• sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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      3 months ago

      It features heavily in the DX franchise because … well DX was written in Texas in the mid to late 90s, around the same time Alex Jones had a public access TV channel.

      They quite literally could have just worked in half the conspiracies he mentioned, and that would have been about 80% of the more fantastical stuff.

      I’d say they did a compelling job of weaving in batshit conspiracy stuff (it does make for dramatic storytelling, wild enemy types and locations) with … fairly prescient actual stuff around the unchecked progression of capitalism and technology.

      I can’t believe I am saying this, but compared to a whole lot of modern media franchises, they actually did a lot of continuity work to make the FEMA thing make sense in HR as a plausible precursor to how much more widespread it was in the original.

      I don’t think it really features in IW at all, as by that point the US government doesn’t… really exist, almost every where that still has a functional technological society is managed by a mixture of UN/WTO authorities and gigantic megacorporations.

      Also I guess worth mentioning: DX accidentally contributed to conspiracy culture even further by ‘predicting’ 9/11.

      When playtesting Liberty Island, enough people noticed that they’d cheaped out on the background worldbox/skybox by mirroring it, not including the Twin Towers, that they wrote it in a minor lore blurb that they’d been destroyed by terrorists in the early 21st century.

      Game is set in 2052… but came out basically a few months to a year (depending on your region) before … 9/11 actually happened.

      • jaybone@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        And there had been prior terrorist attacks or attempts on the WTC involving bombs in vans and such. So if you’re writing a fictional future dystopia, it’s not an entirely unreasonable speculation.