#THIS TRULY IS AN ARCANE ODYSSEY

[lunastars21]

Nimbus sea part 1 is okay, hope they fix the bugs and stuff

I don’t have the sirens pants sad :<

[mordvpn]

💥 CURSE 💥 YOU 🫵, FIRSTNAME SURNAME 🧍‍♂️ ‼️ I'LL FOLLOW 🏊‍♂️ YOU 👁️ TO ▶️ THE END 💀 OF WAR ⚔️ SEAS 🌊 FOR WHAT 😡 YOU 💢 HAVE 😤 DONE ‼️ COME BACK HERE 👇 AND FINISH 😱 ME 🤓 OFF ⚠️ 💢 IT SHOULD 🗯️ HAVE 😡 BEEN ME 😭 WHO 😢 DIED 🪦 ‼️ I'LL KILL 😱 YOU 🫵 AND EVERYONE 👪 YOU 🫵 CARE 💔 FOR ‼️ JUST LIKE YOU 😡 DID TO ME 😭 FIRST NAME SURNAME ‼️ ‼️ 💥 💥 💥 🔥 🔥 🔥 🚒 💯

[beaningeneralacceptance]

I would really love to see the return of the sky skates when Skyhall is added. Not only that... I want to see a whole mid-air boss battle! Not like the one with Verdis where you could land and recharge but literally in the middle of the sky. No clouds, no floating island. How cool would that be? Just figure skating in the clouds, blasting magic or kicking or slashing against an all powerful foe!

[indecisive-v]

every day is another day of me patiently waiting for vetex to say anything about spirit weapons and vitality classes

[g1-skywarp]

so many magic posts on my dash today damn

[crowrave]

Quick doodle dump of my Arcane Odyssey OC!

Technically I have 2 versions of him (this is the first save slot)!

Posting the 2nd version soon!

Cain Crown is cocky for a newbie in the Grand Navy. He’s hardheaded, and not afraid to instigate a fight; no matter how strong the opponent.

He’s a Light Magic Mage, and a force to reckon with; constantly dodging moves before pushing a quick combo against his enemies.

Codenames are common for the Grand Navy, despite each hero being well known in the field. Cain is known by the others as “Solar” as reference to his blinding light magic, and the name of his brig (The Solar Sail)!

Despite his arrogant facade he puts up; he truly does care for his friends, and fears that they may forget about him; just like how he lost his memory of his past. He has a habit of clinging onto Morden, as he does not want to lose the only thing he has left of his past memories and life.

[joetn]

ngl, waking up to see a smut fanfic of my and my friend AO OCs was a surprise, what the fuck LMFAO, truly an arcane odyssey

[canonicallyanxious]

2022 top 10 lists

my favorite end of year tradition is making lists and trying so hard to remember literally anything i've put into my ears and eyeballs

top 10 discovered songs

note: not all 2022 releases, though a lot are

The Last Goodbye feat. Bettye LaVette - ODESZA (aka the most song of all time)

Nobody Speak feat. Run The Jewels - DJ Shadow (shoutout to my irl best friend for showing me this tour de force of a music video. this song was my top spotify track of the year also go figure)

Dynasties & Dystopia - Denzel Curry, Gizzle, Bren Joy (truly the entire Arcane soundtrack slaps from start to finish)

Dance Now - JID, Kenny Mason (really challenging to pick only one track from JID's album for this list ftr, runner ups for me include Kody Blu 31 and Better Days)

Freaks - ATARASHII GAKKO!! & Warren Hue

Violence - POLIÇA

Running Back To You feat. RebMoe - Holiday87

Star Walkin' - Lil Nas X (TWO league of legends songs on this list???!?!??!?!?! unfortunately LoL does make absolute bangin tracks and that is not my fault)

Pretend feat. Kota the Friend - pluko

Better Days - Mr Little Jeans (at least one song called Better Days made this list I guess lol)

top 10 albums

note: as per tradition these are all 2022 releases babey! also REALLY challenging to narrow down this list, quite a few i had to cut, so this list is entirely based on personal preference - could have gone differently if i'd gone for a best albums list rather than sarah's favorite albums list

