Colin Hay Science Fiction Art

Dark Seed (1993) - An Overlooked H.R. Giger DOS classic

 

Even the box art was ahead of it's time. 

He has a splitting headache. 

     Before we get started, you can play this classic game free in browser online, located here. I highly suggest you get started. Dark Seed is a point and click game, modified from its SCUMM engine roots, and features a robust and dark theme from the very beginning. You visit other worlds that make little sense, aliens are abundant, and the scenes are vast. You play the game through a curtain like you are watching a show, which adds to the tone of the game. 

Forget the door, there is an alien baby here. 

     This game does have it's flaws, but when you mix equal parts H.R. Giger artwork and Michael Cranford of Bard's Tale fame, you are going to land on something special. The music was generic, but haunting in a low budget horror movie way. The game is strangely monotone in color, but advanced in resolution;  Giger himself said he could not work with the pixelated 300x200, and insisted on 640x350, at the sacrifice of the enhanced color pallet. The cover comes from one of Giger's famous art works from 1974, Li II. From the wikipedia article on the production of the game:

"Developers used an Epson flatbed scanner to import selected body parts and landscape fragments in monochrome, then with Deluxe Paint II Enhanced for MS-DOS assembled them into single images. An Amiga and an S-VHS camera digitized actors' poses that Cyberdreams further edited on PCs. After the company decided that the images were inadequate late in the development process, developers hand colored the art for six more months.^[7] The main character, Mike Dawson, is named after the game's designer and producer. He also lent his appearance to the character's sprite."

The NES version is a Famicom oddity, turned real.

     Dark seed is one of the rare games that only comes along every so many years. It has no right to exist and have the budget it has, and was made to work with available resources and technology of the day. I find it very facinating that it's following was so vast that an unknown person created a Japanese port of the game to NES, unlicensed of course. A fan made translation is underway. 

     Dark Seed 2 came out in 1995 with further enhanced graphics and more of that nightmare feel and ambiance. Not nearly the sleeper hit of the first game, Dark Seed 1 and 2 had their fair share of ports, including the Sega Saturn with rare mouse support. Either way, put this game on your radar on any platform, it's really worth it.. and what do you know! You can play the second one online in the browser for free as well. 

Blade Squad (1998) AKA: Inline Cops - Full Movie & Review!

This just writes it's self.

     I've been on a tear with Rollerblading again, even bought a pair recently to skate at work around the brewery. I've mentioned how I skated in the past, even got myself in a couple of magazines in the 90's.. so discovering more inline cinema cheese is going to be right up my alley. Science fiction? Check. Bad effects? Check. D List celebs? Super check. This is 100% something I would have watched as a 15 year old with nothing to do on a Friday and a 12 pack of Surge.

My backpack's got jets

    This movie is either the leftovers from Prayer of the Rollerboys pitch meeting (which I covered here), or a poor re-write. I see a lot of inspiration from that movie, Robocop 2, and the movie Hackers.  All movies that are guilty pleasures of mine, and really know how to channel the 90's energy. This is an obvious TV movie to series launchpad for the network, and just never really worked out, was believable in anyway, and didn't have enough star power to keep it moving. This is a piece of TV was locked in time, at the end of  decade when the popularity of something started to fade away, but alas it was too late, and the money was spent and script was written.

Channeling Bladerunner?

     The movie opens up to the busy streets of New York city, the smog and pollution in the distance- highly populated, congested, and fraught with overwhelming amounts of TV PG petty crime. The only solution for this distressed city is to police it with a crack team of inline skating 20-somethings with jetpacks on. David Bowie's "I'm Afraid of Americans" plays over the crime montage, which in this version, has been removed due to copywrite issues. I love this song and it the whole Nine-inch Nails thing he was going through at time. I remember seeing Howard Stern's birthday party on the E-channel, and watching him perform live thinking how cool he was, and questioned what time period he belonged in. I know now, that time is obviously the mid-to-late 90's,. Duh.

High Tech.

     They are being monitored back at home base with cameras that are not attached to the suits they are wearing, and are just moving around randomly, and makes no sense. They were trying to go for an Aliens thing with how that worked, and really just missed the mask. We get a really good example of what the team can do, jumping over trash cans and on to the backs of small time crooks. Ironically the city does not look that overwhelmed with people/cars in these scenes and montages, so a motorcycle would be more appropriate in 90% of these situations. I'm sure I'm going to mention this a few times, but I'm having a hard time wondering why we need to have rollerblades on for most of the movie. Speaking of...

