Once hailed as the future, even the likes of Google, Sony and Microsoft have struggled to make streaming games fun, fast or affordable
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In August 2009, at the very first Gamescom expo, I sat in a small meeting room in Germany and played Mario Kart and World of Warcraft on a laptop, via technology that was then completely new: cloud gaming. It was a demonstration for a yet-to-be-launched service called Gaikai that promised to let you play any game in a browser window, without a console. (Here is an ancient video of that demonstration, featuring a very young Keza.) With a single click I could launch into any game, hosted on servers hundreds of miles away. It really did look like the future.
Since then, plenty of companies have tried to be the first to truly crack game streaming, vying to be the Netflix of games. Sony ended up buying Gaikai for $380m (£242m) in 2012; its technology now powers the streamable classic games library on PlayStation, and the PS5’s advanced game streaming. OnLive, Gaikai’s first competitor, launched in 2011 but shut down after less than a year, leaving Sony to acquire all its patents. Google’s Stadia cloud gaming service also imploded, launching in 2019 and shutting down three years later.
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© Photograph: Ina Fassbender/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Ina Fassbender/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Ina Fassbender/AFP/Getty Images
Historically a new Grand Theft Auto game inspired controversy around violence – but this time people are getting exercised about its romance
There was never any doubt that Grand Theft Auto VI’s extended look would elicit a viral reaction from the internet. Having won the Game Awards’ Most Anticipated award twice consecutively, Rockstar’s forthcoming crime opus is one of the most frothed-over games in recent memory, or indeed ever. It’s nothing short of a cultural phenomenon.
One aspect of the game has provoked an unexpectedly vehement response on social media: not violence, but romance. Protagonists Lucia and Jason are in love, you see, and as a player, part of your job is keeping their spark alive and their relationship strong, so that their criminal escapades are underpinned by a strong connection to one another. Holding hands, enjoying a date at the beach, spontaneously texting one another when apart – all of these interactions will strengthen their bond. You’ll be putting in a lot of work to ensure this couple thrives, which is why some people have come to believe that playing GTA VI counts as micro-cheating.
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© Photograph: Rockstar Games
© Photograph: Rockstar Games
© Photograph: Rockstar Games
One of the cinematic highlights of 2023 was director Takashi Yamazaki's gloriously grounded kaiju epic, Godzilla Minus One, which became a major international hit and snagged an Oscar for best visual effects. Yamazaki is back this fall with the hotly anticipated sequel, Godzilla Minus Zero. Toho just dropped the full IMAX trailer, featuring not just our beloved Godzilla, but also a distinctive roar that teases the appearance of none other than the three-headed King Ghidorah.
(Spoilers for the 2023 film below.)
Godzilla Minus One focused on kamikaze pilot Kōichi Shikishima, who struggled with survivor's guilt after he failed to take action when Godzilla attacked the Japanese base on Odo Island in 1945. Knocked unconscious, Kōichi woke to find he was one of only two survivors—and the other, a mechanic named Tachibana, was furious about it. His parents and many others were killed in the World War II bombing of Tokyo. Kōichi rebuilt a life with a woman named Noriko and the orphaned baby she rescued, Akiko. But then Godzilla re-emerged, and Kōichi resolved to die fighting the monster to atone for Odo Island.
© Toho
Luca Guadagnino-directed film will be released by Neon after being dropped by Amazon amid OpenAI partnership
The first teaser trailer of Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial has been released.
After being dropped by Amazon MGM Studios in June, the biopic of the OpenAI tech executive Sam Altman will be released in the US on 25 December by Neon after it premieres at the New York film festival this October.
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© Photograph: Courtesy of Neon
© Photograph: Courtesy of Neon
© Photograph: Courtesy of Neon
In 1948, Muriel Howorth was living a relatively ordinary life in the seaside town of Eastbourne on the south coast of England when she received a letter that would completely change the trajectory of her life.
From an early age, she had wanted to take part, or as she put it, “be of use” in international affairs. During World War II, she was employed by the Ministry of Information, the government office primarily responsible for wartime publicity and propaganda in the UK.
Howorth must have been talented at promotion and publicity, because the letter that arrived in 1948—“out of the blue,” according to her personal papers—inquired if she would like to apply her talents to making atomic energy seem more friendly.
She was well-educated, but not terribly knowledgeable about atomic science, so she borrowed a book by the radiochemist Frederick Soddy, who was born in Eastbourne, titled The Interpretation of Radium. Within a few chapters, she found herself a true believer in the promise of the atom. She would devote the rest of her life to sharing the wonders of atomic science with anyone who would listen.
