This week in Extra Punctuation, Yahtzee coins the term “ghost train ride” to describe a template for a certain type of cinematic AAA video game, like Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, Tomb Raider, or Uncharted.

Extra Punctuation Transcript

The sad thing about mainstream video games these days is that it’s no longer a craftsman’s industry, really. While the technology was still developing everything had to be built from the ground up. Developers usually coded their own engine, created all the art assets and sounds – I can’t find a source right now but I remember reading that the underwater explosion sound in Quake was created by wrapping a condom around a microphone and sticking it in a bath. That’s a fun story. They made the explodey head effect in the movie Scanners by filling a fake head with dogfood and blasting it with a shotgun. That’s a fun story, too. A lot more fun than “we downloaded it from a library” or “we just used CG.”

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