave him pause. “Neither then nor at any time since have I had any serious personal qualms, either of digestion or of conscience,” he insists.

This unrepentant cannibalism was too much even for the sensation-starved public that had embraced Seabrook’s earlier tales of voodoo and zombies. In his 1942 autobiography, the writer quotes a review of Jungle Ways in the Montgomery Advertiser that captures the tenor of the public disgust: “It is not agreeable to think that an intelligent, educated member of the white race and of the American nation, has voluntarily descended to a scale lower than that observed by these lowly peoples.”

In Seabrook’s telling, he had been castigated and condemned for his broadmindedness and universalism, not for eating human flesh. “Those who might have forgiven me for eating a n——r couldn't forgive me for eating with one,” he wrote.

Seabrook knew that he would be remembered for his flirtation with cannibalism and for touching off the zombie craze, not for his lofty literary pretensions or his desire to be a world-bridging truth-teller. That tormented him, and he in turn tormented those around him. He became increasingly obsessed with alcohol and sadomasochism, and convinced several publishers to pay him to write about his experiences with both. Seabrook would die in 1944 after downing several handfuls of sleeping pills and a bottle of hooch. His former friend, the satanist Aleister Crowley, wrote, “The swine-dog W. B. Seabrook has killed himself at last.”

Seabrook was smart enough and self-aware enough to grasp that all of his vaunted taboo-busting had ultimately been about his own wealth, notoriety, and self-gratification.

READ MORE ABOUT IT:

William Seabrook. The Magic Island (1929)
William Seabrook. Jungle Ways (1930)
William Seabrook. No Hiding Place: An Autobiography (1942)
Marjorie Muir Worthington. The Strange World of Willie Seabrook (1966)
Emily Matchar. The Zombie King (2015, The Atavist Magazine, No. 45)
Joe Ollmann. The Abominable Mr. Seabrook (2017, graphic novel)

ELSEWHERE ON SUBSTACK:

In 1941, Seabrook released a book Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today. As part of the promotional campaign, he and some fellow occultists held a “hex party” to curse Adolf Hitler with voodoo. Time Magazine was on hand to photograph the proceedings. has the whole story here.

writes an essay on why all horror—including zombie stories—is inherently political. Read it on right here.

by has a fascinating essay on Vodou, Haiti, and the Colonial Aesthetics of Fear. You can read it here to get more context on its rich revolutionary history beyond the pop cultural appropriations.

, a journal of erotica in the arts, has a great piece on Man Ray, De Sade, Surrealism, and Bondage, which contextualizes the photo series “The Fantasies of Mr. Seabrook.” Read it here.

, cohost of the Space the Nation podcast, joins for a suitably wonky discussion of the undead, as well as his book Theories of International Politics and Zombies ( now available in a new updated Apocalypse Edition!). On his own newsletter , Dan explains that The Last of Us is, in fact, a zombie show.

is sharing a carefully curated collection of classic films on . Among them: the original 1932 undead film, White Zombie. Read the essay about the film’s changing reputation, then watch it in its entirety here.

marks the release of 28 Days Later by castigating its creators for killing off supernatural zombies. You can read that on his eponymous newsletter here.

reimprime un artículo fascinante sobre tomar en serio a los zombis, que apareció originalmente en la incomparable revista de ciencia Muy Interesante. Léelo AQUÍ.

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Irradiated Crusaders

Many iconic comic book characters, from Spider-Man to Daredevil to the Fantastic Four, have radiation-fueled origin stories. No matter that in the real world a strong dose of radiation can cause cancer and bone necrosis, destroy chromosomes, and ruin reproductive organs. Why have so many comics linked radiation with superpowers instead of super-impotence?

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I believe that we can trace all of it back to the December 1953 issue of Mechanix Illustrated. The magazine typically promised DIY projects and How-To guides for garage tinkerers, but it occasionally dipped into science and futurism. This particular issue featured the unforgettable article “How Nuclear Radiation Can Change Our Race.”

The piece begins, “Now hear this, Earth! I am Mutant Man, Homo Superior! I have been created by radiation forces out of the loins of you, the human race, after your great and terrible Atom War. Yes, I am a step above and beyond you and I am now your master for better or for worse. You created me in your blind, savage, senseless war of atomic radiation. You have only yourselves to blame if I turn out to be your—Frankenstein Monster!”

After that bold warning, there’s a feeble attempt by the author “O. O. Binder” to cite real science, like x-ray research, Hiroshima victims, and “Darwin and his theory of evolution, which burst like an atomic bomb into human thought in 1859.” But the thrust of the piece is that the atomic age is maybe probably gonna turn humans into superhumans—or horrible monsters.

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This sensationalist piece is ostensibly a science-tinged thought experiment, but it has the breathlessly florid tone of a superhero comic. This isn’t surprising because O. O. Binder is actually Otto Binder, a comic book writer with 4400+ issues to his name, much of it for DC Comics. He’s the co-creator of Supergirl, he helped establish the character of Bizarro, and he dreamed up Super-foe Brainiac as well as Superman’s pet dog, Krypto.

The illustrator of the Mechanix Illustrated article was Kurt Schaffenberger. At the time that he drew these eggheaded radioactive super-geniuses, he was a journeyman comic artist working for Marvel, EC Comics, Gilberton, and American Comics Group. Binder would later lure him to DC, where he would work on Superman and Captain Marvel comics. He’s particularly known for his depictions of Lois Lane.

The Mechanix Illustrated article by Binder and Schaffenberger presents multiple scenarios in which humans are transformed by radiation into a strange new race of mutants. Every single scenario would go on to become a comic book trope. The core conceit is that radiation will send evolution into overdrive, producing creatures “as far beyond us as we are beyond the ape-man.”

Before cosmic rays created the Fantastic Four, Binder described how it could happen

“Shrug this off if you can or laugh at it as fanciful Sunday supplement pseudo-science,” writes Binder. “But first, examine a few cold hard facts that stare us straight in the face today, showing that atomic radiation has changed us physically … What does this two plus two add up to? A frightening four. We are living in what might be called the new Age of Rays.”

The idea of radiation creating enhanced versions of human beings would later fuel the rise of Marvel comics, beginning with the November 1961 issue of Fantastic Four #1. Reed Richards takes his girlfriend and two buddies for a trip to space, where they are bombarded with weird cosmic rays that give them special abilities. “The way Jack Kirby draws the Fantastic Four going through the Cosmic Ray Belt, and suddenly something is very clearly happening to them, is such an indelible image,” says Douglas Wolk, comic book scholar and author of All the Marvels.

The Fantastic Four return to Earth, and their powers immediately manifest. They also immediately begin to interact in ways that the simplistic superhero teams of the time had never done. In the excerpt below, you see their bodies transform, and you also see them bicker and fight. The rock-man Thing expresses resentment and even a touch of sexual jealousy. This was spicy stuff for a medium that most people associated with the boyish Shazam (whose fanciful backstory is that he was granted the powers of six mythological figures—Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles, and Mercury.)

The fact that the group’s powers were supposedly derived from the actual Van Allen belt that encircles Earth added to the distinctiveness of this comic. It was slightly more sophisticated than Superman and his menagerie of Krypto the Superdog and Streaky the Supercat and Comet the Superhorse and Beppo the Supermonkey. Binder, dreamed up several of those goofy superpets, but his 1953 Mechanix Illustrated article also laid the groundwork for this new kind of comic book icon. “The Fantastic Four were specifically science fiction characters, as opposed to superhero characters,” notes Wolk.

Before gamma rays created the Incredible Hulk, Binder imagined radiation unleashing “savage new sub-men”

The piece also predicted a very different sort of superbeing when he posited that radiation could create “savage sub-men … of inferior mind.”

In prehistoric times, man was little more than a huge, slow-thinking, cruel beast. Radiations from an atomic war might easily bring such monsters back to hunt us down, to destroy our race.

By “our race,” he means homo sapiens, but the “monster” and “destroy our race” talk in this article is still extremely disquieting. (Especially since it appeared just 8 years after the genocide of WWII.) Binder goes on to write:

If enough reproductive genes are affected, say thousands of them, and if they are altered into defective new mutant-genes of the dominant type, the mutant children born would be monsters of some kind. Perhaps throwback forms of inferior mind .which would then unleash a horde of savage new “sub-men" upon civilization. They, in turn, might be more dangerous in our midst than the previous Homo Inferior, for Mutant Man might then war on us and kill us off, scorning us as a useless breed that no longer has any right to rule Earth.

Hear that, puny human? This description conjures thoughts of the Incredible Hulk, who would be introduced in 1962. His origin story: While researching Gamma Rays, scientist Bruce Banner is accidentally trapped in an atomic blast that impregnates his cells with radiation. “Banner standing in front of the trench while the bomb goes off—that is an image that sears itself on your memory,” says Wolk

The radiation transforms Bruce Banner into a “savage sub-man of inferior mind.”

Binder’s article depicts a hulking monster. And as you can imagine, it’s bizarre nightmare fuel.

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Long before Marvel’s X-Men encountered McCarthyite anti-mutant persecution, Binder imagined “a tragic, stupid witch-hunt destroying creatures better and finer than we are”

Binder imagines radiation unleashing a new species who lord over humankind. Remember, he started his article imagining how this new species might announce, “Now hear this, Earth! I am Mutant Man, Homo Superior! … Yes, I am a step above and beyond you and I am now your master!” That arrogant line seems like it could come from the mouth of Magneto, a character who would be introduced in The X-Men #1 (September 1963), which appeared almost a decade after the Mechanix Illustrated article.

Marvel writer/editor Stan Lee and writer/artist Jack Kirby portrayed a Homo Superior who wanted to rule mankind. They also envisioned noble Homo Superiors who were threatened by fearful and violent homo sapiens. But Binder got there first as well. He wrote:

Picture the final poignant result of this deadly struggle for supremacy, between Old Man and New Man, as somewhere on Earth a panting, frightened figure is cornered in the ruins of a city by Mutant Man and there he dies—the last man.

…but the reverse might also come true, that we humans outnumber the Mutants. They might be comparatively rare, say 1,000,000 against Earth’s 2,000,000,000 humans. In which case the tables would be turned and we would hunt down and kill the last Mutant. And this might be a pity, especially if the Mutants are our superiors. Then it would be a tragic, stupid witch-hunt, destroying creatures better and finer than we are.

The X-Men issue #14 would explore exactly this sort of “tragic, stupid witch-hunt.” Its architect in that November 1965 comic was Bolivar Trask, who touched off a national campaign to demonize and persecute the “muties.”

Comic nerds debate whether it’s Stan Lee or Jack Kirby who deserves more credit for their role in establishing a new paradigm of the Space Age irradiated superhero. I posit that Binder’s odd thought experiment in Mechanix Illustrated was a key inspiration.

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Do we have any evidence that the creators of Marvel’s irradiated superheroes were ever even aware of Binder’s bizarre article? I think we do…

It must be said that Wolk pours cold water on my Grand Unified Binder Theory of Marvel Comics. In fact, he thinks it’s a gross oversimplification to suggest that irradiated origin stories are a cornerstone of Marvel. He notes that the era of atomic-powered superheroes was limited to a narrow window from 1961 to 1963, and was most likely inspired by the headlines of the day and not by an article in an obscure hobbyist magazine.

“There was a moratorium on nuclear testing that ended in summer of 1961, which meant that there were mushroom clouds on the front page of the paper frequently until the partial nuclear test ban treaty went into effect in late 1963,” says Wolk. “And then you had the Cuban Missile Crisis in late 1962, and a lot of nuclear brinksmanship. That was a moment when everybody goes, ‘oh, crap this could be really, really bad.’ The Fantastic Four and the Hulk and the X-Men debuted in that moment of testing and of fear, when everyone was preoccupied by the possibility of fallout and radiation.”

That probably was the main reason these indelible characters had radiation baked into their origin stories. But in researching this piece, I stumbled on something shocking. Some overlap between the Binder article and Marvel comics that seems to line up too neatly to be a mere coincidence.

That same issue #14 of the X-Men that introduces Bolivar Trask and his “anti-mutie” crusade also depicts how the Mutant Menace is portrayed in media propaganda …including illustrations of Trask’s dire predictions labeled “ARTIST’S INTERPRETATIONS OF FATE OF MANKIND IF MUTANTS ARE NOT DRIVEN OUT.” And the illustrations look eerily familiar.

“A witch hunt for mutants!” says X-Men leader Professor Charles Xavier as he reads the xenophobic article and its lurid visuals. “The feature writers must have LOVED this, considering the way they played it up!”

The article text reads:

Artist’s interpretation of fate of mankind if mutants are not driven out–as predicted by Dr. Bolivar Trask. Dr. Trask warns that the superior abilities and supernatural powers of the hidden mutants will enable them to enslave the human race, replacing our civilization with their own! According to the anthropologist's startling prediction, it is even possible that the superior mutants will consider normal men as little more than savages, suitable only for forced labor and gladiatorial sport!

I mean, you see it too, right!? This comic book pauses to show us an article warning about the mutant menace that’s accompanied by artist renditions of humans dressed in tattered rags … at the mercy of mutants … in the ruins of a city?

Mutants who, by the way, have giant swollen eggheads, and are wearing futuristic garb that exposes their arms and legs, complete with pointy bibs over their shoulders?

I’m calling it—STAN LEE AND/OR JACK KIRBY DEFINITELY SAW THIS MECHANIX ILLUSTRATED ARTICLE AND WERE INSPIRED BY IT.

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I feel like I’ve just scratched the surface of the historical importance (and utter lunacy) of this cultural artifact. You could write a whole grad thesis about this article. I am going to share the whole damn thing below for anyone who wants to dive deeper, and you can find the entire December 1953 issue of Mechanix Illustrated on archive.org if you want to see it in its proper context. (The advertisements alone make it worth skimming...)

Elsewhere:
Douglas Wolk’s Eisner Award winning All of the Marvels: A Journey to the Ends of the Biggest Story Ever Told examines all 27,000+ issues of the comic as “the longest continuous, self-contained work of fiction ever created.” He finds several fascinating throughlines and proposes multiple ways into the franchise that are thrilling to neophytes and insightful to people who think they are familiar with this canon. His book Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean is also great. His Patreon is here.

by has an interesting in-depth look at Fantastic Four #1 here. from does a similar drill down here.

does a deep dive on the backstory of Krypto the Superdog here. (He was unruly and ill-behaved in his original Binder incarnation, just like he was in the James Gunn movie.) has more Krypto backstory here.

by has a deep dive on Binder’s role in creating an obcure character called The Black Owl here.

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While cartoonists nowadays are often allotted just a quarter of a page for their Sunday funnies, artists back then were often given entire pages as their canvas. And the pages were enormous! Most newspapers nowadays use a 12 by 22 inch format, but back then, broadsheets could be 18 inches by two feet. Today, it’s hard to grasp how much spectacle could be crammed into those pages.

