Imagine’s answer to EuroGamer, NowGamer, went live recently. With the publisher having a dedicated retro magazine—the rather spiffy Retro Gamer—it should come as no surprise that NowGamer offers a dedicated retro section.

Most of the section appears to be reprint, but there’s some great stuff in there, including a slew of making-of articles, a smattering of company profiles and a couple of ‘def guides’ to videogame series. A fairly random selection of my own articles has been reprinted on the site, including The Making Of: Hitchiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, where I interviewed Steve Meretzky about his collaboration with Douglas Adams.

The game itself remains one of the meanest, toughest and funniest pieces of interactive fiction to date, and with the original article buried away in an old issue of Retro Gamer (and not making the cover nor even the contents pages), it’s great to see it get another airing, not least because Steve Meretzky was a wonderful interviewee. I hope that we can one day talk about the controversial Leather Goddesses of Phobos, which would make for a fun making-of in the mag.

Elsewhere, you can also read my making-ofs on seminal soccer title Sensible Soccer, ubiquitous action puzzler Tetris, US platformer Miner 2049er, fantasy/chess mash-up Archon, and overhead bouncing ball action game Bounder.

As for the magazine itself, Retro Gamer’s on the stands, priced £4.99, and can be bought from retrogamer.net. The current issue includes a making-of Space Invaders, Amiga and Mega Drive retrospectives, and my interview with Ed Rotberg and Andrew Burgess on their classic S.T.U.N. Runner.

Google Street View has been a controversial development. Most people seem initially excited by it, right up until the point where they use it and find on display their car, their garden, their house, and, sometimes, their front rooms.

In the UK, the response has been largely negative, perhaps due to Labour increasingly turning the country into a surveillance society. However, in today’s BBC article, Villagers challenge Google camera, Google makes a particularly weaselly statement:

“Imagery is taken on public property and is no different from what any person can readily capture or see walking down the street.”

Technically, this is true—Google’s car drives along public roads, and takes photos that anyone could take. But this ignores the all-inclusive nature of the photography—I doubt ‘anyone’ could take the sheer number of photos the Google car does, even in a single town, without massive investment.

Also, I bet if ‘anyone’ tried to emulate Google, either driving or walking around a major town, taking dozens of photos every few metres, and subsequently published them online, they’d be arrested, not defended, by local police forces.

A couple of days ago, Josh Marshall’s article about his Kindle on Talking Points Memo got me thinking. He relates how on experiencing the device, he surprisingly got sucked into using it, which was subsequently followed by a dark epiphany:

“In our living room we have two big inset shelves where I keep all the books I feel like I need or want ready at hand. And last night, sitting in front of them, I had this dark epiphany. How much longer are these things going to be around? Not my books, though maybe them too. But just books. Physical, paper books. The few hundred or so I was looking at suddenly seemed like they were taking up an awful lot of space, like the whole business could dealt with a lot more cleanly and efficiently, if at some moral loss.”

This is the kind of statement I’d have scoffed at a few years ago, but we do seem to be rampaging ever onwards into a digital-only future regarding media. Newspapers are struggling, being replaced by online equivalents. The CD is clearly on its last legs, about to be obliterated by digital formats for all but those in the niche space. And although video has resisted this transition, things are on the move, and it’s clear that a combination of bandwidth and storage issues is the only thing holding this particular shift back.

And so, wither books? Almost certainly, and largely for convenience. As living spaces get smaller and the amount of crap we own grows, space is at a premium. Although I’m a staunch buyer of CDs, I almost never play them, instead ripping them to a Mac and playing the music back via iPods and amps. I keep threatening to put our CDs in the loft, but at that point, why bother even buying new CDs in the first place? (And, yes, I’m fully aware that online music purchases are generally in compressed format, but for the most part the formats are now in a decent enough quality that I can’t tell the difference, and most music is mixed so poorly and compressed so heavily that it makes no odds anyway.)

