I have been doing Miscellabra since 2012 (sites here and here), which means it has now existed for long enough to become one of those private creative things that is not really a side project anymore. It is just there. A parallel shelf. A drawer full of invented merchandise. A little clothing label for thoughts, jokes, dreams, misread cultural signals, fake campaigns, animal prophets, mythic weirdos, metal riffs, damaged optimism, and whatever else seems to want cotton more than paper.
There are storefronts, technically. Miscellabra appears publicly on Redbubble, with designs sold under that name, including Albert Chessa/Resonant/Quantumyth pieces across shirts, prints, bags and other formats. There are also public references to Miscellabra as a design brand founded in 2012 and primarily focused on apparel. But that is the external description. The internal description is better: Miscellabra is where I make the shirts I wish already existed.
That has always been the reason. Not commerce first. Not fashion first. Not some tidy brand strategy first. The basic impulse is more childlike and more stubborn than that. I think of a shirt, I want to see it, and then I make it. Sometimes I print it off for myself (see here, and shouts out to Kinda Funny). Sometimes I put it online. Sometimes it sits there like a tiny broadcast from another timeline, waiting for the one other person who understands the exact joke, the exact longing, or the exact nonsense frequency.
“Garments for the Guileless” feels right because these are not cynical shirts. They may be sarcastic, strange, obscure, stupid, bleak, elaborate, or stupidly elaborate, but they are not dead-eyed. They are shirts made in good faith by someone who still thinks a visual joke can be worth making properly. Someone who still thinks a made-up word can carry a worldview. Someone who still thinks a fake campaign shirt for an impossible film sequel can feel weirdly urgent. Someone who still thinks a red panda named Cosmo Kenny can arrive with the authority of folklore.
Cosmo Kenny is probably the correct mascot for this first entry, because he explains the whole thing without explaining anything. A red panda, scarfed and luminous, framed in purple, bearing the message: COSMO KENNY LIVES. That is all. No lore dump. No franchise context. No polite explanatory subtitle. Just a creature and a declaration. He lives. Accept it.
That is the exact Miscellabra zone. The shirt behaves as if the viewer has arrived late to something. It implies a mythology without requesting permission to build one. Who is Cosmo Kenny? Why does he live? Was he presumed dead? Is this a memorial, a resurrection cult, a children’s television relic, a forgotten mascot, a cosmic trickster, a small god of personal survival? The shirt does not answer because the unanswered space is the point. It gives you the relic and lets your mind supply the church around it.
That sensibility runs through the rest of the group. The best Miscellabra shirts often feel like they came from a world that has slightly more nonsense infrastructure than ours. A world with services, campaigns, local legends, mascots, failed films, cult slogans, strange philosophy, and regional riff providers.
The Kelliherlihy Boy Metal-Riffing Service shirt is one of the cleanest examples. It takes the shape of an old local business advertisement and applies it to something no council has yet had the courage to regulate: metal riffing as a household service. Not performance. Not entertainment. Service. Something essential. Something you might book when the roof is leaking, the soul is sagging, or the garage has not heard enough distorted guitar in the last financial quarter.
The fake quotation on the shirt — “Let me strum for you… Let me shred your soul…” — gives it the feeling of a trade card from an alternate comedy-metal universe. The little stadium illustration, the cartoon figure, the formal lettering, the absurd service language: it all combines into a piece that looks as though it should have been handed to you at a local fair by a man who can repair both amplifiers and morale. It is ridiculous, but it is not empty ridiculousness. It has a job. It makes a private idea look public.
The Make Wayne’s World 3 Happen and Put Mastodon In It shirt belongs to the same family, but with a more direct civic function. It is a petition shirt for a cultural event that does not exist. It says the quiet part very loudly. It does not suggest. It demands. Wayne’s World 3 should happen, and Mastodon should be in it. The orange type, the black shirt, the group composition, the sense of a campaign poster that accidentally became apparel: all of it works because the shirt treats an absurd wish as a public cause.
That is one of the pleasures of making imagined garments. You can take a thought that would normally vanish in conversation and give it the force of merchandise. Merchandise has a strange authority. A thing printed on a shirt looks as though at least one committee, one tour manager, one fan club, one wrong-headed genius, or one underground movement has already approved it. Miscellabra uses that authority irresponsibly, which is precisely why it works.
Then there is HYPELOSOPHY, which is probably the most openly doctrinal of the bunch. A little monkey making a heart with its hands sits under the word like a saint of anticipation. Beneath it is the entire creed: get hyped and it happens, 100% joy; get hyped and it does not happen, 50% joy; do not get hyped and it happens, 50% joy; do not get hyped and it does not happen, 0% joy. Conclusion: get hyped.
This is funny because it is formatted like a joke, but I also believe it. Hype is not a guarantee that reality will behave. Hype is not evidence. Hype is not prophecy. It is a voluntary enrichment of the waiting period. It turns the lead-up into part of the experience. You can be disappointed later and still have gained something from the imagining. You can be wrong and still have enjoyed the approach. The monkey understands this. The monkey has done the maths. The monkey is correct.
The MISANTHROPTIMIST shirt is more wounded, but still affectionate. A seal in icy water, solemn and beautiful, sits beneath a word that sounds like it has always existed. Misanthroptimist. Someone who mistrusts humanity but has not fully given up on it. Someone capable of looking at the species with narrowed eyes and still hoping it pulls through. The line beneath — “In a world composed of equal parts good and evil, one must become a…” — cuts off before completing itself, leaving the invented word to carry the conclusion.
That is another Miscellabra habit: making language look official before anyone has agreed that the word exists. A good made-up word feels discovered, not coined. Misanthroptimist has that quality. It is silly, but it also describes a real posture toward the world. It is not soft optimism. It is not fashionable despair. It is a seal’s-eye view of civilisation: cold water, huge eyes, suspicion, endurance, some remaining tenderness.
The One Below moves away from text almost entirely. The figure stands alone on a green shirt: damp, ancient, narrow-limbed, subterranean, maybe noble, maybe dangerous, maybe just surprised to have been printed. Redbubble results identify a Miscellabra piece called The One Below (Noble Elder), described as a subterranean creature alerted to a presence in the distance or a scent on the wind. That phrase suits it. The design feels like a character entry torn out of an old fantasy sourcebook, except the sourcebook is missing and the shirt is all that remains.
