Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity (2020)
Credit: © Nintendo

The year 2021 marks the 35th anniversary of one of the most beloved video game series of all time. “The Legend of Zelda” is a fantasy adventure series developed by Nintendo for play on the company’s video game consoles and handheld game systems. A video game console is a specialized gaming computer that connects to a television.

In the main series of Zelda games, the player controls an elflike boy named Link on a solitary quest. Zelda is the name of a princess whom Link must often rescue. Armed with a sword, shield, and other magical items, Link must explore puzzle-filled dungeons and battle fantastical monsters. Critics have widely praised the Zelda games for their rich, interactive worlds, engaging puzzles, and dramatic musical scores.

The Japanese game designer Shigeru Miyamoto created the first Zelda game, The Legend of Zelda, released in 1986. The game’s spirit of adventure and mystery was inspired by Miyamoto’s recollections of his childhood explorations of a cave by lanternlight. He took the name Zelda from Zelda Fitzgerald, the wife of the American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Legend of Zelda became the first video game to enable players to save their progress across multiple play sessions.

The Legend of Zelda (1986)
Credit: © Nintendo

Sequels to the game featured increasingly complex gameplay. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1991), for example, challenged players to explore a parallel “dark world” that mirrored the game’s main world. In The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time (1998), players use a magic ocarina (flutelike instrument) to change the passage of time. Early Zelda games, like most early electronic games, featured two-dimensional gameplay. The Ocarina of Time is considered a pioneering work of three-dimensional play.

Since 2000, Eiji Aonuma, another Japanese designer, has led development on most Zelda games, with Miyamoto playing a more advisory role. Aonuma’s games include The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (2002), in which players control the wind to sail across a vast ocean. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (2006) was noted in part for its darker, spookier tone. Aonuma also produced The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (2011). The game introduced virtual sword fights that closely track the player’s swings and thrusts with the game controller.

The Zelda series returned to its open-world roots with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017). The game presented players with a sprawling three-dimensional world to explore: killing monsters, foraging for natural materials, and completing quests in the desired order. This setting was also featured in Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity (2020), an action game that served as one of many spinoffs of the Zelda series.

In the electronic game Among Us (2018), players take on the role of crewmates, shown in this image, originally on a spaceship. One or a few of the apparent crewmates is actually an impostor, tasked with killing crewmates and sabotaging their work.
Credit: © Awangart18, Shutterstock

Are your friends acting strangely? Have they begun accusing various colors of being “sus”? They haven’t necessarily lost their minds. They’re just going crazy for the latest video game sensation: Among Us.

Among Us is a multiplayer game in which players take on the role of crewmates, originally on a spaceship. Each crewmate is given a list of tasks to perform, such as repairing vital systems or refueling the engines. Crewmates accomplish these tasks by succeeding at minigames, smaller games within the main game. However, one or a few players are secretly assigned to be impostors. Impostors look like crewmates, but it is their job to sabotage equipment and kill crewmates without being discovered.

Among Us can be played via the internet or a local wireless network. The game is played from a top-down perspective, with players moving around a map. Each player has a limited field of vision, enabling impostors to sneak around and conduct their mischief. When the body of a dead crewmate is discovered, play stops, and the players are taken to a meeting. Players can also call an emergency meeting.

It is at the meetings that the game really gets wild. In a meeting, players share information in an attempt to deduce the identity of one or more impostors. The players can then vote to kick people off the crew, with the goal of kicking out the impostors. It may sound simple enough, but remember the impostors are in the meeting also, and they are indistinguishable from ordinary crewmates. The impostors can deceive, misdirect, and outright lie to the crewmates, coaxing them to vote an innocent crewmate off the ship. Players refer to one another by the color of their spacesuits at these meetings, for example declaring “Cyan is sus” (short for suspicious).

Among Us traces its style of play to a party game sometimes called Mafia or Werewolf. In that game, certain players are secretly selected to be “killers,” and the other players must work to deduce their identity. Among Us was developed by the game studio InnerSloth of Redmond, Washington, and released in 2018. Among Us exploded in popularity in mid-2020, partly through playthroughs (video recordings of gameplay) posted on the video-streaming service Twitch. In October, a stream of the United States Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez playing the game became one of the most widely viewed Twitch streams ever.

April 13, 2020

In late March, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in New York City named the computer scientists Ed Catmull and Pat Hanrahan as the recipients of the annual A. M. Turing Award. The award is given to one or more individuals each year in recognition of contributions of lasting importance in the field of computing. Catmull and Hanrahan were honored for their work on three-dimensional (3-D) computer graphics and the impact of these techniques on computer-generated imagery (CGI). Their work has greatly influenced the motion picture and video game industries as well as the fields of augmented reality and virtual reality.

The 1995 film Toy Story used 3-D animation software created in part by Ed Catmull and Pat Hanrahan, the winners of this year’s A. M. Turing Award. Credit: © Walt Disney Pictures/ZUMA Press

Ed Catmull is a former president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios. Pat Hanrahan, a founding employee at Pixar, is a professor in the Computer Graphics Laboratory at Stanford University. Catmull and Hanrahan helped guide Pixar through its early years (the animation studio was created in 1986), and they helped create the “RenderMan” graphics system that gives two-dimensional images a 3-D appearance.

Under Catmull, Pixar used the RenderMan software to produce the motion picture Toy Story (1995), the first fully computer-animated feature film. Pixar then used RenderMan in a number of highly successful Toy Story sequels and other animated films. RenderMan software has also been used in numerous video games and in such blockbuster live-action films as Avatar, Titanic, and movies in the “Lord of the Rings,” “Jurassic Park,” and “Star Wars” series.

Alan M. Turing (at right) was an English mathematician and computer pioneer. He made important contributions to the development of electronic digital computers. Credit: Heritage-Images/Science Museum, London

The A. M. Turing Award is named after Alan Mathison Turing, a British mathematician and computer pioneer. Turing made key contributions to the development of electronic computers, including his work helping to build the first British electronic digital computer. In 1950, he proposed a test for determining if machines might be said to “think.” This test, now called the Turing test, is still central to discussions of artificial intelligence.

The first Turing Award was given to the American computer scientist Alan J. Perlis in 1966 for his role in developing influential computer-programming techniques. Since then, an award has been given every year. As of 2014, the award includes a $1 million cash prize. Catmull and Hanrahan are scheduled to receive the A.M. Turing Award at ACM’s annual awards banquet on June 20, 2020, in San Francisco, California. That event is contingent, of course, on the containment or continued spread of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.