Signal · dispatches
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Reporting on the systems, tools and people quietly deciding what the next decade runs on.
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Earned Respect From Releasing Previous Titles is a Mix Tape
A studio’s back catalogue works like a mixtape: the sequence carries the meaning, the choices cannot be edited later, and one cynical track re-colours…
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Kentucky Route Zero is a Pixel Art Masterpiece
Everyone calls Cardboard Computer’s five-act road trip pixel art. It contains almost none. What people are really remembering is a game that lights one…
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Forty-One Phones in a Cupboard
Before an update reaches nine million handsets it spends three weeks in a Sheffield stockroom, wired to a hub and prodded on a rota.…
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Art Exhibitions Around The World Are Phenomenal
Fifteen seconds in front of a masterpiece is not a failure of attention, it is a rational response to a badly designed room. Curators…
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The First Circle of Hell: Limbo
Playdead’s monochrome debut kills you until you learn, never explains itself, and stops dead in a field. Sixteen years of argument later, the ending…
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The Summary of Going to a Posh Party, and 5 Things Not to Do.
The forks do not matter and never did. What matters at a genuinely posh party is understatement, and understatement is a competitive sport played…
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Get to the Chopper As Fast As You Possibly Can
Electric aircraft fix almost everything wrong with the helicopter except the one number that matters. The flying taxi is coming, just not to the…
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Survival Week: Child of Light is Beautiful
A hand-painted twelve-hour RPG built by a small team inside an enormous publisher, with the best asymmetric co-op in the genre and a script…
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The Power of Ten Requires Totally New & Radical Space
Every tenfold gain in sensitivity costs an observatory an entire building. A low white shed on the Atlantic coast explains why the dishes get…
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The Art of Endless Legend
Amplitude built a 4X that looks like an illustrated book, with eight factions you can identify as black shapes. A decade later nobody has…
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