"I have said this before, and I do feel it is worth reiterating for those of you about to embark on archaeology degrees: ancient and powerful civilizations do NOT leave dangerous weapons lying around on the off chance that their descendants might someday find themselves in a tight squeeze and need them."
— Professor Bernice Summerfield, "Beyond the Sun"
"The world has had other acts: the curtain rises and falls and rises. Way I hear it, we're in the third act... or was it the fourth? The game board gets wiped. Do over! Sometimes the tech and the toys slip on through to the next game. The Pachinko Machine was not always a pachinko machine... but it always was."
— Daimon Kiyota, The Secret World
Ennesby: Neosynchronicity is an artifact of a lost era of galactic history.
Sorlie: I'm not a history student, but that sounds like something I'd have heard of.
Ennesby: "Lost" era.
Sorlie: I got that. Eras are big, hard-to-lose kinds things.
Sorlie: I'm not a history student, but that sounds like something I'd have heard of.
Ennesby: "Lost" era.
Sorlie: I got that. Eras are big, hard-to-lose kinds things.
Sorlie: People have been suckering each other with "secrets of the ancients" scams for thousands of years. Claiming that some lost technology has been re-discovered is pretty much the same as saying "I am running a con."
Ennesby: So you see our problem.
Sorlie: Of course I... no, wait, your problem?
Ennesby: We want to sell actual re-discovered technology, but our potential customers think they're all too smart to buy it.
Ennesby: So you see our problem.
Sorlie: Of course I... no, wait, your problem?
Ennesby: We want to sell actual re-discovered technology, but our potential customers think they're all too smart to buy it.
There might even be a table or two of items from the third salvage category. The physically disobedient impossible scobs, that looked & behaved like nothing should. Sham remmebered one such object - or was it three? A Strugatski triskele, the salvor had called it, waving it around to attract interest. Three curved black rods equidistant from each other in a Y-shape. The man had held one, & above it jutted the others, & and in the centre, where they should join, was nothing. They did not touch, although they stayed together, no matter how you shook them.
What that was was a piece of alt-salvage. Something made not only epochally long ago but unthinkably far away, beyond the farthest reaches of the upsky. Brought to the railsea, used & discarded by one of the visitors fr other words, remnants brushed from cosmic laps, during the long-ago years hen this planet had been a busy layby, a stopover point for the same brief visits that had accidentally stocked the upsky with its animals. The world had been a tip.
"For nine hundred years he had meditated in isolation, but it was whispered that to those whom he judged worthy, he would pass on the secrets of the Ancients."
"Like how to make bows and arrows?" asked Buster.
"Like how to make bows and arrows?" asked Buster.
Satoru Iwata: What was difficult in bringing a 30-year-old game back to life in the 21st Century?
Makoto Kano: Well, it's 30 years old, so none of the relevant documents were around anymore. It was hard contacting all those involved and gathering the materials.
Iwata: But since we recreated Game & Watch for Game & Watch Gallery for the Game Boy, didn't the software know-how exist?
Kano: For the software, yes. But that was for Game Boy, so it didn't feel the same. I tried to recreate it as faithfully as possible by remembering the actual console 30 years ago—how it felt in your hands, how the LCD looked, and how it felt when you punched buttons. [...] It was hard to faithfully recreate something from 30 years ago, though. In addition to the documents, we had trouble getting our hands on the same parts.
Iwata: The various parts used in Game & Watch aren't around anymore.
Kano: Right. And what's more, my memory is fading.
Everyone: (laughs)
Kano: When the staff who worked on the reproduction with me asked, "Why is this part like this?" I could only say, "Beats me!"
Iwata: You couldn't answer because you'd forgotten! (laughs)
Kano: Exactly! It's a fact that I had made it, but I thought, "How's it all go now?" and had quite a hard time.
Masao Yamamoto: But it's a good thing that you did it while you still remembered. Before long you might forget ever even making it! (laughs)
Kano: It's possible!
Everyone: (laughs)
— Iwata Asks, "Game & Watch: Recreating ''Ball'' 30 Years Later"