That kind of image is important to Miscellabra because not everything has to be a gag. Some garments are just creature evidence. Some are field notes. Some are fragments of lost media. Some are apparently promotional objects for stories that were never written down. The One Below has that quality. It does not need a slogan because the body is the slogan. The whole design says: here is a being, and apparently it belongs somewhere.
Then there are the simpler, stranger pieces: Nosgoth, with its vertical weapon-like forms and cold title; the light-blue sketch portrait, stark and oddly vulnerable; the black shirt with a white unreadable metal-style logo, which turns typography into thorns, bone, weather and noise. These shirts do not ask to be decoded in the same way. They are tonal objects. They sit in the collection like side rooms. They widen the cabinet.
That is what Miscellabra really is: a cabinet. The name has always suggested miscellany and candelabra at the same time, which is useful because the project is both a pile of unrelated things and a little ritual object. The logo understands this. A candelabra under the word MISCELLABRA is almost too literal, but literal in the right way. It looks like a mark from a shop that sells cursed stationery, fake band shirts, prophetic animalwear and one-off philosophical garments to people who wandered in by accident.
The symbol works because it does not over-explain the project. It gives it a crest. A fake institution. A house mark for things that should not necessarily belong together, but do. Cosmo Kenny, the Hype Monkey, the Misanthroptimist Seal, The One Below, the riff service, the Mastodon-Wayne’s-World campaign, Nosgoth, the sketch head, the impossible metal logo: all of them can sit under the candelabra because the candelabra is not asking for consistency. It is asking for illumination.
I like that apparel can do this. A shirt is a small public surface. It is not a full essay, but it can imply one. It is not a film, but it can feel like film merchandise. It is not a record, but it can dress itself like a tour shirt. It is not a manifesto, but it can print a conclusion in block letters and make a monkey the face of the argument. Shirts are blunt objects, but they can carry surprisingly delicate private signals.
Miscellabra has stayed interesting to me because it accepts all of those signals. There is no need to force everything into one lane. One design can be nostalgic. One can be mythic. One can be heavy. One can be cute. One can be philosophical in a stupid hat. One can be nothing but a creature standing in the middle of a green field of cotton. The only real standard is whether I want the object to exist.
That is why “imagined garments” feels more accurate than “graphic tees.” A graphic tee is a product category. An imagined garment is a small artefact from a possible world. It has implied context. It suggests events, jokes, bands, shows, services, religions, creatures, movements, and local legends that may or may not have happened. It invites the viewer to fill in the missing timeline.
Cosmo Kenny lives. The Kelliherlihy Boy provides metal-riffing service. The Hype Monkey has solved anticipation. The seal has developed a philosophy of disappointed hope. The One Below has surfaced. Wayne’s World 3 has not happened yet, but the campaign office is apparently open. Nosgoth still echoes. The candelabra is lit.
That is the sensibility. Garments for the Guileless. Shirts for people who still enjoy a premise. Shirts for people who can look at a fake thing and immediately understand that the fake thing has weight. Shirts for people who do not require every joke to announce itself as a joke. Shirts for people who enjoy the object first and the explanation later.
Miscellabra began in 2012, but it still feels like the same operation now: make the thing, print the thing, wear the thing, let the thing behave as though it came from somewhere. That is enough of a brief. That is enough of a brand. That is enough of a mythology.
Case in point, I’m listening to this Elwynn Forest Ambience video as I type.
I suppose it’s because it sits at a very particular intersection in my life.
The film itself is one thing: a huge, expensive, sincere, technically ambitious fantasy adaptation that tried to bring Blizzard’s world into cinemas with scale and conviction. But around the film there is another story, and that is the one I find myself returning to more often. It is the story of being in my twenties, studying at ANU, working in the Australian public service, still half-believing that the future might lead somewhere near games or visual effects or digital cinema, and finding myself unusually invested in the road to a film that seemed to be attempting something almost impossible.
By 2014, Warcraft had been with me for more than a decade in one form or another. My earliest contact with it goes back to 2002 in Curtin, through Anton, the Russian kid who was friends with George and who was deeply into Warcraft III. That was my first proper contact with the thing: not World of Warcraft as a global MMO phenomenon, not the later film campaign, but the box art, the RTS language, the look of the orcs and humans, the sense that this was fantasy with weight and muscle and architecture behind it. I remember drawing the Warcraft III cover art in high school. I still have some hope that the drawing exists somewhere, because it would be perfect to include here, a small piece of evidence from before I really knew that these fictional worlds would stay with me for as long as they have.
Then there was Ciarán around 2004, and that later layer of exposure, when Warcraft III and its wider culture had settled into the background of teenage life. It was one of those games that did not have to be “yours” in the strict ownership sense to become part of your internal landscape. You saw it on other people’s computers. You heard people talk about it. You watched pieces of matches, campaigns, custom maps, cutscenes. It entered through friends as much as through the software itself. That is important, because Warcraft was never only a story delivered from author to audience. It was a shared technical and imaginative space. Even before I understood the lore properly, I understood that the world had a shape.
By the time the film was being presented seriously, I was at ANU, doing an Arts degree, working at the same time, and carrying a lot of optimism about where study might eventually take me. I had this clear, maybe slightly naive, but still meaningful sense that there could be a future somewhere near visual effects, gaming, cinema, or some adjacent creative-technical industry. I had always been drawn to that threshold: the point where imagination becomes production, where a thing from the mind becomes a rendered image, a model, a scene, a world. I had loved Avatar historically for that reason as much as anything else. I knew the story of enormous technical risk, of people betting that audiences could emotionally engage with digital characters if the craft and conviction were strong enough. Warcraft seemed to be facing a similar test, only with a different problem: it had to translate a game world already loved by millions into a film that could hold together as cinema.
That is partly why I found myself rooting for it. Warcraft was popular, yes, but it was not cinematically proven. Game adaptations had a terrible reputation. Fantasy cinema had its own enormous precedents and expectations. Blizzard’s universe was dense, stylised, factional, sometimes operatic, sometimes cartoonishly broad, and often emotionally direct in a way that could either work beautifully on screen or collapse into costume and exposition. The whole thing could easily have gone wrong. Yet there was something compelling in the fact that Duncan Jones was the person trying to do it.
Jones was not an anonymous studio journeyman being handed a brand. He had made Moon, which had given him immediate credibility as a filmmaker who understood isolation, identity, systems, and emotional clarity inside a genre frame. He had followed that with Source Code. Then he stepped into Warcraft, which on paper looked like a massive leap in scale. The Guardian’s 2015 profile of Jones described him as a child who had spent time on tour with his father, David Bowie, and who found in games a form of escape and also a kind of knowable place, a world one could return to and understand through repeated contact. That detail always felt relevant to Warcraft, because this film needed a director who understood games as places, not merely as plot reservoirs.