The danger, of course, is in terms of longevity. In moving from physical product to digital-only, we’re in danger of creating very temporary history. Already, people are finding that digitally printed photos often fade frighteningly quickly, massively at odds with faded but still perfectly visible black and white photos from the early portion of the last century. And digital file formats rapidly change and evolve. JPEG and MP3 may be dominant today, but what about in ten years? What about in 100? Are we rapidly moving towards a time where everything we create will be potentially lost within a few generations, all in the name of convenience?

This is the news!

Being late to the party, I just watched Newswipe while eating breakfast, thereby setting myself up to be thoroughly confused for the rest of the day. Superficially, the show is like a news-oriented version of Brooker’s first-rate TV-bashing Screenwipe being smashed into The Daily Show with a hammer.

Although superior to previous BBC4 Daily Show wannabe The Late Edition—primarily a vehicle for Marcus Brigstocke to be smug and patronising, and Steve Furst to be as unfunny as humanely possible—Newswipe at times left me bewildered, and may just be the instrument that propels reality into a whirling vortex of postmodern news doom.

The problem with Newswipe is the news itself. When Chris Morris parodied the genre, in 1994, via The Day Today, he was remarkably prescient, but still able to stroke the absurd stick until it burst, exaggerating every aspect of the news to comic effect. Unfortunately, the news subsequently became The Day Today. While idiots in 1994 somehow mistook the Morris show for real news (“Sacked chimney sweep pumps boss full of mayonnaise”/”Headmaster jailed for using big-faced child as satellite dish”), today, you’d be hard-pressed to tell the real from the fake, such is the flash, sound-bite-oriented, ratings-grabbing and absurd nature of modern news broadcasting.

And so with Brooker, the show begins with him being Chris Morris (the newsreader and the comedian), talking in Chris Morris fashion about real news, which is being portrayed in a manner like The Day Today, without irony, and continues to dissect news broadcasts that look like they’re written by Chris Morris by highlighting the absurd nature of them by sometimes being Chris Morris and by sometimes being absurd.

Overall, the show—bar the odious poetry section—is still worth a look. Brooker’s entertaining, and he briefly waggles his fact muffin to debunk a few of the wilder news claims. But I couldn’t help feeling that the show is almost redundant. The news has become a parody of itself, and trying to create a comedy vehicle around it (albeit one concentrating on satire and deconstruction) results in the frustration of a show being slightly drier and more serious than what it’s reporting on, which is supposed to be dry and serious in the first place, but isn’t.

It’s enough to make your brain hurt.

Lights! Camera! Titles!

From mid-2007 until the end of last year, I regularly wrote for 4Talent, but Channel 4 radically rebooted the website this year, removing the interview archive. Although many of the interviews I did for 4Talent were off their time, about specific projects or competitions, some don’t warrant vanishing forever, and so here’s the first ‘resurrected’ piece.

This an interview I did in the summer of 2007 with Kyle Cooper, the designer who revolutionised the movie title-sequence industry with Se7en, and who remains one of its leading lights today

“To be honest, I always wanted to be a film director,” begins Kyle Cooper, when we ask what first appealed to him about title design. It’s a surprising revelation from someone considered among the elite of title designers, but a logical one. “I thought by getting into film titles, I could find a way into the film industry itself,” he explains. Despite Kyle’s solitary director credit (2001’s New Port South), one can easily argue he’s more than achieved his goal—but instead of helming films, he’s been responsible for dozens of stunning title sequences, including those for Spider-Man, Wimbledon, Dawn of the Dead, and Se7en.

Kyle continues: “I’ve always been interested in film and editing—more specifically, the juxtaposition of images in film or on a single page. However, I felt it more comprehensive to tell stories over time. Print design can provide great single moments, but I wanted to work with a sequence that had a beginning, middle and end.” This passion, which began in childhood, continued through Kyle’s education at Yale School of Art, and into initial roles in the creative industry. “I got a job at R/Greenberg Associates in New York, who were known for opening titles at the time,” says Kyle. “The first main title I was allowed to pitch for was Martin Scorsese’s Life Lessons. I won, and was promoted to managing the design department.”

