Starflight came on two 360 kB floppy disks. That’s kilobytes, not megabytes. I have one-page Word documents bigger than that. And yet, the game world comprised hundreds of explorable planets, generated randomly by fractal algorithms. This was a revolutionary move, an early gesture toward the open-ended gameplay you see in the Grand Theft Auto series.

Starflight also had a compelling underlying narrative. Most of the time I don’t care about the story behind a game. The games I tend to prefer have no narrative at all, like Tetris, or a very nominal story that isn’t central to the gameplay, like Plants vs Zombies. But Starflight told a terrific story, revealed throughout the gameplay in intriguing fragments.

The storyline begins in the future on an Earthlike planet called Arth. An archeological dig deep underneath the planet has uncovered artifacts from an elder race, including a faster-than-light starship powered by a crystal-like fuel called endurium. In the game, you captain one of these ships, based in a space station orbiting Arth.

Your mission, at first, is straightforward Star Trek boilerplate. You fly around looking for endurium and habitable planets. You also occasionally encounter various alien races, some friendly, some not.

As you do your exploring and interacting, you encounter clues to the real plot: something called the Crystal Planet is moving slowly but relentlessly across the galaxy, causing every star it passes to go supernova. You ultimately need to find the Crystal Planet and destroy it before your home sun blows up. There are some nice twists to this story. The Crystal Planet turns out to be made of endurium, the same substance that powers your ship. It further turns out that the endurium crystals themselves are living, sentient beings, which are being destroyed by human spaceships. So what you’re doing is heading off a desperate act of self-defense by the helpless creatures you burn in your engine. It feels uncomfortably like being in the Bush Administration. Complicated.

In order to discover how to destroy the Crystal Planet, you have to do a little detective work on the Galactic Empire’s history, and in so doing, you discover the ‘mythical’ planet Earth. It’s Earth in the far distant future, with the familiar continents and climates, but devoid of human presence. Aside from a few ruined buildings, there’s no sign of our ever having been there. The post-apocalyptic setting wasn’t the sci-fi cliche it is now, and at the height of the Cold War it was alarmingly plausible. When you discover the deserted Earth, it’s a poignant moment. Poignancy is not a quality you find in too many computer games.

Technology has gotten a lot better in the video game world, but the writing hasn’t. I’d trade all the 3D graphics in the world for more game settings like Starflight.

What’s interesting to me is how the movie is simultaneously so fresh and so derivative. Avatar’s freshness is in its breathtaking visuals, all the technogeekery of its making. It’s derivative in its plot, setting, characters, and all other non-technical content. It’s practically a mashup in movie form. In the spirit of my blog post parsing out all the sources of Halo, I figured I’d do the same for this movie. Here are some of the most obvious sources, similarities and resonances (There are some spoilers within, but the plot of this movie is totally predictable and the least interesting thing about it, so feel free to read if you’re planning to go see it.)

Dances With Wolves

The plots are extremely similar. Both are racially problematic, as thoughtfully outlined by io9.

Pocahantas

Not the historical Pocahantas, the Disney version. From Ponyponyshow’s Tumblr, click for full-sized.

Both Dances With Wolves and Avatar descend from the Pocahantas myth. I haven’t seen the Disney version, but Terrence Malick did a lovely job of it in The New World. That movie, Dances With Wolves and Avatar all share a cast member, Wes Studi.

Roger Dean’s paintings

Like the album covers he did for Yes.

Avatar is especially influenced by Roger Dean’s thing for floating islands.

The ever-helpful io9 has many more examples.

The Matrix

The whole virtual body thing naturally didn’t start with the Matrix, but that’s what I kept thinking of. The “avatar” disambiguation page on wikipedia lists a zillion things with that name, the two most culturally significant being the original word from Hinduism and the ubiquitous computing concept. Unlike in the Matrix, in Avatar, the virtual bodies are real. Except that they really aren’t, they only exist as ones and zeros. Layers within layers! Who says Hollywood action movies are dumb?

The Abyss

James Cameron has a fetishistic thing with asphyxiation, relating to his love of near-death diving experiences – see the New Yorker profile for some gruesome details.

Aliens

Sigourney Weaver! Robotic exoskeletons!

Sexy blue women

See this article on io9 about the phenomenon.

Unobtainium

Praise be to wikipedia. How else would I know that “unobtainium” is a fifty-year-old word?

Every Vietnam movie

All that helicopter-based combat in a jungle setting. A rich high-tech civilization being defeated by a less rich, lower-tech one with home field advantage.