24:40 is when this goes down.

     You really have to suspend disbelief here. This huge chase culminates in an abandoned warehouse that has super long stretches of open area. After a quick unnecessary grind down some stairs, and a wrist activated pulse of the jet-pack, our Blade Squad was easily able to overtake a sport bike on full throttle, and stop it just in time from hitting a wall. This is pretty much the theme for the rest of the movie. Really outlandish jump takes, jet-pack pulsing, and very little of the severe congestion and highly populated streets to navigate, which was kind of the reason this team was put together in the first place. I like the off-camera executions from the villain who looks like 1 part bully from Christmas Story, two parts Budnick.

I can't believe it's over.

    Wow. Really strange how this did not make it into a TV series. (cough) I see what they were going for, I really do. However, the show set up the premise and the rules right at the beginning, and violated them. It was explained very early on why the team was deemed necessary from the jump, then broke the mold and made exceptions right away. Shannon Elizabeth was a good casting choice for obvious reasons, and the main cast was not.. horrible. If they went a more sci-fi route, doubled down on the tech part, it may have had a chance to be a 90's cheese cult classic. This whole last paragraph was me trying my best to write a serious review about Rollerblading Cops... I appreciate you hanging in there with me on this one.

 

Long before Interstella 5555 by Daft Punk.. there was La Serenissima.

 

La Serenissima - Rondo Veneziano

         Twenty years before Daft Punk ever considered releasing Interstella 5555, an Italian Orchestra called Rondo Veneziano released an album that was a surrealist mix of bass, synth, drums and violins, written and orchestrated by Maestro Gian Piero Reverberi. This was matched with an animated short drawn and animated in a Japanese style and influenced by the pulp magazines and comic books of the late 70's and early 80s by Walter Cavazzuti & Giovanni Ferrari. The result was what you see above in all its pulpy Heavy Metal glory. 

      

You think Heavy Metal was some kind of influence here?

     You can clearly see the inspiration of the music video, art and album covers is based on the covers of Heavy Metal and Omni magazine. Raising Venice is an obvious choice for the Italian creators, and the mix of the rock-opera-roller-boogie vibe is strangely a pretty good marriage for the animation. Rondo Veneziano made several other animated shorts to pair with his music over the years, all based in science fiction and high fantasy. Quite the reality check when you compare the quality and music of this animation and some of the other things we find beautiful and different today. If you dig around enough, you may find out what you think is unique has already been done, and occasionally.. in some ways better. 

Enjoy some HQ animation cells below:

Prayer of the Rollerboys (1990) Full Movie!

 

Corey Haim and Rollerblades!

   In the not-so-far-away future, after "The Great Crash", gangs and drugs reign supreme. The great grandson of Adolf Hitler's rollerblade gang, dressed in white trench coats and black gloves, control the ebb and flow of a drug called Heaven's Mist. Naturally being a relative of Hitler, they are going to put something in the drugs to kill junkies and minorities. Checkmate fuckers!

These are bad dudes and they mean business. 

    Everyone settle down, because we have Corey Haim, and he is an accomplished rollerblader and can infiltrate this gang and counter corrupt it from the inside. At the middle point of the movie, I started to wonder if this was a prequel for the movie Solarbabies. It hit all the key points: Postapocalyptic, in the future, rollerblades, cast members from the Lost Boys. This movie inspired Corey Haim to pick up rollerblading full time, and often talked about it in interviews.

Skating in this way allows for perfect accuracy.

     My brother and I would wear one of my dad's trenchcoats and put skates on, and pretended we were part of the Rollerboys. Later on in life, after watching some more terrible rollerblade movies, I would end up trying to make a mini-career out of inline skating. So in a way.. I guess this terrible movie influenced me in some way? I guess I should write about that in some kind of future article.

Watch this movie, suspend your disbelief, and drink in the majesty that is Prayer of the Rollerboys.

    

Thunder Run (1985) Full movie!

