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2002 Onion: "Ghost Of Christmas Future Taunts Children With Visions Of PlayStation 5"

Jordan117

Member
Fourteen long years ago, back when there really was just one Battlefield and Halo LAN parties were a thing, The Onion ran a Christmas Carol-inspired article that tried to forecast the state of gaming for Christmas 2016:

Ghost Of Christmas Future Taunts Children With Visions Of PlayStation 5.

Let's see how they did!

First, the console itself:

tRS18gv.jpg


The resolution isn't great, but it clearly suggests Sony would follow the colorful curvy plastic style that defined competing gadgets like the iMac and the Gamecube -- ironic since most consoles now resemble the minimalist black slab of the PS2.

As for the article...

Bored with scaring elderly misers, the Ghost of Christmas Future is spending the holiday season taunting modern children with visions of Christmas 2016's hottest toy: the Sony PlayStation 5, a 2,048-bit console featuring a 45-Ghz trinary processor, CineReal graphics booster with 2-gig biotexturing, and an RSP connector for 360-degree online-immersion play.

They start out getting a little ahead of themselves -- with the PS4 Pro launch, we're only just getting to the (at best) PlayStation 4.5, and bit ratings have been irrelevant for years. The processor speed is an absurdly high 45 Ghz, with a "trinary" architecture you don't see outside of obscure science fiction. But while the "CineReal booster" and "2GB biotexturing" are likewise nonsense, they strike gold with "360-degree online-immersion play." Can you say PSVR?

"I like to appear in the living room with a PS5 hooked up to 2016's most popular TV, the 4'x8' Hi-Def Sony Titania," the Ghost said.

This is only a little overambitious -- 4'x8' works out to 108'' diagonal, and LG once offered a 105'' model for a mere $10,000. And it was even 4K instead of merely "Hi-Def"!


"I usually start by showing them Toteki Aluminum, one of the future's most popular fight-and-chase games," the Ghost said. "It's far from the best available in 2016, but it always blows their mind to see the guy get hit with the falling sign while the drops of sweat fly off his face. You can see the whole scene, distorted, in each of the individual drops. That gives them a good preliminary idea of the graphics technology we're dealing with."

Toteki and "fight-and-chase" are an invented franchise (and genre), but NVIDIA was already touting "enhanced rain" with individually modeled raindrop physics last year.

The Ghost said he then likes to show Airsledz, a racing game in which jet-powered sleds whoosh through a four-dimensional racing course in the sky. The game, he said, enables the player to compete online against dozens of other players all around the world.

"They always ask if you can play it on the Internet—it's so cute how they still call it 'the Internet'—and I tell them, 'Hey, you can play this against 63 other PS5 owners simultaneously. At least you can in 14 years,'" the Ghost said. "And you should see their jaws hit the floor when they learn about the add-on accessories that enable users to actually fly around the room during gameplay."

Dunno about video games, but that sounds pretty similar to the increasingly popular IRL sport of drone racing. It can even make your eyes bleed! No hover accessories, unfortunately, though there's always Kickstarter. (Fun fact: Wired magazine's "Found" feature also predicted hoverboards for Christmas 2016.)


Also, "The Internet" is starting to sound a little antiquated, and 64-player MP is becoming more common.

Younger children, he said, salivate upon seeing Level One of Zonic Fugue. In it, Zonic, the indigo-colored son of Sonic The Hedgehog, faces off against Chuckles The Echidna in a Terrordactyl sky-joust, attempting to earn the Ankle Rockets he needs to gather the five Chaos Sapphires that, when combined, form the master key that opens the Melody Dome.

No word on if this title continues to defy the Sonic cycle, though the picture it paints sounds interesting.

To break the spirits of children 12 and up, the Ghost runs a brief demonstration of Back To Werewolf Island. The horror-action thriller, he said, will be produced in full 10.8 Omneo sound and feature new music from 40 of 2016's hottest skagcore acts, including FU3P, Dredgerous, and Frances Cobain.

Sounds a lot like The Order: 1886! Minus the licensed soundtrack, which has fallen a bit out of fashion. 10.8 surround sound is a bit over the top, though (eight subwoofers?). Interestingly, while Frances Cobain is more of a visual artist, she did take baby steps into music this year -- though it doesn't exactly sound like "skagcore".