Entire planet as organism

Pandora’s planetwide nervous system descends from the Gaia hypothesis. There’s an Asimov novel called Nemesis where a planet’s bacterial life all turn out to be a single networked superorganism that communicates telepathically with human visitors. The best “planet as organism” is the South Park episode “Lice Capades” where the sentient world is Clyde’s scalp.

The Dragonriders of Pern

Outing myself as a real dork here, but so Anne McCaffrey wrote a whole series of books about riding giant flying reptiles. As I recall, the riders communicated telepathically with them.

Fern Gully

Haven’t seen it myself, but one of my Twitter buddies pointed it out. Tone Loc is in it!

My point here is not that James Cameron is a bad artist for being so derivative. His work has its problems, what with the racial stereotyping and clunky dialog and broadness of stroke. But he’s still a good artist. His referencing, borrowing and outright quotation makes his work stronger. Any quotes or sources I missed? As usual, kindly hit the comments.

Here’s a list of all Halo’s sources, the ones I can think of anyway.

Every war movie

You play a space marine. You get dropped off in what’s basically a helicopter. You drive jeeps and throw grenades. There’s a particularly entertaining sequence where you’re driving around in what looks like an M1 Abrams tank.

Star Wars

Which is itself a mashup of many World War II movies. George Lucas spliced together a mixtape of dogfight scenes and then had Industrial Light & Magic recreate them shot-for-shot. One mixtape inspired another. The very first level of the game is lifted from the opening scene from Star Wars almost exactly. You fight your way off a spacecraft that’s been boarded and overrun by armored dudes shooting lasers. You make your way to an escape pod and launch it to the planet below. The only thing that’s missing is C-3P0.

Star Trek

In Halo’s universe the United Nations Space Command maps neatly onto Starfleet.

Alien and Aliens

The moody, cramped hallways with flickering lights. The helmet-mounted video cameras. The frequent sense of claustrophobic dread. The horror of humans being parasitized by aliens. One of the Covenant species looks kind of like the aliens in Aliens.

Ringworld

It’s set on a ringworld.

The Bible

Your foes are called the Covenant and the Flood. The game and the world it’s set on are called Halo.

The Song of Roland

Your holographic assistant Cortana is named after a sword.

All this borrowing and sampling is what makes Halo great. If it was “original” it would be tedious. You don’t need a ton of exposition and backstory if you’ve seen the movies or read the books that Halo is based on.

Any influences, references or outright thefts I missed? I know I must have. Hit me up in the comments.

If you haven’t had the pleasure, Doctor Who is an extremely long-running, low-budget British science fiction show about a time-traveling alien being who looks like a flamboyant Oxford don. Or actually a series of flamboyant Oxford dons. The original actor playing Doctor Who was elderly and became ill while the show was just getting to be popular. When he couldn’t continue, the BBC ingeniously decided to have the Doctor’s species periodically reincarnate as a routine part of their life cycle. They were thus able to keep the show going through many changes of lead actor. Doctor Who has been on the air for most of the past forty-five years with no signs of stopping anytime soon.

Here’s the original 1963 title sequence, with music composed by Ron Grainer and arranged, produced and recorded by Delia Derbyshire:

Let’s talk for a second about Delia Derbyshire.

She produced the Doctor Who theme music using analog oscillators and tape loops, laboriously, over a period of many weeks. Here she talks about her process.

Her name suggests that she might have been a professor at Hogwarts, but Delia Derbyshire was a genuine hipster ambient techno producer, decades before such a thing existed. She was buddies with Paul McCartney, Yoko Ono, Brian Jones and the guys in Pink Floyd. In addition to the Doctor Who theme, she produced a bunch of other tripped-out electronica. Hear a sample:

Delia Derbyshire – “Planetarium”

The Doctor Who theme I was hearing in the eighties as a third grader was a newer arrangement by Peter Howell:

The Delia Derbyshire version broke a lot of new ground, but the eighties version is the one that really works for me musically. The groove is tighter because the bass was recorded to a click track. The main melody is played on an Arp Odyssey, a more sophisticated version of the synth they used for R2D2′s voice. Peter Howell sings the B section melody wordlessly through a vocoder. Here’s a behind-the-scenes video if you want to really geek all the way out. Dude isn’t the world’s most dynamic camera presence, but he demonstrates all the different retrofuture gear one piece at a time.

In 1988, The KLF had a number one pop hit in the UK with “Doctorin’ The Tardis” which includes a sample of the Peter Howell theme.

What I like about electronic music is how it makes the strange familiar, and the familiar strange. The best science fiction does that too. Nothing could have sounded more futuristic or otherworldly to me as a kid than those synths and that vocoder. Now they’re museum pieces.