Linked List: December 21, 2009

Monday, 21 December 2009

Why ‘Duke Nukem Forever’ Took Forever ★: Clive Thompson on the story behind the greatest vaporware in video game history:

It’s a dilemma all artists confront, of course. When do you stop creating and send your work out to face the public? Plenty of Hollywood directors have delayed for months, dithering in the editing room. But in videogames, the problem is particularly acute, because the longer you delay, the more genuinely antiquated your product begins to look — and the more likely it is that you’ll need to rip things down and start again. All game designers know this, so they pick a point to stop improving — to “lock the game down” — and then spend a frantic year polishing. But Broussard never seemed willing to do that.
Blue Moon ★: Panic’s Dave Hayden on the history of calendars.
The Known Universe ★: Neat movie from the American Museum of Natural History: zooms out from the Himalayas in Tibet to the entirety of the known universe.