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doctornolonger · 3 days
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The Killer Cats of Gin-Seng
In Survival, the last regular serial of Classic Doctor Who, the Doctor and Ace visit a planet of humanoid cats called “Cheetah People”. The Cheetah People are highly telepathic: they can mentally control and inhabit their pet cats, and they can even teleport between planets. Most notably, one of them is played by Lisa Barrowman, better known as Bernice Summerfield.
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But this wasn’t actually the first time that humanoid cats had been set to appear in Doctor Who. In 1977, script editor Anthony Read commissioned his former collaborator David Weir to write the Season 15 finale, a four-part serial set on Gallifrey. The request was to explore society outside the Capitol with an emphasis on morality, a theme which Weir had written well in the past. So he pitched a story about Gallifreyan civilization of humanoid cats.
The Gallifreyan cat-people would have mirrored real-world cats’ dual penchant for both sophistication and savagery: they would appear advanced and civilized until the Doctor wound up in one of their elaborate gladiatorial displays! Weir delivered his scripts on time, and production proceeded to the point that Dee Robson designed costumes for the cat actors.
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Ultimately the story was cancelled: Weir, by all accounts an excellent screenwriter, dramatically overestimated the show’s VFX capabilities and budget. But executive producer Graham Williams later mentioned the idea at a fan convention, so it became well-known in fandom (albeit under the false name The Killer Cats of Geng Singh). As a result, when Survival finally brought cat people to screens, fans naturally canonwelded the two.
One of these fans was Adrian Middleton, editor of the Apocrypha fanzine. Here’s how Apocrypha issue 1 covered the cats:
Apocrypha on the Killer Cats
THE GIANT CATS     -16,000,000
The first intelligent mammalians on Gallifrey evolved from its version of the sabre-toothed Tiger. These giant cats developed a rudimentary form of empathic communication, which allowed them to influence the actions of their prey.
Over an extended period of time, the cats developed a finer telepathic ability, allowing them to actually control other species. This became a necessity as feline culture grew, as their physiological form prevented the use of tools to build or write with. Thus, in spite of their intelligence, the cats could not establish a true civilisation without anthropoid assistance.
FELINOID CIVILISATION     -14,000,000
Early Gallifreyan hominids soon became the tools of feline culture. The first buildings on the planet were built by hominids but designed by cats, taking the form of vast stone arenas, in which the cats would use lesser species for sport - hunting and killing for pleasure rather than survival.
HOMINIDS     -14,000,000/-13,980,000
Forced to live alongside saurian and feline predators, Gallifrey's first hominid tribes evolved as creatures of guile and stealth. Communities were established using primitive communications. These hominids were the cave-people, the tree-people, and the river-people.
THE FALL OF THE GIANT CATS     -13,980,000
The hominid tribes had at first been easy prey for the cats, easily manipulated as a supply of muscle and food. Ultimately, however, the development of feline culture accelerated the development of hominid culture. Being made to use their hands and having the telepathic parts of their minds manipulated awakened a new sense of purpose within them. Seeing the cats as their slavers, they rebelled, exposing the cats to a coup so bloody that the species was all but wiped from the face of the planet.
THE LEGEND OF THE VANISHING CATS     -13,800,000
It is rumoured that, after their defeat by the hominids, the giant cats fled to the mountains, where they hoped to restore their numbers (perhaps in an effort to restore their power over the hominids). Often hunting parties would venture into these mountains, bringing back the occasional cat. It seemed that the mental strength of the hominids had come to match their feline contemporaries.
Other psychic powers were attributed to the cats, including the power of teleportation. In Gallifrey's southern hemisphere, atop one of its highest mountains, there stands a crudely erected stone circle. Gallifreyan archaeologists determined that this was built by the cats themselves. Legend states that the giant cats emigrated by mass teleportation to another worlds. Few giant cats were seen from this time on, and those that did appear bore no telepathic powers. However, smaller domestic cats, or Kitlings, retained this ability.
WHY LINK THE KITLINGS FROM 'SURVIVAL' WITH THE KILLER CATS OF GALLIFREY?