The BlizzCon 2014 panel is where the memory fixes itself. BlizzCon 2014 took place on 7–8 November in Anaheim, very close to my own birthday on 1 November, which has always made BlizzCon feel oddly adjacent to birthday season in my mind. The Warcraft movie presentation was part of that 2014 convention cycle, with Duncan Jones and Chris Metzen appearing together to talk about the film and present it to the Blizzard audience.
I remember the stage imagery clearly: the soldiers, the armour, the Stormwind presence, the attempt to make the room itself feel pulled into faction identity. I had misremembered the name as something like “Stormguard,” but of course what I am reaching for is Stormwind: those blue-and-gold, Alliance-coded human guards and soldiers, the martial ceremonial language of the human side of Azeroth. That was exactly the kind of thing the panel understood. Warcraft has always had its story, but it also has banners, silhouettes, poses, tabards, crests, mounts, and faction posture. When Blizzard presents something, it often does so through those visual codes first. You do not need a lore lecture before you know what side of the room you are standing in.
Chris Metzen’s presence gave the whole thing a different charge. Metzen was not simply a producer on a film panel. For many people he was one of the voices of Blizzard’s internal mythology, one of the central architects of Warcraft’s tone and heroic language. His involvement made the film feel connected to the older creative bloodstream of the franchise. It suggested that the film was not being assembled by people merely licensing the name, but by people who understood that Warcraft had a rhythm: parents and children (my wife and I just became parents in February), clans and kingdoms, corruption and honour, portals and exiles, doomed leaders and strange inheritances.
The panel itself reached me in Canberra, not Anaheim. This is the part I can still see without effort. It was raining. I had headphones, an umbrella, and snacks — donuts, I think — and I decided to watch the panel from a specific place on the ANU campus. It was a willow tree near an oval, a place I can still go to today. I set myself up underneath it, not perfectly sheltered, but sheltered enough. I remember being warm enough, dry enough, and completely absorbed. There was something faintly absurd about it, sitting under a tree in Canberra rain watching American convention footage about orcs, mages, motion capture, and fantasy cinema. But it made sense to me at the time, and it makes even more sense to me now.
That small scene has become inseparable from the film. It was not a cinema screening. It was not an opening night. It was not even the trailer release. It was a panel, watched on a phone, under an umbrella, under a willow tree, during a period when my life still felt open in many directions. I was working, studying, building a relationship that had begun in 2012 with the woman who is now my wife, and still imagining some future relationship with creative production. The phone was small, the world being described was enormous, and somehow the two scales worked together.
That is the part I wanted in the banner for this article: the film imagery dominating the frame, because of course the entry is about Warcraft, but a tiny detail at the bottom centre, a little memory tucked into the larger retrospective. A willow tree, rain, a person seen from behind, an umbrella, a phone held horizontally. The private act of watching something public. The modest Australian setting beneath the enormous fantasy machinery of Azeroth and Draenor.
The film’s development had already been long by then. Legendary Pictures and Blizzard first announced a Warcraft film partnership years before Jones came aboard, and the eventual film, directed by Jones and co-written by Jones and Charles Leavitt, would not reach audiences until 2016. Principal photography began in January 2014 and wrapped in May 2014, with a long post-production period after that, which makes sense given the number of digital characters, environments, battles, spells, and hybrid live-action/CG sequences involved.
That long post-production period was part of the fascination. Warcraft was a film that had to be built as much as shot. Stormwind had to feel physically grounded but also larger than ordinary medieval architecture. The orcs had to be massive without becoming inert. Gul’dan had to look grotesque and ancient and powerful while still being playable as a character. Durotan had to be recognisably an orc but emotionally legible as a husband, father, chieftain, and dissenter. The gryphon flight over Stormwind had to work as a moment of visual announcement, the kind of shot that tells a Warcraft player: yes, they are at least trying.
The plot of the film is, in retrospect, both more ambitious and more compressed than people sometimes remember. It begins on Draenor, the orc homeworld, which is dying under the influence of fel magic. Gul’dan, a warlock whose power depends on draining life from others, unites the orc clans into the Horde and opens a portal to Azeroth by sacrificing captives. That image is central to the whole film: a new world reached through mass death, a promised escape built on corruption. The first movement of the story is therefore not conquest in a simple sense. The orcs are invading, but they are also fleeing. Their world is ruined, and the new one is both salvation and target.
Durotan, chieftain of the Frostwolf clan, enters that invasion as a leader already uneasy with what Gul’dan represents. He travels with Draka, his pregnant mate, and Orgrim Doomhammer, his friend and ally. Draka gives birth after arriving in Azeroth, and their son, Go’el, is nearly lost before Gul’dan revives him through fel magic by draining the life from a deer. It is a disturbing moment because it presents fel not as abstract evil but as an immediate transaction: one life consumed to preserve another. The child lives, but the method stains the miracle. The film uses that kind of exchange repeatedly. Life, honour, political survival, magical power — nothing is free inside Gul’dan’s system.
On the human side, the story follows Anduin Lothar, military commander of Stormwind, as the kingdom begins discovering the aftermath of orc attacks. Khadgar, a young mage who has left the Kirin Tor, recognises traces of fel magic on bodies found after the raids. King Llane Wrynn sends Lothar and Khadgar to Karazhan to seek help from Medivh, the Guardian of Tirisfal. Medivh is introduced as the great protective magical figure of the realm, but the film slowly reveals that he is compromised. The same corruption that has enabled the portal is already inside Azeroth’s highest magical defender.
That is the cleanest structural idea in Warcraft: both worlds are already damaged before the armies fully meet. Draenor has been poisoned by fel, and Azeroth’s protector has been corrupted from within. The war is therefore not simply caused by misunderstanding. It is driven by decay in the systems that are supposed to preserve life. The orcs are caught under Gul’dan. The humans trust Medivh. In both cases, authority has been infected.
Garona sits between the two sides, and the film uses her as a bridge figure, though not always as elegantly as it might have. She is first held by the orcs, then taken by the humans, then placed into political and emotional proximity with Llane, Lothar, and Khadgar. Her mixed identity makes her useful to both sides and fully safe with neither. The film’s own behind-the-scenes discussion framed Garona and Khadgar as outcasts in parallel: he has separated himself from the Kirin Tor, while she exists between cultures and must adapt constantly in order to survive.