I know exactly how impressive these newspaper comics were in their heyday, and I know it because of Peter Maresca and his publishing company Sunday Press Books. Maresca took it upon himself to track down these comics, most of which have been unseen for over a century, digitally restore them to what they looked like when they were first published, and release them in compilations that match their original dimensions. Here’s a spread from Sunday Press Books’ Forgotten Fantasy: Sunday Comics 1900-1910 with my watch and a playing card underneath it for scale.

Sunday Press has published many award-winning collections of classic American newspaper strips, and re-established the reputations of several virtually forgotten illustrators. Many of its books have been in this enormous Sunday supplement format. The Palo Alto-based curator and publisher Maresca has done more than anyone to help modern audiences grasp the artistry and cultural impact of the form at the zenith of its popularity.

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He believes that the most important work he has released is a companion piece to Forgotten Fantasy called Society Is Nix: Gleeful Anarchy at the Dawn of the American Comic Strip 1895-1915. It includes an amazing assortment of comics from that era, but it also gives an exhaustive history and pre-history of the newspaper comic, presenting fascinating archival material as well as essays from historians and prominent comics creators, both past and present.

You might have heard of prominent strips like The Yellow Kid or Little Nemo, but Society is Nix highlights brilliant, idiosyncratic work from scores of lesser-known artists. The impression you get from reading the book is that there was a riot of creativity happening in newspapers from coast to coast, much of which was only seen by a small local audience. For example, the unique work below was only ever experienced by people in southwestern Ohio who happened to glance at the paper on a certain day in 1908.

Society is Nix also stresses how subversive and rebellious this medium was in its infancy, and how the comics’ celebration of an unruly lower class and unassimilated immigrants flew in the face of stodgy American society of the era. (There are also thoughtful essays contextualizing the crude ethnic stereotypes and blatant racism that were commonplace in these comics.)

The name of the volume is taken from a line in The Katzenjammer Kids, an immensely popular comic about the exploits of two bratty German-American brothers who constantly wreak havoc. All dialogue in the strip is rendered in a dense “Denglish” dialect that mixed the characters’ old language with their new one. In one strip, a disapproving adult shouts, “Mit dose kids, SOCIETY IS NIX!”

Chris Ware called the original edition of Society Is Nix “a mind-blowing portable museum retrospective of the raw, tangled ferocity and frustration that went into the making of America.” Art Spiegelman declared that he “never thought anything like this could exist outside my dream life.” It was originally released in 2014, and used copies were recently on offer for $2499 on Amazon.

Thankfully, you don’t have to pay those ludicrous rates to resellers anymore. Maresca has partnered with Fantagraphics on a newly revised edition of Society Is Nix. It features new works from a wider array of artists, updated essays, and a handy index with minbios of every creator in the collection. I can’t stress enough that if you love comics and are at all interested in the history of the medium, you should click the link above and buy a copy.

I interviewed Maresca about the new edition of Society is Nix and the early history of comics. (All images in this post are from his fantastic book.)

PCP: First of all, congratulations on this new edition of the book! How do you describe Society is Nix to people who aren't familiar with it, and how does it fit into your broader project?

MARESCA: First of all, it gives the history not only of how American comic strips began, but also where they came from. It didn't just spontaneously generate—it’s not like the Yellow Kid comic appeared out of nowhere in 1895. There's a great deal of background information by several historians on the pre-history of comics—people who are the best in their field, like Thierry Smolderen, R.C. Harvey, and Richard Samuel West.

One big point I wanted to make is that when comics started, there were no rules. There were some humor magazines that had comics, and there were editorial comics in the newspapers, but there really was nothing like a comic strip section. So when publishers started to get artists to do these things, they were just given a blank 16-by-24 inch page, and they were able to just go wild.

The creativity was astounding. The artists could do whatever they wanted, and the comic strips themselves dealt with anarchic and anti-establishment topics. That's why I subtitled the book “Gleeful Anarchy at the Dawn of the American Comic Strip.”

There were a lot of actual anarchist movements going on in the world, particularly in Russia, that were parodied in the comics. And the streets of New York were crazy at the time. A lot of the book’s content is based on this anarchy and irreverence toward society.

Another element of the anarchy is the actual business. Newspapers weren’t really selling material to other newspapers at the time—everybody had their own thing. Then the giants of that time, Hearst and Pulitzer, began syndicating their comic strips to other newspapers who couldn't afford to make their own.

I wanted people to know the history, what it felt like to make and read these comics, and how modern comic artists were influenced by these men and women that I call “the founders of the funnies.”

PCP: Can you tell me in a nutshell the impact that the comics had on the different newspaper syndicates and their battle for audience share?

MARESCA: The first color comics section came out in Chicago. There was a publisher named Kohlsaat who was vacationing in Paris, and he discovered a magazine, Le Petit Journal, that had a very inexpensive color process. In the States, color lithography was very expensive, and certainly wouldn't be thrown away on a mere newspaper. Kohlsaat brought this printing process back to Chicago and used it in his Chicago Inter-Ocean for fashion coverage and political cartoons and things.

Joseph Pulitzer saw this and said, hey, I can bring my little editorial cartoons to life with color and really explode this business. He understood that a lot of his audience in New York City were immigrants who did not have a strong command of the English language, so they couldn't read the newspapers. But these color images were so striking, and they could tell stories with very few words or no words at all.

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The irreverence of the comics gave these immigrants a chance to poke fun at the people who were controlling their lives, whether it was landlords or cops or teachers. Pulitzer realized that this was the way to sell newspapers. And it was just incredible how his circulation exploded.

William Randolph Hearst came along in the late 1890s. He saw what was going on with comics, and it was just like the movie Citizen Kane. The Kane character was Hearst, and there’s a scene in the movie where Kane is looking at a photograph of the staff of the newspaper across the street that had huge circulation, and then the film cuts to that same staff sitting in Kane’s office getting their photograph taken—they were all working for him now. What Kane did in the movie, Hearst did with comics. He poached all the best writers and artists that had been working for Pulitzer.

There was a huge circulation war going on at the time between Hearst and Pulitzer. And at the center of that battle, believe it or not, was The Yellow Kid. Hearst had stolen away the artist RIchard F. Outcault from Pulitzer to do The Yellow Kid for his paper. Pulitzer still had the trademark for the title “The Yellow Kid,” so he got one of his artists to do a version of the Yellow Kid too. So there were two artists at the same time doing what was essentially the same character for different newspaper barons.

Yellow journalism was the term they coined for the war between these newspapers, and it was named after this kid in a yellow nightgown from the comics. Hearst ended up winning the war, and I think one of the reasons is that he caught on that people wanted regular characters. The Pulitzer papers were a lot of one-shots—great artists doing their thing, but with different subject matter each week. Hearst had plenty of one-shots, but he had his artists concentrate on characters like the Katzenjammer Kids, Opper's Happy Hooligan, and Swinnerton’s Little Jimmy. His newspapers really took off because people wanted to see what these characters were doing each week.

PCP: One of the things that shocked me was how much chaos and violence there were in these early comics. We think of this period as being very straitlaced, and we think of the funnies as being kid-friendly and mild, but they absolutely weren’t in the 1890s and 1900s. It reminded me of how pre-1935 films were far more risqué and dealt with darker topics than the ones made after the Hays Code was established during the Depression.

MARESCA: Yes, once the newspapers became more established, they started getting complaints, just like movie theaters started getting complaints from people who saw all this disrespect and the anarchy and didn't like it. And just like the Hays Commission came about in the 1930s for movies, the newspaper syndicate owners and the publishers were getting a lot of criticism as well, and that's one of the things we talk about in the book.

PCP: There were a lot of hand wringers and arbiters of culture 120 years ago insisting these things in pop culture were warping kids' minds and decaying their morals, just like they always do. And the outcry was probably exacerbated by the fact that, as you point out, this was arguably the first example of pop culture as we currently understand it. I think your term is “temporally shared experience.”

MARESCA: The newspaper comics really were the first form of popular culture as we now know it. Dickens was popular culture; Shakespeare was popular culture; street music and dime novels were popular culture. But those were all asynchronous—small numbers of people were viewing them at any given time.

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Newspaper comics were the first time that people all over the country were taking in the same entertainment at the same time. Someone in Los Angeles could be talking around the water cooler about the latest Katzenjammer Kids strip, and it would simultaneously be the the same topic of conversation in New York City or Chicago or St. Louis or anywhere else. This was way before radio and motion pictures. It's absolutely a first for pop culture.

PCP: Was there a sense that a fine illustrator was slumming if they went to the comics at the time? Or were they paid so handsomely that it wasn't a factor?

MARESCA: A lot of them were very well paid, but part of that was merchandising. When Outcault started Buster Brown, he owned the character, and he made millions just selling merchandise for his characters.

You mentioned fine artists. There was a time when The Chicago Tribune tried to bring in great artists to create a line of more “refined” comics. They went to illustrators for German magazines, because there was a huge German immigrant population in Chicago at the time. They lined up Lyonel Feininger and a couple of other German artists.

They did a complete comic section of German artists drawing family-friendly comics; and it failed miserably. That isn't what kids wanted, or what the immigrant community wanted. They wanted anarchy. They wanted disrespect. They wanted chaos. It only lasted about a year and a half. Then The Chicago Tribune picked up Buster Brown and a version of the Katzenjammer Kids and so forth. They went in the same direction as other syndicates and other newspapers.

PCP: We think that comics just recently discovered the idea of characters breaking out of the set square boxy panels, or breaking the fourth wall and talking directly to the readers. But it’s actually as old as the medium, right?

MARESCA Sure, sure. So much of the stuff that we think was invented when we were kids had actually been done long before.

There's a two-spread edition in Pultizer’s New York World in 1897 that's done by seven different artists, about how they each look at summertime. And the pages are separated into one, two, three, like seven different triangles. And each one of these different artists tells their story within that triangle, using one panel or six panels or however they want to do it. Just an incredible layout.

All these artists would get together and do their own bit. I always thought this sort of comics jam was invented with the underground comix. But it was done as early as the 1890s. Sometimes the artists would just work together on a large page with different little vignettes. And sometimes they'd actually create a 12 or 16 panel story with all of their different characters interacting with each other.

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One of the reasons this was common then is, like with the underground comix, they were working in close proximity. These people making newspaper comics would go to work in the studios. And they'd be sitting there in their jackets and ties at their desks and drawing their comics next to each other. So it was very simple to take a page they were working on and pass it around and have other artists work on it.

PCP: I'd love to hear about some of the iconic artists that have been added to this new edition of Society is Nix. You've added a comic from Louis Wain, the father of all cat memes. He later developed severe mental health issues, and his artwork got increasingly kaleidoscopic and psychedelic.

MARESCA: Yeah, his story is fascinating. There's a recent movie about him as well, with Benedict Cumberbatch.

As I went through the original book, I noted some people that were missing, and realized that I had the opportunity to include things that I'd come across since it was published. I didn't have anything from Rea Irvin, the original art director for The New Yorker who created the magazine’s mascot Eustace Tilly. He had a couple of successful comic strips in the early days, and I wanted to make sure I included him.

There were a couple other people who I added, or who had their presence expanded. I put in another one of Kate Carew’s strips, and added one by Grace Drayton. In total, there's about twenty-five comic strips that were added.

PCP: What's next for you and Sunday Press?

Maresca: I would like to do another edition of Forgotten Fantasy and do the same thing I did with Society is Nix—put more comics into it and give it a wider distribution than the original one, because that's also out of print now. I’d also like to do a book on George McManus. There are lots of things he did that people aren't aware of.

The other thing I want to do is take a look at how the comics changed from 1915 to 1929. There was huge growth of the middle class, people became more educated. Society changed, and the comics started telling new kinds of stories. Instead of mobs of kids in alleyways, comics increasingly focused on family life.

PCP: Are you still discovering new stuff? New old stuff?

Oh yeah. Once a year, I'll go to Ohio State University and look through their archives at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. That was where the collector Bill Blackbeard's collection went—millions of comics clippings, truckloads of stuff that they're still sorting through. Whenever I go there, I see things that I’ve never seen before.

Thanks for reading! Go buy Society Is Nix: Gleeful Anarchy at the Dawn of the American Comic Strip 1895-1915 Revised Edition.

ELSEWHERE:

Panels and Prose

() highlights several other books curated and edited by Maresca, including Thimble Theatre & the Pre-Popeye Comics of E.C. Segar: Revised and Expandedand The Nancy Show: A Celebration of the Art of Ernie Bushmiller. Read the post here.

The weekly lecture series (postings by the great artist ) recently hosted Maresca and the co-creators of the collection Jimmy! The Comic Art of James Swinnerton. Read background on the event here and watch the full video of the event here.

(@petercollects) is on Substack.

But a real-life cyborg action hero did it first: a German mercenary named Götz von Berlichingen. And he did it over 500 years ago.

Gottfried "Götz" von Berlichingen grew up to become a knight of the Holy Roman Empire who robbed nobles and merchants in his free time. In 1504, he was struck by a cannonball during the Siege of Landshut. The impact ripped off his right hand and blew shrapnel from his sword and armor clean through his arm.

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It's a miracle he survived. A normal man would've retired to a farmhouse on the Danube. Not Götz. He had an armorer fashion an iron limb with articulated fingers controlled by gears inside the prosthetic. With the appendage, he was able to grip anything from a sword to a quill pen to playing cards.

The handicapable mensch-maschine went on to cut an unholy swath across the continent for another 40 years, pillaging, murdering, and basically flipping the metal bird to authority. Götz lived to the ripe old age of 82 and became a Robin Hood-like folk hero in Germany. His pioneering prosthetic was hailed as a symbol of the nation's mechanical ingenuity and resilience.

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Every cyborg in pop culture is indebted to Götz, particularly the mad professor Rotwang from the 1927 science fiction classic Metropolis. The design of the character’s fake hand is clearly modeled on that of the folk hero, who would’ve been well-known to the German-speaking audience the film was made for.

Like many subsequent fictional depictions of cyborgs, the classic silent film suggests that fashioning a functioning limb out of artificial materials requires a sort of Faustian bargain, surrendering a portion of your humanity in the process. The subtext of the film is that the brilliant mad scientist is able to construct amazing robots because he is part machine himself.

There are no such dark undercurrents in the many artworks celebrating the medieval mercenary with the iron hand. Goethe wrote a play, Götz von Berlichingen, that’s loosely based on the exploits of the humanoid knight. The theatrical work is mostly remembered for one particularly pungent line, a line that Goethe cribbed directly from Götz’s memoirs.

“Mich ergeben! Auf Gnad und Ungnad! Mit wem redet Ihr! Bin ich ein Räuber! Sag deinem Hauptmann: Vor Ihro Kaiserliche Majestät hab ich, wie immer, schuldigen Respekt. Er aber, sag's ihm, er kann mich im Arsch lecken!”