The 'cat' theme is one that has been expanded on greatly in recent years. Colin Baker's cat motif and 'I am the cat that walks alone' slogan, followed by Eric Saward's novelisation of 'Slipback', set a pace followed by 'Survival' and the 'Cat's Cradle' trilogy.
Upon learning about 'The Killer Cats of Ginseng' by David Weir, everything seemed to fit into place. Cats can't exist everywhere in the universe, they have to come from somewhere - we have Earth cats, and Gallifrey has telepathic or empathic cats, just like the Kitlings.
Commentary
Since the 90s, a few stories have referenced the killer cats idea. Gary Russell’s VMA Invasion of the Cat-People mentions “mercenaries of Gin-Seng” alongside the Cheetah People in a list of felinoid species (hence the “canonical” spelling); there’s a similar offhand mention in Big Finish’s Erasure. But there’s only been one actual appearance of one of the cats: Daniel O’Mahony’s Faction Paradox short story “The Return of the King” (pdf).
“The Return of the King” is a prelude to the author’s 2008 novel Newtons Sleep. In that book there’s a glimpse of “the nocturnal delegations of the wild things, whose sharp bright teeth and claws gleamed in the dark of their robes.” The prelude elaborates,
[Time Lord Thessalia’s] oracle stays at the window, seething playfully below his hood. He has fiercely intelligent eyes, neither as sharp nor as bright as his scar. His mouth is a succulent white smile in a lightless face. His people have nothing but contempt for the rituals of the Great Houses. She’s little better than prey to him, a bloodless snack for his long teeth and hungry mind. He breathes, honeyed air purring out of the cavities of his body.
A killer cat kept as a Time Lord’s personal oracle … as @rassilon-imprimatur​ once noted, a funny recontextualization of The Mark of the Rani’s reference to the Lord President’s “pet cat”!
This was my first exposure to the killer cats, so I always took it for granted that they’d always had psychic or oracular abilities. But in fact, as best as I can tell, there was zero hint of this in the original serial. I tracked down every published description of the story, and they all amount to the same few repeated bits of information: Gallifrey, humanoid cats, and a gladiatorial arena. Richard Bignell ultimately told me, “No summary of Killers of the Dark exists. Even David Weir couldn’t recall anything about it when I spoke to him.”
So when “The Return of the King” features an oracular cat-man, it’s not just a reference to the unmade Classic serial. It’s a reference to fan interpretations like Middleton’s which canonweld that serial with the psychic Cheetah People.
And in some ways, it seems to be referencing Middleton’s version specifically! In “The Return of the King”, the above quoted memory is interrupted by commentary:
Your first oracle? ‘My last.’ You think? But his kind were vanishing from the world. ‘They were escaping the War. They could see it coming.’
Compare:
Legend states that the giant cats emigrated by mass teleportation to another worlds. Few giant cats were seen from this time on, and those that did appear bore no telepathic powers.
And so Middleton explains how the cats vanished in O’Mahony’s telling, and O’Mahony explains why they vanished.
Afterword
While we’re on the topic of why, why did O’Mahony choose to revive this specific idea in “The Return of the King”?
One of the places I checked for Killers of the Dark details was issue 336 of Doctor Who Magazine. Imagine how thrilled I was to find that the relevant “Accidental Tourist” piece, located one page after a Faction Paradox ad, was written by none other than O’Mahony himself!
Part of his reflection was particularly striking. He recaps the wild undefinedness of the Doctor’s backstory, a topic I’ve discussed before on this blog. But in his telling, the uncertainty extends past The War Games all the way to The Deadly Assassin.
After all, The War Games declared that “the Doctor’s people are the Time Lords”, but “who are the Time Lords?” was still left undefined. In the Time Lords’ many subsequent appearances, they were simply walking plot devices, and lore details were left to the wayside. Contradictions were rife. Who was Rassilon to Omega? Is their planet called “Gallifrey” or “Jewel”? Who or what on earth are the “First”, “Second”, and “Third Time Lord” who exiled the Doctor?