The middle of the film is built around failed attempts at understanding. Durotan sees Gul’dan clearly enough to seek contact with the humans. Llane is pragmatic enough to consider that not every orc is the same. Garona becomes the interpreter of that fragile possibility. But Blackhand’s attack, Medivh’s weakening, and the death of Lothar’s son Callan break the possibility before it can become durable. That sequence is one of the more interesting tragic turns in the film, because the collapse is not caused by one person being foolish. It is caused by timing, fear, divided loyalties, and a corrupted power structure interfering exactly when trust begins to form.
Then comes the Frostwolf tragedy. Gul’dan and Blackhand purge Durotan’s clan. Orgrim helps Draka escape with the baby. Draka sends Go’el downriver in a basket before being killed. Durotan, now stripped of almost everything except his public honour, challenges Gul’dan to mak’gora, the orcish duel tradition. The point of the duel is not merely to win. Durotan needs the gathered orcs to see what Gul’dan really is. When Gul’dan resorts to fel magic and drains Durotan’s life rather than defeating him honourably, the crowd witnesses the truth. The tragedy is that revelation does not immediately become revolution. Gul’dan is exposed, but he is still powerful.
The final movement of the film is built around the portal. Medivh, now fully revealed as corrupted, begins opening the way for the Horde’s full arrival. Khadgar and Lothar confront him at Karazhan, and Medivh, near death, uses what remains of himself to redirect the portal to Stormwind, allowing prisoners to escape. Meanwhile, Llane understands that he is unlikely to survive and privately instructs Garona to kill him, knowing that by doing so she will gain standing among the orcs. It is a grim political sacrifice, one that turns personal horror into strategic positioning. Garona does it, and is received by the Horde under Gul’dan’s gaze.
Lothar arrives to retrieve Llane’s body and is challenged by Blackhand. He kills him in single combat, avenging Callan, and the orcs allow him to leave because the rules of mak’gora bind them even when Gul’dan wants otherwise. The film then closes by establishing the Alliance: the human nations, dwarves, and high elves begin uniting against the Horde. Elsewhere, Go’el is found by a human, setting up the destiny of Thrall, one of Warcraft’s most important figures. The plot is therefore a beginning in the strictest sense: the First War as a founding wound, not a resolved adventure.
This is one reason I remain fond of the film despite its obvious compression problems. Warcraft is not really shaped like a conventional standalone fantasy film. It behaves more like the opening chapter of a chronicle, one that assumes history will continue beyond the frame. This is both its strength and its weakness. The film is full of names, places, political roles, magical institutions, clan structures, and lore implications. For some viewers that density felt like homework. For others, myself included, it gave the film a strangely comforting texture. It felt like the edge of a much larger map.
The criticism that the film tries to do too much is fair. It is covering Draenor, Stormwind, Karazhan, Dalaran, the Horde, the Alliance, fel magic, the Guardian, orc honour, human politics, Garona’s divided identity, Durotan’s rebellion, Lothar’s grief, Khadgar’s investigation, Medivh’s corruption, Llane’s sacrifice, and Thrall’s origin. That is an enormous amount of narrative load for a 123-minute film. The final cut often moves with the blunt efficiency of a campaign summary. Scenes sometimes feel like they are arriving because the lore requires them rather than because the drama has fully breathed its way there.
But I also think that bluntness is part of why the film has aged in an interesting way. It does not feel slippery or embarrassed. It is not winking at the audience. It does not apologise for being Warcraft. It places strange names into actors’ mouths and expects everyone to keep up. It gives us fel, mak’gora, Karazhan, Dalaran, Stormwind, Ironforge, the Kirin Tor, the Guardian, the Horde, the Alliance, and the Doomhammer, and it does so with a level of straight-faced commitment that I still appreciate. The film’s problem is not a lack of belief. If anything, it believes so strongly in the source world that it sometimes forgets how much translation a general audience needs.
That sincerity extends into the visual effects work, which remains the most important part of any serious retrospective of the film. Industrial Light & Magic’s work on the orcs was central to the entire project. The film could survive a certain amount of plotting density if Durotan, Orgrim, Draka, Blackhand, and Gul’dan worked as characters. If they failed, the whole film would collapse into spectacle. The ILM process was built around preserving actor performance rather than using motion capture as disposable reference. FXGuide reported that what audiences see in Durotan came almost entirely from the facial solve rather than hand-animated invention, with a stereo camera head rig capturing performance data, Animatrik tracking facial markers in 3D, and ILM using its proprietary solver and SnapSolve process to transfer subtle performance into the digital characters.
That technical choice gives the orc scenes their best quality: the sense that there are actual performances inside those faces. Toby Kebbell’s Durotan works because the eyes and brow carry thought. Rob Kazinsky’s Orgrim works because his hesitation and loyalty register beneath the surface mass of the character. Daniel Wu’s Gul’dan works because the performance is not built solely from posture and design; there is a calculating, parasitic intelligence behind the eyes. The orcs are not perfect. Some shots are more convincing than others. But the intention is clear: they are characters first, creatures second.
The facial-capture detail is still remarkable. /Film’s ILM visit reported that the hero orc actors wore face-mounted camera systems with two cameras and more than 200 facial motion dots to track, and that ILM did not treat the captured performances as loose inspiration. The team tracked details such as eyeballs and teeth separately, then tested the performance on a scan of the actor before transferring it to the orc model. The article also notes one of the stranger practical problems of translating humans into orcs: tusks. Animators had to adjust lips and mouth movement so that the performance could survive the enormous dental architecture of the species.
Hal Hickel, ILM’s animation supervisor, explained that the team deliberately tried not to overwrite what the actors had done. He also described the challenge of making human performance fit onto far larger orc bodies, particularly with the size of their mouths and tusks. Hickel singled out Durotan as the character who received the most time and care because of his screen presence, and he noted that these orcs needed range: anger and violence, yes, but also sadness, fear, tenderness, and stillness.
That last word, stillness, is one of the reasons I think Durotan remains the film’s strongest element. He is not compelling because he is the biggest or loudest figure. He is compelling because his story is built around restraint. He is watching his people become dependent on a power he knows is destroying them. He has a child born into exile. He tries diplomacy despite belonging to a culture organised around strength and honour. He dies not because he misreads Gul’dan, but because he understands that Gul’dan has to be exposed publicly. Durotan’s tragedy is that moral truth and political power do not automatically align.