The United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, a key factor in the end of World War II. The scale of the destruction and the ongoing damage from nuclear fallout after these attacks was vast. Despite the devastation, when a Gallup poll was released in mid-August of 1945, 85 percent of Americans approved of the bombing.
The atom was more or less a mystery to the average American, and was seen both as something to be feared and a source of hope. The potential for nuclear energy seemed endless, and although the Soviet Union was America’s ally, establishing a lead over the Soviets in nuclear technology seemed prudent.
In the years after World War II, American and European scientists and heads of state agreed that there should be a focus on more productive and peaceful uses for atomic power. The letter that Howorth received in 1948 was part of this effort. She threw herself into projects that combined science education and entertainment.
Notable among these was an elaborately choreographed pantomime titled Isotopia: An Exposition on Atomic Structure. Howorth also self-published a children’s book featuring Daddy Proton, Mummy Neutron, and their electron children. Her greatest impact as an early science communicator, though, was her work in atomic gardening.
Applying radiation to agricultural plants was, in part, a response to wartime scarcity. Restricted rations had made people acutely aware of the possibility of food insecurity. Researchers hoped that exposure to gamma radiation might induce mutations that resulted in higher-yielding or disease-resistant crop varieties. Perhaps some of those crops might be more dense in nutrients, too.
As atomic ambassador, Howorth founded the Atomic Gardening Association and recruited hundreds of members—or, as she called them, “atomic mutation experimenters.” Soon, atomic gardening kits were available to the public. One could send away for packets of seeds from an irradiated plant. By planting these seeds and propagating multiple generations of the plants, home gardeners could test whether any useful-seeming mutations had arisen.
Howorth herself served a mutated variety of Carolina peanuts to some of her scientist friends in 1959. Their response was underwhelming, so she planted the rest of the peanuts in her garden, where they grew remarkably quickly and produced extremely large peanuts. She usually kept a handful of these extra-large peanuts tucked away in her handbag in case the opportunity arose to recruit a new member to the Atomic Gardening Association.
It’s tempting to view Howorth as a kooky eccentric. Contemporary newspaper reports of her various events and projects were certainly dismissive in tone. More accurately, she represents an early effort at addressing the gap between scientific research and public understanding.
The world was far less interconnected in her day, with no internet, no omnipresent news media, and no social media platforms. Not only that, but the idea of women as integral parts of scientific research was slow to catch on, despite pioneering work by scientists like Marie Curie and Rosalind Franklin.
Today, the same gulf exists between what scientists publish in their fields and what the average person understands. The same challenge of translating scientific language for public consumption exists for science communicators, but the tools available to them have evolved beyond recognition. You can find videos and posts by scientists explaining everything from how blimps work to what various chemical reactions look like, or from how fossils form to why black holes are so dark.
If Howorth were around today, her atomic choreography might have gone viral. As it stands, she was a wonderful example of the love of sharing knowledge with the public, and of the excitement and joy that comes with learning new things about how our world works.
In That Time When, Popular Science tells the weirdest, surprising, and little-known stories that shaped science, engineering, and innovation.
During WWII, Great Britain poisoned sheep with anthrax on an idyllic Scottish island
When the U.S. almost nuked Alaska—on purpose
During WWII, a dress-wearing squirrel sold war bonds alongside FDR
During WWII, the U.S. government censored the weather
After WWII, flying saucer-shaped houses almost filled American suburbs
The CIA once trained cats to be Cold War spies
The post The British author who harvested mutant, jumbo peanuts from her atomic garden appeared first on Popular Science.
Venice film festival: Alex Gibney interviews former colleagues, wives, the trillionaire’s father and a CG avatar in this absorbing documentary
‘Elon is a nuke.” The speaker is Ashley St Clair, a former conservative Maga influencer and one of Elon Musk’s former girlfriends-slash-baby mommas.
She is a fascinating expert witness in Alex Gibney’s four-hour epic study of the world’s richest and dullest man: the overgrown brattish South-African-born trillionaire plutocrat, ersatz visionary and Trump courtier who owns Tesla cars, SpaceX rocket ships, Starlink satellites on which nation states’ military capabilities are increasingly reliant, X (formerly Twitter) which shapes the collective incel id of billions and GrokAI whose vast server farms daily guzzle oceans of precious water.