It was The Deadly Assassin which first dove into the details by featuring the Time Lords like they were any other of the show’s alien cultures. And for this, it was widely panned: “the fans had voted it the worst story of Season Fourteen and published reviews vociferously attacking its ‘betrayal’ of the Time Lords. The BBC practically disowned it, physically vandalising the master tape to placate Mary Whitehouse.” In other words, the stage was all set for a discarding of Holmes’ Time Lords.
O’Mahony writes in his conclusion,
The Deadly Assassin could have remained a one-off, its vision of the Doctor’s homeworld set at odds not just with the Gallifrey stories of the past but also those of the future. The Killer Cats of Geng Singh was the last chance to slip the leash. Williams loved the Time Lords but he had a raft of other ideas he could have put into play, not least the frustratingly deferred Guardians who were clearly intended as a new rung of the series cosmology above and beyond the Time Lords. The premise of Killer Cats was also to counterpoint the Time Lords with another Gallifreyan species – a race of humanoid cats that delighted in bloodthirsty gladiatorial contests alongside a highly refined culture. This wasn’t cribbing from The Deadly Assassin, this was building something new that would expand the newly-forged mythology of the series. In fact, with the cat-people on board and the Guardians waiting in the wings, the possibilities for Time Lord mythology were fluid. It might be possible to return to Gallifrey and find something new and exciting each time, different Gallifreys, with a mutable and ever-expanding history.
However, thanks to Killers of the Dark’s cancellation, Williams and Read were left with a slot to fill on short notice, and for The Invasion of Time they ultimately turned back to Holmes’ ideas. The Deadly Assassin wasn’t discarded or undermined, it was reentrenched.
This was the real moment that the Time Lords as we know them were crystallized: a real-world anchoring of the thread. This was when the whimsically-named planet “Gallifrey” definitively transformed into the rationalistic, stagnant, bureaucratic Homeworld that would feature in the Faction Paradox series.
Because in FP, by the time Grandfather Paradox enters the scene, the Great Houses are total strangers to whismy. It’s only through the course of the War that their understanding of the cosmos is broadened and stranger things begin to return to the Homeworld (with great vengeance).
By showing us a cat in the flesh, O’Mahony is finishing the housekeeping: just as the Intuitive Revelation banished the Pythia, the Eremites, and the Carnival Queen; just as the Grey Eminence unwrote Gallifrey’s first childbirth; and just as the Eternals “despaired of this reality, and fled their hallowed halls” at first hint of conflict – the Killer Cats have to leave to set the scene for the War to come.
P.S.
In Baker’s End, Tom Baker wound up “the King of Cats”. What does this imply about the Other?!?
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mth-emma · 9 months
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take some time this week to archive online content you care about, it could disappear or get harder to find at any point! youtube channels, blogs, images, personal chat logs, you name it
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chibisilverwings · 2 years
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On the recent Infinity Train HBO erasing thing: I want to say that not only should you save and get physical media copies of anything you can from big media, but also, YouTube videos, fanfics, anything you love and think you might want to revisit.
Hoard these things! Young people, trust me, as someone who was around during the early web, lots and lots of whole websites, fanfiction, flash games and videos, photos, songs, podcasts, etc was basically erased and unpreserved. Many are likely gone forever.
Save the things you love like preserving leaves in-between book pages. Anything that matters to you for it to be preserved, you need to help preserve it. Save it AND share it.
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mcytblr-archive · 27 days
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i'm putting out a message to anyone who participated in 2020/2021 mcytblr!
i've recently reignited my passion for archiving niche fandom history! if you were involved in early mcytblr, sleepyblr, idotsblr, or dteamblr, i would LOVE to pick your brain and collect firsthand accounts of what it was like and different mcytblr events!
a short (but by no means exhaustive) list of events/happenings i'm interested in collecting accounts of:
the mcytblr elections, dlying, gay castle, 'kinnie' imposter blogs, friend or host, any discourse you can remember, the general vibe, truthing, critblr, copypastas (dream is a youtuber, hey wilbur, in this video we coded it so that i am in love with georgenotfound) and whatever sticks out to you from that era!
please feel free to reblog/send this to anyone who you remember from back then! i think firsthand accounts are just as important to preserve as physical media, especially right now, before memories get any more faded or warped. if you're interested, shoot me an ask or a message, or say so in the tags and i'll reach out!