The production also had to solve the issue of orc physicality. Terry Notary, who has become one of modern cinema’s key movement specialists, worked with the orc actors as movement coach and also appeared in the film. Hickel noted that Notary helped the actors move like massive 500-pound orcs rather than ordinary humans, and that it was useful for actors to see real-time approximations of themselves as characters such as Durotan, Orgrim, and Draka.
That real-time preview detail is fascinating because it points toward where filmmaking was heading. Warcraft came before the current dominance of virtual production language, but it already sits in that transitional zone where actors, directors, and VFX teams are trying to keep performance grounded inside a world that will mostly be completed after the shoot. Bill Westenhofer, the film’s VFX supervisor, told The Hollywood Reporter that Duncan Jones wanted to get as close to a live-action experience as possible, which led to systems where actors could be seen as orcs in environments during production.
Westenhofer is another important figure in this story. He had already won Oscars for The Golden Compass and Life of Pi, and he brought serious VFX credibility to Warcraft. More charmingly, he also described himself as having been a Warcraft player from the beta period, which is exactly the kind of overlap I suspected would be common in the VFX world: people building these images were not necessarily detached technicians. Some of them knew the world from the inside, as players.
The Hollywood Reporter piece also gives one of my favourite behind-the-scenes facts about the film: the Murloc cameo. Westenhofer said there had not been a plan to include the amphibious creature, but he created one himself in Blender and put it into the film as a gift for fans. That is exactly the kind of obscure production detail that warms me toward the project. The film may be uneven, but it was made by people who understood the pleasure of recognition.
The same article describes how the team approached magic practically where possible. Actors could wear LED lights that illuminated them and parts of the set when magic was meant to be present, and blasts of air were used to affect the environment. That kind of detail is easy to overlook, but it helps explain why some of the spellcasting has physical presence rather than feeling entirely pasted in afterwards.
The scale was enormous. Westenhofer described 14 hero orcs and another 30 to 40 generic variations, with some battle shots requiring more than 1,000 orcs. He estimated that rendering on a single computer would have required 30,000 years of render time. That figure is almost comically huge, but it captures the gap between the apparent simplicity of “make a Warcraft movie” and the actual industrial problem of putting armies of fur, hair, leather, skin, armour, cloth, weapons, smoke, fire, magic, and digital bodies into photorealistic motion.
This is where my own 2014 mindset becomes relevant again. I was thinking about visual effects and games as possible worlds of work, not in a fully mapped way, but with that young-adult sense that proximity might eventually become direction. Watching Warcraft’s road to release, I was not only watching a film campaign. I was watching a production problem. I was watching people try to solve the question of how to make game scale cinematic without sanding away the game’s own design language.
That design language is one of the things I still like most about the film. Stormwind is not just medieval. It is Warcraft medieval: oversized, polished, heraldic, almost toyetic in its silhouette, but rendered with enough stone and light to feel plausible inside the film’s own rules. The armour is broad and ornate. The gryphon is not a background animal but an emblem in motion. The orc weapons are enormous because Warcraft proportions have always been enormous. A more timid adaptation would have reduced everything toward generic historical fantasy. Jones’s film often does the opposite. It accepts the scale problem and tries to photograph the exaggeration as reality.
That choice is probably one reason the film divided people. To a non-player, the proportions can look strange. To someone who knows Warcraft, reducing those proportions would have felt like betrayal. The film had to choose, and I respect that it chose the world’s own visual grammar. It says: this is how Azeroth looks. The shoulders are huge. The banners are clean. The magic is green. The cities are impossible. The wolves are massive. The hammers are absurd. The sincerity of that choice has aged better for me than a safer approach would have.
The cast also deserves some credit here. Travis Fimmel’s Lothar is loose, slightly irreverent, and not always playing the solemn fantasy commander. Dominic Cooper gives Llane a kingly softness that makes his final decision more effective. Ben Schnetzer’s Khadgar carries the exposition burden with a lighter touch than the script probably deserves. Paula Patton’s Garona has the hardest job in the film, because she is asked to carry makeup, cultural conflict, physicality, romance-adjacent tension, political sacrifice, and lore compression all at once. Ben Foster’s Medivh is perhaps the strangest performance, which is appropriate for the character: remote, wounded, decaying, and slightly out of phase with everyone around him.
The orc performers, though, remain the centre. Toby Kebbell, Rob Kazinsky, Daniel Wu, Anna Galvin, and Clancy Brown are working through a technical layer, yet their characters often feel more cohesive than the human side. That may be because the orc story is simpler and more tragic: a people fleeing death, led by a monster, with one honourable chieftain trying to prevent spiritual collapse. The human story has to introduce institutions. The orc story introduces a moral wound and then keeps pressing on it.
There are also several obscure casting and cameo details that add to the film’s odd charm. Glenn Close appears uncredited as Alodi, the ancient mage encountered through the magical artifact in Dalaran. Chris Metzen has an uncredited cameo as a perfume vendor in Stormwind. These are small details, but they contribute to the film’s feeling of being made partly as an internal celebration, with little pockets of recognition placed around the main narrative.
Rob Kazinsky’s presence is another example. He was known publicly as a genuine Warcraft player, and Wired covered his Comic-Con comments about how his love of World of Warcraft had once caused relationship trouble, which he joked was vindicated by eventually starring in the movie. Wired also reported that Orgrim’s design drew from Blizzard concept art combined with photographs and scans of Kazinsky.
That kind of fact is easy to treat as trivia, but it points to something real about the production. Warcraft was not made by a cast and crew uniformly outside the culture of the game. There were people involved who had played, cared, obsessed, recognised. That does not automatically make a film good, but it changes the nature of the attempt. It means some of the strange choices are not careless. They are over-faithful, or too condensed, or caught between competing audience needs. Those are different failures from indifference.
When Warcraft finally released in 2016, the box office story became almost as interesting as the film. Box Office Mojo lists the film at about $439 million worldwide, with only about $47.4 million domestic and about $391.7 million international. China alone contributed about $225.5 million. Australia’s release was listed for 16 June 2016, which places it right in that midyear winter pocket for us.
Those numbers created a strange legacy. In one sense, Warcraft was a huge global grosser for a video game film. In another, its domestic underperformance and high cost made the future of the franchise uncertain. It became one of those films people could describe as both successful and unsuccessful depending on which accounting frame they were using. That ambiguity suited the film almost too well. Warcraft itself is about two sides looking at the same event through completely different histories.