Translation:

“Me, surrender! At mercy! With whom do you speak? Am I a robber! Tell your captain that for His Imperial Majesty, I have, as always, due respect. But he, tell him that, he can lick me in the arse!”

This defiant battle cry, equivalent to the English-language idiom “kiss my ass,” became iconic in Germany, partly because of the pungency of the language. (An American equivalent might be something like Admiral Farragut’s cry of “Damn the torpedoes!” during the Civil War.) The line was later immortalized in the 1979 German film Goetz von Berlichingen of the Iron Hand.

This seminal cyborg’s profane utterance was not just portrayed on stage and cinema screens. It was memorialized on statues, engravings, and plaques.

Götz was also celebrated by Mozart in not one but two compositions. For your listening pleasure, here is “Leck mich im Arsch,” a canon in B-flat major composed by Wolgang Amadeus himself around 1782. In the video below, lyrics in both English and German are helpfully provided onscreen. Hit play and you’ll hear an angelic chorus of voices pay tribute to Götz von Berlichingen by inviting you to lick their ass.

The other Mozart ass canon was covered by Jack White in an unforgettable collaboration with Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J of the Insane Clown Posse. (I wish I was kidding.)

That’s quite a legacy for Götz Of The Iron Hand. A half a millennium before krautrock pioneers Kraftwerk penned ditties about man-machine hybrids, this Germanic proto-Terminator showed us all how it could be done.

The Pin promised to forever change how we thought of mobile devices. There was one problem, though: it just flat-out didn’t work. This February, Humane was sold to HP for less than half of the funding it raised to create the device, and announced that support for the Pin would end.

The new era of interactivity that the Humane Pin promised to usher in lasted less than a year. I come not to gloat over its untimely demise—I’m rooting for any bold innovator who dares to design a completely new type of human-computer interface. The failure of this product is a reminder of just how hard it is to design and mass-produce such a thing.

All of this put me in mind of another massively hyped device that promised to fundamentally change how we interacted with technology…if it had only worked. It was called the Mattel Power Glove.

Most people first got a glimpse of the Power Glove in the 1989 film The Wizard, which was about kids traveling across the country to take part in a video game tournament. The whole film is a thinly veiled commercial for Nintendo, but the reveal of the Power Glove is a particularly egregious example of diegetic advertising. A cool kid sporting Ray Bans produces a gleaming silver case and opens it to reveal what looks like a prop from a sci-fi movie.

It's a bulky metallic grey glove with input devices attached to the knuckles and the wrist. It bristles with controller buttons. An ersatz version of Morricone's The Good the Bad and the Ugly theme song plays as the kid straps it on, flexing his fingers and holding his arm aloft like he's wearing Marvel’s Infinity Gauntlet.

The kid fires up the game Rad Racer on his Nintendo Entertainment System game console and begins to play, holding his gloved hand out in front of him as if it were wrapped around an invisible steering wheel. With simple and natural twists of his wrist, he weaves the car in Rad Racer between lanes with the casual cool of Magnum P.I. piloting his cherry red Ferrari down the Moanalua Freeway. “I love the Power Glove,” he effuses. “It's so bad.”

Mattel's other commercial for the device—the one that ran on TV, not that scene from The Wizard—followed the same paradigm, depicting a cool young dude in a denim jacket waving his hand around like an orchestra conductor to play classic Nintendo games. With a flick of his wrist, he can make Mario jump in Super Mario Bros. 2. Then he uses the glove to make the boxer Little Mac sock his opponents in Punch-Out. The narrator intones, “Now you and the games are one.”

It’s so bad

This wearable device promised a radical new form of interface that was as natural and intuitive as turning a door handle. It was based on The Dataglove developed by VPL Research, a company that was at the forefront of the first VR boom in the 1980s. “Optical fiber sensors mounted on a lightweight lycra glove monitor flexion and extension of the fingers,” reads the promotional material, “while a magnetic sensor measures the position and orientation of the hand.”

When attached to a cutting-edge computer of the era, the Dataglove could detect subtle movements of the fingers in three dimensions. “The glove lets you feel a world that doesn’t exist as if it’s real and pick up things in that world as if they’re real,” said VPL Research’s dreadlocked founder Jaron Lanier. “It lets you reach into an imaginary world.”

The toy company Mattel licensed VPL’s technology. Then they set out to make something that could be mass-produced much more cheaply than the Dataglove, and marketed to kids as a cool new way to play games. Instead of requiring a personal computer, it would be designed to work with the far less powerful Nintendo Entertainment System game console.

But something vital was lost in that downgrade. The kid in that movie The Wizard who said that the Power Glove was “so bad” used the phrase in the Run DMC sense — not bad meaning bad, but bad meaning good. But in point of fact, the traditional definition of “bad” was far more accurate. The Power Glove simply did not work as advertised.

Kids who were seduced by The Wizard into begging their parents for the Mattel controller quickly discovered that it was impossible to play that cool-looking racing game Rad Racer, or any other classic NES game, using the $75 (about $190 in today's money) glove.

The Mattel Power Glove was a legendary failure. Like the Humane AI Pin, it was discontinued after less than a year on the market. Looking at the two devices, a few key lessons emerge for anyone hoping to sink tens of millions of dollars into establishing a new UX:

1. Technical limitations - Both products suffered from technology that wasn't a match for their ambitions. New interfaces need technical foundations that can deliver on their promises.

2. No clear value proposition - Neither product effectively answered the question "What problem does this solve better than existing solutions?"

3. Just because a new form of interactivity looks cool in a carefully edited promotional video doesn’t mean people won’t find it to be a chore when the novelty wears off - The social awkwardness of the AI Pin's interactions and the impracticality of wearing the Power Glove quickly became apparent to users. Think about the glove-based interface that Tom Cruise shows off at the beginning of the sci-fi film Minority Report. It looks cool, but would you really want to stand in front of an array of screens for your entire work day waving your arms around like an air traffic controller?

   

Refusing to Let Go

Despite its quick commercial flameout, the Power Glove still has plenty of ardent defenders. “It was not just a gimmicky toy,” insists Andrew Austin, one of the directors of the documentary The Power of Glove, which explores the failed promise of the device.

He explains that it’s an oversimplification to say that the device did not work. “It was using the speed of sound to triangulate its position,” Austin explains. “Two transmitters in the glove were 'chirping' at three receivers that you placed on your TV. It was very sophisticated, but the cycle could only happen 20 times a second, which is three times slower than a regular Nintendo controller. If you have a game designed for quick tactile response, something that requires catlike reflexes, then the Power Glove is operating at a big disadvantage.”

“You just can't play Super Mario with a motion controller,” says Adam Ward, another director of The Power of Glove. “It's just not conducive to capturing the small movements you need to make in order to control Mario.”

Ward insists that games that were designed around the slower response time of the controller worked just fine. “Mattel did have a lineup of custom games slated to come out for it. Super Glove Ball was the only one released, and it plays fairly well – you can actually sense your hand moving in this virtual 3D space.”

There was another game called Bad Street Brawler that had Power Glove support retrofitted onto it. But because the game wasn’t designed with the controller in mind, it was an excruciating struggle to control the onscreen action of the protagonist, “Duke Davis. Former International Punk Music Rocker and Street Fighter Extraordinaire.” None of the other planned releases in the Power Glove Gaming Series made it to market before the device was discontinued.

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There were an array of weird gesture-based controllers in the offing, and Mattel was eager to beat potential rivals, like the “touch-free” Broderbund U-Force controller, to market. “They rushed it, in a nutshell,” says Austin. The Power Glove went from concept to commercial release in about a year, and man oh man did it show.

The device made a promise that no peripheral available at Toys R Us could hope to keep. Still, it looked like what the Nintendo Generation saw in their mind's eye when they imagined the future. “We talked to the designers of the device, and they said that they wanted children to think this was a very expensive high-tech piece of wearable electronics,” says Austin. “The awesome little input device on the top is called ‘The Stealth,’ and it was modeled after Robocop.”

“Even the bulkiness of it was a selling point,” adds Ward “This was the era of giant mobile phones, giant shoulder pads, and big hair. Everything was big back then.”

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“Nowadays, we want tech to be sleek and almost invisible,” notes Austin. “Back then, they wanted to make you look like a cyborg. There was this almost delusional sense of tech optimism.”

Endless Glove

The Power Glove sold a very specific fantasy that it had no hope of realizing. But Mattel’s short-lived controller has had a bizarre afterlife as an iconic example of consumer-grade retrofuturism and Reagan-era kitsch. The device seems to embody all of the gee-whiz techno-utopianism that burned within the hearts of Eighties kids. Long after the glove was pulled from the market, it lived on as a pop culture icon.

In the 1991 film Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, the titular serial killer upgrades his bladed weapon to have Power Glove functionality. The controller also made cameos in everything from the family movie Beethoven to the film that made it impossible to ever take the notion of “cyberpunk” seriously: Hackers.

Mattel's peripheral is still a pop culture icon, though now it's more likely to signify nostalgia and quaintly dated retrofuturism. The Regular Show on the Cartoon Network built a whole episode around something called the Maximum Glove, a cool-looking controller that failed to do what the commercials promised.

In the kitschy retro-futurist movie Kung Fury, the Power Glove is an essential tool that the character Hackerman needs to time travel, and its kitschy cameo lovingly mimics its debut moment in The Wizard. In the 2021 film 8-Bit Christmas, the 1940s setting of A Christmas Story is updated to the 1980s, and the Power Glove is employed as the central MacGuffin, just like the Red Ryder BB Gun in the original film.

“The Power Glove is such a potent reminder of how the 1980s embraced technology with excitement and optimism,” says Ward. “The people making it weren’t trying to ruin everybody’s Christmas in 1989; they were genuinely trying to make an awesome toy and push the limits of consumer technology while doing it.”

People continue to do things with (and for) the Power Glove. There’s a thriving indie game development scene for the original Nintendo console, including homebrew Power Glove games like 8-Bit Hero Trainer, a “first-person combat simulator for training to fight 8-bit RPG-style monsters.”

Many people were so besotted with with promise of the Power Glove that they redesigned it to do all of the amazing things that they felt it was capable of. For instance, Dillon Markey, a filmmaker working on shows like Robot Chicken, turned his glove into a Bluetooth-enabled software controller that lets him tap the buttons on his wrist to shuffle back and forth between frames in his stop-motion animation software while shooting. (He also added a touch-sensitive microphone so that when he gives you a fist bump, his glove says “FU¢#!NG AWESOME!”)

Yeuda Ben-Atar, who goes by the handle Side Brain, mapped the buttons and fingers of the glove to MIDI effects, so he can perform live shows by waving around the Mattel controller. It also has a retractable set of tweezers for making minute adjustments to his character models

And Alessio Cosenza, an IT professional from Italy, retrofitted the glove to make it a fully functional VR controller. His mod, which he dubs the Power Glove Ultra, can actually do everything that the ads for the Power Glove promised. “It features almost 50% of the original hardware and some basic off-the-shelf electronic components,” Cosenza tells me.

Watching Cosenza's video demoing his retrofitted Power Glove, it becomes even more clear that the device anticipated the Nintendo Wiimote and the motion controllers for VR devices like the HTC Vive and the Meta Quest. “It was absolutely ahead of its time, even if it didn't work!” Cosenza insists. “I mean, the idea, the look, the overall concept…in 1989!?”

ELSEWHERE: Watch the documentary The Power of Glove, which is available on several streaming services. The filmmakers encourage you to watch it “if you’re into reminiscing about a happier time when technology actually seemed cool instead of evil.”

The Retroist did a podcast episode reflecting on several innovative but unsuccessful Nintendo-related products, including R.O.B., the Power Glove, and the Virtual Boy.

has been assembling a master list of the Top 500 Indie NES Games, and the list includes the weird and wonderful Power Glove game 8-Bit Hero Trainer. Check it out at .

has a rundown on the failure of the Humane AI Pin.

The popular YouTuber Marques Brownlee’s critique of the Humane AI Pin was titled “The Worst Product I've Ever Reviewed... For Now.” It racked up over 8 million views and is widely regarded as an Emperor Has No Clothes moment that sealed the fate of the wearable device. wrote a meditation on the impact of this review entitled Roger Ebert, MKBHD and the Job of a Critic.

Interested in playing around with a Power Glove yourself? Ward and Austin note that there’s a great step-by-step guide to fiddling with the hardware on Instructables.

Okay, so there’s this yellow guy who lives in a yellow castle, and he's on a quest for a gleaming chalice. He's a total square, and no one could argue that he's drawn with nuance or complexity. But his adventures represent a milestone in video games. The yellow guy navigates complex mazes, hunting for objects that appear in random locations. He does battle with three dragons, each with a distinctive personality. He tracks down keys that are required to unlock impassable gates, all while dodging a thieving bat that's itching to pilfer from him. The yellow guy can even uncover a secret room that contains a secret message that was hidden there by The Creator himself.

I am of course describing the epochal game Adventure that Warren Robinett created in 1979 for the Atari 2600 console. Robinett was 26 when he programmed the game, entirely by himself, on a 6502 microprocessor. It looks low-res and dated now, but Adventure was among the most ambitious and complex games of its day.

It was also incredibly influential. Robinett essentially created the console adventure game and pioneered several video game tropes that are now so common that we take them for granted. He’s like the early movie makers who hit upon techniques like the close-up and the cut that went on to become the fundamental grammar of film language.

Adventure was made in the era of Space Invaders, when a game’s entire world existed within the confines of a single screen. Robinett came up with the idea that a game could take place on a series of screens, each representing a discrete location. If you steered your avatar off the left side of the screen, it would reappear in the next room on the right side of the screen. “I didn’t set out to make the videogame world bigger than a screen, but I had to,” he tells me.

He set himself the challenge of designing a game that seemed to go far beyond what the hardware of the era was capable of doing, and he took great satisfaction in solving that challenge. He was so proud of it that he found a way to illicitly sign his name on the game, at a time when commercially released Atari titles did not credit the creator in any way. (But more on that later.)

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Robinett explained how he made Adventure in a session at the Game Developers Conference in 2015. The game, he says, was inspired by a visit to Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, where he spent several hours on a mainframe playing a game called Colossal Cave Adventure by Willie Crowther and Don Woods. It was a pure text experience (“YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING.”) built around exploration and inventory management. Robinett resolved to adapt that game that had been designed to run on a mainframe computer into something that could be played on the first hit game console.

Making It Seemed Impossible

That seemed impossible on its face. The Atari 2600 was built with graphics-intensive arcade-style games like Missile Command and Asteroids in mind. The standard controller was a directional joystick with a single button, not a keyboard. “Also, Colossal Cave required hundreds of kilobytes of ROM,” Robinett says. The Atari 2600 had 4 kilobytes—about 2% as much. He would have to vastly condense and simplify the game to fit within that limited storage capacity.

