🎮 Too graphic
🎮 Too graphic
Fitness fit for a gamer, a history of platformers, and much more.
Mornin’. What a week, huh? Congratulations to the Denver Nuggets, who won their first NBA title by beating the Miami Heat four games to one.
You needn’t be a basketball fan to appreciate Colorado’s capital city. Here are five facts about it:
The “Mile-High City” really is a mile (1,609 meters) above sea level.
Because of Denver’s thinner atmosphere, balls travel 10% further, alcoholic drinks hit harder, and the sun feels warmer.
Denver is dryer than Phoenix and gets more annual hours of sun than San Diego.
It’s a young city. In 1860, there were more than 800,000 people in New York City, more than 100,000 in Chicago, and 57,000 in San Francisco—but not quite 5,000 in Denver.
Denver may seem like the capital of “Subie Nation,” and indeed, outdoorsy Subaru vehicles usually crowd the top 10 list of cars sold in Colorado. But as a share of the total? Vermont wins.
—Andrew Nusca, Eric Alt, Marques Edge
Buffed/Nerfed
What’s up and down in the world rn.
Nerfed: Revenge spending. The two-year stretch of people furiously spending on flights, hotels, and other pandemic-suppressed services has finally eased. Here’s to, uh, revenge saving?
Buffed: Buying vowels. Whoopi Goldberg wants to host Wheel of Fortune, and if that means the chance of reviving some of her best Hollywood Squares moments, we’re all for it.
Nerfed: The supply chain. (Again.) Just when we thought the ol’ chain had returned to normal after the pandemic, a section of Interstate 95 collapses in Philadelphia. That sound you hear is 14,000 commercial trucks firing up Waze.
Buffed: The number 10. Famous athletes whose teams retired their signature No. 10 include Walt Frazier, Diego Maradona, Mo Cheeks, Chipper Jones, Eli Manning, and Pelé. Now we can add Sue Bird to that list. (We see you, Carli Lloyd.)
Nerfed: Literary America. R.I.P. Cormac McCarthy, 89, the stylish writer whose post-apocalyptic The Road won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007 and whom Steven King remembered as “maybe the greatest American novelist of my time.” —AN
Cheat Code: The ideal workout for an esports junkie
Change your game.
It took professional athletes for intensely physical sports like football, basketball, and hockey several decades before the concept of “fitness” as a lifelong pursuit took hold. Back in the 1970s and ‘80s, players usually wouldn’t touch a weight or a stationary bike until training camp.
In that respect, esports athletes are already ahead of the game.
Competitive gaming may be a largely sedentary pursuit, but pros already understand that physical fitness is as important as hand-eye coordination for keeping your game sharp. We’ve already covered gamer nutrition in this newsletter; now contributing writer Jordan Burchette sits down with certified strength and conditioning specialist Cody Braun to design the ideal gamer workout regime.
Extractor: A brief history of the platformer
Investigations of interest.
In its earliest stages, video games were amorphous things. You had a few blinking dots or vector lines set inside black voids.
The so-called platformer—the nickname given to games where the primary objective was to run, jump, or climb up staggered or uneven platforms—gave it shape, gave it direction, gave it purpose.
But when did the platformer emerge and how did it evolve over time? Funny you should ask.
Executive editor Eric Alt has your cheat sheet right here.
Wayback Wednesday
We take portable gaming for granted today, but in 1989, the technology was just emerging to make it possible.
It’s hard to explain how highly anticipated the Atari Lynx was when it hit store shelves in 1989 (or 1990, depending on where you lived). Highly competitive with Nintendo’s Game Boy, which arrived to market at roughly the same time, Lynx turned out to be the Betamax to Game Boy’s VHS—that is, it was far more technologically advanced than its simpler rival (more powerful graphics, not to mention color) but managed to get outsold by several orders of magnitude. (The six AA battery requirement couldn’t have helped.)
It was at this time—with George H.W. Bush in the Oval Office, Margaret Thatcher in 10 Downing Street, and the Berlin Wall freshly fallen—that a young actor named Tobey Maguire took a job for a television commercial promoting a hot new gaming system. It would be the beginning of a, shall we say amazing, career in Hollywood. —AN
Wormhole
Click the following image and…well, we don’t want to ruin the surprise.
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