 

You may be wondering, why 1985's Thunder Run? I'll tell you fucking why:

1. Nitro square body Chevy race truck
2. Shotgun proof 1975 Kenworth Semi with flame throwers
3. Radioactive secret payloads
4. Sweet death scenes
5. Lasers
6. Extreme amounts of Technobabble
7. Missiles mounted on a VW bug
8. 80's level nudity

If that's not enough reason to watch this often overlooked 80's classic, then you are in the wrong place. 

Hackers - The Movie - My thoughts and comparisons

 

    I've written about Hackers; the 1995 movie starring Angelina Jolie and Johnny Lee Miller, several times in the past. I gave my quick thoughts, explained how it got me excited and let me down, and my interactions with the hackers community before, during and after the film was released. I was driving to Miami today and I was thinking about watching the movie again for the first time in about 5 years, and decided to listen to a podcast about it. I flipped through a few, and all of them were making fun of the movie, saying how horrible it was, and how it was a waste of time for everyone involved. Admittedly the one podcast I listened to all the way to the end, they said they were a little young for the film, had no connection to early 90's culture, and no link to hacking or Macintosh computing from the era. I thought, well, since I have all these connections, and was the original target audience, why not go over it in depth?

The Technology

     Let's be perfectly honest: Computers of that time cost a metric fuck-ton. The introductory price of a Macintosh LC II in 1993, with 4MB of RAM, no monitor, no modem or add-ons of any kind, was $1699- or $3095 in today's dollars, allowing for inflation. Add a monitor? No problem, for $399 for the cheapest and smallest 13 inch available. 4MB RAM? Better call Kensington and hand over another $219. Modem? Toss in another $100 for a cheap one. Don't worry, I did the math; the average complete Macintosh Setup from the day cost around $4800 in today's money. Forty-Eight-Hundred.

   

    I use the LC II as an example, because at the time you could run in to an Office Max and this was the budget solution and setup you could expect to be hard sold by some guy in a red shirt making $5 commission per sale. In 1994, the Performa/Centris/Quardra/LC lines became all one computer that ran different variants of the 68040 Motorola processor. For the low, low price of $599, you could interchange your motherboard with the next model up for an almost imperceivably increase in speed and zero functionality. This was a dark time for Mac's, but were a mainstay in school, and their system 7 environment was far more advanced than the Windows 3.1 available at the time. 

    Bottom Line, if you had a PC in your home, it was for the entire house to use. Your parents paid their bills and used it like a word processor, while you played games and got online to talk to friends. 

     The movie Hackers was absolutely full of portable computers. Every character had one, and a nice one with all kinds of options. Let me tell you, no one I knew at the time had a laptop, luggable or portable PC. Especially a Macintosh. Why? The insane cost. In the market for a Powerbook Duo as pictured in the movie? You would have to shell out close $5000 just to get started. Want a bag, modem, or the famous DuoDock to go with it? Get that wallet! The dock alone was $800. No teenager in the 90's just casually had a laptop that could get online with them. Most of the IBM PC Compatible laptops of that time had no sound, grayscale graphics, and very little expandability. 

My Group of Friends, and their Tech

    We had an IBM DOS compatible computer in our house that my parents used, and I got on to BBS's on, all the way from the late 80's to the early 90's. At school it, was all about the Macintosh computers, System 6, and how advanced and friendly they seemed at the time. I begged my parents for one, and every time they looked, it was way out of their price range. I come from a pretty well to do family, for them to say it was out of their price range is kind of a big deal. My sister got a car for her birthday one year, and they said the computer would be more than a used car. My whole life changed when I moved to Florida after my parents divorced, and my grandfather died no sooner did we move. There was an inheritance involved and it was close to $10,000. I didn't have any friends in Florida, but I knew I wanted whatever Macintosh was available at the time. It was 1994, and the Performa's were the newest machine available in Macmall Magazine. I was able to the get the best one in the magazine, with the best monitor, keyboard and modem, no expense spared. I chose the Performa 636CD, and added the optional DOS card, a supra express external 28.8k modem, printer, ergonomic keyboard, speakers, and whatever software looking awesome at the time. It came with a free 100 minutes of America Online in the box. I was ready to go. 