The critical reception was rough, and I understand why. The film asks too much of newcomers and perhaps not enough of its strongest emotional material. It needed more time with Durotan and Draka. It needed more space for Llane and Garona to develop before the final sacrifice. It needed Medivh’s corruption to unfold with more dread. It needed the human kingdoms beyond Stormwind to feel like more than sequel scaffolding. It needed either a longer cut or a serial format. In 2026, it is hard not to look at Warcraft and think that it arrived in the wrong shape. It might have thrived as a prestige streaming season with eight episodes: Draenor, Stormwind, Karazhan, the Frostwolves, Garona, Medivh, mak’gora, the portal.
But that is retrospective convenience. In 2016, the dream was still cinema. A huge fantasy film, released globally, built from Blizzard’s world, directed by Duncan Jones, with ILM building the orcs and Ramin Djawadi scoring the whole thing. There is something moving about the scale of that attempt. Even when the film stumbles, it stumbles forward with conviction.
I think part of my affection for Warcraft comes from its coziness, oddly enough. That might sound strange given how much of the film is war, corruption, execution, grief, and invasion, but the coziness is in the world texture. The tavern-like warmth of certain interiors. The banners. The gryphon ride. The directness of honour language. The feeling that every object has a chunky silhouette and every place has a name from a map you could spend years exploring. Some films are comforting because they are gentle. Warcraft is comforting because it feels built.
That built quality connects to other things I have loved for years: Magic: The Gathering, Shandalar, the old MicroProse sense of walking through a fantasy system, and my own long-running Quantumyth instinct toward linked worlds, bridges, thresholds, cosmologies, and layered realities. Warcraft begins with a portal between worlds, which is about as direct as symbolic architecture gets. One world dying, another world invaded, a gate held open by sacrifice, a child sent downstream into future myth. It is large, almost blunt mythmaking, but I like large mythmaking when it is handled sincerely.
That is also why the film still feels related to that willow tree memory. Watching the BlizzCon panel under an umbrella was, in miniature, its own portal moment. A global fantasy production was being transmitted through a small phone into a quiet place on a Canberra campus. I was between worlds in the ordinary life sense: work and study, youth and adulthood, ambition and practicality, private life and public dreams, old game memories and new cinematic anticipation. Warcraft’s own story of crossing from one world into another had a directness that matched the period, even if I would not have articulated it that way at the time.
The strangest and most beautiful part now is that life has moved on and folded the film into a completely different context. I was then a man in his twenties under a willow tree, watching Duncan Jones and Chris Metzen talk about bringing Azeroth to the screen. Now I am writing about it ten years later, with my wife beside the broader story of my life, with a daughter here, and with Warcraft books and making-of material becoming something I can read aloud in the house. The film has moved from anticipation to memory, and from memory into family life.
That is how these things survive. Not by remaining current. Not by winning every argument about quality. They survive by attaching themselves to actual days. A friend’s computer in Curtin. A high school drawing of Warcraft III cover art. A rainy ANU afternoon. A panel watched under a tree. A cinema release. A book read years later to a child too young to understand the full machinery of what it means to her father. The franchise is vast, but the personal thread is tiny and precise.
If I am honest, I do not think Warcraft (2016) is a great film in the clean, conventional sense. I think it is too compressed, too burdened by setup, and sometimes too loyal to structure at the expense of lived dramatic rhythm. But I also think it is far better and more interesting than its reputation suggests. It is a serious attempt to adapt a world that resists simplification. It contains visual effects work of real ambition. It gives Durotan a tragic dignity. It understands that the Horde cannot simply be monsters if Warcraft is to mean anything. It treats Stormwind, Karazhan, Dalaran, and the orc clans as places and cultures rather than decorative fantasy wallpaper.
Most of all, it carries the quality I value in a lot of imperfect art: the sense of people trying very hard to solve a problem worth solving. That is what I felt under the willow tree in 2014. That is what I still feel when I watch the gryphon cross the skyline or Durotan hold his child or Gul’dan’s fel light spill across a face. The film may not have opened the franchise portal Hollywood wanted, but it did open something for those of us who were paying attention to the attempt.
Ten years later, Warcraft remains a film I remember with more fondness than defensiveness. I do not need it to be flawless. I do not need to pretend the criticisms were invented. I can see the seams and still love the effort. I can see the compression and still admire the scale. I can see the unrealised sequel paths and still value the fact that, for one strange stretch of the 2010s, Blizzard, Legendary, Duncan Jones, ILM, Metzen, Westenhofer, and a cast full of humans and digital orcs tried to build a bridge between Azeroth and cinema.
And somewhere in the smallest corner of that bridge, at least for me, there is still a willow tree at ANU. There is rain. There is an umbrella. There is a phone held sideways. There is a younger version of me watching a panel from the other side of the world, eating something sweet, listening carefully, and believing that this enormous risky thing might actually work.
Every now and then Adult Swim produces something so perfectly small, so absurdly specific, so apparently unnecessary, that it ends up feeling permanent. Not important in the institutional sense, perhaps. Not canon in the grand television-history sense. Not something the average person would even know exists. But permanent in the stranger, truer way: as a thing that lives in the back room of the mind, waiting to be rediscovered, quoted, remembered, or forced upon some poor unsuspecting friend at 11:43 p.m. with the words, “No, no, you have to watch this.”
Live at the Necropolis: Lords of Synth is one of those things. It is a ten-or-so-minute Adult Swim short from 2016, presented as a recently unearthed concert film from 1986, in which three godlike masters of the synthesizer gather beneath Halley’s Comet to determine who among them deserves to be named the Lord of Synth.
Its central figures are Xangelix, Morgio Zoroger, and Carla Wendos, transparently and lovingly warped versions of Vangelis, Giorgio Moroder, and Wendy Carlos.
That description already gets you most of the way there, but not all the way. The real pleasure of the short is not simply that it parodies three synth pioneers. It is that it understands the exact ridiculous grandeur surrounding them: the robes, the sunglasses, the synthesizer banks, the science-fiction seriousness, the fusion of classical pomp and electronic futurism, the faint sense that these people did not merely compose music but discovered forbidden frequencies beneath the Earth’s crust.
The short aired in that wonderful Adult Swim zone where something can look as if it was found on a damaged VHS tape, bought from a defunct public-television station, dubbed six times, left in a Greek basement, and then broadcast to a sleeping nation at four in the morning. It belongs to the same general late-night ecosystem as the network’s other strange one-offs and fake programs, but it has a slightly different flavour. It is not horror in disguise, nor pure anti-comedy, nor an escalating sitcom nightmare. It is a fake concert documentary, a fake athletic broadcast, a fake lost cultural event, and a fake work of music history all at once. It treats synthesizer performance with the ceremonial weight of an Olympic final, a gladiatorial contest, and a planetary emergency.