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lawlesslibrary · 4 months
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Vintage 1987 Archival Issey Miyake Two Piece Set
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syxadel · 1 year
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baby dream + time traveler dadmare
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drunkenskunk · 3 months
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There's a project related to my interest in Warhammer that I've wanted to do for quite some time, but I know I'll never get the chance to actually do it. At least, not properly. And it involves... I think "historical preservation" is probably the best word for it?
See, I like to occasionally sift through my collection of old "out of date" rulebooks and army codex books from earlier editions of 40k. The sort of things that have been out of print for many years. Games Workshop hasn't sold these books in 2 or 3 decades, and they've all been supplanted by the current rules. And I do this because I think it's interesting to see how the game - in both crunch and fluff - has changed since 1987.
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More beyond the break...
For example: the different ways the galaxy has been depicted in 40k between the different editions. In the first rulebook, when it was still called Rogue Trader, all we got was a small, almost abstract, image on the bottom of the page. The 2nd edition rulebook that came out in October 1993 (specifically, the Codex Imperialis book) had a two page spread, but it was also very abstract with a few notes, but no real detail to speak of. As far as I can tell, the first time we got a map of the galaxy with the segmentum divisions that we're all accustomed to now came from a very unexpected place: the very first Tyranid codex that came out in August 1995.
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Of course, my copy of the 2nd Edition book is a very poor quality black and white scan. Those segmentum divisions could genuinely be there, and I just can't see it. Not to mention, it's entirely possible that a map with segmentum divisions first premiered in an issue of White Dwarf first, because GW liked to do stuff like that in the old days where you'd see it in the hobby magazine long before it was "officially" released in a rulebook.
There are a lot of glaring omissions from a lot of the other files in my collection: poor scans, missing pages, corrupted files... There's a lot I still don't know, because it's impossible for me to currently confirm that the little I do know is, in fact, accurate. My collection is woefully incomplete. Plus, I don't really have much past 6th edition anyway.
And this, in essence, is my idea: try and complete the collection. Find pristine copies of all the old 40k rulebooks, army codexes, even old copies of White Dwarf, and digitize them all into a huge archive for the sake of historical preservation. Of a sort.
Basically, I want to become a Lexmechanic of the Adeptus Mechanicus, looking for Dark Age of Technology era STC's uncorrupted by the Heresy or the war with the Iron Men. Either that, or I want to become Trazyn with his Infinite Archive on Solemnace.
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Unfortunately, there are many problems with this plan. The first being GW's overly litigious nature. They see all this Warhammer shit as "product" first and a hobby for people to enjoy a very, VERY distant second. Doesn't matter that these books (and the magazines) are long since out of print and they don't sell them anymore, effectively making the old editions the tabletop hobby equivalent to video game abandonware... if they got wind that I was attempting a project of this nature, I just know GW would smack me in the face with a cease and desist.
Of course, the other major stumbling block here is the financial issue. And I'm not just talking about buying the books. Obviously, there's the problem of the rarer books that go for upwards of $300 or more on ebay, but there's also a volume problem. Even if you find some good deals, and you're able to find older books for $10 or $15 a pop, there's just SO MANY books, that if I were to attempt this I would be wasting several thousand dollars that I just don't have.
More importantly, there's also the machine I would need to buy in order to do this project in the first place. Because if I was going to do this, I would want to do it right, y'know? I wouldn't want to simply shove the books into my dinky little scanner-printer combo hooked up to my computer. The only way I'd get a clean scan using that method would be to physically destroy these very valuable books, and that's the last thing I'd want to do. No, I would want to do it right, and get a machine like Scribe, the book scanner used by the internet archive:
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Now, obviously, I can't get access to that machine, specifically, because Scribe was custom built by the engineers at the Internet Archive. But other V-cradle book scanners that let you digitize books without destroying them do exist... and they're all REALLY expensive. A good one to produce professional quality scans is, like, $25,000.