     I met a few people at school who played with computers, one in particular asked me what kind of PC I had, and I told him a Macintosh proudly. He practically begged me to come to his house and see his setup. He only lived a few streets away in a nice neighborhood, and had the aforementioned LC II in his room, with all the bells and whistles, RAM upgrades, and even a scanner, which was kind of rare at the time. He had a commercial grade laser printer, and his previous computer, a Macplus with an external hard drive, was also plugged in as a secondary computer to test HyperCard stacks and whatever else he was working on. Color me impressed. Up until this point, I played games on mine, got on to AOL maybe once a week to use my 20-30 minutes of time I was allowed as it was $1.99 a minute, and played around in the paint program and such. I had no hacking tendencies and really never thought of it. The only time I thought about doing something malicious online was finding a way to get more internet time.

Friends and the Vibe

     There was no real "Hacking Style" like the movie. That is 100% exaggerated. Even the music and the whole vibe to the movie is so off, it's crazy. Myself and others did take on some of that style and music choice of the movies. I'll explain.

    Each character in the movie has their own computer. A portable of some kind, tailored to their own eccentric natures and unique to them. Well, we didn't have portables, but we sure customized. I brought my PC with me almost everywhere. I had skate stickers all over it, and screwed a handle in the back and sides so I could lug it around easier. My friend mentioned before painted his monitor, keyboard, mouse and PC jet glossy black; He was an expert typist already and didn't need to see the keys. Other friends had various stickers, markers and even graffiti on theirs to reflect their personality. 

     We dressed how we dressed before we starting messing around with computers. How did people dress in the 90's? Well nothing like the people in Hackers. I was in a skater/BMX community in Vermont with my older brothers before I moved to Florida, so already wore clothes and shoes that reflected I was a skater. Rollerblading was super hot at the time, and skateboarding was out. We rarely saw any skateboarders at the park, it was all blades. I met someone who was not in to the Macintosh scene, a neighbor a few streets away who had an Amiga in his room. He could play awesome games, visit BBS's and listen to music on his PC, but not get on AOL like we were doing. I instantly was hooked on Rollerblading, and it became my preferred choice of transportation in 1994. We had chain wallets, Mossimo shirts, and Airwalk shoes. We rollerbladed so much, we both became very good at it, and later competed in competitions around the South Florida area. Remember, this is all before the movie Hackers came out. 

     We went to Macworld Boston in 1997, me and three other guys, rollerbladed in the Subway, met new people and saw new technology. We took disks as booths with the sole purpose to overwrite the information on them and keep the free disk. People had glasses and polo's on, khaki pants and white tennis shoes. No one stood out like us, and we didn't care. We met some other people that were around our age and local and made a weekend of it, and had the times of our lives. 

    It was super rare to know someone that had a personal computer in their room back then. Getting online? Even more rare. That had a Macintosh? 10000000% more rare. My four friends and I were a group, we wanted to know more, we lived and died Macintosh, and hated on the 'IBM Lamerz'. First order of buisness was to find out how to get free internet, because $1.99 per minute was way too fucking much.

Introduction to Hacking

     We had to get online as much as possible. Getting free AOL disks from the kiosk at the Mall or Office Max seemed like the best idea, but 150-1000 minutes free on a new account went faster than you think it would. We needed to be online 24/7. 4-5 months of using the trial accounts worked for a while, and someone we knew even made a utility that generated "Certs" so we didn't even have to go to get the disks from the mall anymore, we could generate them at home. The "Certs" started lasting less and less time, as AOL caught on to people using them for unlimited free trials. It became almost an emergency to find another way to get free AOL, or any kind of internet for that matter. One way was the local area network providers. Basically a company in the area that offered unlimited shitty internet for a cost and did not meter the bandwidth or who was logging in. Peganet was a good option at the time, and for $50 a month you could have unlimited 14.4 baud connections, then use that to log in AOL. Bad news: The price was a little high, the speed was slow, and they only had 10 nodes and we were 4 people alone. To get all online at once and for free was hard to do, and, you still had to have an AOL membership that was active and use their minutes. Makes no sense, but perfect sense at the same time. It was only a matter of time before we discovered carding.

