Quantum Break is narrative experimentation at the grandest scale imaginable. However, this is the first time such a ‘transmedia’ spectacle has been given the financial backing of a company like Microsoft. We saw something notionally similar attempted with Defiance, which existed as a multiplayer role-playing game and a SyFy Channel TV series, until the latter was canned last year. In this way, the grand promise of the video game experience, the ability to choose your own adventure, is played out across two mediums, stitched together in one single, unwieldy entity. Shoots but doesn’t hit its targets … Quantum Break. Your actions and choices in the game sections affect the plot in the live-action episodes – to some degree. The idea is simple, if cumbersome: a five-act, action video game interspersed with four 20-minute long, luxuriously produced TV episodes. There’s an early invitation for the player to – no joke – sit down and watch a short documentary outlining how the game’s swimming pool-sized time machine actually works.Ī failure to show rather than tell is just the first of this curious multimedia project’s problems, which ripple out far beyond the fiction and into the very structure of the whole enterprise. Quantum Break, a multimillion dollar video game turned TV series from Helsinki-based Remedy Entertainment, takes a more scholastic approach. In Back to the Future, by contrast, Doc Brown scribbles the word ‘Past’ on a chalkboard then draws a line toward the year 1985 to explain his invention. In 1978’s Superman, we watch the hero fly around Earth, rewinding history like reeling back a spool of tape. With only 50,000 humans left, the only hope for humankind is to locate the mythical "13th Colony" known as Earth before they fall prey to the Cylons.T he problem for any writer of time travel fiction – at least, the kind that tries to fortify its premise with a spattering of science – is how to communicate the theory behind the time-hopping high jinks. But the Galactica was set to be commissioned at the time of the attack, and is hardly an ideal vessel to harbor humanity's last hope. Led by the Colonial warship the battlestar Galactica and its commanding officer William Adama (Edward James Olmos), those survivors fled into deep space. As a result of the attack, the entire human race was nearly destroyed, and only those who were lucky enough to be aboard starships at the time were spared. Though no Cylon envoy would show for the first 39 years, something terrible happened on the 40th anniversary: immediately after a beautiful Cylon in human form appeared on the Armistice Station, the neutral zone was vaporized and a devastating nuclear attack was launched on Caprica and the Twelve Colonies. Over the course of the next four decades, humanity would deploy an envoy to the neutral Armistice Station to meet with a Cylon envoy on each anniversary of the treaty's signing. The Cylons subsequently withdrew into a remote region of deep space, and for the next 40 years, a tense, silent treaty existed between the Cylons and the Twelve Colonies. As a result of the Cylon rebellion, man and machine engaged in a bloody war that would eventually end in stalemate, after which a treaty was signed. Later, the Cylons would become sentient, rebelling against their mortal masters. In the distant future, intelligent robots known as Cylons were created to serve as slaves to the people of the Twelve Colonies on the planet Caprica and to fight humanity's wars.
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