And I know what you're thinking: why do I even care about any of this? Even if this project was not entirely out of my reach, it's ultimately pointless, right? Why would I want to preserve all these old, out-of-date, no longer relevant rulebooks for a tabletop wargame that has only existed exactly as long as I have?
Because... let's be honest, this isn't really about Warhammer. The reason I want to do this stems from a much deeper desire to simply Remember. It's amazing and terrifying in equal measure just how easily history can be erased, either deliberately or simply through neglect. All of these things in our lives that are seemingly so important to us can easily vanish from history, like sandcastles when the tide rolls in.
Hell, if you really want to know my feelings about this, just watch Jacob Geller's video on this very subject.
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If I had infinite time and infinite money, and I didn't care about any kind of repercussions from GW's legal team, this project would not be beyond my reach.
But I do not have infinite time or money. And there are more things in my life that I need to be concerned with that are far more important than creating a... stupid archive.
Shame, really.
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silvermoon424 · 10 months
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Really awesome command-line programs I've discovered on GitHub
I'm a data hoarder, so all of these have to do with downloading and saving media. I also use a Mac, so all of these are MacOS-compliant via Homebrew. If you also use a Mac (or Linux), do yourself a favor and install Homebrew via Terminal right now- all you need to do is copy-paste a line of code into Terminal and it will open you up to tons of awesome programs that normally only run on Windows.
Anyway, onto the list!
Yt-dlp (Youtube/Video downloader): On top of letting you rip Youtube videos directly from the site, this program supports a huge array of other video/media websites. The program is highly customizable as well; I would highly recommend at least installing FFmpeg, which allows you to download videos in quality higher than the default 720p. Here's a guide on how to do that for Windows and I wrote a guide here for Mac (I forgot to write in the guide that you should install FFmpeg via Homebrew).
Mangadex-dl (Mangadex downloader): Allows you to download manga directly from Mangadex, the hub of scanlation. Like yt-dlp it is customizable and you can pick which chapters you want to download (useful if you only want to download current chapters you haven't gotten before).
Gallery-dl (Bulk image downloading): A godsend for an art-hoarder like me, this program allows you to bulk download things like Pixiv pages, Twitter galleries, Deviantart galleries, Instagram pages, etc. Like yt-dlp it is highly customizable. Some websites (like Pixiv) may require user authentication; the GitHub page outlines the steps each authentication process requires.
List of other command line programs you might find interesting on GitHub
I'm sure I'll add to this list as I find more cool stuff on GitHub!
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g1rlevie · 5 months
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bad bitches of the 90s🐈‍⬛
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since rooster teeth is shutting down, and the state of all the media is kinda up in limbo, i’ll be doing my best to download and archive the entire stinky dragon podcast. if any of you want to help, that’ll be great but you definitely don’t have to.
i’ll be downloading most of the content from spotify and uploading it first to a thumb drive and then my hope is to get one big stinky cd collection lol
if anyone wants to help archive all the thumbnails and other art, that would be greatly appreciated too
soon hopefully i’ll set up a website all about archiving. this news really saddens me and hopefully the podcast gets picked up by someone else, if at all :[
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username1nv4lid · 1 month
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FREE PREDSTROGEN FREE PREDSTROGEN FREE PREDSTROGEN
SCREENSHOTS FROM PHOTOMATT 2/19/2024. HERE IS THE ONE WHERE HE WAS MISGENDERING AND PROCEEDED TO OUTRIGHT DEGENDER PREDSTROGEN AS WELL
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PREDSTROGEN WAS NOT BANNED FOR HARASSMENT SHE WAS BANNED DUE TO THIS POST BEING LABELED SEXUALLY EXPLICIT.
