From the advent of the personal computer to the birth of the first test tube baby, this period was characterized by intense and rapid technological change. As Guffey notes, retrofuturism is "a recent neologism", but it "builds on futurists' fevered visions of space colonies with flying cars, robotic servants, and interstellar travel on display there where futurists took their promise for granted, retro-futurism emerged as a more skeptical reaction to these dreams." It took its current shape in the 1970s, a time when technology was rapidly changing. Retrofuturism is first and foremost based on modern but changing notions of "the future". ![]() But in its more popular form, futurism (sometimes referred to as futurology) is "an early optimism that focused on the past and was rooted in the nineteenth century, an early-twentieth-century 'golden age' that continued long into the 1960s' Space Age". In avant-garde artistic, literary and design circles, futurism is a long-standing and well-established term. Retrofuturism builds on ideas of futurism, but the latter term functions differently in several different contexts. Critic Pauline Kael writes, " presents a retro-futurist fantasy." Historiography In an example more related to retrofuturism as an exploration of past visions of the future, the term appears in the form of “retro-futurist” in a 1984 review of the film Brazil in The New Yorker. The ad talks of jewellery that is "silverized steel and sleek grey linked for a retro-futuristic look". The word retrofuturism is formed by the addition of the prefix "retro" from the Latin language, which gives the meaning of "backwards" to the word "future", a word also originating from Latin.Īccording to the Oxford English Dictionary, an early use of the term appears in a Bloomingdales advertisement in a 1983 issue of The New York Times. Primarily reflected in artistic creations and modified technologies that realize the imagined artifacts of its parallel reality, retrofuturism can be seen as "an animating perspective on the world". Characterized by a blend of old-fashioned " retro styles" with futuristic technology, retrofuturism explores the themes of tension between past and future, and between the alienating and empowering effects of technology. If futurism is sometimes called a "science" bent on anticipating what will come, retrofuturism is the remembering of that anticipation. ![]() Retrofuturism (adjective retrofuturistic or retrofuture) is a movement in the creative arts showing the influence of depictions of the future produced in an earlier era. ![]() System Shock tells us otherwise.Sailing ship airborne ("White Cruiser of the clouds"), 1902 After years of playing FPS games that finish on a low, you might be forgiven for thinking there were no great FPS endings out there. And finally, there's the vertiginous sprint through the collapsing station, into the brainstem of the beast-into SHODAN. You run a gamut of feeling, from bafflement to horror and revenge. You start off knocking over zombies and poking about in the trash of a ruined space station soon you're exploring the innards of a supercomputer with destructive intent. The structure of the game emphasised this: you were back and forth madly between the various zones, trying desperately to break SHODAN's control and, ultimately, save both yourself and the planet full of people that the deadly station was cruising toward. More than BioShock's Rapture, the System Shock space station gave a strong impression of being a working thing-a device for living in space. ![]() Each of them was perfectly pitched-the great air-locks of the spaceport section, the clunky jungles of the bio-spheres, and the surprising elegance of the executive suites. Competent acting with CD-quality reproduction: this was a great leap forward for the time, and brought game audio into the modern age.Įven with its graphically crude presentation, System Shock delivered the most believable, detailed environments we'd ever seen. This is what inspired BioShock's own series of voice-recordings, and, for those people who were lucky enough to buy the CD rather than the floppy disk version of System Shock, they were revelatory. Although you never see another living person, they're brought to life via their journals and diary entries.
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