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© Photograph: Alex Brandon/AP
© Photograph: Alex Brandon/AP
© Photograph: Alex Brandon/AP
A biodegradable wash may help remove surface pesticide residues and keep fruit fresh longer, though more testing is needed before real-world use. Many shoppers follow the same pattern after buying produce: they bring fruits and vegetables home, wash them, dry them, and hope they stay good long enough to eat. Fresh produce, however, can deteriorate [...]The story of a Medieval European plague is coming into focus through historic manuscripts, but not in the way you might think. Instead of providing mere historical accounts, the animal skins from which these Medieval volumes are constructed provide genetic evidence for reconstructing the 3,500-year story of the sheepox virus (SPPV), which decimated European livestock.
In a recent paper published in Science Advances, an international team of interdisciplinary researchers ranging from geneticists and virologists to historians and conservators explored the history of this pre-modern plague.
The new work combs through Medieval history to reveal the lineages of diseases plaguing modern herds, providing new insight into the viruses threatening modern animal agriculture.
Chosen for the work were some of the most important Medieval manuscripts that Europe has to offer, including the millennium-old York Gospels, one of the best surviving examples of an early Anglo-Saxon illuminated manuscript. Another work used in the study was one of the earliest known English dictionaries, the Corpus Glossary of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Beyond these notable examples, the team exploited a variety of English and continental European works.
Medieval volumes did not contain paper pages like modern books, but instead, vellum pages made of calfskin, as well as the skins of goats and sheep. Therefore, these works are preserved as hundreds-of-years-old biological specimens for modern geneticists.
SPPV tends to target younger animals, such as the calves from whom vellum is made, and is highly contagious, rapidly spreading through large portions of a herd. While these factors made the disease easier for modern researchers to study via vellum samples, it also made it devastating to wool, meat, and milk production.
“The recording of ancient DNA of pathogens has completely changed our understanding of infectious disease in the past, and here we show that parchment can also preserve animal pathogen DNA. It is possible that archives and libraries around the world also contain the genetic traces of disease outbreaks in animals in the past,” said lead author Louis L’Hôte, PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, Dublin.
“These genomes help us understand how these pathogens evolved and how they impacted past societies – such as sheeppox virus, which we show has been affecting Eurasian sheep herds for at least three and a half millennia,” L’Hôte added.
With the rapid spread of SPPV across herds, many manuscripts contained SPPV DNA on multiple pages within the same manuscript. Additionally, finding SPPV DNA on pages made from both calf and goat skin marks it as a rare example of cross-species infection.
“Parchment making has been considered a vanishing craft, but we are beginning to understand just how much of the past it has retained. This project shows that parchments not only preserve our cultural history for hundreds of years, but also the landscape of disease in our livestock in the medieval period,” said supervising author Dr Kevin G. Daly, Associate Professor at UCD School of Agriculture and Food Science.
“This kind of exciting, surprising discovery is only possible when researchers from a range of disciplines come together to share their expertise and data,” Day said, calling this “a generosity and trust that collaborative science depends on.”
The Medieval manuscripts combine with even older surviving biological records, such as teeth, to show the virus reaching back 3,700 years. Between the manuscripts and archaeological finds, the team identified 41 samples containing related viruses.
Along with the goatpox virus and the lumpy skin disease virus, SPPV belongs to a category called capripoxviruses. The new research allowed the team to compare the ancient and modern sequences to determine that the division between the various viruses in the group occurred between 3,700 and 11,500 years ago, around the time animal domestication took hold in Europe as sheep came off the steppe.
“Ancient genomes can help us understand how these pathogens affecting us today evolved. We find that, unlike the smallpox virus, the sheeppox virus genome was very stable over the last few millennia,” L’Hôte concluded. “This might mean that genetic changes before this point were very important to how the sheeppox virus evolved to infect its host, which may help us fight the pathogen in the future.”
The paper, “3,500 years of Sheeppox Virus Evolution Inferred from Archaeological and Codicological Genomes,” appeared in Science Advances on September 2, 2026.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.
John Ternus has entered one of the most visible positions in global business without trying to turn his first days into a personal media event. The new CEO arrived with a remarkably discreet public profile, a newly opened social presence and decades of work completed mostly behind Apple’s products.
His X account, @johnternus, appeared publicly on September 1, the day he officially succeeded Tim Cook. Its biography contained only the company logo and his new title. The first post was even shorter: “hello.”
