The Classics: cultural artifacts for the new millennium
The Classics are must-see, must-read, must-play works revered by The Verge staff. They offer glimpses of the future, glimpses of humanity, and a glimpse of our very souls. You should check them out.
The Classics: Lush, 'Spooky'
The Classics are must-see, must-read, must-play works revered by The Verge staff. They offer glimpses of the future, glimpses of humanity, and a glimpse of our very souls. You should check them out.
British band Lush’s first full-length album, Spooky (4AD, January, 1992) is a relic of a past which no longer exists, but which incessantly reminds you that it once did. You hear its reverberations in predecessors like Black Tambourine and in successors like Wild Nothing. What ties them all...
The Classics: 'Tales of the Unknown Volume 1: The Bard's Tale'
The Classics are must-see, must-read, must-play works revered by The Verge staff. They offer glimpses of the future, glimpses of humanity, and a glimpse of our very souls. You should check them out.
The year was 1986. A much-younger version of myself went over to my friend Frank's house to play games on his dad's Apple IIe. My gaming experience had been fairly limited up to that point — highlighted by Karateka, Oregon Trail, and some frustrated fumblings around the Zork trilogy (my love...
The Classics: 'Everyday Shooter'
The Classics are must-see, must-read, must-play works revered by The Verge staff. They offer glimpses of the future, glimpses of humanity, and a glimpse of our very souls. You should check them out.
It's rare that I go back and replay games. It's more a matter of time than anything else: there are just so many games out there, I'd rather be checking out something new than give something a second go. Everyday Shooter is the exception to that. It's like comfort food. It's a game that I can...
The Classics: 'It's a Good Life'
Have you heard the one about the omnipotent six-year-old? Even if you've never seen the episode, by now you probably know the gist — maybe from The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror takeoff, or a late-night description from an older brother. There was also the movie version, or the ‘80s sequel. Like the best Twilight Zone episodes, 1961's "It's a Good Life" has traveled far.
The Classics: 'Transmetropolitan'
The Classics are must-see, must-read, must-play works revered by The Verge staff. They offer glimpses of the future, glimpses of humanity, and a glimpse of our very souls. You should check them out.
It’s the future, but nobody actually knows what year it is. Humans are mass-cloned and sold as fast food (or occasionally as fresh-faced politicians), extraterrestrial life has become a fashion statement, and universal matter replicators not only exist, they can get hooked on their own...
The Classics: 'System Shock 2'
The Classics are must-see, must-read, must-play works revered by The Verge staff. They offer glimpses of the future, glimpses of humanity, and a glimpse of our very souls. You should check them out.
Despite the recent push for more nuanced and realistic narratives, some of my favorite story-driven games earned their place with grand gestures, and the recently re-released System Shock 2 is right at the top. Though the game follows 1994 Warren Spector title System Shock, it stands solidly on...
The Classics: 'The Invisibles'
The Classics are must-see, must-read, must-play works revered by The Verge staff. They offer glimpses of the future, glimpses of humanity, and a glimpse of our very souls. You should check them out.
A bald, leather-clad horror novelist who’s also a deadly assassin, now grown weary of killing. A redheaded witch sent back from the future with nanomachines in her blood. A transvestite Brazilian shaman known for facing down Aztec gods. A former NYPD officer still grieving for her kidnapped...
The Classics: 'Carnival'
The Classics are must-see, must-read, must-play works revered by The Verge staff. They offer glimpses of the future, glimpses of humanity, and a glimpse of our very souls. You should check them out.
The 1980 arcade game Carnival, released by Sega, is before my time. So too, really, is the 1982 port for the Colecovision. But, growing up, I had one friend who, in addition to her NES, also had an aging Colecovision in her basement. On that system, we spent hours playing the first two or three...
The Classics: 'Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire'
The Classics are must-see, must-read, must-play works revered by The Verge staff. They offer glimpses of the future, glimpses of humanity, and a glimpse of our very souls. You should check them out.
Like the rest of the Star Wars franchise, the bevy of novels set in a galaxy far, far away vary quite a bit when it comes to both quality and tone. There's everything from exciting thrillers that take you through the underbelly of planet-sized megacities to horror stories filled with zombified...
The Classics: 'The Iron Dream'
The Classics are must-see, must-read, must-play works revered by The Verge staff. They offer glimpses of the future, glimpses of humanity, and a glimpse of our very souls. You should check them out.
Let’s get this out of the way right now: 90 percent of Norman Spinrad’s satirical The Iron Dream is a science fiction novel written by an alternate universe Hitler. It was published in the 1970s with blurbs from luminaries like Harlan Ellison and Michael Moorcock, who said it was "bound to...
The Classics: 'Dark City'
The Classics are must-see, must-read, must-play works revered by The Verge staff. They offer glimpses of the future, glimpses of humanity, and a glimpse of our very souls. You should check them out.
In the late '90s, one of my favorite movies was about a hyper-real city that wasn't a real city at all, but instead a false reality created by powerful Capital-O Others who needed humanity to survive and kept them trapped. The hero in this story slowly became aware of this false world and his own...
The Classics: 'Burning Chrome'
The Classics are must-see, must-read, must-play works revered by The Verge staff. They offer glimpses of the future, glimpses of humanity, and a glimpse of our very souls. You should check them out.
