Hacker Cinema
Wild Palms
1993 · TV series · 57 min episodes · 1 season
Created by Bruce Wagner, Oliver Stone
A man uncovers a dangerous web of schemes and deceit when he accepts the presidency of a TV company.
2 positive2 neutralfrom 4 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
4 comments on Hacker News
Love this post. Adding a whole bunch of things to my watch list.
One thing I don't see mentioned is the TV mini series "Wild Palms". I remember watching that as it debuted on TV back in '93. Haven't seen it since though. I remember Kim Cattrall being in it and I remember VR being a big part of the plot.
In looking it up I had no idea that Ryuichi Sakamoto created the music for it.
Here's a trailer for it. It looks so bad now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJMPCGo42cE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Palms
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106175/
It’s complicated.
First the meaning of selling ads. Steam also sells ads with a price of 30% of your net sales: cross promotion, store featuring, recommendations, etc. They are a games company and an ads company.
Like how does Amazon become a $25b+ rev ad behemoth seemingly overnight? It’s the same energy. They’re ads companies. This isn’t reductive nor taking Meta off this antagonist pedestal, it’s objective reality.
Meta owns Beat Saber. Whether they like it or not they’re a games company now. Sort of always were. That started as early as Zynga using their platform for viral advertising.
For budgets between $25k and $1m, where 90% of indie games with budgets greater than $0 lie, branding is a good fit for financing your original game.
Branding means you get as big and engaged audience as possible. So make your game fun. Then you have nothing to sell, so no micro transactions. Then budgets are fixed and deadlines are near, so few delays. And CMOs are pretty hands off. It’s a good fit for game financing.
What are the alternatives? Apple Arcade gives a similar budget and the games are good. However you usually need to have a finished game - if not the one you are showing Apple, then the one you already found success with. Everyone else is a traditional publisher.
So ads have a lot to offer games. Always have. Huge synergies.
About the Metaverse: we kind of have Wild Palms energy, influencers are more in the home on 13 year old’s TikToks than ever. I don’t know how much of that matters or will be enhanced by more immersion like in the miniseries.
This finally came out on Bluray not long ago. I remember seeing part of this in the early 90s and was trying to try and find it again forever but it was never available.
https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Wild-Palms-Blu-ray/245856/
Indeed... and as hard as the problem seems, what we think we see is already unlike what hits our retina - the mind fills in blind spots, balances color and detail, patches retinal irregularities, smooths motion, and so forth. The solution will probably use these qualities to its advantage.
(In Oliver Stone's 1993 miniseries Wild Palms, the near-future AR/VR experiences are sometimes enhanced via a hallucinogen/hypnotic called mimezine.)