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SHE HAD WENT TO TUMBLR SUPPORT MULTIPLE TIMES, NOTHING CHANGED
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STOP LYING MATT HE HAD ALSO PROCEEDED TO DM MANY DIFFERENT TRANSFEMS ABOUT THE POST
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FURTHER DIRECT MESSAGES CAN BE SEEN AT @stayingsillyforpred AS WELL
STOP TARGETING TRANS WOMEN MATT AND OWN UP TO YOUR ACTIONS
OR ELSE YOU WILL BE FORCED TO IN COURT PLEASE REBLOG TO SPREAD THIS ARCHIVE. WE CANNOT LET THIS GO WITHOUT CONSEQUENCE. WE CANNOT LET TRANS WOMEN BE BURIED. IF MORE PHOTO EVIDENCE IS PROVIDED I WILL ADD TO THE POST. THANK YOU.
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prissypixie · 1 month
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Thierry Mugler Robot Suit worn by Zendaya:*・゚゚・⭑
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ddddspup · 1 year
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Neopets New Year gifs - Fun Images
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myconetted · 9 months
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the internet is exploding. spare some cpu cycles to save it!
and by save i mean archive, to archive.org and elsewhere, by joining the effort to grab everything we can before it's gone.
archive team has user-friendly things you can run on your computer that will do all the work for you, no programming or esoteric command line skills required
see here for the list of projects you can help with, eg archiving reddit, gfycat, tumblr and friends!
and check this page for how to get up and running:
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thunderlina · 5 months
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LOST MEDIA: Gorillaz - Plastic Beach Web Games
I come to you tonight with one request: I want help in tracking down the Plastic Beach point-and-click adventure game from the Phase 3 (2010-2012) Gorillaz website.
In 2010, coinciding with the release of their third studio album, British virtual band Gorillaz gave their website a huge overhaul, including the release of several new flash games. The centerpiece was a point-and-click adventure game (untitled, usually just referred to as "Plastic Beach") in which the player was able to explore the island of Plastic Beach, similar to the games available on earlier websites where the player was able to explore Gorillaz HQ Kong Studios.
Along with this game were a few others: Escape to Plastic Beach, a three chapter long action/adventure game (the third chapter of which cost €1.50 to play, and was available both for PC and iPhones.) Just recently the developer, Matmi, hinted at trying to re-release these, but they went silent regarding it and nothing has come of it so far.
There were also two smaller Flash titles, Submatronic and Gorillaz Fishing. Not entirely sure what these two entailed but they were listed on the website and, like the adventure game and Escape are not playable via the Wayback Machine nor are they archived elsewhere.
From my research, it seems the website had some kind of DRM software that the older websites (which have been archived over at zombiehiphop.xyz) didn't, since the Plastic Beach game used full tracks from the album and EMI was worried about piracy. Before anyone suggests it like was done in other places where I've asked about this, no, the game was not released on a CD or DVD. Because of this, all four games unique to the Plastic Beach era website are lost. The iPhone port of Escape to Plastic Beach was also removed from the App Store years ago, and as such is also completely lost.
As of right now, all that still exists are low-quality videos of the adventure game in action, a few screenshots, and a handful of Flash files I've dug up from the Wayback Machine.
The loss of this game represents not just a loss for Flash preservation, but a huge loss for Gorillaz fans as it was an integral element of the story of the Plastic Beach era. Without it and much of the other content from the old website, the already incomplete story that Jamie Hewlett and the rest of the Zombie Flesh Eaters team were trying to tell lives on almost wholly through secondary accounts. While recordings exist, it is simply not the same as having access to the full experience.
I ask of you all to please consider my words and help me do something about this, instead of wallowing in hopelessness as it seems the community has been doing for oh so long now.
Thank You.
Footage of the adventure game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUnvkZFPu1Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmAo_POMRHY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW6KHLLgBss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWIkwVDIJNQ
The handful of Flash files I dug up via the Wayback Machine: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1RKpP9o-j-4jFkdQEDN54ye5LGZIrBd_7
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syxadel · 1 year
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error art for his bday
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