The opening premise is already wonderful. It is 1986. Halley’s Comet is passing overhead. The world has gathered at the Necropolis for a cosmic contest. Three synth masters will score the celestial dance of the comet, and the winner will become the Lord of Synth. The losers will be banned from music for one hundred years. It is the kind of rule that only makes sense inside Adult Swim’s particular moral universe: arbitrary, severe, hilarious, and instantly accepted. Nobody in the short behaves as though this is a silly arrangement. Nobody stops to ask why a music competition has century-long exile conditions. Nobody questions why a comet needs to be scored live, or why the fate of music itself has been placed into the hands of three competitive keyboard mystics. The format is declared, and the format is law.
Then come the players. Xangelix is the Vangelis figure, a solemn, secluded, semi-divine man of sound, draped in mystery and portent. He seems to have emerged from a mountain monastery where the only permitted activities are staring at constellations and holding down enormous minor chords. His whole bearing suggests that he has never once sent an ordinary email or waited at a service station. He speaks with the gravity of a man who knows that the synthesizer is not a musical instrument but a metaphysical organ. His most famous declaration from the short, “There is only one hope for humanity: the synthesizer,” captures the entire joke. It is silly, but it is also exactly the kind of thing the grandest electronic music can make you half-believe for a moment.
Morgio Zoroger is the Moroder figure, and he is the one who still makes me laugh the hardest. ZOROGER! The name alone is enough. It has the perfect syllabic stupidity of a legally safe parody name that somehow becomes funnier and more memorable than the thing it is spoofing. He is all sunglasses, Italian swagger, disco arrogance, cocktail chemistry, open-shirted sensuality, and rivalry. Where Xangelix seems to channel the cosmos, Zoroger seems to channel the nightclub at the end of the universe. He is ridiculous in the precise way Moroder iconography can become ridiculous when amplified by only ten percent: the studio wizard as Euro-seducer, the composer as dance-floor alchemist, the keyboardist as man who may have invented both the future and a very specific kind of aftershave.
Then there is Carla Wendos, the Wendy Carlos figure, whose role in the short is maybe the sharpest and strangest of the three because the parody is working from a more complicated historical figure. Carlos was not merely a synth pioneer but one of the figures who helped bring the Moog synthesizer into wider cultural consciousness through classical interpretation, film scoring, and a very particular vision of electronic exactitude. Wendos, in the short, carries that sense of technical command and outsider genius, though the humour also steps into territory that now feels more noticeably of its time. It is still a loving parody, but it is the one section where the retrospective eye has to do a little separating: the broader musical joke remains strong, while some of the gender material lands with a 2016 bluntness that would probably be handled differently now.
What makes Lords of Synth work so well is that it is built by people who actually know the thing they are mocking. A lazy version of this sketch would simply put three people in wigs behind keyboards and have them make bloopy noises. This short goes deeper. It understands the sacred architecture of old synthesizer culture: modular systems, impossible instrument names, fake academic commentary, prog-documentary grandeur, musicologists with invented specialties, and the strange heroic aura that surrounded electronic musicians when synthesizers still looked like equipment from a moonbase. The jokes are not merely about synthesizers sounding funny. They are about the whole mythology of synthesizers as machines of destiny.
The mock-commentary is essential. The short treats the performance like a sporting event, with experts explaining each manoeuvre as though the audience is witnessing feats of extreme physical and theoretical difficulty. The fake titles are priceless: professors of MIDIology, octave collectors, polyharmonic specialists, men who seem to have tenured positions in disciplines invented three seconds before broadcast. This is where the short moves from parody into miniature world-building. For ten minutes, it convinces you that there is an entire global culture of competitive synth performance, with rules, legends, scandals, grudges, forbidden techniques, and archival disputes. You can almost imagine a whole ESPN-style documentary series about it.
The Necropolis setting also gives the short its particular charge. The title clearly evokes Yanni: Live at the Acropolis, the kind of grand televised concert event that once occupied a very real corner of public-broadcast culture: serious, sweeping, international, orchestral, vaguely ancient, and extremely earnest. By swapping Acropolis for Necropolis, the short turns that grandiosity a few degrees toward death cult. Suddenly the concert is not merely at a historic site. It is at a site of doom. The synthesizers are not merely being played. They are being invoked. The musicians are not merely competing. They are participating in some televised rite beneath a comet.
And then, of course, the comet itself becomes more than scenery. The first half of the short plays as a ludicrous competition, but the premise escalates until the synth masters are no longer just scoring the comet. They are confronting it. The heavenly body becomes a threat. Music becomes intervention. The world appears to depend on whether these pompous, brilliant, deranged keyboard lords can convert ego, circuitry, and fingoric dexterity into salvation. That movement from concert parody into cosmic emergency is beautifully Adult Swim. The show announces a stupid concept, plays it straight, then keeps raising the stakes until the stupid concept becomes the only reality available.
The plot, such as it is, is beautifully simple. The synth masters gather. The commentators mythologise them. Xangelix brings his grave space-priest energy. Zoroger brings his louche Italian-disco confidence. Wendos brings the experimental legacy and technical mystique. They perform. They compete. They glare and posture and summon sounds from their machines. The contest is not judged like normal music because nothing in the short is normal music. It is judged like celestial weather, like weapons testing, like sacred combat. Halley’s Comet passes overhead, and the scoring of its dance becomes entangled with the comet’s physical path. The music does not merely accompany the cosmic event. It interacts with it. By the end, the whole short has converted the synthesizer into a planetary defense system.
That is the central genius of the piece. It takes the private fantasy of every electronic-music obsessive — that the right tone, the right sequence, the right shimmering wall of analogue sound could open the sky — and literalises it. Of course the synthesizer can save humanity. Of course a comet can be redirected by sufficient arpeggiation. Of course an Italian disco wizard, a Greek space oracle, and a Moog-classical trailblazer are the exact people you would summon in a crisis. It is nonsense, but it is nonsense built from real feeling. Anyone who has ever listened to Blade Runner, I Feel Love, Switched-On Bach, Tron, Chariots of Fire, or a Tangerine Dream score late at night knows that electronic music has always carried a trace of imagined infrastructure. It sounds like it is powering something enormous just out of view.
