THE SPY
The Spy can recite
Sandra Bullock’s The
Net from memory.
he Spy is growing increasingly
concerned about the metaverse.
Sure, it’s a meaningless term –
The Spy knows this – and no
amount of PR fluff about
metaverse marriages will change
that. But the problem with
meaningless terms is, if people
keep talking about them, they sort
of just start to exist. Fortnite used to be a game, and
everybody accepted that. But then Epic kept calling it a
metaverse in an attempt to win a legal battle with
Apple. Slap a couple of music concerts and a few movie
reveals in there, and suddenly it’s the harbinger of
some sci-fi virtual brandspace. But also, in terms of the
extant product that is Fortnite, it’s still just a game.Like money, then, or the perceived danger of quicksand, it
doesn’t really matter what’s real, only what people with
vested interests can make you think might be real. In this
sense the metaverse is inevitable: because nobody needs
to know what it actually is until enough people believe in
it that companies can point to something and go, “It’s that.
That is the metaverse.”
This is bad news for The Spy, who
has spent the last few years building a
retroverse to exist in – a
supercomputer of networked Nokia
3310s that can generate a low-fi 3D
GUI that The Spy can use for data
crimes. To be clear, this isn’t some
grand revolutionary gesture; acounterculture alternative to Silicon Valley’s latest
solution in need of a problem. It’s just The Spy really likes
the whole late-’90s computer aesthetic, and was greatly
disappointed to learn that actual hacking looked nothing
like when Johnny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie crashed
the Gibson in the seminal 1995 work Hackers.
Perhaps, then, instead of worrying about the drive of
the world’s technological elites to create their virtual
utopia regardless of the ideological ramifications, we
should instead talk about the BioShock series.WOULD YOU KINDLY?
YouTuber Colin Moriarty recently shared some details
about the game – some of which were confirmed by
sources for both VGC and Eurogamer. According to
Moriarty, BioShock 4 will be set during the 1960s, and take
place in a fictional Antarctic city called Borealis. “Internally
the game is very secret and, apparently, totally locked up,”
said Moriarty, disproving his statement by saying it.
Moriarty claims that it’s known that BioShock 4- codenamed ‘Parkside’ – will be compared to BioShock
creator Ken Levine’s next project, and so the development
team is being given the space to get it right. Levine
remains at Ghost Story Games, the successor to Irrational
Studios, working on an as yet unannounced game. Little
has been revealed about his project beyond teases from
Levine himself. In 2015 he said it would be a “first-person
sci-fi” game, and in 2017 he said it would feature elements
inspired by Shadow of Mordor’s Nemesis system.
As for BioShock 4, a job listing for Cloud Chamber
earlier this year was searching for “someone who can
weave impactful, character-driven stories in an open
world setting”, suggesting something of the scope of the
studio’s ambition. Ultimately, both games hold plenty of
secrets, making for a perfect real-world test of The Spy’s
retroverse. Unfortunately, hours into
what at the time seemed like a tense
hack, The Spy discovered that The
Spy wasn’t infiltrating a wireframe
representation of 2K’s private servers,
but playing an advanced 3D recreation
of Snake. Maybe it’s time to embrace
the metaverse after all. Spy out.
The Spy
1
Traditionally the first issue of
the new year is made on a short
deadline thanks to the Christmas
break. Which makes it an especially
bold choice to run the Top 100 – one
of PC Gamer’s more intensive annual
features – in this month. And yet!
Skyrim is this year’s winner, claiming
the top spot just a month after its
game of the year win.3
It’s weird to open a ten-year-
old magazine and see a Dota 2
preview, in part because Dota 2 feels
like a modern game. Right now, it’s
still the second most played game on
Steam. It still receives updates. It
still has an esports scene. Expect
more of this as our exploration of the
past moves deeper into the
live-service era.2
“Command &
Conquer
returns,” says our
Monitor section. In
the end Generals 2
never happened.
And given EA’s love
of free-to-play at
the time, maybe
that’s for the best.ISSUE
236, February 2012
ON THE COVER
Total War: Shogun 2- Fall of the Samurai
IN THE CINEMAS
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
T
This month in... 2012
IN 2015 HE SAID IT
WOULD BE A
“FIRST-PERSON
SCI-FI” GAMENEWS | OPINION | DEVELOPMENT
BUT WHO WATCHES THE SPY?The Spy