The Last Goodbye - ODESZA (congrats to ODESZA for topping both of my music lists this year, honestly a difficult feat)

Forever Story - JID (if this list was based on what I think were objectively the best albums of the year I think this one would probably top the list, just an immaculate record from start to finish)

Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers - Kendrick Lamar

Laurel Hell - Mitski

Hold the Girl - Rina Sawayama

The Family - Brockhampton (honestly crazy that i listed a BH album this far down on the list this year but since it was a fairly late release i had a lot less time to get attached to it, also imo BH's best albums ever are Ginger and Roadrunner so really hard to follow up on those but i still think this and TM are killer records)

Brighter Future 2 - Big Gigantic

Hideous - Oliver Sim

<COPINGMECHANISM> - WILLOW

NO THANK YOU - Little Simz (a bit of a last-minute addition to the list, big rip to Superorganism whose "World Wide Pop" would have taken this last spot if Little Simz had not dropped absolute fire like three weeks before the end of the year)

top 10 movies/shows

Everything Everywhere All At Once dir. Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert

Everything Everywhere All At Once dir. Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert

Everything Everywhere All At Once dir. Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert (i watched this movie three times this year don't @ me)

Arcane: Season 1 (I believe this is the only item on this list that isn't a 2022 release)

Dimension 20: A Starstruck Odyssey

Dimension 20: A Court of Fey and Flowers (am i allowed to put two seasons from the same show on this list? well i listed eeaao three times so i do whatever i want sorry about it)

Fire Island dir. Andrew Ahn

Our Flag Means Death: Season 1

What We Do in the Shadows: Season 4

Luca dir. Enrico Casarosa (never mind this is the other item on this list that isn't a 2022 release)

[ultriodoodlers]

Fanart for Karmic Spice (Youtube)

[snowyfaerie]

“𝓐 𝗍𝖺𝗅𝖾 𝗈𝖿 𝖽𝗋𝖾𝖺𝗆𝗌 𝖺𝗇𝖽 𝗆𝖾𝗅𝗈𝖽𝗒”

Once upon a time in the enchanting land of Suwon, Gyeonggi, South Korea, a radiant soul named Kim Min-Jeong was born on January 1, 2001. However, destiny had a whimsical twist, and the tale truly began on January 1, 2001, in Nampo-dong, Busan. Little Kim Min-jeong spent her childhood amidst the gentle breezes of Yangsan, Gyeongsangnam-do, surrounded by the proud echelons of a military family – a father, an older brother, and numerous kin all donned in the uniform of service. In the tender cradle of her youth, she harbored dreams of becoming a soldier herself.

Winter's journey through the chapters of life led her to Yangsan Samsung Middle School. A diligent scholar, she excelled in the arcane arts of advanced math, her popularity earning her the coveted role of vice president among her peers. Yet, her tale unfolded not only in the hallowed halls of academia but also in the symphony of skills she honed. A virtuoso of multiple instruments, the piano and guitar bowed to her command. In the realm of sports, she danced with grace through bowling alleys, embraced the precision of kendo and fencing, soared through the air in the pursuit of basketballs, and engaged in the elegant shuttlecock ballet of badminton. The rhythmic echoes of her passions resonated further as she adorned the dance club of her school. Little did she know that her destiny would take a turn at a dance festival in 2016, where an SM talent scout discovered the hidden melody within her. A surprise to her military lineage, for she had never shared her aspirations with her family. The audition demanded a songbird's serenade for three to four hours, an enchantment that secured her acceptance into the magical realm of SM Entertainment. And so, with a brave heart, she departed from Yangsan Girls' High School, her GED exam later attesting to her scholarly prowess.

𝖠 𝖬𝖾𝗅𝗈𝖽𝗂𝖼 𝖩𝗈𝗎𝗋𝗇𝖾𝗒 𝖡𝖾𝗒𝗈𝗇𝖽 𝗍𝗁𝖾 𝖵𝖾𝗂𝗅

In the mystical year of 2020, Winter emerged from the cocoon of training, unveiled as the first luminary in the celestial constellation of Aespa. The group, a wondrous creation under the auspices of SM Entertainment, bore the unique metaverse concept, captivating hearts with a resonance echoing through the corridors of the magical company. A herald of harmony, Winter and her compatriots embarked on their melodic odyssey, casting spells with the debut single "Black Mamba" on November 17. This ethereal journey marked not only the genesis of Aespa but also the rebirth of SM Entertainment's girl group legacy, a tale continuing the enchanting narrative woven by Red Velvet in the bygone days of 2014.