The Ghost said he shows the children a brief clip of DC vs. Marvel, in which cinema-realistic figures of Spider-Man and the Joker dash across impossibly detailed city streets, attacking each other with dozens of different offensive maneuvers while leaping, somersaulting, and throwing objects.

"They usually start trembling at that point," the Ghost said. "That's when I go in for the kill by casually mentioning that the game comes packaged with the 2016 feature film of the same name—not on DVD, of course, but on SCAP. Ten times better."

We've yet to see a proper DC/Marvel crossover in any medium outside of 90s-era comics, but this did a good job foreshadowing grimgritty superhero fighting titles like Injustice: Gods Among Us. Also, is the current Blu-Ray standard ten times better than DVD? Not exactly.


The few children unbroken by DC vs. Marvel are invariably finished off by the sight of Star Wars—Episode IX: Jedi Destiny, a game which employs the world's most advanced artificial-intelligence algorithm to place the player inside the film's climactic battle sequence on the planet Mon Jeedam.

"With more than 12,000 distinct soldiers, creatures, and vehicles fighting at once, and the option to command the New Republic Fleet, the Imperial Armada, or the Yuuzhan Vong Invasion Force, it's not merely the best Star Wars game that's ever existed; it's an interactive film that looks better than any movie that's ever been made. No child has failed to sob hysterically at the sight of it."

While this sounds remarkably similar to Star Wars: Battlefront, we won't be seeing Episode IX until 2019, and the entire expanded universe has been junked. :,(

The PlayStation 5 will be available in stores Nov. 12, 2016, at a list price of Δ399 New Dollars ($199 Canadian).

Currency re-valuation. Hmmm. Check back in a year?

 

Eblo

Member
the Sony PlayStation 5, a 2,048-bit console featuring a 45-Ghz trinary processor, CineReal graphics booster with 2-gig biotexturing, and an RSP connector for 360-degree online-immersion play.

Talk about bottlenecking.
 

Inuhanyou

Believes Dragon Quest is a franchise managed by Sony
DOA5 already perfected sweat in fighting games and environmental destruction on 360 and PS3 Onion, systems only 2/3 years ahead of your article.
 

Lol

I loved Next Generation magazine though. It's pages were glossy and the cover was even better.

Trivia: I got into trouble at school over this Next Gen magazine/cover:

tb88sLP.jpg


Me and my buddy were exchanging gaming mags after school. I forgot which one he was giving me (GamePro I think). One of the teachers saw us (this was 5th grade), and thought the girl on the magazine meant a porno mag or something. They took the magazine and I told them it was mine. I had to explain to the headmaster that it was a games related magazine and there's nothing in it. The teacher gave it back eventually, like, after a week.

Good times!
 
Even at the time, I was wondering why I should be impressed that this was an actual screenshot.

It was impressive. Because at the time FPS graphics looked like this:

maxresdefault.jpg


Let me just say that Unreal was completely mindblowing at the time. The reflective surfaces alone were jawdropping. The scale of heights was incredible.
 

Mike M

Nick N
It was impressive. Because at the time FPS graphics looked like this:

maxresdefault.jpg


Let me just say that Unreal was completely mindblowing at the time. The reflective surfaces alone were jawdropping. The scale of heights was incredible.

But none of that is apparent in the screenshot of the cover. It's just a weird worms-eye view of a character model that has marginally more geometry going on against a backdrop of more brown castles.

Unreal was a great game, but this screenshot doesn't do a great job of demonstrating why that is the case (and certainly is not so amazing that it needs the magazine to assure us it's not pre-rendered or doctored, or whatever the point of that statement was).
 
Lol

I loved Next Generation magazine though. It's pages were glossy and the cover was even better.

Trivia: I got into trouble at school over this Next Gen magazine/cover:

tb88sLP.jpg


Me and my buddy were exchanging gaming mags after school. I forgot which one he was giving me (GamePro I think). One of the teachers saw us (this was 5th grade), and thought the girl on the magazine meant a porno mag or something. They took the magazine and I told them it was mine. I had to explain to the headmaster that it was a games related magazine and there's nothing in it. The teacher gave it back eventually, like, after a week.

Good times!

Lol her eyes look fucked up.
 
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