The simplicity felt consistent with an executive who has spent most of his career explaining materials, engineering decisions and manufacturing improvements rather than building a public personality. It also created a sharp contrast with the scale of the position he now occupies.
Ternus can remain personally reserved, but the CEO role will repeatedly place him before customers, employees, investors, governments and developers. His first social post may have been quiet. The responsibilities arriving behind it are anything but.
Ternus did not maintain a prominent public social account during his years leading hardware engineering. Most customers encountered him through carefully produced product presentations, occasional interviews or appearances focused on a particular device.
Even within those settings, his style remained technical and controlled. He usually spoke about engineering choices, durability, materials, performance and the work required to turn a design into a product that could be manufactured at enormous scale.
His new X account does not immediately change that character. Opening a channel is different from revealing a private life or becoming a daily commentator. The minimal introduction suggests a place for official communication rather than an invitation into every passing thought.
That would follow an established pattern for senior leadership. Tim Cook used his public account to acknowledge product launches, employees, social causes, environmental initiatives, community visits and major events. His posts rarely became extended personal debates.
Ternus may adopt a similar rhythm, although the account is too new to define its purpose. One word and a short biography cannot tell us how frequently he will post, which subjects he will address or whether he will write directly during moments of controversy.
The restrained opening still served one practical purpose. It established an authenticated public identity before unofficial profiles, impersonators and parody accounts could occupy the space around a newly appointed CEO.
The limited public profile should not be mistaken for limited influence inside the company.
Ternus joined the product design team in 2001 and became a vice president of hardware engineering in 2013. He entered the executive team as senior vice president in 2021, eventually overseeing engineering work across iPhone, iPad, Mac, AirPods and Apple Watch.
His official biography credits him with an instrumental role in the introduction of iPad and AirPods, along with work across multiple generations of the company’s largest product lines. It also connects his leadership to improvements in reliability, durability, materials, repairability and environmental performance.
This background gives Ternus a different starting point from a CEO recruited principally through finance, sales, software or public policy. He arrives from the part of the organization responsible for making difficult designs function consistently outside a laboratory.
Hardware engineering at this scale reaches far beyond choosing a processor or shaping an enclosure. It requires coordinating displays, batteries, cameras, radios, thermal systems, structural materials, manufacturing equipment, repair procedures and supplier capacity. A small change can affect production across millions of units.
That experience may explain part of his measured communication style. Engineering organizations reward details that survive testing. Public attention often rewards immediate confidence. Ternus has spent his career in an environment where confidence eventually meets a drop test, production line or repair bench.
His public appearances have often carried the same discipline. He tends to explain what a product team accomplished without placing himself at the center of the accomplishment.
Leading hardware engineering allowed Ternus to speak after a product decision had passed through years of development. As CEO, he will also need to speak while difficult questions remain unresolved.
Investors will expect him to explain spending, growth and long-term priorities. Governments will want answers about manufacturing, competition, privacy and platform control. Employees will look for direction as artificial intelligence, robotics, home technology, augmented reality and satellite communications create new opportunities across the company.
Customers will judge him through products, but they will also hear his response when a launch disappoints, a service fails or a policy creates frustration.
This is where a discreet profile can become either an advantage or a limitation.
A CEO who does not comment constantly preserves the weight of the moments when he chooses to speak. Fewer posts also reduce the chance that a hurried reaction becomes the story instead of the company’s work.
Silence becomes harder to maintain when people expect reassurance. Product defects, security incidents, employee concerns and political disputes can create situations in which a carefully prepared statement feels too distant. Ternus will have to decide when restraint protects the company and when it begins to look like avoidance.
Cook will remain involved as executive chairman and is expected to assist with areas including engagement with policymakers. That arrangement gives Ternus continuity during the transition without removing the need to develop his own public authority.
The distinction between their roles will become more visible with time. Cook can offer experience and institutional relationships, but employees and customers need to recognize which priorities belong to the new CEO.
Ternus does not need to imitate Steve Jobs’ stage presence or Cook’s diplomatic style. A convincing public identity can grow from the expertise that brought him to the position.
The most natural version would be an engineering-minded CEO who explains trade-offs without turning every decision into a slogan. Product design is full of compromises involving battery life, weight, cost, durability, repairability and production capacity. Carefully explaining some of those decisions could make corporate communication more informative.
His 2024 commencement appearance at Penn Engineering offered a rare view outside a product presentation. Ternus returned to the university where he earned his mechanical engineering degree and addressed students as an experienced engineer rather than a celebrity executive.