And so, the chronicles of Winter, born Kim Min-Jeong, unfolded – a tapestry of dreams, melodies, and the captivating allure of the metaverse.

[rotisseries]

🎬📺 Share ten different favorite characters from ten different pieces of media in no particular order 🎮🃏 Then send this to 10 people (anon or not, your choice) /nf !!

HELLO🤩🤩

nancy wheeler stranger things. my babygirl my sweet cheese my everything. I don't talk about her enough but I promise she's my fave

link legend of zelda. specifically botw, but all links are good. perfect character, any and every queer headcanon works with this guy. he's transfem he's transmasc he's gay he's bi he's a lesbian, truly thee character of all time

percy jackson. not to choose the main character like I'm the most boring person ever but I love him <333

yennefer the witcher. I LOVE HER I LOVE "MEAN" WOMEN. fun fact: my introduction to the witcher franchise was the 3rd game and literally the second she was on screen I knew she was the one for me. you can also romance triss in that game but she never stood a chance with me. also I feel like I'm the only person in the witcher fandom who prefers yenralt to geraskier bc of this (but both are good)

zelda botw. I know I already put a zelda character on this list but I love her too much, she is soooo. I'm the only one who understands her and every gamer bro on the internet who calls her whiny and annoying will die by my hand

inej six of crows. not to out myself as a ya reader, but, knife wife <33

sokka atla. if you saw earlier when this said a different character no you didn't<3 I completely forgot about atla for some reason and I couldn't live with myself

vi arcane. I'm a lesbian

kassandra assassin's creed odyssey. I'm a lesbian

beverly marsh. I love her I wish stephen king didn't hate women

[linuxgamenews]

Source of Madness side scroller has a Linux build in the works

Source of Madness dark action roguelite game holds hope for Linux with Windows PC. Thanks to recent details from the creators, Carry Castle. Which is already doing very well on Steam Early Access. Coming in hot with 91% Very Positive reviews. Thunderful Publishing & Carry Castle have revealed that With ever changing landscapes to explore and new monstrosities to face on every run, Source of Madness Lovecraftian odyssey offers a truly unique spin on the genre. Plus the developers already have sights on Linux support, according to the Discussions reply.

I have built it for Linux and we fixed one bug there. I hope we can support Linux and the real launch. But right now we need to focus on making the game great. And not stop and do a new Linux bug to test things out in addition to the normal build. I hope this makes sense to you too. I cannot promise but I think we will be able to support it. Also, we have already had people playing it on Linux.

First off, Source of Madness is developed in Unity 3D. So this means that Proton support works, and very well I might add. However, it's also a pleasure to know that Carry Castle already have a Linux build. Along with already applying a fix. But the studio has a strong point since they are focused on "making the game great". Its also typical of some developers to wait until after Early Access. Which is due to last "for half a year".

Source of Madness | Early access out now

Source of Madness is a side scrolling dark action roguelite set in the Loam Lands. Which is a twisted Lovecraftian inspired world powered by procedural generation and AI machine learning. This is where you take on the role of a new Acolyte. While they embark on a nightmarish odyssey. Uncover the cosmic secrets of the Loam Lands and The Tower of Madness. Which is the moon’s mysterious Citadel. The horrific monsters you face in Source of Madness are never the same. Coming together with procedural generation and animated using a neural network AI. This also includes explosive close combat magic. A puzzling setting that is ripe for exploring. On top of powerful loot management and a skill tree filled with abilities, classes, and spells. All coming together in a beautiful AI assisted art style. The amazing world of the Loam Lands reveals a deep arcane lore. Unfolding as players uncover its many secrets. Source of Madness dark action roguelite RPG releases now on Steam Early Access. Priced at $16.99 USD / €16.99 / £13.99. Currenlty only available on Windows PC, but a Linux build is in the mix.