Near-future science fiction can age poorly, and the stuff that seemed coolest in its time often fares the worst. But though his books are always firmly rooted in their era, William Gibson somehow consistently manages to escape this. Maybe it’s that he seemed to be winking when he put his...
The Classics: X Minus One
The Classics are must-see, must-read, must-play works revered by The Verge staff. They offer glimpses of the future, glimpses of humanity, and a glimpse of our very souls. You should check them out.
Here’s something I bet you never do: listen to AM radio.
The best stories are an experience which falls somewhere between reading an engrossing book and watching a television show
When I was in college and then in graduate school, I had a hard time getting to sleep, and unsurprisingly, a hard...
The Classics: 'Dirk Gently'
Two of my favorite literary series have very little in common. The numerous adventures of Sherlock Holmes are especially notable for the incredible feats of logic performed by the consulting detective, while The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is an absurdist sci-fi tale filled with fish that can translate any language and a restaurant where you can literally watch the universe end. Luckily for me, there is a character that combines the very best aspects of both: Dirk Gently, the holistic...
The Classics: 'A Mind Forever Voyaging'
The Classics are must-see, must-read, must-play works revered by The Verge staff. They offer glimpses of the future, glimpses of humanity, and a glimpse of our very souls. You should check them out.
A Mind Forever Voyaging is a text-based, interactive fiction computer game released by Infocom in 1985. Created by Steven Meretzky, who had previously designed the successful IF version of Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, AMFV is quite possibly the best text adventure...
The Classics: 'The Screwfly Solution'
The Classics are must-see, must-read, must-play works revered by The Verge staff. They offer glimpses of the future, glimpses of humanity, and a glimpse of our very souls. You should check them out.
When I was a teenager, I decided the best way to learn about science fiction was to read through every Nebula Awards collection in the library system, marking names. It rarely worked: even if I loved the story, I usually forgot the author, leaving me with a jumbled recollection of plot points and...
The Classics: '2001: A Space Odyssey'
The Classics are must-see, must-read, must-play works revered by The Verge staff. They offer glimpses of the future, glimpses of humanity, and a glimpse of our very souls. You should check them out.
In high school my friends and I would end up at the chain video store (Hastings, it was called) about once a week. There we'd spend an hour or two selecting a movie that nobody ended up liking. I usually gravitated toward sci-fi, and one week I happened upon 2001: A Space Odyssey. This was before...
The Classics: 'The Jesus Incident'
The Classics are must-see, must-read, must-play works revered by The Verge staff. They offer glimpses of the future, glimpses of humanity, and a glimpse of our very souls. You should check them out.
Frank Herbert is well-known, even amongst less hard-core science fiction fans, as the author of Dune. However, few have heard of The Jesus Incident, a later work written in collaboration with poet Bill Ransom. First published in 1979, the novel tells the story of a warring group of humans and...
The Classics: John Carpenter's 'Apocalypse Trilogy'
The Classics are must-see, must-read, must-play works revered by The Verge staff. They offer glimpses of the future, glimpses of humanity, and a glimpse of our very souls. You should check them out.
John Carpenter has made a lot of important films, at least if you're a cult or horror movie fan. Halloween, Escape From New York, Christine, and Big Trouble In Little China are just a few of his more popular works. But there are a set of movies in Carpenter's stable of releases which I think are...
The Classics: 'Another World'
The Classics are must-see, must-read, must-play works revered by The Verge staff. They offer glimpses of the future, glimpses of humanity, and a glimpse of our very souls. You should check them out.
There wasn't anything quite like Another World when it was released, and that's largely the case over two decades later. In an age where too many games teach rules by holding hands and tell stories by stopping play, Eric Chahi's 1991 Amiga classic is all the more relevant. Ostensibly a Prince of...
The Classics: 'Dino Crisis'
The Classics are must-see, must-read, must-play works revered by The Verge staff. They offer glimpses of the future, glimpses of humanity, and a glimpse of our very souls. You should check them out.
The easiest way to explain Dino Crisis is that it's Resident Evil with dinosaurs instead of zombies. And while that may sound reductive, it's also very true — and it's what makes the game so great. The change gives Dino Crisis a bigger range of enemies to fear and more reasons to fear them....
The Classics: 'The Left Hand of Darkness'
The Classics are must-see, must-read, must-play works revered by The Verge staff. They offer glimpses of the future, glimpses of humanity, and a glimpse of our very souls. You should check them out.
The Left Hand of Darkness is a classic by almost any measure: it's award-winning, having grabbed the Hugo and Nebula Awards in 1970; and it is genre-defining — famed literary critic Harold Bloom said that it was this book, more so than even Tolkien, which had "raised" fantasy to the stature of...
The Classics: 'Beneath a Steel Sky'
The Classics are must-see, must-read, must-play works revered by The Verge staff. They offer glimpses of the future, glimpses of humanity, and a glimpse of our very souls. You should check them out.
Sometimes all it takes to brighten up a dystopic future is a sense of humor. 1994's Beneath a Steel Sky from Revolution Software took place in a somewhat cliche, gritty cyberpunk world — oppressed citizens kept in check by a Big Brother-style government, that sort of thing — but managed to...