That type of setting allows more personality to appear without requiring constant social posting. Longer interviews, engineering discussions, employee conversations and educational appearances may suit him better than trying to manufacture spontaneity several times a day.
A restrained profile could also reinforce collaboration. The products reaching customers are built by large teams, and Ternus has generally presented himself as a representative of that work. Maintaining that tone as CEO would keep attention on the organization rather than turning every announcement into a personal performance.
The difficulty will be preserving technical depth while discussing areas beyond hardware. Services, entertainment, artificial intelligence, software platforms and international policy cannot always be explained through materials and manufacturing. The CEO must connect them into one recognizable direction.
The opening “hello” gives Ternus room to decide how visible he wants to become.
Upcoming product events will offer an early test. A social account can distribute announcements and photographs, but the stage will reveal more: which subjects he chooses to introduce, how much technical detail he includes and whether he remains present throughout the presentation or delegates most of it to other executives.
Earnings calls will create a different test. Product videos are rehearsed around finished work; financial discussions require direct answers about demand, margins, investment and risks. His language in those conversations will begin shaping how investors understand the new administration.
Internal communication may prove equally influential even when the public sees only fragments. Employees will listen for signals about decision-making speed, tolerance for experimentation and the relationship between engineering ambition and commercial discipline.
The X account can support that work, but it cannot substitute for it. A polished stream of product announcements would tell customers what has shipped. Occasional direct messages during difficult moments would reveal more about how Ternus intends to lead.
For now, the empty space around his first post is part of the story. The next useful signal may not be how often John Ternus speaks, but which moment persuades this notably private engineer that the CEO should speak in his own voice.
The post John Ternus Begins His Apple CEO Era With a Discreet Public Profile appeared first on AppleMagazine.
In Boé National Park, researchers have repeatedly encountered a small number of trees marked by gouged bark and piles of stones at their bases. These signs suggest that wild chimpanzees have returned to the same trees for years to throw rocks. According to a recent field account by University of Victoria researchers Robyn Nakano and Ammie Kalan, some of these sites have remained in use for over a decade.
This behavior, called accumulative stone throwing, has been observed in only four chimpanzee populations in West Africa. While rocks and trees are widespread in chimpanzee habitats, piling stones at specific trees is rare. Nakano, Kalan, and other researchers suggest this may be a cultural practice within certain groups rather than arising from environmental factors alone.
Video recordings collected through the Pan African Programme and analyzed in a 2016 Scientific Reports study led by Hjalmar Kühl show that mostly adult male chimpanzees throw rocks at particular trees and repeatedly return to the same trunks. During these events, the chimpanzees pant-hoot, a loud call used for long-distance communication, and sometimes perform buttress drumming by repeatedly striking the tree’s buttressed base with their hands and feet.
Pant-hooting and buttress drumming are typical features of displays put on by male chimpanzees. The fact that these behaviors occur alongside stone throwing suggests that accumulative stone throwing may have developed as a variation of these existing social displays.
Researchers suspect this behavior may be cultural rather than simply a response to environmental conditions because it occurs only in certain areas, even though appropriate rocks and trees are common throughout chimpanzees’ habitats. Within one population, only particular trees are used as throwing sites. Earlier studies have suggested that the behavior might function as a form of communication or could indicate places of symbolic significance within a community’s territory.
The behavior could also offer archaeologists a rare example of how repeated stone use and accumulation can create material traces that persist after the animals that made them have moved on.
Some primates use stones as tools, including populations that use rocks to open nuts for food. Accumulative stone throwing differs because the behavior occurs in a social context rather than during extractive foraging. The purpose of this behavior for the chimpanzees remains unclear.
Nakano and Kalan conducted their fieldwork from Béli, a village where the Dutch nonprofit Chimbo operates a solar-powered research compound with local partners. The team traveled 22 kilometers by bicycle and on foot into the savanna-woodland to establish a camp, working with field assistants Djei Baldé, Balu Séra, and master’s student Taylor Tippett from the Great Ape Behaviour Lab.
The Boé chimpanzees are not used to humans and tend to avoid them, making direct observation impossible. The team instead set up two video cameras at each known stone-throwing site and placed audio recorders nearby to monitor the area.
Each day began at 6:30 a.m. with visits to two to five sites to replace SD cards and batteries, check equipment, measure trees, and create 3D scans of rocks thrown at the trees for later analysis. The team also recorded chimpanzee nests, feeding traces, and vocalizations along the trails. Their camp was located beside the Fefine River, which continues flowing through the dry season and provides an important water source for wildlife.
