The entertainment medium that's most thoroughly indebted science fiction these days is probably the video game—sci-fi tropes and aesthetics have successfully permeated all media, of course, but it predominates video games more than it does films, TV series, or books. Case in point: the most anticipated game of the day is probably Bungie's Destiny (I feel the hype, and I don't even have an Xbox), and that's essentially an old-school, 1920s space opera with crazy good graphics.Which is interesting. Bungie is certainly trying its damnedest to transport today's youthful video game-buying masses into an otherworldly future, and it's doing so with a narrative and visual palette that hasn't changed much over the last 100 years. Which is no accident: the game's designers are clearly sci-fi buffs, and they've conscientiously absorbed decades of classic genre hallmarks into crafting their latest epic (Bungie is also the team behind Halo). Bungie describes Destiny as the first science fiction "shared world shooter."
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Polygon sat down with Bungie at the GDC games conference in San Francisco (where Motherboard's own Colin Snyder is roaming around, too), and the developers designed the inspiration for the sure-to-be-bestselling Destiny.Bungie set about building the "idealized reality" of Destiny by exploring the combination of fantasy and sci-fi by creating hundreds of visual "touchstones." One image in particular captured the essence of Destiny, that of a cloaked space soldier standing next to a white space tiger — an animal responsible for the game's codename, "Tiger."The game's look and story, it turns out, is all about meshing fantasy and science fiction visuals, which is a call back to some of the earliest works of sci-fi. In those early days of science fiction, authors went light on the science and heavy on the bulge-eyed monsters and noble beasts–proto sci-fi like Edgar Rice Burrough's Mars books, which were essentially fantasy novels that took place on Mars.Destiny's story, however, is more anchored in the space opera mold. Those tales of Earth under attack (mostly by the bulge-eyed monsters, natch) and the galaxy at war first got popular in the 1920s with the rise of pulp mags like Amazing Stories. In both genres, logic dictates little: You can populate space with six-armed green monsters a la Burroughs or with white space tigers a la Bungie; they're just there because the authors thought it would be cool for them to be there (who knows what's out there in space, after all, could be anything)—and to have humans vanquish them.
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As for the specific aesthetics,Destiny's visual direction drew inspiration from Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, director of Solaris and Stalker, and in an effort to not "take ourselves too seriously," the work of Terry Gilliam, specifically Time Bandits. Bungie tapped '70s sci-fi art for inspiration, Barrett said, including the work of John Harris, Zdzislaw Beksinski and Peter Gric. Destiny's visual language also draws from anime and Japanese sculptors Takayuki Takeya and Kow Yokoyama.So we've got an aesthetic rooted in the dictates of old school fantasy/sci fi on one end, and a heavy emphasis on the look of 70s and 80s sci-fi art on the other. We can trace the legacy of the next sci-fi video game smash hit directly to a tradition that began in the 1910s (maybe earlier), and has evolved little but been refined plenty since then. Here's, roughly, the ingredients that go into the modern space video game epic:
The first work widely recognized as space opera, The Skylark of Space, published in Amazing Stories in 1928. And that's all the conjecture we'll need to rely on. From here on out, it's Bungie's own words. These are the works they cited as major influences on Destiny, making the following equation possible:
… Zdzislaw Beksinski's fictive alien creep-art, plus Peter Gric's concept architecture, equals something that looks like this:
That's 2013 sci-fi, stuffed like a soaked sponge with the shapes and colors of its forebears. It looks like nothing on this world, but like plenty we've already seen.
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