[bigporras]

Lovecraftian inspired action roguelite Source of Madness is coming soon to PC (Steam®)

Thunderful Publishing & Carry Castle have revealed all new gameplay for their upcoming Lovecraftian side-scrolling action roguelite Source of Madness, ahead of its release later this year on PC (Steam®). Having premiered at this year’s Guerrilla Collective showcase, this latest trailer teases but a handful of the procedurally generated horrors you’ll encounter in this creepy cosmic adventure!

Source of Madness is a side-scrolling dark action roguelite set in a twisted Lovecraftian inspired world powered by procedural generation and AI machine learning. Take on the role of a new Acolyte as they embark on a nightmarish odyssey. Uncover the cosmic secrets of the Loam Lands and The Tower of Madness, the moon’s mysterious Citadel.

Fight hordes of nightmarish beasts utilising powerful close-combat magic, explore labyrinthine environments, collect powerful loot and manage your item loadout, then infuse the beasts’ blood at magical altars to unlock additional abilities, perks and spells. Decide your Acolyte’s fate in the customisable skill tree.

As your journey progresses, the arcane lore of the Loam Lands unfurls and plunges you deeper into its dark depths. The world and monsters are rendered using a combination of hand-drawn assets, AI visual manipulation and procedural generation. The monsters inhabiting this dark world are animated using a machine learning AI. This means Source of Madness offers ever-changing landscapes to explore and new monstrosities to face on every run.

“We’re really thrilled to partner with Guerilla Collective to show off more of the game as we get closer to launch later this year,” said Carry Castle CEO Per Fronander. “We not only wanted to showcase our unique AI-driven art style, with its gothic and Lovecraftian overtones; but we also used this opportunity to tease a little more of the arcane lore that Source of Madness will contain for those willing to explore it deeper...”

Source of Madness combines so much of what we love about cosmic horror and video games into one unholy cocktail of roguelike adventuring,” said Thunderful Head of Publishing, Dieter Shoeller. “Its procedurally generated creatures and labyrinths make it utterly unpredictable and eerie, as you encounter machine learning concoctions that feel truly one of a kind.”

About Carry Castle

Carry Castle is a small game company based in Sweden that loves new technology and was born from their great passion for playing and making games. Its titles include musical VR relaxation experience Zen Garden, the action-packed VR physics adventure Everything Must Fall, and its upcoming gothic action-roguelike Source of Madness.

About Thunderful Publishing

Thunderful Publishing is a games publishing company, founded in Gothenburg, Sweden in 2017. Part of the Thunderful Group, which also includes development studios Zoink Games and Image & Form, and publisher Rising Star Games, Thunderful Publishing focuses on premium PC and console games for a worldwide audience and is the publisher behind award-winning games such as Steamworld Quest: Hand of Gilgamesh, Lonely Mountains: Downhill and Curious Expedition 2.

[arcadeidea]

The Magnavox Odyssey [1971] + Pong [1972]

The most famous Magnavox Odyssey game is Table Tennis. It was the direct inspiration for Pong, and there is an infamous lawsuit decided in Magnavox's favor to that effect, which became famously the first of decades of copyright trolling putting up a hundreds-of-millions tollbooth on the mere concept of video games at home. If we take gaming as a legitimate art form, which is the essential premise of this blog, then it's the equivalent of copyrighting the concept of canvas. Despicable! If we are to take gaming as a legitimate art form, though... It behooves me to mention its business legacy, and move on briskly.

Table Tennis might look for all the world like Pong, (I'm not going to pretend like we can talk about one without the other,) but the way each handles is worlds apart. The elements of Table Tennis are the two pawns, the ball, and the line separating one side of the screen from the other. The pawns are controlled with both a horizontal and vertical dial, much like the horizontal and vertical alignment control dials familiar from period televisions. This direct inversion of The Outer Limits' famous promise is telling of its conceptualization as a "TV Game," designed by a television manufacturer. It's a peek at TV from the technician's perspective, or perhaps the television's itself, all light and no content. The ball always travels at a constant horizontal rate, changing direction when it hits something solid, but its vertical position can be directly manipulated by the last player to touch it with an "English" knob, which fictionalizes it as the spin you give the ball... but that's a lie. Spin, in real life, is applied at the moment and thereafter set. If the ball goes off-screen The line exists, but is, in Table Tennis, intangible and powerless. Players can cross the pawns across the line freely or eliminate it or change its location.

