Drift Stage
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7 Independent Games Best Played on Big Screens

This article is part of a collaboration with iQ by Intel. Advances in technology lead to bigger, shinier games each year, but outside the mainstream flows a river of creative and entertaining independent games that play well across a variety of devices and screen sizes. Many small studios use innovative design techniques to create incredible adventures that rival games from bigger studios. They commonly deliver gorgeous pixel and 2D art without requiring a high-end computer processor and graphic chips. That means these games work across different devices, including hardware like the Intel Compute Stick, a tiny PC that plugs into TVs…

Drift Stage OST vinyl
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Drift Stage’s soundtrack is being pressed onto a car-shaped vinyl

When Patrick McDermott of LA-based label Ghost Ramp first told me that two tracks from Drift Stage‘s soundtrack would be available on a car-shaped vinyl I didn’t fully grasp the idea. It’s to be a “shaped picture disc 7″ that’s the shape of one of the race cars from the game,” he said to me eagerly. Cool, I thought. That was it. I thought it was cool. But then I saw it and I realized the full implication of what he had originally told me. You can see the vinyl and its cover pictured above. Yes, we’re talking about a vinyl that’s…

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Throwback car game Drift Stage is elegantly sliding its way towards completion

Drift Stage is quite obviously a game about cars, but it is also a story about the passage of time. You can trace the evolution of car—and car game—culture in its influences: from 1960s Hot Wheels fantasies, to iconic cars of the 1980s, to 1990s arcade racers like Initial D, to the 21st century funding mechanism that is Kickstarter. To watch preview footage of Drift Stage, then, is to think about how our relationship with automotive entertainment has evolved. One part of that evolution, of course, is that Kickstarter delivery dates are purely notional. So it is with Drift Stage,…

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Listen to John Carpenter’s Lost Themes now

The importance of John Carpenter’s first decade or so of filmmaking is hard to overstate, particularly to fans of genre films. With laser-like precision in editing and pacing, he created definitive action (Assault on Precinct 13), dystopian (Escape from New York), slasher (Halloween), horror (The Thing), satire (They Live) and adventure (Big Trouble in Little China) films, racing as confidently and breathlessly between genres as his various protagonists did from corridor to corridor. Also: the dude got Kurt Russell. Like, really, really got him. Kurt Russell was the best action star.  Anyway, if Kurt Russell was the main course of those movies,…

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Drift Stage is the neon-soaked anime arcade racer the universe needed

Growing up with diecast cars and car carpet city, there were two main camps: Hot Wheels and Matchbox. Matchbox represented something to appreciate from afar—nice details but not built to throw in a racing track. The raging colours and tough builds of Hot Wheels, on the other hand, screamed, “I want to go sideways!” The synthed-out neon cityscapes and sports cars of Drift Stage’s Sunset City are much more 60’s “Redline” Hot Wheels, with heavy metallic greens and reds giving off edgy vibes, vibes of going fast. I’ve been getting familiar with the sharp turns of this metropolis, having spent…