     Our aforementioned friend made a program in Director that would exploit the Zahn method of credit card generation. He got the secret of it from trading files with other in the 'MaCWaReZ' chatroom, and built a small but light program around it. These programs were like gold, and easy to download and use. Some of them even came with detailed instructions and the people that made them frequented the chatroom to help you if you got stuck. A mutual friend worked at Blockbuster provided us with Credit Card numbers and expiration dates from out of the country that were Blockbuster card holders. Bajedo Puerto Rico seems like the one we always used. Input the CC information, the generator would spawn 100 card numbers, load the card number into the next utility someone traded us, it would generate the expiration number and boom, we are off to the races.

     AOL only billed at the end of the trial period, so no matter what, the card would work if everything matched the Zahn method. We would make a new account, spoof a new screen name which would just be different variants of our typical handles, and stay online for 30 days straight without interruption. We would use thousands of minutes at $1.99 a minute. 1000's every single month. This worked perfectly until AOL went to the Unlimited for $29.99 a month subscription service, which we all signed up for. Our introduction to hacking was the necessity to get online as much as we wanted without getting charged an arm and leg. We all had our own dedicated phone lines, so that was a non-issue.

Everyone's Personality

     Each person was good at something. I was good with the creation of OneClick pallets and editing and stealing other people's code and programs and using ResEdit to repurpose them for our use. The "Hell" tools that people used on macs that were basically low-rent visual ports of AOLHell from Windows 3.1 and were remade in OneClick. The one that I was known for was WhiteHell. I spent weeks on end finding out ways to change the boot up screen, the backgrounds, icons and logos of the Finder operating system so we could put whatever we want there. My best friend who was great at coding loved to make things from scratch and had been coding and making HyperCard stacks since say 1. We had one friend who had access to servers of different types, and used an IBM PC as his main computer so we had multiple ways to read and store information. Another friend had a full music setup in his house, all MIDI based craziness hooked up to Roland Keyboards and was able to make MOD and MIDI files on the fly with professional software and hardware. My father was the owner of a Radio Shack franchise in town, so we could always get parts or anything we needed easily and quickly with zero cost. I had one friend that used a 286 PC that was a hand-me-down from years before, that had a 9 inch amber gas plasma display and a 9600 baud modem. He was a super fast typer, was on BBS websites locally and all across Florida constantly. He traded files with people overseas and from other states, and had a amazing library of text files and small DOS programs that could help you get free long distance calls, make Phreak boxes and so on. This same person was a fucking wizard at stealing things. David Blaine level slight of hand and thievery skills. He was very introverted but was also very interested in anything that was dangerous or highly illegal. Need some RAM? Give him a 12pk of beer and a smile and he will grab some at the mall for you. Super amazing resource. 

The Movie Comes Out

     My closest friend decided he did not want to watch the movie. The trailer had a young kid with VR glasses on, there were attractive women, and stylish night clubs. It was obviously a super glamorized version of the lift we were living. I did have an attractive girlfriend, but she wanted nothing to do with computers. Getting a date was hard as a nerd who spent 90% of their time on a computer and the other 10% rollerblading. I ended up going to the movies to watch it with my friend that owned the Amiga. He was the furthest away from being a PC user and hacker, but had all the access to the professional audio equipment. His dad made his own beer, and he had insane speakers that were modular to take to parties. Before we knew what a modern DJ looked like, he was it. Hooking up his computer to a giant amp and house speakers to play his newest mods, or in some instances, even early MP3's. We both LOVED the movie. We talked about it to our friends and hyped it up over all. I went to the mall the next weekend and bought the soundtrack, the Fat of the Land Prodigy album, and changed what I was wearing almost immediately to be more edgy. I knew the movie was not the reality of a Macintosh soft-hacker from south Florida, but holy shit, I wanted it to be. Before this movie came along, Pump Up The Volume was the song of our people.

     I wanted to go to NY City. I was under the impression that this mystical place had a whole culture where people went by their user name and were "In the business". I spray painted my walls and brushed up on coding. I even further customized my computer's boot screen. I even distributed an early version of the backgrounds featured in the movie that I made in photoshop to the AOL download message boards. The movie came out on VHS, and I was the only one of my group that was interested in watching it. I know it's fantasy guys, but it's so close. Take the VR shit out of it. The stylized version of the net, take that out too. Those backgrounds and desktops are so similar to ours. We do the little customizations to our setups, and we even rollerbladed. The similarities were too hard to pass off as a coincidence, and at the end of the day, I desired to know how Hackers was made.