The first step was translating the game from a pure text experience to a purely graphical one. Robinett cleverly distilled environments, characters, and objects down to simple, instantly recognizable icons. Except for the deadly enemies—Grundle the green dragon, Rhindle the red dragon, and Yorgle the yellow dragon.

It must be said that these dragons do not look like the ones on the cover of fantasy novels—they look more like giant waterfowl. But using only three different poses, he was able to create two-dimensional creatures that looked vaguely menacing as they roamed the game world, opened their mouths wide to devour you, and crumpled pitiably when you managed to run them through with your sword. “I've become attached to my Duck Dragons,” Robinett says. “If I ever do a sequel, it will be Return of the Duck Dragons.”

Robinett built subroutines into the characters that gave them distinctive behaviors. The subroutines continued even when characters were offscreen in one of the 30 different rooms. [Thirty different rooms! It boggled the minds of kids who got the game in 1980.] The offscreen action made the game world feel even more like a real place and all sorts of emergent situations arose from these subroutines. For instance, you could be devoured by a dragon and trapped in its stomach, only to see that thieving bat fly in, pick up that dragon, and flit around the game world with the two of you in tow. “That wasn’t intentional,” says Robinett. “It resulted from the fact that it was a true simulation.”

Beyond grappling with the severe technical constraints of the console, Robinett had to do battle with his bosses at Atari. They initially discouraged him from tackling such an ambitious project, and then when they saw a working prototype, they pressed him to make it into a tie-in for the upcoming Superman movie. He ignored their demands. “Sometimes you have to fight for your ideas,” he says.

Somehow, Robinett crammed the entire game into the constraints of an Atari cartridge. “I even had 15 bytes of RAM left over,” he says. “There was room to have three more dragons if I had chosen to do so, but it seemed to be working pretty well as is. I guess that’s what you’d call game balancing nowadays.”

So he chose to use that tiny bit of leftover space in the cartridge in a way that he did not share with his bosses. The hidden feature that he secretly added to Adventure is the first widely publicized example of what came to be called an Easter Egg. It’s a sort of in-joke between the Adventure’s creator and players, one that the publisher was completely ignorant of.

The Story of the First Easter Egg

Instead, Robinett used some of that space to build a secret room accessible only through an elaborate series of steps. You needed to find the hidden dot that was buried deep in the catacombs of the Black Castle. The hidden dot is just that—a single pixel so tiny that players only know they’ve found it when they hear the sound that signifies that you have equipped an item.

Holding this invisible dot allows you to pass through an otherwise impenetrable barrier and enter a secret room. The room contained the only piece of text in a game composed only of simply blocky shapes. It read: CREATED BY WARREN ROBINETT.

Robinett didn’t tell anyone about it and left Atari soon after finishing Adventure. “I thought of it as a self-promotion maneuver,” Robinett tells me. “Also, I was pissed off. Adventure sold a million units at $25 apiece. [That’s about a $90M gross in 2025 dollars.] Meanwhile, I got a $22K a year salary, no royalties, and they never even forwarded any fan mail to me.”

He has likened this hidden message to the way a painter signs their canvas. He’s also compared it to the hidden messages on Beatles records, “I remembered, from when I was in high school, the rumors that Paul McCartney was dead, and how people played Beatle records backwards, searching for secret messages.” In 1980, it was unthinkable that fans could engage as deeply with such a simple and primitive-looking video game as they did with a Beatles record, or that they’d dig so deeply into it in search of buried surprises.

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But many Adventure players did, and they found Robinett’s autograph. The first recorded evidence of the discovery of the Easter egg was a letter sent to Atari in August of 1980 by a 15-year-old in Salt Lake City.

The people at Atari were flabbergasted when they received the letter. Until that moment, no one realized that this feature was in the hundreds and thousands of game cartridges they had already sold. Rather than go through the costly process of stripping the secret message out of the code, Atari chose to embrace it.

In 1981, when the new magazine Electronic Games reached out to Atari about the “wild stories” going around about a hidden room in Adventure, Steve Wright, the Director of Software Development in the Atari Consumer Division, didn’t just confirm its existence—he suggested that there’d be plenty more where that came from. “From now on, we’re going to plant little ‘Easter Eggs’ like that in the games,” he told the magazine. (Atari is still a going concern, and they now host a short documentary about Robinett and the origin story of Easter Eggs on their official YouTube account.)

The practice spread widely among game developers, and from games to software, DVD menus, and search engines. Easter Eggs are central to the book Ready Player One, and the film adaptation by Steven Spielberg culminates with the protagonist finding the hidden dot in Adventure.

The Legacy of the Father of the Easter Egg

Robinett’s appearance at the Game Developers Conference was karmic payback for all the fan mail he missed out on. His presentation to a packed auditorium was met with thunderous applause, and he was mobbed by fans afterward. A Google engineer peppered him with intricate questions about his code and his data structure, pulling up a video on his laptop to demonstrate a specific flicker effect he wanted to know more about. Robinett patiently explained the tech, pausing occasionally to shake hands and pose for photos. Then he autographed the grateful engineer’s printout of the disassembled code for the Duck Dragon sprite.

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A graphics design lead at AMD gushed to Robinett about playing the game as an 8-year-old. He was too young to memorize the different patterns of the mazes in the game, and he described how terrified he was of being trapped by the dragons as he traversed the blocky virtual realm. “Adventure was the first survival horror game,” the fan insists.

A computer engineer and professor from Brazil asked Robinett to autograph his copy of the book 100 Greatest Console Video Games: 1977-1987, in which Adventure is the first entry. He thanked Robinett profusely as he clutched the book to his chest. “Your game is … everything to me,” he said.

It's all a bit surprising to Robinett, who left the game industry in the early 1980s, moved to North Carolina, and has worked in other fields ever since. For decades, he had no idea that anyone was still interested in his groundbreaking lo-res creation.

“I'm so glad it's not forgotten,” he says.

If you want to go even deeper into the early history of game developers burying hidden secrets, you absolutely have check out this piece by the brilliant digital archeologist Kate Willaert. She scrutinizes several examples that predate Adventure and the coining of the term “Easter Egg.” (Many of these developers, like Robinett, were slipping illicit autographs into their work.) Here is the video version of that article:

Screamboat joins the recent trend of low-budget horror flicks based on classic kid-lit properties. These films are generally pretty lousy, but we should not criticize them for what they are but celebrate them for what they represent—a fresh infusion of classic works into the public domain.

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In November of 1928, an upstart company called Disney Cartoons released the short animation Steamboat Willie. It was one of the first toons to feature synchronized sound, and it starred a singing, dancing mouse who gets into all sorts of shenanigans while piloting a riverboat. There had been a handful of silent Mickey Mouse cartoons, but this film’s technological innovation caused a sensation, and the mouse became the cornerstone of Disney’s IP Empire.

Steamboat Willie was made in the infancy of the sound era, and Mr. Disney clearly knew that the novelty of cartoon animals performing music and engaging in noisy slapstick would be enough to enthrall his audience at the time. But it’s still marvelously entertaining today. That original monochromatic iteration of Mickey Mouse was much more of a mischievous chaos agent than the character would become in the ensuing decades.

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In this short, the mouse yanks open a cow’s mouth to play its teeth like a xylophone, and he tugs at piglets suckling at their mother sow’s teats to produce a series of musical squeals. (This scene was actually cut by the censors decades later—most people don’t realize that American movies made before 1934 were darker and earthier and more innuendo-laden than the stuff made over the next 25 years due to the strictures of the Hays Code.)

You really should watch this cinematic milestone if you haven’t. It’s easy to find now because it’s in the public domain.

Disney famously built its reputation on animated adaptations of public domain classics—The Three Little Pigs, Grimm’s Snow White, Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Mermaid, Collodi’s Pinocchio, Charles Perrault’s Cinderella, Kipling’s Jungle Book, Villeneuve’s Beauty & the Beast, Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, etc. etc. etc. However, the company has always been viciously protective of its own copyrights. In 1998, a piece of legislation called the Copyright Term Extension Act, or CTEA, lengthened the terms of copyright to 95 years. It was dubbed the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act," because it ensured that Steamboat Willie would not enter the public domain until nearly a century after its creation.

After all the legislative extensions ran out, Steamboat Willie finally entered the public domain on January 1, 2024. The tongue-in-cheek horror adaptation Screamboat was announced the next day. The director of Screamboat says that it’s "the story of a late-night ferry ride in New York City where commuters and deckhands and all the usual passengers are attacked by a murderous and mischievous mouse who is mean, tiny, and loves getting up to no good."

Screamboat was not alone. Two other twisted horror takes on Steamboat Willie were announced the same day: the movie Mickey’s Mouse Trap and the survival horror game Infestation: Origins. And these Steamboat Willie rip-offs are part of a whole subgenre of low-budget horror films that steals juice from a classic IP. After a beloved children’s book series by A. A. Milne entered the public domain a few years ago, the grisly (grizzly?) film Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey was released. It featured Milne’s cute animals gone feral and eager to kill.

The last few years have also seen two different horror films based on E.C. Segar’s spinach-crazed Sailor Man, who is also no longer under copyright—Shiver Me Timbers and Popeye the Slayer Man. Meanwhile, Blood and Honey was followed by a Pooh sequel, as well as several spin-offs based on other classic IPs like Bambi and Peter Pan. The series will culminate with an Avengers-style crossover film called Poohniverse: Monsters Assemble.

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The director of this unique franchise, dubbed the Twisted Childhood Universe, is Rhys Frake-Waterfield. He will release his next film Pinocchio: Unstrung later this year. The Chuckie-esque re-imagining of the classic will feature Robert Englund (aka Freddie Krueger) as the Talking Cricket. But even Frake-Waterfield, who seems to see macabre updates of childhood touchstones as his calling, has said that he wouldn’t dare mess with Mickey Mouse. “We didn’t want to go near that character,” he told Indiwire.

Beyond the copyright issues, there are trademark issues. Disney has recently taken steps to make the iconic black-and-white Steamboat-era iteration of Mickey into a core element of its brand. A low-budget horror parody of the character will probably avoid legal issues, but a big-budget animated adaptation would probably still face some legal challenges.

These kid-lit horror films have another thing in common beyond source material that recently entered the public domain: they haven’t exactly been garnering critical raves. Screamboat is actually getting a slightly warmer reception than other entries in this bizarre subgenre, though reviewers frequently stress that this new film sails over the low bar set by its predecessors. The Guardian thinks it’s a “draining bout of horror opportunism,” but The Wrap writes, “If we absolutely must have low-budget spree killer movies starring classic cartoon icons, I hope they’re at least as good as Screamboat.”

But just because these films have a low cumulative Rotten Tomato score doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be excited about what could happen as more and more classic works enter the public domain. (Besides, critical aggregator sites are notoriously unhelpful in determining the enjoyability of horror films.)

“The public domain is the basis of our culture; it’s a condition for human flourishing throughout history,” says Harvard Law prof and copyright scholar Rebecca Tushnet. “And the only way to get a thriving culture is to have a whole bunch of stuff that isn't very good. The more people you have making things and the more perspectives they make it from, the more likely we are to get something that will stand the test of time.”

Tushnet points to the 1823 poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas" as an object lesson. It established the character Santa Claus as we currently understand him: a fat jolly dude in a sleigh pulled by eight reindeer who shimmies down chimneys on Christmas Eve to deliver presents while children sleep. (Seriously, all of those character details come from that one poem.)

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“Santa Claus entered the public domain very quickly because copyright terms used to be much much shorter,” says Tushnet. “And now Santa is everywhere and everyone gets to do their own thing with him, including horror movies like Silent Night Bloody Night.” (That 1972 film was reviled in its time, but is now viewed as a holiday classic and a vital progenitor of the slasher genre.)

Look at the profusion of Shakespeare film adaptations: Olivier’s Richard III, Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet, Prospero’s Books, Chimes at Midnight, 10 Things I Hate About You, West Side Story, James Gunn’s gross-out black comedy Tromeo and Juliet. All but one of them are timeless classics. (Sorry, Sir Larry.)

Frankenstein, Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, the works of Lovecraft and Lewis Carroll, the Oz books—all are now in the public domain, and all continue to inspire adaptations, some good, some bad, some so bad they’re good. (Did you know that the 2014 film I, Frankenstein, which reimagines the titular monster as a badass action hero who wields two Filipino fighting batons, is known as Yo, Frankenstein in Spanish-speaking countries?)

Buñuel/Dali’s surrealist film Un Chien Andalou entered the public domain this year. So did the first Marx Brothers film and Hitchcock’s first sound film. So did Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury and Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms and Virginia Wolf’s A Room of One’s Own.

Next year, Mickey will be reunited with his beloved pet dog when the earliest iteration of Pluto breaks free of his copyright leash. I can hardly wait for Screamboat 2: Man’s Best Fiend.

Critics and fans marveled at how the show’s fleshed-out universe helped to make that galaxy far, far away feel so much more lived-in and real. But Andor didn’t make up that backstory out of whole cloth—35 years before, Star Wars: The Role Playing Game was the first piece of media to describe the inner workings of those organizations in exhaustive detail. The Imperial Security Bureau wasn’t dreamed up by George Lucas—it was invented by a game designer.

The designers of that game had to fill in that backstory—players would need all of those granular specifics to help them craft their Dungeons & Dragons-style tabletop roleplaying experiences. This means that a handful of role-playing game designers added as many minutiae, tropes, and story elements to the Star Wars universe as anyone before or since, including George Lucas himself.

Star Wars: The Role Playing Game isn’t well-known today, but many of the characters, creatures, vehicles, and institutions that those tabletop dice geeks dreamed up were fully incorporated into the ongoing and ever-expanding canon of Star Wars. It might have even helped to bring the franchise back from the dead…

A long, long time ago—in 1986

Imagine living in a time when it seemed like the Star Wars phenomenon had run its course. It’s almost impossible to conceive of now. Even in the Nineties, before the prequels had been announced, or during that terrible drought between the prequels and The Force Awakens, there were still endless tie-in TV shows and comics and action figures and video games and Darth Tater Potato Heads, all helping to keep the franchise alive.

But there was a period of time when the Star Wars phenomenon was completely moribund. In the late Eighties, the original film trilogy was a distant memory, the kid-friendly TV specials were done, the Saturday morning cartoons had run their course, and there were no new novels or toys on the horizon.

Most people quite naturally assumed that Star Wars was never coming back, because that was generally how things worked back then. This was an era before every single intellectual property that had ever been vaguely popular, from Ghostbusters to Gremlins to The Karate Kid to Magnum P.I., got rebooted and recycled. At the end of the Reagan era, it genuinely seemed to many that the lifecycle of George Lucas’ film franchise had petered out.

That’s why it was sort of crazy that West End Games, a maker of tabletop role-playing games, was willing to spend what seemed at the time like a fortune to license Star Wars. Bill Slavicsek, who helped create Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game for West End, remembers telling a friend who worked for Marvel Comics about the project. “He said, ‘Why would you make that?! That’s a dead license!’” he recalls.