This marks a distinct change from the inherently hostile gameworlds we've seen up until now. Here, the players are in nigh-absolute control of the game. It inherits something of the designer Ralph Baer's experience, the sheer delight of drawing light on the CRT. Basic components like the size of the squares or width of the net or speed of the ball can be customized by the player. The TV screen has become a playground. For example, the players could theoretically completely ignore intended play to create a state of equilibrium and adjust the distance between the pawns for use as a metronome, or at incredibly-close distances, granular sound synthesis. This freedom isn't really the players', though. They could exercise it, but they're not encouraged to. It's the designer's. To freestyle with your square of light would be "play", but it would be the play you do with a toy, not with a game. A game has rules, constaints. The Magnavox Odyssey can have a lot of rules, they're just not enforced by hardware. Thus far, paratext like genre or history has informed how we fictionalize the mechanics of a game, now the rules themselves bare their artificiality and voluntary nature as they leap out of the screen and onto the page. Literally, you are given transparent overlays to superimpose on your screen and circumscribe yourself. Lots of the games come with further extensions like board games and cards.

The games of the Magnavox Odyssey beg to be considered as a whole, like the games of a WarioWare or other minigame compilation, seeing as they all came bundled together with the unit. They are all variations on a theme, which is to say all the other games are based on Table Tennis. It reminds me of the old "creativity test" where you have to write down as many things as you can think of to do with a paperclip. These people, who as far as they know are the innovators of the video game, sit at the dawn of the medium and are really roaring to take it for a spin and see what can be done with three squares and a line. Some games, like Cat And Mouse, want you to move on a grid. Some games, like Handball, make the line solid. Some games, like Invasion, use the "RESET" button that returns the ball when it leaves the screen instead as a "fire" button. Some games, like Fun Zoo or University Of The Solar System which are quizzes to challenge children, or Ski in which you trace a dotted line, could be adequately replaced with two tokens or better yet flashlights to shine on the board to indicate player position. Some games, especially the ones that attempt to emulate team sports with only two pawns like Baseball or Football, spiral into arcane knots that run on for pages and are approximately as complex as... let's say Settlers Of Catan [1995].

The Magnavox Odyssey also has lightgun games, bringing us 3 for 3 on games being a medium where perhaps the most significant direct interaction you can have with the world is shooting it with a gun. It makes you question if there's something fundamental about video games that makes them well-suited for shooting and/or violence. I think there is, but moreover that it's not driven into existence by a rotten, violent culture. Less cynically: It's a way of conceptualizing space and extending player agency beyond the immediate vicinity, nigh-instantaneously and in immediately apprehendable and intuitive ways, same as the ball off the pawn in either Table Tennis or Pong. And death is easy to program, a moving object becomes a non-moving object or even stops existing.

The visual impact of the two square pawns, not to mention the way they explore rules and rely heavily on external text and for the most part familiarity with external referent to function as legible, reminds me of nothing so much as The Marriage [2006], a flashpoint for discussion of the expressive potential of rules as art and a bold stride of minimalism, which almost could have been on the Odyssey save for the gendering colors. I'd like to take a closer look at the alphabetically-first Magnavox Odyssey game: Analogic.