Start with the prologue

In time, Kyle moved on to even bigger and better things, eventually founding the company he runs today, Prologue. With an initial aim to “do main titles and motion graphics as progressive as what was happening in print and other areas of graphic design,” Kyle has made good on this promise, creating visually exciting titles with impact. Partly, this is down to his philosophy that titles are far more than a list of credits: “Titles must be born out of the content of the film itself—they’re in service of the film’s story, and even if they’re visually interesting, they should have a deeper meaning and connect with the movie’s characters.” Many factors must be taken into account, including the director’s wishes. “A director is the gatekeeper to what the final film will be,” notes Kyle, “and so it’s my job to service those needs and make something that dovetails perfectly with the director’s point of view”.

Studios can also affect title sequences, as Kyle explains: “What’s interesting about the way I’m currently working—and, coincidentally, the reason for naming my company Prologue—is that studios are screening films to test audiences and realising something else is needed after principal photography has been shot. The audience may have missed something about the plot, and I’m asked to use the title sequence to help tell the story. Many sequences I’ve done as Prologue have become the film’s prologue: the main titles of Se7en and Dawn of the Dead became the first scene in each movie. If those sequences weren’t at the beginning, the overall impression and understanding of the films would have been different.”

These things, according to Kyle, highlight an important aspect of title design: “When collaborating with other people, you cannot always have the definitive answer—you have to allow ideas to evolve, and that comes from listening and talking things out.” Because title design involves working on varied projects—each production typically taking just a few months—it’s also important to tailor the visual design to each specific movie. “I try not to let one project influence the next, and don’t bring a ‘style’ to each movie,” says Kyle. “New ideas result from keeping my work informed by each film’s content, context and voice. Because each film is a different problem to solve, each solution is different. The process of researching, experimenting and exploring fitting ideas for each film leads to unforeseen and unexpected answers. The opportunity to be innovative comes by immersing oneself in a film and being true to the work.”

Old versus new

Perhaps surprisingly, given the dynamic, cutting-edge nature of many of Kyle’s projects (think of the movement in the webs, text and imagery in the Spider-Man titles), he considers technology something of a double-edged sword, and favours old techniques: “I try to do as much as possible in the camera, or with my hands, although that’s increasingly hard to do today”. At Prologue, technology inevitably gained a foothold, but Kyle stresses that “tools do not dictate the direction of ideas,” and warns: “While technology enables certain modes of production, it does not provide a good story nor clear communication nor a beautiful image!”

What technology does provide is a means for Kyle to improve his exacting attention to detail: “I like designing in the edit room, because it gives me an opportunity to see every frame that has been designed and animated, and manipulate those images accordingly. I review composition on a frame-by-frame basis, which I realise is unusual in this field, but not in respect to the framework of my graphic design background and training. I truly want every frame in the sequence to be a beautiful, perfect composition.”

For the industry’s future, Kyle thinks a mix of new technology and traditional ideas will lead to many more classic title sequences. Technical innovations bring the potential for increasingly complex films, and few limits exist regarding what can be done. Kyle reckons advances in CGI and motion-capture are leading to a point where viewers won’t be able to distinguish something photographed from computer generated imagery, and so main titles will “become anything that can be imagined”. Ultimately, though, Kyle thinks the keys to successful titles sequences remain timeless: “They should make you feel something emotionally, and make you thrilled to be in a particular cinema at a particular moment, getting ready to see a particular movie. We strive to make everything else in the world go away except the curiosity, excitement, and feeling of anticipation for the film you’re about to see. If you’re already immersed in the emotional tone of the film or have insights into the main character’s thought process before the film begins, we have achieved what we strive for, and I hope the work we create continues to emotionally engage people in this way.”