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But Star Wars wasn’t dead. And the tabletop game was one of the things that helped keep the franchise's flame alive for countless fans. West End’s RPG wasn’t merely a stopgap. In giving players the robust framework they needed to have their own adventures in Star Wars, the game became a cornerstone of the Expanded Universe of spinoff books and games and comics and merchandise that followed.

Tabletop games are sort of amazing. With a handful of dice, a couple of rule books, some graph paper for mapping environments, and a few willing friends, players could create their own limitless world—a sort of shared hallucination. “It’s an act of group storytelling,” says Slavicsek.

It was also a crowded and highly competitive industry by the mid-1980s. Dungeons & Dragons creator TSR was the major player, but upstart companies were rushing to create competing games built around different settings and licenses. Before making a bid for Star Wars, West End had success with original RPGs like the dystopian sci-fi comedy Paranoia, and an adaptation of Ghostbusters.

Greg Costikyan, a co-creator of Paranoia, was one of the people tasked with securing the Star Wars license. “We flew out to California to meet with Lucasfilm,” he says. “We made a bid of $100k. We later learned that TSR had tried to get the license too, but they only bid $70k.” (I’m sure it seemed like a gamble at the time, but think about that for a minute—they scored the rights to make a game based on all of Star Wars and its associated intellectual property, free and clear, for the equivalent of less than an inflation-adjusted quarter of a million dollars.)

Costikyan says that the people at Lucasfilm didn’t seem to think that the franchise was dead at that point — Lucas’ original vision had called for nine films, after all. But they were fully aware that Star Wars was essentially in hibernation—as if frozen in carbonite. “Lucasfilm thought that an RPG could help keep Star Wars active in the minds of geeks, which was why the licensing deal had some value to them,” says Costikyan.

Costikyan set to work on creating the rulebook for Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game. His design of it would be a crowning achievement for some people, but it was a just sidenote for him. He would go on to create influential and innovative tabletop, PC, mobile, and social games in a variety of genres, and write extensively on game design. He won a Game Developers Choice Maverick Award for his tireless early efforts to create digital distribution systems for indie video games.

Costikyan had been interested in the franchise since he first encountered it at World Sci-Fi Con the year before the first film was released. “The filmmakers had taken a room at the con, and were showing stills and little clips,” he says. “It looked like it had the makings of a really good space opera.”

He saw the original film at an early matinee after an all-night D&D session. A fellow participant in that role-playing marathon had bought a ticket to Star Wars, but was too exhausted to attend. Costikyan bought the ticket and watched the film, then stuck around to watch the next showing.

“There’s great worldbuilding in that film, often done with very simple special effects,” he says. “Like the two suns in the sky on Tatooine. That’s just a double exposure, but I’d never seen anything like that. I also liked the fact that the characters weren’t all nice and happy. There was an interesting dynamic where they got upset with each other, they bantered and whined. It’s so much more compelling than just being all nice and cool and happy with each other.”

Now that he was working on the game, he rewatched the films intensively. West End wouldn’t just have to recreate the set pieces from the film — they would actually have to systematize how the action played out in that universe. “Like, exactly how fast would your body temperature drop on the ice planet of Hoth?,” says Costikyan. “There needed to be mechanical implications for what we saw onscreen. In the films, Stormtroopers famously cannot hit anything. In the game, we needed to allow them to hit things occasionally; otherwise, there’s no drama involved.”

“I had a couple of design objectives,” says Costikyan. “Unlike most RPGs, I knew that we weren’t selling purely to people who were already into D&D. This needed a simpler paradigm.”

He focused on the most intense and memorable moments in the films: Think of the hapless droids trying to traverse a corridor in the middle of a pitched battle, pursuing their own secret agenda while laser blasts ricocheted around them. Think of Luke and Leia preparing to swing across a chasm on a flimsy rope, sharing a quick kiss for luck (a plot detail that seems far more icky with the benefit of hindsight.) “I wanted a system that really lends itself to those sorts of moments, those exploits that were cinematic and exciting,” says Costikyan. He also instructed game masters on how to coax players into bantering and bickering like the original film protagonists did.

West End’s designers divided up the different types of characters in the film into different classes that players could choose to be. They also introduced several archetypes that hadn’t appeared in the film. “There were obvious ones like bounty hunters and smugglers,” says Costikyan. “A particular favorite of mine was the failed Jedi — a drunk who didn’t quite make it, but had some control of the Force.”

While Costikyan was working on the rule book, Bill Slavicsek, an editor at West End, was overseeing The Star Wars Sourcebook. It would flesh out the details of the universe — everything from how repulsorlift engines and lightsabers and sublight drives worked to the biographical details of characters and the biological makeup of the various monsters and alien races.

Slavicsek was also a huge fan of the film franchise. He had watched them 38 times in the theater. “It so enthralled me that I wanted to go again and again and watch the reaction of my friends and family members to it,” he says. “It was unlike anything I’d seen before. It wasn’t a clean, sterile sci-fi universe — it was lived-in and visceral.”

Slavicsek says that, to his mind, there are fundamental similarities between the universe that George Lucas created and the ones that RPG designers create. “Star Wars and D&D aren’t just telling stories — they’re opening up the imagination,” he says.

Slavicsek started by learning everything he could about the universe of the films. “The Internet didn’t exist back then,” he says. “We had to do all the research ourselves.” He hounded Lucasfilm for photos, magazines, and archival material.

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But there were huge holes in the canon that Slavicsek and his co-writer Curtis Smith would have to fill in. Movies simply don’t require the sort of exhaustive world building that an RPG does. The West End designers had to create all that, getting signoff from Lucasfilm on major additions. “We didn’t want to add anything that didn’t fit the milieu, like any tech that seemed too Star Trek,” says Slavicsek.

“Lucasfilm was fairly hands-off,” says Costikyan. “They would have the occasional directive, like, 'you can’t show a stormtrooper with their helmets off,’ I guess because they thought that a property based on the Clone Wars was going to come out eventually. They didn’t want us to kill off the main characters, but we didn’t want to kill them off anyway. We thought players would want to create their own characters in this world.”

Slavicsek was like Adam in the Garden of Eden, giving names to all of the creatures in God’s creation. For instance, there’s a bizarre alien that’s glimpsed briefly in the famous cantina scene from Star Wars that has a long curving neck and eyes on either side of its wide, flat skull. The Kenner toy line simply referred to the creature as Hammerhead. “I convinced Lucasfilm that ‘The Hammerheads’ wasn’t a good name for a species,” he says. “If anything, they’d take that name as an insult.”

Slavicsek renamed the cephalically overendowed creatures Ithorians, and the sourcebook described the herd-like society they had developed on their lushly forested homeworld. He also named the Twi’leks, a race who have two long protuberances extending from the back of their skulls, like the dancing slave girl that Jabba feeds to a giant monster in Return of the Jedi. “Those names didn’t exist until I put them on paper,” says Slaviscek.“It’s neat to see things I invented decades ago show up now in toys and cartoons and novels.”

The sourcebook was studded with artifacts and written as if they were excerpts from actual works from within the Star Wars universe. “We put it together in such a way that statistics were just a small part of it,” says Slavicsek. The book didn’t just describe the characteristics of the giant space slugs that almost devoured the Millennium Falcon in The Empire Strikes Back, it presented a Melville-esque snippet from the autobiography of a spacefarer who had witnessed one ship captain’s destructive obsession with hunting down one such space slug.

There was a narrative richness to the sourcebook that fired the imaginations of players. It didn’t just give the backstory on Han Solo, and explain why Jabba the Hutt put a price on his head, it presented a memo from Jabba’s accountant that itemized Solo’s debts and explained why the Hutt was well within his rights to demand the smuggler’s head. “As always, the decisions of the mighty Jabba are fair, just, and extremely profittable!” writes Fen. (I assume that the double-Ts in “profittable” are a riff on the double-Ts in Hutt and not a misprint.)

When the rulebook and sourcebook launched in late 1987, their popularity caught Lucasfilm by surprise. “I think it began to dawn on them that there was a lot more to what they had with this franchise than they’d thought,” says Slavicsek. “What we were doing gave impetus to other licensees.”

Within a few years of the launch of Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game, Lucasfilm signed off on a new line of Star Wars comics, and Heir to the Empire, a novel written by Timothy Zahn that would explain what happened immediately after the events in Return of the Jedi. Zahn was actually given the RPG sourcebook material to use as a reference when he wrote his novel. “The way I heard it, Zahn was insulted by this at first,” says Slavicsek. “But then he figured that it was better to use our material as a resource rather than have to create a bunch of stuff from scratch.”

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Slavicsek would oversee the Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game for several more years, and would eventually be tapped to write several editions of the exhaustive Guide to the Star Wars Universe, becoming one of the foremost authorities on the subject. He continued to design tabletop RPGs, eventually rising to a leadership role at Wizards of the Coast, the company that bought D&D's publisher TSR back in 1997. While there, Slavicsek directed the creation of the third and fourth editions of D&D, and he also co-designed another Star Wars RPG during nearly two decades working at Wizards of the Coast, the role-playing behemoth that had acquired the granddaddy of the genre, Dungeons & Dragons. He’s now a project narrative director overseeing story elements of the massively multiplayer game The Elder Scrolls Online.

The sourcebooks that Slavicsek spearheaded continue to influence Star Wars, even after the vast Expanded Universe was declared non-canonical in 2014. The Story Group within Lucasfilm, which oversees every new narrative element to make sure that it all fits together, includes Pablo Hidalgo. He grew up loving the West End Games RPGs. and contributed to several of the company’s supplements and guides before he became one of the official keepers of the canon at Lucasfilm.

Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game told stories that are still sustaining the franchise to this day. In 2015, Slavicsek saw an episode of the canon-correct TV series Star Wars Rebels that concerned the creation of the B-Wing fighter ship. It lifted names and story elements from “Strike Force: Shantipole,” a 1988 module for the West End RPG that he had edited. “I really get a kick out of stuff like that,” says Slavicsek.

When he was developing the “Rebel Breakout” introductory adventure for the West End Games Star Wars RPG, Slavicsek needed a villain to oppose the players and he didn’t want to simply make it a faceless, nameless Stormtrooper. So he decided that the Empire had elite agents that worked for something called the Imperial Security Bureau, or ISB. Later, he oversaw the making of an entire book about the inner workings of the Empire, The Imperial Sourcebook. It hints at the rivalries and friction within these organizations in ways that definitely seem to prefigure Andor.

“Other than overall tone and direction, Andor has been telling a unique story,” says Slavicsek. “But it’s obvious that someone working on the series is familiar with the West End Games material.”

UPDATE: After he saw this post, Lucasfilm’s official Star Wars Lore Advisor Pablo Hidalgo confirmed that he is one of the people who is putting bits of the tabletop RPG’s story contributions into Andor and other new properties. “The WEG game hit me at the perfect age and let me make my own Star Wars universe,” he posts. “Always happy to bring some of that material forward when I can.”

Hidalgo added, “The original RPG had to, by necessity, fill out what the experience of living day to day life in the fictional universe entailed, a level of granularity never required by the movies. But all that work benefited the steaming future. Episodic Star Wars shows needed to answer such questions as what does money look like? What do people eat? What government agencies affect peoples’ lives? And thankfully these answers were already workshopped in tabletop RPG supplements.”

READ MORE: If you want to go all the way to the bottom of this particular rabbit hole, Bill Slaviscek himself wrote a book called Defining a Galaxy: 30 Years in a Galaxy Far, Far Away in 2018. It details his experience working on the West End Games Star Wars RPG.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas
Toys in every store…
A pair of Hopalong boots and a pistol that shoots
Is the wish of Barney and Ben

Barney and Ben weren’t alone in their desire for licensed Hopalong Cassidy footwear. In midcentury America, it seemed like every single kid wanted clothes, toys, and knickknacks branded with the face and the moniker of the famous small-screen cowboy known as “Hoppy.”

You might think that the preposterously excessive licensed merchandise bonanza as we know it today only dates back to the era of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Transformers or Star Wars. But it actually kicked off 75 years ago when an over-the-hill B-movie cowpoke became the first superstar of the small screen.

Half a century before the Schwarzenegger comedy Jingle All the Way poked fun at the commodification of Christmas, parents were already spending December 24th battling tooth and nail over the last piece of Hopalong Cassidy merch on department store shelves

The character Hopalong Cassidy originated in a series of Western novels that appeared in the first years of the 20th Century. Those were followed by 66 B-films cranked out between 1934 and 1948. “Hoppy” was portrayed by the actor William Boyd. He wasn’t a particularly skilled horseman. He didn’t sing in the saddle like Roy Rogers or Gene Autry. He had a string of sidekicks over the run of the films, and they were mostly interchangeable. The only thing remotely singular about this sarsaparilla-swigging buckaroo was that he wore black instead of standard good-guy white.

What turned Hopalong Cassidy into a TV icon was Boyd’s unflagging belief in the character. When the studio felt that the B-Western series had run its course in 1943, Boyd produced the final 12 films himself on shoe-string budgets. And when there was no longer a market for even those cheaply made oaters, the actor sold his ranch and his car and poured his life savings into buying the rights to the Hoppy films, the character, and all associated merchandising.

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Boyd was no John Wayne, but his understanding of the value of intellectual property was way, way ahead of its time.

Boyd finalized the deal just as the TV medium was hitting critical mass. The price of sets was plummeting, the number of broadcast networks was expanding, and the number of households with TVs was quadrupling year-to-year—from a million in 1949 to 20 million in 1952. The new medium was starved for content to fill all of those broadcast hours.

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Hopalong Cassidy became the first TV cowboy in the summer of 1949. The library of old feature films that Boyd owned was immediately sliced up into broadcast-length chunks and aired over and over again in prime time while a new TV series was rushed into production. The old films and the 52 new episodes cranked out over the next three years caught rival Western movie stars, many of whom had much higher profiles, flat-footed. Hopalong Cassidy quickly became a household name, and Boyd quickly became obscenely wealthy.

“Among all the U.S. enterprisers who devote themselves to titillating the unripened mind, none has succeeded as Hoppy has, both with his under-age customers and the thousands of manufacturers, retailers, and advertising men who hawk his wares,” wrote Time magazine in a 1950 cover story. “Last week 63 television stations were pumping out his old movies, 152 radio stations were carrying his voice, 155 newspapers were printing his new Hopalong Cassidy comic strip, and 108 licensed manufacturers were turning out Hopalong Cassidy products at the rate of $70 million a year.”

Licensed merch wasn’t a completely new phenomenon. There had been a profusion of tie-in toys for Mickey Mouse and Superman in the 1930s. And as the movie A Christmas Story demonstrated, one young man was willing to do anything to get his hands on a Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-shot Range Model air rifle back in 1939.