In Analogic, the players begin at opposite corners of the board and the goal is to get to the other corner. Whoever is first wins, but motion is confined to a grid labelled with arbitrary numbers, and moreover, each player can only move to adjacent squares that would make the sum of the number they're moving to and the sum of the number their opponent is currently on either even or odd (depending on starting position.) On top of this strategic level that could again be replicated with tokens or flashlights, the players must maintain a constant volley of the ball. Keep in mind, the players will be positioned diagonally at the start, and possibly for the entire run of the game, while the ball without constant player input automatically moves horizontally. Once again, even with the OdySim emulator I am bereft of the experience of actually being able to get hands-on and play the damn thing, not only because of the lack of a player 2, but because of the fundamental difference between a keyboard press that will move me at a constant rate and the dial that will let me zip the ball or creep along, so I'm really mostly analyzing the manual here — but I can only imagine that this experience is tense and taxing, even if you know your addition front and back. Also, the players are nominally in competition by virtue of the win condition, but in every other aspect they are inexorably, fascinatingly mutually parasitic. Not only must a connection between players constantly maintained with effort, but the very rules of movement are constructed only collaboratively. This doesn't "mean" anything, like The Marriage is explained to... but it could, easily, with a simple twist of the mind, a recontextualization. There's just as much here as there about the balancing act of pursuing your own goals while maintaining the fraught interpersonal bonds that keep us healthy. It goes to show there's still gold in the 1-Bit Singular Activity Game hills, that works of art don't truly get superseded, be it Table Tennis by Pong or Pong by Ultra Pong [1977]. Art lives in the eternal now.

Pong still largely retains the sheen of the "first video game" in popular culture, even though it's since been outmoded many times over on that count, and part of that is the business savvy of Atari — such as pioneering video game microtransactions by charging 25 cents a taste, instead of $100 upfront (equivalent to $611 in 2019 dollars) for something almost nobody on Earth knew what was yet — turning Pong into something actually popular with the mass public, but part of it is also that, in its stripped-back constrained style, it really does look and feel like the ur-game. Even a short survey of game history up to this point (like of Galaxy Game [1971]) shows that the technology at Atari's disposal could have been pushed much further towards representation and sophistication than they were. No, the primitivism of Pong shouldn't be understood as economic or technological limitations, but as aesthetic ones. Pong is minimalist, honed to a sterile knife's edge.

It was Atari's second time up to bat with the arcade-game model, the first being Computer Space [1971], which was their take on Spacewar [1962], but changed up far more compared to the inspiration than Galaxy Game or Pong, with UFOs that moved in different patterns instead of a star or another player, and bullets curving under the influence of gravity. Their next game would have a punchier name, to match less convoluted gameplay. Pong was actually apparently designed as a telephone-game version of Table Tennis, the designer Allan Alcorn in ignorance of it, under orders to make a tennis game from Nolan Bushnell, who had seen the Table Tennis game. It kinda shows: There's none of the delight in the novelty of drawing on a CRT monitor that bled through into the open design of Table Tennis. For the first time on this blog, the quietly confident craftsmanship of a video game that knows what video games is. The instructions are three lines long, printed on the front of the machine.

The square screen enclosing the play is mostly empty space, but all that vertical space means is that you have more ground to cover and less time to react than on a more standard horizontal-rectangle display. Points (an Atari concept inherited from Computer Space) are the point, written out far bigger than anything else, parceled out one-by-one until victory. The paddles are small, the ball is smaller, and both are fast, in contrast not just to Table Tennis but also the downright stately and methodical Spacewar. The "English" mechanic is replaced with harsh zig-zag trajectories either randomly assigned from half-court or ricocheting wildly from encounter with the minutely different parts of the paddle, so there's no thought, nothing clever, just action. It's a raw reflex test: you can get to any point on the screen in no time flat, but can you operate the dial with both speed and precision? It's a closer approximation of a real white-knuckle sports experience than anything the Odyssey could provide. Such a frenzy entranced.

Magnavox Odyssey games may have pitted players 1 & 2 against each other, but given how the construct of the games only exist by a constant act of collaboration and good faith on both parts, or how it's pitched squarely at the hypothetical nuclear family unit, it makes more sense to conceive of the relationship between the players as nominally adversarial. Pong is much more the competition, and without the constant labor of just upholding rules, players can enter a flow state of conquering the challenges (or challengers) before them. Its location in public means that this is a game anyone with sight and a hand can pick up, even complete strangers, who will then have something to relate about. The advertising shows as a demographic, instead of rosy-faced children, hip 1970s young adults, or boast that its understated cabinet is suitable for "sophisticated locations," perhaps coyly alluding to the massive sexual tension of mingling over a game of Pong [1972] surrounded by ferns and wood paneling. (Atari’s first attempt at a wholly original title, Gotcha [1973], would be infamous for its purposefully boob-evoking controllers.) Video games wouldn't become widely solitary affairs like their cousin the pinball machine until taken back into the home for good with the rise of the Atari 2600 and the first personal computers instead of ARPANET-connected mainframes. I'll regrettably be skipping ahead past multiplayer games from here on out, and thus most of this 1-bit era I'm growing fond of. It's worth noting, though, that in doing so I could arguably be missing the entire point of the medium of games, those communal or outward-looking experiences that the titles covered so far have been purpose-built for.

