In the hollowed out Manzano Mountain, the United States Armed Forces Special Weapons Command once stashed the nation’s largest domestic nuclear weapons repository, some 2,450 warheads as of the turn of the millennium.įrom NASA to SETI to the Trinity nuclear test site and the landfill where Atari abandoned its surplus E.T. When the weather is clear, the Sandia Mountains to the east of Albuquerque drip the juices of their namesake fruit for a spell each evening, ripening quickly until the twilight devours them. . . . When characterizing the New Mexican landscape at the beginning of Alien Phenomenology, Or What It’s Like to Be a Thing, Ian Bogost (2012, 1) writes: One such anomalous material, a 1 x 5.5-foot rock formation, was found on the 53rd Martian day of NASA’s first rover mission in 2004 and nicknamed “Sandia” after the Sandia-Manzano mountain range in New Mexico (NASA 2004). A terrestrial tabula rasa chemically contrasting the Martian soil, basalt is used to calibrate the half-lives of materials on Mars. Cut from some of the densest lava on Earth, a smooth basalt disk installed as part of the rover’s alpha particle X-ray spectrometer (as distinct from mass spectrometers) is the control variable for extraterrestrial experiments (NASA 2012). On the surface of Mars, NASA’s Curiosity rover carries a piece of New Mexico with it.
A computer-generated New Mexican vista (top) is the result of a series of six seamless textures (bottom) that wrap the skybox to produce the background of Half-Life. This New Mexico may as well be Mars (see Figure 2.1).įigure 2.1. Wisps of cream-colored clouds, pre-baked maroon shadows, and the rippling bump map of the teal water paint a strange picture. In Half-Life (1998), low-poly models float in the middle of a New Mexican-themed box-a cube composed of six seamless 256 x 256 pixel textures. Patrolling the cliff’s edge, a lone marine from the Hazardous Environment Combat Unit (HECU) idles outside the Black Mesa Research Facility the contours of his crisp uniform stand out against the anti-aliased skyline. On a contemporary computer, the sharp cliff faces and stiff bipedal figures that populate the foreground are rendered at a much higher resolution than those twenty-year-old, interpolated buttes in the background. The smell of ozone and petrichor of the desert is replaced by the odor of a freshly unboxed graphics card or stack of memory sticks in anti-static wrap. An anamorphic image posing as perspectival space, this imaginary New Mexico unfolds into a cruciform that wraps around the geometry of a skybox. The colors are odd, the shadows are off, and the entire scene is slightly stretched like the painted panorama of a museum diorama, Hollywood backlot, or chapel ceiling. Atmosphere occludes the horizon where a purple, pixelated smear articulates the union of red and blue. Below, specular highlights and ray-traced reflections define a river’s surface-a sheet of frozen ripples sinking beneath banks of rust-colored sand. Fat tubes of rich, red earth jut into the sky as if extruded along the sharp contrasts of a height map. Peering out from a canyon cradled between two mesas, a series of striated buttes punctuate the Southwestern landscape. Gabe Newell, “On Productivity, Economics, Political Institutions and the Future of Corporations” Realism is a terrible, terrible design trope. Their only experience of humanity was a crowbar coming at them down a steel corridor.