But the scale and the scope of Hopalong-mania were unprecedented. Part of the reason was that the increased immediacy and intimacy of the TV medium forged a deeper connection. But the main reason is that this craze coincided with the post-WWII economic boom. People had more disposable income, consumer choice had become much broader, and manufacturing processes were more flexible and able to respond more quickly to trends.

Starting in 1949, Hopalong Cassidy’s kisser was stamped onto hundreds and eventually thousands of products, including the first lunchbox to bear a licensed image. The tin food receptacle was available in red or blue and had a simple paper decal of Hoppy pasted on the side. Within a year, it led to a twelve-fold sales increase for its maker.

Hopalong Cassidy was the first pop culture craze to truly lasso the hearts of the Baby Boomers. Adults in an increasingly urban and industrialized America were astonished by the intensity of their children’s newfound passion for the Wild West.

Time magazine noted:

The kiddies exhibited a leaping enthusiasm for the new and massive doses of entertainment offered by video. Overnight, almost every little boy & girl in the nation had become a cowboy; in those carefully metered periods which they spent outdoors between programs, they saw cattle rustlers around every corner. They were not the first U.S. children to indulge in make-believe about the Old West. But they were the first to catch the fever simultaneously from coast to coast and to demand such splendid arms and accouterments.

Children with impressively styled cap guns and bejeweled double holsters (many tied to their thighs to facilitate a fast draw) were so commonplace that those without them seemed a little underdressed.

The array of branded playthings on offer was dizzying. This virtual museum exhibit hints at the variety of toys. But the Hoppy craze went so far beyond toys…

In the early 1950s, a kid could sleep in a room decorated with Hopalong Cassidy wallpaper, wearing Hopalong Cassidy pajamas, on a Hopalong Cassidy bunk bed. They could wake up and switch on a Hopalong Cassidy lamp atop their Hopalong Cassidy nightstand, listen to a Hopalong Cassidy radio while they washed their face with soap shaped like their hero’s horse Toppy, dress head-to-toe in Hoppy-branded cowboy gear pulled from their Hopalong Cassidy dresser, eat breakfast with Hopalong Cassidy branded plates and bowls and utensils, and then grab an armload of Hopalong Cassidy school supplies and pedal off to school on a Hopalong Cassidy bicycle.

Many of the foods that Hoppy-besotted youths consumed also had sponsorship deals with the TV star. There were cookies and candy bars and peanut butter and Sugar Crisp cereal, all branded “Hoppy’s Favorite.” But The American Heritage Center, which houses Boyd’s papers, notes that the most common deals were for staples like bread, tuna, and dairy products. Boyd had his standards—he reportedly declined one endorsement deal because he disapproved of chewing gum, and he claimed to have turned down innumerable offers from products that he deemed shoddy or unsafe.

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Time wrote that the actor “has an almost evangelistic attitude about his success. He discusses himself in the third person—as ‘Hoppy’ or ‘this character’—and seems to feel that he has retapped the same deep vein of American character which made the Old West, and that it is both his fate and his duty to strengthen the fiber of U.S. youth…When a department store manager suggested that crowds which had come to see Hoppy were duty-bound to buy something in return, the people's friend promptly punched him in the nose.”

“For folks who sell things to the nation’s small fry, he’s the greatest godsend to come down the train in the memory of man,” The Wall Street Journal wrote. “Manufacturers are standing in queues awaiting permission to tack his name to their merchandise for juveniles.”

“Hopalong was the Michael Jordan of his time,” says Byron Price, executive director of the Cowboy Hall of Fame. “It was the most successful merchandising campaign there had ever been.”

In the summer of 1951, the 80-acre Hoppyland amusement park opened in Venice, California. (Four years before Walt Disney launched his own titular theme park in Anaheim.) It offered 20 rides, a baseball diamond, horseshoe pits, and even “a man-made mountain stocked with goats,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

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Hoppyland closed its doors in 1954, and the whole cowboy craze fizzled before the end of the 1950s as kids’ attention increasingly turned to sci-fi. Boomers set aside their spurs and cap pistols and cowboy hats for toy rockets and ray guns and space helmets. (This cultural shift is recapitulated in the first Toy Story, with the Sheriff Woody stuffed doll elbowed out of the spotlight by the Buzz Lightyear plastic action figure.)

Still, William Boyd continued to profit from the Cassidy cash cow that he never relinquished the rights to. Despite giving a large chunk of his fortune to charity, he had nearly $10 million in the bank when he rode off into the sunset in 1971. You can still watch all of the episodes of Hopalong Cassidy through various streaming services, but Boyd’s real legacy is the more than 2,500 products bearing the Hoppy name.

And if your cranky octogenarian great uncle mocks you for driving all over town trying to find your kid a Chicken Dance Elmo or a Barbie Dream Besties doll, you can console yourself knowing that when the old coot was young, he probably whined and moped for weeks until his poor parents broke down and bought him a pair of Acme Hopalong Cassidy Cowboy Boots and a Hopalong Cassidy Gold Plated Repeating Cap Pistol.

Before Jurassic Park, before King Kong, there was Gertie. In February 1914, a few months before the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand touched off World War I, cartoonist Winsor McCay thrilled audiences with the most amazing special effect they had ever seen.

McCay climbed onto the stage at the Palace Theater in Chicago, bullwhip in hand. Projected on a screen behind him was a simple line drawing of a sparse landscape. Then McCay called out to his pet, Gertie, and a towering animated Diplodocus longus peeked out from behind a pile of rocks.

She loped toward the camera, pausing to swallow a boulder and uproot a tree. Gertie towered over her creator.

For audiences still coming to grips with moving pictures, it was astonishing. Already famous for his surreal, exquisitely illustrated comic strips like Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend and Little Nemo in Slumberland, McCay had slaved for years drawing thousands of frames of Gertie. Most early experiments in animation had been flat, simplistic and herky-jerky; the smooth movement and dimensionality of this cartoon monster was revelatory.

Gertie moved as if she actually had a muscle system under her skin. Her torso expanded and contracted as if she was really breathing. When she drank a river dry, her belly became distended. When she tossed a mastodon over her shoulder, it receded into the distance realistically. The creature was fanciful, but every detail of anatomy and perspective felt authentic.

Gertie was also the first toon to have a personality; every subsequent animated character from Mickey Mouse to Gollum is in her debt. But what was truly revolutionary about the character was the way McCay appeared to interact with her. McCay built his own live participation into the short cartoon, and he stood on-stage alongside the projected image like a ringmaster at a circus, appearing to direct the onscreen actions.

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When McCay commanded the dinosaur to bow, she bowed; when he later scolded her for not obeying, she burst into tears. Then, at the end of the film, McCay would walk towards the giant screen that his artwork was being projected onto and disappear, just as an animated version of himself suddenly appeared within the film. The cartoon version of McCay is then hoisted 30 feet into the air by his pet. The barrier between the real and onscreen worlds had been breached.

Here’s a recording of recent showing of Gertie, with someone playing the McCay role as the animation unfolds. Listen closely and you can hear that the even though Gertie is just a series of monochromatic line-drawn images, the act is convincing enough to fool a younger audience member.

A version of this article previously appeared in Wired Magazine.

The memorable sound was created by composer Akira Ifukube, who also crafted the film’s iconic score. “It’s the most important sound effect in cinema history,” Erik Aadahl told me. He was one of the supervising sound editors on the 2014 Godzilla Hollywood reboot. (Bits of this post previously appeared in an article for WIRED.)

The unsung heroes of cinema are the people who craft the audio—watch a rough cut with no score or sound f/x added, and even a great film looks plodding and dull. Ifukube is one of the most illustrious and talented composers in the history of cinema. He’s known for his classical compositions, and he worked extensively on dramatic films by great directors like Akira Kurosawa and Josef von Sternberg as well as Kon Ichikawa (The Burmese Harp, Fires on the Plain), Hiroshi Inagaki (The Samurai Trilogy), Kenji Misumi (creator of the Zatoichi and Lone Wolf and Cub series).

But Ifukube is most famous for his dozens of collaborations with kaiju (giant monster) auteur Ishiro Honda, beginning with the original Godzilla that birthed the entire genre.

Ifukube never thought that the lowbrow giant monster movie was beneath him. “My specialty was biology,“ he said. “I couldn’t sit still when I heard that in this movie the main character was a reptile that would be rampaging through the city.” (All quotes here from the original filmmakers of the 1954 Godzilla are cadged from the invaluable tome Japan's Favorite Mon-Star : The Unauthorized Biography of "The Big G.")

The composer only had access to the raw footage of the rough cut sans special effects, and had to build his musical score for the film out of whatever he could glean from the script and a small model of Godzilla. He said that the special effects guru Eiji Tsuburaya was protective of footage of the monster itself before the film was completed, and told him, “If you look at the expressions on the extra’s faces you’ll know how scary the thing is behind the mountain.”

Ifukube crafted a bass-heavy musical arrangement heavy on strings and brass to capture the thudding rampage of the monster. He later conducted the NHK Orchestra as it performed over the finalized footage. The score was recorded while the foley artist simultaneously created the mechanical foley effects of Tokyo being destroyed—the archaic audio setup only had four tracks for all of the different sound components in the film, so these elements had to be created together, live and on the fly.

The following clip from the film hits different when you watch it knowing that the slightest mistake by any musician or sound technician meant that the whole scene would have to be re-performed.

But the timeless shriek of the monster was devised and recorded beforehand. The director Honda dictated that Godzilla should roar even though no reptile actually does that. (The closest thing in nature are the bellows and growls that crocs and alligators produce during mating season.) The film had a sound recordist and a sound effects designer, but Ifukube was so deeply involved in the project that he wanted to craft the monster’s roar himself.

The sound recordist Hisashi Shimonaga experimented with the actual sounds produced by predatory big cats and raptors played back at different speeds, but that was found wanting. Ifukube borrowed a double bass from Japan Art University and loosened the strings to make the low-pitched instrument even more resonant and bass-y. He rubbed a leather glove covered with pine tar resin up and down the strings to create an eerie bellowing sound. The recording of that was then slowed down to make it even more plaintive and menacing. This is the final result.

Aadahl diagrams the elements of that sound that he strove to recreate for the 2014 film. "The main element of the roar is this metallic shriek, accompanied by an earth-shattering sound,” he says. “But there is another component that is kind of a bellowing finish. There’s the 'RRAAAAAAAAH' of the attack and then an 'OWWWOOO-WOOMPH' of the finish."

Godzilla’s roar is a sound effect, but it’s also a vocal performance. “As sound editors, we’re trying to illuminate the soul of this creature,” says Aadahl. “There’s a quality of enormity and triumph to it. On the other end, there’s a pathos. There’s an arc to that character that I find to be pretty profound.”

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The Godzilla series moved in a more tongue-in-cheek direction as the kaiju cycle progressed; an understandable shift given the stiff monster costumes and the unconvincing miniature cityscapes. But the original 1954 film was meant to be harrowing and tragic, the product of a society that had recently endured the firebombing of scores of cities and two atomic bombs—a level of cataclysm and devastation that had previously been unimaginable.

Modern audiences might snicker at the dated effects work, but close your eyes and listen to the monster’s furious, anguished shriek, and the artistic intent of the film is unmistakable.

ELSEWHERE: ’s Tokyo Calling newsletter has an interesting post about what was happening in Japanese society at the time of the film’s release in 1954—check that out here. ’s Pure Invention newsletter has a fascinating critique of the most recent Godzilla film, which is set in the aftermath of WWII and has the somber tone of the original film. You can read that here.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Seabrook was a bohemian, an occultist, a sadomasochist, and a journalist who mixed high-minded literary aspirations with a knack for base sensationalism. In 1929, he released the travelogue The Magic Island, in which he described Haitian culture and religious rituals.

Seabrook prided himself on transcending the bigotry, conventionality, and superstitions of his upbringing in the Reconstruction-era South. He wanted to write about voodoo as dispassionately as he might write about Protestantism. But his book-length investigation of “black sorcery” looks incredibly racist and condescending in a modern light. (His writing was accompanied by a series of illustrations by Alexander King that now seem equally offensive.)

Here is how Seabrook says that the supernatural phenomenon of human reanimation was explained to him during his time in Haiti:

While the zombie came from the grave, it was neither a ghost, nor yet a person who had been raised like Lazarus from the dead. The zombie, they say, is a soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical sem­blance of life—it is a dead body which is made to walk and act and move as if it were alive. People who have the power to do this go to a fresh grave, dig up the body before it has had time to rot, galvanize it into movement, and then make of it a servant or slave, occasionally for the commission of some crime, more often simply as a drudge around the habi­tation or the farm, setting it dull heavy tasks, and beating it like a dumb beast if it slackens.

The idea of zombies as cannibals with an insatiable hunger for human flesh is a more recent invention, with no connection to Haitian lore.

In The Magic Island, Seabrook explains what the actual dietary needs of the original zombies were reputed to be. He shares the story of a Haitian couple, Joseph and Croyance, who command a group of field workers that are “not living men and women but unhappy zombies who [they] had dragged from their peaceful graves to slave in the sun.” Croyance must prepare tasteless meals for them because zombies die if they taste salt or meat. One day she takes pity on the “poor dead creatures who should be at rest,” and decides that it might cheer them to see the crowds and processions in the city during a religious festival.

So she tied a new bright-colored handkerchief around her head, aroused the zombies from the sleep that was scarcely different from waking, gave them their morning bowl of cold, unsalted plantains boiled in water, which they ate dumbly uncomplaining, and set out with them for the town. Croyance, in her bright kerchief, leading the nine dead men and women behind her, past the railroad crossing, where she murmured a prayer to Legba, past the great white-painted wooden Christ, who hung life-sized in the glaring sun, where she stopped to kneel and cross herself—bu the poor zombies prayed neither to Papa Legba nor to Brother Jesus, for they were dead bodies walking, without souls or minds.

In town, Croyance slipped up and mistakenly fed salted pistachios to the zombies. The tasty seasoned food broke the spell that had suspended them in an unnatural state between life and death; they all cried out, and then they each began to trudge towards the graveyards in their home villages. “No one dared stop them, for they were corpses walking in the sunlight, and they themselves and all the people know that they were corpses.”

When they reached their destinations, each of the zombies fell to the ground and immediately transformed into a pile of rotting flesh.

Seabrook records that he had several supposed zombies pointed out to him, but he eventually concluded, “Zombies were nothing but poor, ordinary demented human beings, idiots, forced to toil in the fields.” When the book was published, he felt that he had delivered a serious ethnographic study. But he was canny enough and cynical enough to play up the most exotic aspects of Haiti at every turn. And doing so helped to gauarantee massive sales.

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The mythos of voodoo and the idea of corpses reanimated by means of dark magic immediately struck a chord in American popular culture. Within a few years of the publication of The Magic Island, zombies had become a staple of the horror genre.