Like Table Tennis was on the Odyssey, Pong was taken as prototype in the arcade, both by Atari and by what was now an industry of a new class of professional video game developers. Just look at this incomplete list of Pong variations and derivatives, which doesn't even count, like, Breakout [1976], sideways solo Pong. As much as that paints a bleak picture of an industry unwilling to explore the boundaries of what games were capable of like on the Odyssey in favor of chasing a quick buck, well, it's a very incomplete picture of what quickly became a pretty big industry: Pong, overnight, forever changes video games from a utopian proposition into a primarily commercial one.

[spynotebook]

Image: DC Comics. Art by Greg Capullo

DC’s next big event, Dark Nights: Metal, is promising to head to some strange places. How strange? “The Justice League clad in ‘90s action figure armor plating fighting in an alien combat arena” strange. And honestly, it sounds kind of great.

Scott Snyder, former Batman writer and part of the team behind Dark Nights: Metal, discussed the upcoming series with IGN today. While doing so, he revealed that the series has some seriously wild ties to the arcane world of DC’s cosmology, linking Hawkman’s own research into Nth Metal—a material that’s been in existence in the DC universe since the origin of reality itself—to an experiment by Batman. It seemingly sees the Justice League discover a whole new multiverse, just hiding beneath the reality DC’s heroes usually inhabit:

I can’t say too much about it. I don’t want to spoil too much, but ultimately, I got fascinated by this idea that our universe itself is comprised mostly of dark matter and dark energy. Things that we can’t perceive at all, and we’ve only discovered that relatively recently. So it’s almost as if our universe is the foam on the ocean of things that we can’t see, or know, or perceive, and yet we feel the affects of those things right and left.

The Dark Multiverse is sort of a completely unexplored area of the DC cosmology that’s new to it, but fits in with the cosmology that’s been created by all of the writers and artists ahead of me. In terms of what Grant [Morrison] was able to do in Multiversity, with Geoff Johns in Infinite Crisis and all the way down to stories like Cosmic Odyssey. I had a great time re-reading all of that stuff.

Basically, stuff is going to get weird. And not just dark for the sake of it. Despite the name and the above art of the Justice League, which wouldn’t look out of place painted onto the side of a van in the mid ‘90s, Snyder sees this event, something he’d been laying hints out for in his seminal run on Batman with Greg Capullo, as an exploration of new and exciting material for DC, while Rebirth focuses on restoring nostalgic vibes to the company’s roster of heroes:

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I would spoil so much if I answered that. What I’ll say about the Dark Multiverse is that if Rebirth – which has been so good to us and Geoff Johns did such a great job with – is largely about bringing back classic, restoring legacy and honoring the great characters from the past and bringing them back in a way to set them up, then Metal gets to be the bad brother. The one that gets to create all kinds of new stuff. I can say that it affects, or at least the properties of dark energy, dark matter and begin to affect the DCU.

Teaser art by Andy Kubert for the new Challengers and Sideways series, debuted at C2E2 earlier this year.

While we don’t know how this new universe will affect Wonder Woman, Batman, Superman, and the rest of DC’s heroes quite yet, we do know it’s bringing some familiar superteams and new characters with it in a new Dark Matter line that will spin out of Metal, featuring five new series in the form of The Silencer, Sideways, The Immortal Men, Damage, and New Challengers. But so far, Metal sounds like it’s going to be experimenting with some truly out-there elements of the DC cosmic that I can’t wait to see someone like Snyder tackle.

Dark Nights: Metal is set to begin later this year.

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[IGN]