The team found that most sites first identified by the Pan African Programme and revisited in 2017 remained active when Nakano and Kalan’s team returned in 2026. Chimpanzees have returned to these same trees to throw rocks for more than ten years.
The video and audio collected during this trip will allow the team to identify the age and sex of individual stone-throwers and observe how nearby chimpanzees respond to these events. This data could help the researchers determine the purpose of this behavior.
Chimpanzees’ habitat in Guinea-Bissau is becoming increasingly threatened by industrial mining. During fieldwork, the researchers discovered boreholes dug to explore bauxite, the ore used to produce aluminum. Although bauxite mining might help promote economic development, comparable operations in neighboring Guinea have caused habitat loss and pollution, with negative effects on both wildlife and local communities. The country’s political instability also presents challenges for environmental oversight.
Nakano and Kalan emphasize that losing these stone-throwing sites would be both a cultural and ecological loss, erasing a documented example of primate material culture.
Nakano and Kalan are still analyzing the footage from this field season, but the main question of why chimpanzees throw stones at these specific trees remains unanswered. Still, the evidence collected by the cameras and recorders could help determine whether the behavior functions as territorial signaling, long-distance communication, or something else entirely.
Austin Burgess is a writer and researcher with a background in sales, marketing, and data analytics. He holds an MBA, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and a data analytics certification. His work focuses on breaking scientific developments, with an emphasis on emerging biology, cognitive neuroscience, and archaeological discoveries.
As one card recently sold for £12m, opportunistic thefts have surged – envelopes are being opened en route, costing small businesses thousands
Pokémon’s success over the last 30 years has seen it grow from a much-loved Game Boy classic, to a world-dominating brand with TV shows, spin-off games, toys and even a theme park. The trading card game is a huge part of that, with more than 85bn cards printed over its lifetime, and the appetite for them shows no signs of slowing down. Packs get snapped up after release so quickly it’s now almost impossible to find them in shops, and a booming resale market is driving the hobby into murky waters.
One card recently sold for an eye-watering £12m, and an increasing number of people have gotten into the collecting business on the hunt for huge profits, leading to a rise in thefts targeting card shops. More recently though, some small businesses have reported that their sales have been hit by thieves targeting envelopes within Royal Mail, leading to thousands in lost revenue.
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© Photograph: Daniella Lucas
© Photograph: Daniella Lucas
© Photograph: Daniella Lucas
As FromSoftware’s new multiplayer game The Duskbloods nears release, the legendary game director behind Dark Souls talks connection, pessimism and of course, feet
Since 2009’s Demon’s Souls, Japanese video game director Hidetaka Miyazaki has shown the world a different way to think about game design. His games defy convention with punishing fights, obscure rules, and unknowable, inhospitable worlds. The “Soulslike” genre – named after Demon’s Souls and its sequel Dark Souls – is now ubiquitous, influencing multimillion-sellers from God of War and Star Wars: Jedi to Hollow Knight. Miyazaki’s most recent success, 2022’s Elden Ring, which credited Game of Thrones author George RR Martin as a co-creator, sold over 30m copies and inspired Alex Garland to adapt it for the big screen at A24. It earned Miyazaki a spot on Time magazine’s “most influential” list, an accolade he shares with just one other game developer: Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto.
Miyazaki is now 51 and has been FromSoftware’s president since 2014, elevated from game designer to CEO after the success of the Souls series. He has a cherubic face that could pass for 35. He rarely speaks publicly, and never on camera. When he does speak, he answers questions like one of his characters – softly, sadly, his head bowed, making eye-contact only when I am speaking. Outside the studio where we speak is the sprawl of Tokyo’s Shinjuku, an ever-changing maze where tourists get lost and pop-up stores appear and vanish without a trace. Today, a J-pop band performs in the square as the cicadas scream from the trees. A gilded statue of Malania, one of Elden Ring’s toughest bosses, looms over this dimly lit conference room inside From’s headquarters, a bonfire checkpoint away from the chaos.
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© Photograph: Nintendo
© Photograph: Nintendo
© Photograph: Nintendo
How did you do?
0–4 Back to stage school
5–9 Wooden performance
10–13 Leading light
14 Darling, you were wonderful
The post Take this quiz to test your knowledge of science on stage appeared first on Physics World.
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