Many were eager to exploit the sudden fascination with the walking dead. A Broadway production called Zombie opened in early 1932. This “play of the tropics” was supposedly so bad that it closed almost immediately. It was restaged out of town as a comedy rather than a pulse-pounding thriller.

In June 1932, the pulp magazine Strange Tales Of Mystery And Terror published a short story “The House of the Magnolias.” It transplanted the zombie mythos to a plantation outside of New Orleans, with black zombies toiling through the night in the fields. A visitor took pity on them and fed them salted candy, releasing them from their cursed existence. But before these zombies returned to their graves, they took revenge on their slave master, burning the plantation house to the ground.

The original zombie mythos and the earliest zombie stories in American pop culture focused on the metaphor of slavery and forced labor. In July of 1932, White Zombie, the first zombie horror flick, was released. Boris Karloff portrayed a voodoo priest named Murder Legendre who created an undead workforce to toil in his sugar mill.

Seabrook himself was obsessed with captivity and subjugation throughout his life. He used a portion of the wealth that his zombie book brought him to hire women who would allow him to strip them naked, chain them up for days at a time, and force them to eat table scraps from the ground like an animal. He believed that the deprivation allowed them to enter a heightened psychic and spiritual state—it was all just part of his questing exploration of the outer limits of mysticism, you see. (He even wrote a book about it.)

The idea of zombies as violent creatures driven by an insatiable desire for human flesh wasn’t established until the 1968 release of Night of the Living Dead. The director George Romero never intended for his reanimated corpses to be seen as zombies, and the z-word is never used in the film. But the impact of this grisly low-budget masterpiece on the horror genre was so immense that cannibalism quickly fused with the Haitian mythos. Dead people attacking and devouring living people became the core trope of zombie lore.

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But William Seabrook got to cannibalism first, decades before the Romero film.

In 1930, he released the book Jungle Ways, in which he wrote openly, unashamedly—boastfully even—about eating human flesh The writer’s fascination with the “exotic” rituals of BIPOC people (and the confidence that the book-buying public would reward him handsomely for doing so) compelled him to seek out an African tribe that was reputed to have engaged in ritualistic cannibalism. He wanted to explore the outer edges of human behavior, shatter taboos, and épater la bourgeoisie. And oh brother, did he ever.

While researching the Guere tribe in French West Africa, he concluded that cannibalism was unthinkable in Western cultures that “believe that in the essence of a man there is something holy which other animals have not.” But the Guere, like many cultures around the world, believe that everything has a soul and that it’s therefore unavoidable to eat things that contain the divine spark. Seabrook records his personal eureka moment about cannibalism:

I was compelled to say finally, “I can’t seem to think of any reason why you others shouldn’t eat it if you like it.” And I added, “As a matter of fact, I should like very much to try it myself, just once.”

“If you like it.” He reduces the practice to a mere food preference, as if these people were choosing between trout and pork chop on a restaurant menu.

For the Guere, cannibalism wasn’t a matter of sustenance. It had been part of an elaborate series of rituals that only took place in the context of a vanquished opponent in war. The Guere refused to let Seabrook, who had no connection to their culture or their beliefs, take part in their practice. In fact, they insisted that the practice had been discontinued long before his arrival.

At one point, the Guere gave in to the writer’s unceasing pestering and went through the motions of serving him a cannibal feast. The writer later deduced that they used subterfuge, feeding him ape meat.

But Seabrook didn’t let this deter him.

In Jungle Ways, the writer claims that he later managed to obtain some cuts of human flesh—small chunks of meat suitable for stew, “a sizeable rump steak, also a small loin roast.” He assured his readers that it was the result of an accidental death, “the meat of a freshly killed man, who seemed to be about thirty years old—and who had not been murdered.”

Seabrook was cagy about how he acquired this corpse flesh, and he insisted that it would be “unfair, unsporting, and ungrateful” to reveal the identity of whoever hooked him up. He would later reveal in his 1942 autobiography that an acquaintance obtained it for him from an internist at the Sorbonne who had access to the facility’s morgue.

In Jungle Ways, the writer explained how he prepared these cuts of human meat for consumption, spitting the loin roast, grilling the rump steak, and mixing the stew with rice. He described the sensory experience of the process at length:

The raw meat, in appearance, was firm, slightly coarse-textured rather than smooth. In raw texture, both to the eye and to the touch, it resembled good beef. In color, however, it was slightly less red than beef…the aroma was wholly pleasant, like those of beefsteak and roast beef, with no special other distinguishing odor…the fat was sizzling, becoming tender and yellower. Beyond what I have told, there was nothing special or unusual. It was nearly done and looked and smelled good to eat.

Seabrook was determined to dine upon these pieces of a former person. And not just dainty little nibbles! “It would have been stupid to go to all this trouble and then taste too meticulously and with too much experimental nervousness only tiny morsels…I had thought about this and planned it for a long time, and now I was going to do it.”

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The writer records that he took his first bite and was pleased and relieved to discover that he had no physical revulsion or moral compunctions about what he was doing. “It had no weird, startling, or unholy special flavor.” He went on to describe the taste and texture of human flesh in exacting, appalling detail.

“It was like good fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef... It was mild, good meat with no other sharply defined or highly characteristic taste such as for instance, goat, high game, and pork have. The steak was slightly tougher than prime veal, a little stringy... The roast, from which I cut and ate a central slice, was tender, and in color, texture, smell as well as taste, strengthened my certainty that of all the meats we habitually know, veal is the one meat to which this meat is accurately comparable…A small helping of the stew might likewise have been veal stew, but the overabundance of red pepper was such that it conveyed no fine shading to a white palate.”

Of course, of course, he brings race into it again. And it’s so telling that a little bit of cayenne overwhelmed his gringo honky senses, but the moral issues of what he was doing never gave him pause. “Neither then nor at any time since have I had any serious personal qualms, either of digestion or of conscience,” he insists.

This unrepentant cannibalism was too much even for the sensation-starved public that had embraced Seabrook’s earlier tales of voodoo and zombies. In his 1942 autobiography, the writer quotes a review of Jungle Ways in the Montgomery Advertiser that captures the tenor of the public disgust: “It is not agreeable to think that an intelligent, educated member of the white race and of the American nation, has voluntarily descended to a scale lower than that observed by these lowly peoples.”

In Seabrook’s telling, he had been castigated and condemned for his broadmindedness and universalism, not for eating human flesh. “Those who might have forgiven me for eating a n——r couldn't forgive me for eating with one,” he wrote.

Seabrook knew that he would be remembered for his flirtation with cannibalism and for touching off the zombie craze, not for his lofty literary pretensions or his desire to be a world-bridging truth-teller. That tormented him, and he in turn tormented those around him. He would die in 1944 after downing several handfuls of sleeping pills and a bottle of hooch. His former friend, the satanist Aleister Crowley, wrote, “The swine-dog W. B. Seabrook has killed himself at last, after months of agonized slavery to his final wife.”

Seabrook was smart enough and self-aware enough to grasp that all of his vaunted taboo-busting had ultimately been about his own wealth, notoriety, and self-gratification.

READ MORE ABOUT IT:
William Seabrook. The Magic Island (1929)
William Seabrook. Jungle Ways (1930)
William Seabrook. No Hiding Place: An Autobiography (1942)
Marjorie Muir Worthington. The Strange World of Willie Seabrook (1966)
Emily Matchar. The Zombie King (2015, The Atavist Magazine, No. 45)
Joe Ollmann. The Abominable Mr. Seabrook (2017, graphic novel)

There’s a defining instant like that for esports as well: It’s called “Moment #37” and it happened twenty years ago in a ballroom at California State Polytechnic University. Nowadays, moments like this play out in huge stadiums to tens of thousands of spectators, or are livestreamed on sites like Twitch to global audiences. But esports was a much more niche phenomenon at the time. One of the things that made esports the huge phenomenon it is today was grainy camcorder footage of Moment #37 that was passed around like samizdat among fighting game aficionados.

Moment #37 happened during the third annual Evolution Championship Series tournament, as one of the best players in America, Justin Wong, was facing off against the best player from Japan, Daigo “The Beast” Umehara, on the 1999 fighting game Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike. Wong was playing as Chun-Li, a female character who was prized by players for her kicking attacks. Umehara was playing as Ken. Ken is widely regarded as one of the more boring, plain-vanilla characters in the franchise. But Umehara could perform absolutely amazing feats with him.

Umehara’s talent, drive, and relentlessness have made him the first superstar cyberathlete in Japan, where he is known as “the god of 2D fighting games.” There is a manga comic that chronicles his gaming exploits,

Umehara had a long-running column in a game magazine, and he published five books. One of them became a best-selling motivational book, The Will to Keep Winning, which claims to impart life lessons from his stellar gaming career that are helpful to a general audience. “Interacting and competing with others, clear win–loss results, the planning and effort needed to excel—these all translate well to issues we confront every day,” he writes.

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Umehara has also scored innumerable victories in international events, which have earned him a worldwide following as well as a Guinness World Record for Most Consecutive Tournament Wins. And as the popularity of esports exploded, with audiences and prize purses that are orders of magnitude larger than they were when Umehara started out in the late 1990s, his visibility only increased. He snagged a lucrative sponsorship deal with Red Bull, and he’s a “global ambassador” for Twitch. He continued competing in and winning tournaments until age 41, which is positively ancient in the youth-dominated world of esports. (Imagine Mark Spitz plunging into the Seine to compete in the 2024 Olympics…it’s equivalent to that.)

In his motivational book, which has been translated into English, Umehara explains exactly what fighting games have meant to him. He describes an unpleasant childhood in Tokyo as a detached, irritable, shy kid. He also had a wicked competitive streak. “Losing meant having to lower my head,” he writes. “To me, that was reprehensible. I’d rather die than give up.”

In junior high, he began taking the train alone to arcades. He had discovered his lifelong passion. “The only time I found solace was when I beat someone playing fighting games,” he writes. “I gave my all to gaming, sacrificing my time and my health in pursuit of the win.”

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Tournament-level play in 2D fighting games is extremely intense. Players must master an elaborate set of complicated moves for each character, drilling over and over until they can be performed from pure muscle memory. And they must learn exactly how any response from an opponent can interrupt or break any of their moves. And it’s all happening fast – players are literally counting the individual frames of animation, launching attacks and counters at the precise split-second needed. It’s like playing three-dimensional chess at 200 miles per hour. “There’s no time to think about what your opponent is going to do next; thought and action must be nearly simultaneous,” he writes. “If your read is off, you have to grasp the difference between your and your opponent’s intuitions and instantly adjust.”

He is not a showy, crowd-pleasing player. He is laser-focused on the matches, and is famous for being impassive in the face of victory. When he won his first national title at age 15, he was not enthusiastic or jubilant. “Having put in more hours than all the other players out there, being the best felt like the obvious outcome. So when I was handed the trophy, it didn’t excite me whatsoever.”

“The man looks ice cold; you rarely see him emote,” says Patrick Miller, game developer and author of From Masher to Master: The Educated Video Game Enthusiast’s Fighting Game Primer. “He has a great mind for reading his opponent, he understands the framework of a game and how people make decisions within it. He does well in this very Daigo way.”

Before he unleashed what would become known as Moment #37 (a name chosen entirely at random by the Evo organizers, it turns out) Umehara actually got off to a weak start in the match. The American was “turtling,” using his character Chun-Li conservatively, chipping away at his opponent’s life gauge. It was the antithesis of Umehara’s aggressive approach, and as video of the match proves, it was quite effective at getting under his skin.

“This is rare footage of Daigo actually angry,” noted the match’s commentator Seth Killian, who would go on to work for Street Fighter publisher Capcom and develop many fighting games. “Justin’s turtle-style now on the verge of putting Daigo down.”

The game went down to the final round of the final match. Whoever KO’d their opponent one final time would be the winner. Wong clobbered Umehara again and again until his life gauge was reduced to a single pixel-width. One more hit of any kind would mean game over.

“I remember feeling the pressure as I watched my life gauge dwindle, thinking this might be the end,” writes Umehara in his book. “But when he had me in that corner, I entered into a Zen-like focus, prepared to do whatever it took.”

At that moment, Wong unleashed a seemingly unbeatable move, an explosive flurry of 15 lightning-fast kicks so powerful that each dealt damage even if you blocked it… and Umehara was a single hit away from defeat. Things looked grim for The Beast.

But Wong did not realize that he had been baited into this position.

Umehara had sensed that his opponent was eager to end the match with a flourish. Wong could have simply let the clock run out and won, but the god of 2D fighters did everything he could to goad the American into trotting out his big move.

Umehara saw an infinitesimally small opening to catch his opponent off guard and stage a comeback. All he would have to do was parry each of the kicks instead of blocking them. Parrying is a high-risk high-reward defensive maneuver in Street Fighter III that prevents a player under attack from taking damage if they lean into a blow at the precisely perfect moment. The “parry window” is four frames of animation – about seven one-hundredths of a second.

And that superhuman feat of timing wasn’t even the most difficult part.

Umehara would have no advance notice of when Wong’s attack had been initiated. He would have to intuit the precise moment that the furious onslaught began. “He essentially had to make the first parry before the move started,” says Miller, who was one of the thousand or so fighting game fans in the audience that day. “And if he mistimed just one of them, it’s over and he’s lost.”

Somehow, The Beast pulled it off.

He parried kick after kick after kick after kick after kick after kick. Then, before Wong had time to initiate another move, Umehara dispatched him with a devastating super attack known as Shippu Jinraikyaku, or “Hurricane Swift Thunder Leg.” In just a few seconds, Umehara had gone from near-certain defeat to total victory. (You can watch the whole three-minute match in the embedded video below, or jump right to the climactic moment by clicking here.)

“When I came back to myself Chun-Li was down,” The Beast writes in his book. “It wasn’t until then that the screams from the crowd finally reached my ears.”

“Unbelievable,” shouted commentator Killian, his voice cracking with excitement as the enormity of the reversal sunk in. “Daigo with the full parry, and then combo for the win… It’s madness! It’s unadulterated madness!”

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The crowd was beside itself. They had initially been pulling for their countryman Wong. But after this astonishing display, they leaped to their feet to cheer for Umehara. “This match was no longer about Justin the American guy versus Daigo the Japanese guy,” says Miller. “It was about how humans are capable of incredible things, and how this video game is one of the things that lets us express this.”

Miller says that there were elements of mastery in that moment that he didn’t fully grasp until years afterwads. Killian would later note that the perfectly timed parries and combos were not the most impressive feats that Umehara performed in Moment #37. “The real strength of the play was mental,” he has said. “It was such an incredible read of the situation and such an incredible move of Jiu Jitsu to take someone’s advantage and use it against them in such a brilliant way.”

“The match made a big wave online, reaching more than 20 million views worldwide,” writes Umehara. “And so, the name Daigo Umehara became known across the globe.”

