It features heavily in the DX franchise because … well DX was written in Texas in the mid to late 90s, around the same time Alex Jones had a public access TV channel.
They quite literally could have just worked in half the conspiracies he mentioned, and that would have been about 80% of the more fantastical stuff.
I can’t believe I am saying this, but compared to a whole lot of modern media franchises, they actually did a lot of continuity work to make the FEMA thing make sense in HR as a plausible precursor to how much more widespread it was in the original.
I don’t think it really features in IW at all, as by that point the US government doesn’t… really exist, almost every where that still has a functional technological society is managed by a mixture of UN/WTO authorities and gigantic megacorporations.
Also I guess worth mentioning: DX accidentally contributed to conspiracy culture even further by ‘predicting’ 9/11.
When playtesting Liberty Island, enough people noticed that they’d cheaped out on the background worldbox/skybox by mirroring it, not including the Twin Towers, that they wrote it in a minor lore blurb that they’d been destroyed by terrorists in the early 21st century.
Game is set in 2052… but came out basically a few months to a year (depending on your region) before … 9/11 actually happened.
And there had been prior terrorist attacks or attempts on the WTC involving bombs in vans and such. So if you’re writing a fictional future dystopia, it’s not an entirely unreasonable speculation.
If you actually look at what the paranoid/conspiracy minded R’s believe, it’s basically the x-files.
Like, seriously, some lazy but effective propaganda machine has taken episode after episode of the xfiles and made it a core belief of the right.
… I wonder if Rupert Murdoch… Nah…
Re FEMA. I was a young teen in the early www era. Alex Jones was a nobody, but he was all aboard the FEMA train. As were a number of extremist rw sites that, unfortunately, I ended up following.
I remember when FEMA-as-villain was a thing in the X-Files. Wild that it’s a conspiracy that survived so long.
And Deus Ex.
It features heavily in the DX franchise because … well DX was written in Texas in the mid to late 90s, around the same time Alex Jones had a public access TV channel.
They quite literally could have just worked in half the conspiracies he mentioned, and that would have been about 80% of the more fantastical stuff.
I can’t believe I am saying this, but compared to a whole lot of modern media franchises, they actually did a lot of continuity work to make the FEMA thing make sense in HR as a plausible precursor to how much more widespread it was in the original.
I don’t think it really features in IW at all, as by that point the US government doesn’t… really exist, almost every where that still has a functional technological society is managed by a mixture of UN/WTO authorities and gigantic megacorporations.
Also I guess worth mentioning: DX accidentally contributed to conspiracy culture even further by ‘predicting’ 9/11.
When playtesting Liberty Island, enough people noticed that they’d cheaped out on the background worldbox/skybox by mirroring it, not including the Twin Towers, that they wrote it in a minor lore blurb that they’d been destroyed by terrorists in the early 21st century.
Game is set in 2052… but came out basically a few months to a year (depending on your region) before … 9/11 actually happened.
And there had been prior terrorist attacks or attempts on the WTC involving bombs in vans and such. So if you’re writing a fictional future dystopia, it’s not an entirely unreasonable speculation.
If you actually look at what the paranoid/conspiracy minded R’s believe, it’s basically the x-files.
Like, seriously, some lazy but effective propaganda machine has taken episode after episode of the xfiles and made it a core belief of the right.
… I wonder if Rupert Murdoch… Nah…
Re FEMA. I was a young teen in the early www era. Alex Jones was a nobody, but he was all aboard the FEMA train. As were a number of extremist rw sites that, unfortunately, I ended up following.
That was about 35 years ago.
It’s amazing what you can convince people of.