    I got older. The DVD was released with zero special features. I bought the Laser Disc online for $4, it was the Deluxe version that was letterboxes. I finally had something that was close to the movie theatre version, and not some pan-and-scan bullshit. I paused the movie and would capture little details. I found out through a fan website on Geocities that the movie was filmed in Pinewood studios at the same time as another film at the time. The person had pictures of the lobby cards and even had a copy of the script signed by the actors. I had to have more. I emailed people that had anything to do with the movie, found out cast members names and found their AOL screen names and sent them direct messages. I got little details here and there. Above all, I wanted the address to Cyberdelia, the club from the movie. I learned from a low level grip/lighting person over AIM that the majority of the movie was filmed in London. All the indoor shots, schools, apartments, bedrooms, clubs and so on were all purpose built sets made in the UK. My hopes of every finding Cyberdelia were gone. I know from watching the movie that SOME of it had to have been filmed in NYC. Grand Central Station? I could go there. I wanted little details no one knew. Meanwhile, I picked up the second and third iterations of the soundtrack at the mall in the bargain bin for $2 each at FYE.

     I taught myself HTML and made several fan sites about movies I liked, and begged for more information. 

What you need to get started

     To be a Macintosh Hacker in the 90's you needed a certain set of lucky things happen to you:

• Have nice or wealthy parents that had 5k +++ to throw away on a computer for you
• Have nice or wealthy parents that were willing to keep your computer upgraded
• Have parents that were willing to give you freedom and access to some kind of money
• Be lucky enough to be allowed to have this car-priced piece of equipment in your room
• Lived in a heavily populated area to meet people with the same circumstances or a way to meet those people online, or both
• Pray that they also used Macintosh computers, had access to some way to get online, or trade files with you
• Had friends or resources that were willing to research or help you in some way, and introduced you to hacking, warez rooms, or some kind of entry level coding
• Had student access to school Macintosh computers that could be sourced for parts
• Have friends with wildly different sets of skills that span across multiple different operating systems and computer types
• A basic understanding of how computers worked and communicated with each other

HACK THE PLANET

Hackers Movie HD Desktop Backgrounds (Zero Cool and Crash Override)

Click to enlarge. Both backgrounds are HD 1920x1080 resolution for widescreen monitors.

I've been sitting on these backgrounds for a while. I Founds them a very long time ago.. 2003-ish? I saved them to a CD and just kind of put them away when i had a chance to convert them to a larger format. Originally 640x480, i had to do some extensive editing in CS5 to get them scaled up and not blurry. Not very hard, but i had time tonight so i thought i would get it out of the way.

The top picture was made from a screen grab of the movie when Crashoverride/Zero Cool (Johnnie Lee Miller) is booting up his computer to hack the gibson at the end of the film. A member of the Ubuntu boards originally made it to a users request, i tweaked the colors, enlarged, and sharpened the end product. I could be wrong about whose computer this is, and i just watched the movie. This was one of my earlier creations based on source material. This background has since been widely distributed on the internet.

The bottom image was made by me. It was made from a screen grab at the beginning of the movie when Zero Cool/Crash Override is taking over a TV station. I remade this one from scratch using the gradient tool, find edges and a few clicks of the paint bucket. Johhny had icons all over his desktop in the movie, so if you want, get some shitty copeland icons from Google Images and go nuts. I have found this desktop image in different variations based on the split second image you see of his computer at the beginning. I decided to try and recreate this image the best i could really. See below:

The pictures above are screen shots of me recreating the image from a youtube video. Click to

 enlarge.

The Final Product. Click to enlarge. 1920x1080

The font used in the movie was a condensed OCR A Extended, Bold. I used 18.54pt size, with no blending options used. I decided not to add the icons as some people may wish to kind of place their icons on the bubbles.

**UPDATE** For those of you who are having issues with scaling and images are not the correct size, download the 7zip package here with the original files + photoshop documents so you can play around with it.

**Update #2!** - I see people are frequenting this post from 14 years ago, and I regretfully do not have the original photoshop docs anymore, or the will to create them. Being the internet is what it is, here is what I have to offer- A repository on my own personal google drive of a large amount of hackers backgrounds. I'll never take them down or delete them. Enjoy.