Behind the scenes, the short’s authorship helps explain why it lands. It was written by Scott Gairdner and Ryan Perez and directed by Nick Corirossi and Charles Ingram, with performances from Jerry G. Angelo, Tim Kalpakis, and Molly Hawkey. That is a comedy-world configuration, but the result feels unusually musically literate. The creators are not standing outside the subject sneering at it. They are inside the temple, rearranging the candles. That affectionate precision is why the short has continued to circulate among synth fans, Adult Swim fans, comedy people, and those of us who like tiny, fully-formed media objects that appear once and then vanish back into the fog.
The casting is also a major part of the short’s texture. Jerry G. Angelo gives Xangelix the right kind of monumental absurdity. He is not simply “serious”; he is ceremonially serious, as though every sentence has been translated from a dead star language. Tim Kalpakis makes Zoroger wonderfully obnoxious, but not empty. He has a full comic physiology: the posture, the shades, the smug little performance rhythms, the sense that he is permanently standing near a mirrored surface. Molly Hawkey gives Wendos a sharper, more brittle presence, which suits the character’s place in the triangle. Together they create the impression that these three have a whole history of rivalry, romance, betrayal, admiration, plagiarism, and grudging professional respect that we are only glimpsing in fragments.
That is another reason I wish there had been more. The short feels like a pilot for a universe that never expanded. Not necessarily a weekly series; that might have killed it. But a sequel? Absolutely. One more special. One more unearthed tape. Maybe Lords of Synth II: Return to the Necropolis, discovered in a Bulgarian television archive. Maybe the year is 1997, and the rise of digital workstations has thrown the old analogue priesthood into crisis. Maybe Zoroger has opened a nightclub on the Moon. Maybe Xangelix has withdrawn into a cave beneath the Aegean where he communicates only through sustained pads. Maybe Wendos has built an impossible machine that can perform all twelve tones simultaneously without consent from linear time. The sequel could bring in parody versions of Jean-Michel Jarre, Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Yanni himself, or some terrifying new age keyboard emperor whose instrument rig requires its own visa.
There is also a version where the sequel is not a sequel at all but another fake historical artefact. A 1991 instructional VHS. A 1983 charity concert. A 1978 studio documentary. A 2002 reunion show recorded for a doomed satellite channel. The great thing about Lords of Synth is that its world is immediately expandable because the format is archival. You do not need to explain how the characters return. You only need to find another “lost tape.” Adult Swim could have made a whole fake discography out of these people: album covers, liner notes, behind-the-scenes disputes, rare bootlegs, hostile interviews, keyboard schematics, and a fake Rolling Stone oral history where everyone involved remembers the same event differently.
I also wish there were a game. Not a huge game. Not an open-world monstrosity. A strange, focused, rhythm-adventure game in which you play as one of the synth lords and battle celestial bodies, rival composers, collapsing stage rigs, hostile critics, and malfunctioning analogue equipment. The mechanics write themselves. Xangelix would have slow, devastating cosmic chords. Zoroger would have sequencer-driven disco attacks, charm modifiers, sunglasses-based evasive manoeuvres, and some kind of forbidden bassline. Wendos would have precision patches, modular routing puzzles, and extremely powerful late-game tonal transformations. The final level would obviously involve standing at a cliffside performance rig beneath Halley’s Comet while the Earth’s atmosphere begins to shear apart and the only remaining input prompt is: SYNTHESIZE.
The game could be part rhythm game, part boss rush, part fake documentary. Between levels, commentators could analyse your fingoric dexterity. Unlockable equipment could include increasingly absurd keyboards: the Poly Proto Synclavitronulator, the Octave Mercy Engine, the Pan-Harmonic Moon Console, the Forbidden Jupiter, the Necropolitan Bass Reliquary. You could collect robes, sunglasses, capes, pedals, patch cables, honorary doctorates, and disputed European awards. A local multiplayer mode could simply be called Battle for Synth Dominance. The tutorial would take itself far too seriously. The fail screen would inform you that you have been banned from music for one hundred years.
What is striking, years later, is how complete the short feels despite its miniature length. It has premise, world, characters, escalation, texture, and aftertaste. It does what good short-form comedy often does: it enters late, explains only what is needed, and leaves before the machinery becomes visible. There is no dead patch. No over-explaining. No apologising for its own stupidity. It trusts the viewer to either understand the references or enjoy the spectacle anyway. If you know Vangelis, Moroder, and Carlos, it becomes richer. If you do not, Zoroger’s sunglasses and Xangelix’s cosmic solemnity will still carry you through.
The short also captures a specific older relationship to electronic music. Synthesizers are ordinary now, absorbed into every corner of music production, software, scoring, pop, games, and ambient culture. But Lords of Synth returns them to a period when they still seemed like monuments. Huge machines. Expensive machines. Machines with heat, weight, wires, wood panels, glowing indicators, and occult reputations. The comedy depends on remembering when electronic sound still felt like it came from a laboratory or a temple. The musicians are funny because they behave as though they are not playing instruments but negotiating with modernity itself.
That may be why the short still makes me chuckle. It is ridiculous, but it is not disposable. Every time Zoroger appears, there is that immediate little comic charge. Every time Xangelix intones some grave nonsense about humanity and synthesis, the joke lands again because the line between parody and genuine awe is so thin. Every time the fake experts start explaining the contest, the world expands by one more stupid inch. The short knows exactly how far to push its seriousness. It never winks too much. It never collapses into mere sketch-show noise. It holds the frame. It lets the nonsense breathe.
And that is the masterstroke. Live at the Necropolis: Lords of Synth is a parody of electronic-music grandeur, but it is also a tribute to it. It laughs at the robes, the concepts, the cosmic language, the overinflated concert-film atmosphere, the impossible instrument names, and the keyboard-god posturing. But it also understands why those things are seductive. It understands that there really is something thrilling about a lone figure surrounded by machines, summoning sound as if the universe has a hidden control panel. It understands that synthesizers can seem both silly and sublime, sometimes in the same sustained note.
So here we are, still remembering it. Still quoting it. Still wanting more from a ten-minute fake concert from 2016 about a 1986 synth battle beneath Halley’s Comet. Still wishing there were a sequel, a soundtrack box set, a lost making-of, a game, a fake oral history, a full Necropolis expanded universe. Still laughing at the sheer perfection of the names.
Zoroger. Xangelix. Wendos.
And if the comet ever returns angry, we know what to do.