The obsessive attention that his singular feat continues to garner leaves Umehara somewhat nonplussed. If there’s a central takeaway from his motivational book, it’s that the dedication and discipline and rigorous practice required to stay on top are far more important than any individual victory. “I’ve never deluded myself into thinking that I had mastered games, or that I’m some kind of prodigy,” he writes. “But am I confident in my ability to keep winning? Hell yes.”

“Daigo always was a little surprised that it was such a big deal for us, that it left that kind of impact,” says Miller. “For the people in the American fighting game community that were there to witness it, it was the most significant day of our lives. For Daigo, it was Sunday.”

A version of this piece originally ran on rollingstone.com.

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Wolfe was one of the key figures who introduced the literary techniques of fiction to feature writing. He also had an uncanny knack for spotting the most interesting developments in pop culture, youth culture, and counterculture. He coined incisive and witty neologisms that instantly entered the national consciousness: The Me Generation, radical chic, the Masters of the Universe… He was like a superhero to many, and like any true superhero, he had an instantly recognizable uniform: white suit and rakishly tilted homburg hat, sometimes accentuated with an honest-to-god cape.

The 2023 documentary Radical Wolfe gives a sense of just how influential and impactful the writer was in his prime. It’s available to stream on Netflix.

I watched a little bit of A Man in Full on Netflix, and…I doubt I will ever finish it. But the new series spurred a deep dive into previous film and TV adaptations of Wolfe’s work. Below I submit an appreciation of a woefully overlooked 1973 film based on one of his most memorable magazine pieces. I also drew up a list of all the other adaptations that have been made, including info on a few documentaries and weird obscurities that might be of interest to people who admire Wolfe—did you know that there’s an opera based on The Bonfire of the Vanities, and you can stream it for free on Tubi?! (Wherever possible, I’ve included details on how you can watch all of this stuff.)

”The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!” (1963) adapted as The Last American Hero (1973)

Wolfe's 1965 Esquire feature about stock car racing champion Junior Johnson was an epochal example of what would come to be known as New Journalism. Wolfe vividly captured the thrilling intensity of NASCAR competitions and the reserved swagger of Johnson, who learned to race by shaking off the cops while running shipments of his father’s moonshine. But what sticks with you is the evocative portrait Wolfe paints of the North Carolina milieu.

The subjects of his feature probably saw the writer as a dandified city slicker from way up north in Richmond, Virginia. But Wolfe saw himself as a fellow Southerner, and he wanted to present an uncondescending view of the region and its culture to the stuffy, snobbish Northern establishment that subscribed to (and published) Esquire. He nails the details of the environs, the rhythms of the people’s lives, and the cadence of their speech. The writer doesn’t simply note that Junior Johnson and his father and all of their fellow moonshine runners were folk heroes in their community; he traces the origins of that adulation back to the Whiskey Rebellion in the 18th century.

The essay is where many Americans first learned of the phrase “good ol’ boy,” and Wolfe explains its meaning with great rigor and precision. Junior Johnson was given to communicating in monosyllabic grunts but was also capable of surprising eloquence and self-awareness. Wolfe renders Johnson’s voice so authentically that I found myself repeatedly wondering how he did it—was he taking shorthand notes, or using some sort of recording device, or channeling Johnson’s voice himself (and bending the rules of journalism a tad)?

Wolfe’s feature was adapted into the 1973 film The Last American Hero. It’s not quite as earth-shattering as its source material, but it’s one of the great car-centric films of the early 1970s, and that’s really saying something. I mean, this is the era that gave us The French Connection, American Graffiti, Le Mans, Vanishing Point, Duel, Two-Lane Blacktop, Gone in 60 Seconds, The Seven-Ups, Sugarland Express…

The racing scenes are shot and edited with grit and verisimilitude, bringing you into the action at race tracks, demolition derbies, or on dirt roads. The whole cast is great, but Jeff Bridges is fantastic as Johnson. The locations and cinematography do a good job of capturing the flavor of the locale, though sticklers for historical authenticity will grumble about how the extras in a film set in the mid-1950s have bushy sideburns and long pointy shirt collars. (The fact that the theme song happens to be that quintessential 1970s chestnut “I Got a Name” by Jim Croce is also a jarring anachronism. It debuted in the film several months before it became a radio hit.)

The film helped forge the cinematic paradigm of sexy rebellious downhome dudes sticking it to The Man on the open roads. It set the pattern for all of the Southsploitation flicks that dominated grindhouses in the 1970s, which often focused on outmaneuvering the fuzz via badass stunt driving and a bleeding-edge communication tool known as Citizens band radio. The subgenre would reach its zenith with Smokey and the Bandit, and we can also credit/blame it for The Dukes of Hazard.

The inimitable New Yorker critic Pauline Kael really admired the film, writing "With a script that uses Wolfe as the source for most of the story elements, Lamont Johnson, who directed, has done the South­ern racing scene and the character of the people caught up in it better, perhaps, than they’ve ever been done before." But she faulted it for tacking on a fictionalized downbeat ending in classic 1970s fashion—the film creates an arc where the rebel Johnson is forced to kowtow to the forces of capital to get his shot. In real life, Johnson told Wolfe that a short stint in prison for illicit distilling taught him that following rules and doing what he was told wouldn’t kill him. But he was able to rise to the top of his sport without making the sort of devil’s bargain that the film portrays.

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Kael’s review is excellent, of course, and worth reading in full. She’s especially insightful about the car’s place in cinema and Wolfe’s place in journalism. This bit is particularly good: “Wolfe used the youth culture for excitement just as the movies did. Movies hit us in more ways than we can ever quite add up, and that’s the kind of experience that Tom Wolfe tried to convey in prose.” The Last American Hero (1973) is available to rent or buy on Prime and Youtube.)

The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965)

Studios have always been quick to option many of Wolfe's trailblazing nonfiction works. His first book-length collection of magazine pieces was a best seller that sparked a lot of interest from film studios, especially the anchor story that gives the book its name. It’s a deep dive into the subculture of custom car aficionados in California, but the original version that ran in Esquire in 1963 had a much more fulsome and Wolfe-ian title, loaded with exclamation points and onomatopoeia: "There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored (Thphhhhhh!) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (Rahghhh!) Around the Bend (Brummmmmmmmmmmmmmm)…"

The story established Wolfe’s ongoing fascination with subcultural icons. He clearly admires and envies the custom car artists George Barris and Ed “Big Daddy” Roth because they are completely divorced from the sophisticated art world, and they because they never attempted to move beyond the teen culture they emerged from—they are “untouched by the big amoeba god of Anglo-European sophistication that gets you in the East.” That amoeba got its grubby hands all over Wolfe, and he uses his classical education to put the creations of these hot rod artists in terms that all of the square magazine readers could understand. He compares Roth’s creations to works by Salvador Dali and Heironymous Bosch and lays out a framework in which custom car culture is the Dionysian antithesis to the orderly Apollonian designs of Detroit and the Big Three.

The film adaptation of “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby” was to be directed by John Boorman, but it never happened. However, Wolfe did eventually appear in a documentary on the legacy of the hot rod artiste Roth. The film is called Tales of the Rat Fink, and it's available for rent or purchase on Prime. Some miscreant posted a bootleg of the entire film on YouTube, and here is the portion that features Wolfe.

In keeping with the car-crazy theme of this documentary about Ed "Big Daddy" Roth and his kustom kreations, all of the interviewees appear to speak through their vehicles. Wolfe’s disembodied voice emerges from his 2003 Cadillac Seville. (Both the writer and the car are clad in all-white, natch.)

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)

Wolfe's book about Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, who lived communally and traveled across the country evangelizing for LSD, was a huge hit that cemented the image of hippie culture and psychedelia in the public imagination. The film rights for the book were optioned, but an adaptation was never made. However, the footage that the pranksters themselves shot of their own exploits while Wolfe was reporting on them was later incorporated into the 2011 documentary Magic Trip: Ken Kesey's Search for a Kool Place. It’s currently free to stream on Prime.

Tom Wolfe's Los Angeles (1977)

The great lost artifact of the writer's onscreen career is this made-for-TV special that he penned and hosted for PBS. It's supposedly a freewheeling and episodic satire of Tinseltown that covers some of the same territory as his 1970 essay "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers," which mocked minority resentment as well as the guilt of do-gooder white liberals. That’s a theme running through a lot of the writer’s post-1960s work, which, to put it mildly, has not aged well. He probably saw it as sticking it to the cliches of the liberal establishment—not racism, per se, but anti-anti-racism. It rarely comes off that way.

Wolfe appears as himself and narrates the proceedings. The New York Times reviewer found the satire to be juvenile, noting that it's "as subtle as a porno flick" and that "Mr. Wolfe's snickering television essay becomes an intolerable exercise in contempt." It sounds tasteless and offensive and kind of crummy, and that somehow makes me want to see it even more. Unfortunately, all that's available on the interwebs is some raw outtake footage

The Right Stuff (1979) adapted as The Right Stuff (1983) and The Right Stuff (2020)

The nonfiction novel was the culmination of seven years of reporting and research on NASA and the Mercury 7 astronauts. It became Wolfe’s best-selling work to that date, won the National Book Award, and is widely regarded as one of the great works of literary non-fiction. The film adaptation won four technical Oscars and deserved to win several more. Everyone loved it except for the original screenwriter William Goldman and the astronauts themselves, who all felt that it portrayed the Mercury 7 men as little more than “spam in a can.”

This is one of those movies of the era like Diner or The Outsiders that features a cast full of relative unknowns who would all go on to great fame and success. It’s filmmaker Phil Kaufman’s masterpiece—which is saying something since he’s the guy who directed The Outlaw Josey Wales, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Henry & June. It’s available to rent or buy for a nominal fee from numerous sources online.

In 2020, National Geographic released a limited series adaptation of both the book and the film. Unlike the movie, it didn’t focus on the contrast between the mediagenic, college-educated Mercury 7 astronauts and laconic, hard-bitten test pilot Chuck Yeager. The series is rather dull and dutiful, and it received a chilly reception. A planned second season was canceled, and it was removed from the Disney+ streaming service in a belt-tightening move.

The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) adapted as The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) and The Bonfire of the Vanities (2015)

Wolfe’s first major foray into fiction was a sensation and a bestseller that was widely regarded as a quintessential novel of the 1980s. The film adaptation featured a screenplay by Pulitzer and Tony Award-winning playwright Michael Christofer, production design by Oscar-winner Richard Sylbert, direction by an auteur at the apex of his box office clout, and performances by several high-profile actors who were on the cusp of a new level of success and critical acclaim. The result is…

Look, I am a huge fan of Brian DePalma. I will talk your ear off about the merits of even his lesser works like The Fury and Phantom of the Paradise and Hi, Mom! But he was the worst possible choice to direct this film, and none of his signature cinematic flourishes do more than temporarily distract from the thudding unsubtlety of this unfunny satire.

There’s exactly one memorable scene, where the nervousness of the protagonist gradually turns a routine police interview into a suspect interrogation. But everything else in this cack-handed production serves to magnify the flaws that were already there in Wolfe’s jaundiced take on a modern multicultural metropolis. It’s become one of those films like Heaven’s Gate or Ishtar or Waterworld where its scandalous commercial failure has completely overshadowed the work itself, and while some stick up for the merits of those other movies, no one can muster a defense of this one. It’s available to rent or buy from multiple sources online, but don’t.

Turner Classic Movies devoted a whole season of their podcast The Plot Thickens to the behind-the-scenes story of what all went wrong with the Bonfire adaptation. It was based on Julie Salamon's excellent, dishy book The Devil's Candy, and Salomon hosted that season of the podcast.

The opera adaptation [?!] of Bonfire of the Vanities is currently free with ads on Tubi. (Come back, Brian DePalma, all is forgiven!) The opera's website is still online even though it closed after its initial performances nine years ago.

Miscellany

Wolfe’s later work descended into self-parody, with increasingly crotchety and obtuse attacks on topics from college promiscuity to Darwinism. But he also parodied himself with characteristic elan in the 6th season Simpsons episode "Moe'N'a Lisa"—that's available on Disney Plus.

Wolfe also made a cameo as himself in Bill Cosby's short-lived final TV series in 1999, but that has [understandably] been memory-holed.

The lower half of Wolfe's body makes an appearance in the avant-garde film by Yoko Ono and John Lennon, Up Your Legs Forever. It's literally just a feature-length assemblage of footage of various people's legs, capped by a shot of the filmmaking duo's buttocks. It isn't available to stream anywhere, and honestly, I'm not losing much sleep over that fact.

It’s unclear if Keaton was aware of the experimental artistic explorations of his contemporaries like James Joyce and Luigi Pirandello and Luis Buñuel. But his metatextual masterpiece was one of the most impressive demonstrations of stream of consciousness, surreal dream logic, and self-aware fourth-wall-breaking of the 1920s. And it can still inspire awe today. It’s worth watching the 45-minute film in full, but I wanted to pluck out a few highlights.

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On the surface, Sherlock Jr. is a typical Walter Mitty tale (filmed 15 years before that Thurber short story first appeared). It centers on a hapless movie projectionist, framed by a romantic rival for a theft he didn’t commit, who fantasizes about becoming a brilliant detective and clearing his name. The film is filled with Keaton’s delightful visual wit and signature acrobatic stunts, as you can see in the following sequence.

Keaton literally broke his neck at the end of this train-top sequence—the force of the water pouring out of the railway tank smashed his head against the rails. Another daring filmmaker who regularly risked life and limb to entertain the audience, Jackie Chan, has repeatedly cited Keaton as a major inspiration.

But Sherlock Jr. really gets interesting when the projectionist falls asleep while screening a drawing-room mystery. His dream-self rises, and imagines that the movie characters are replaced by his sweetheart and the romantic rival. Achieving this doubling effect required winding the film backwards and double-exposing the footage, while ensuring that Keaton’s body position was perfectly matched in both takes.

Entranced by the onscreen action, the dream-version of the projectionist grabs the dream-version of his signature pork pie hat, then walks up the aisle as he watches the on-screen action. When the villain makes a pass at his sweetie, the projectionist literally climbs into the screen to confront him. His nemesis picks him up and literally throws him out of the film and back into the audience. (To achieve this effect, Keaton built a carefully lit set within a set.)

As the projectionist’s dream-self is ejected from the film-within-the film, we see his snoozing body twitch.

The projectionist tries to cross over into the film again, and this time the film medium itself attempts to shake him off through a series of malicious quick cuts. The drawing room becomes the front stairs, shutting him out of the house. As he descends, the steps become a garden bench, causing him to take a nosedive. And so on—diving off a wave-battered rock, he lands in a snowbank. By precisely matching posture and camera angle from scene to scene, Keaton made it look like reality was shifting around him.

Half a century before Christopher Nolan was born, and long before CGI, Keaton created a vivid world with its own laws and internally consistent logic. Call it the inception of Inception—it probably left just as many folks scratching their heads on the way out.

A shorter version of this article initially appeared in Wired magazine.