In the mid 1980s, Square Enix entered the Japanese video game industry with simple RPGs, racing games, and platformers for Nintendo’s Famicom Disk System. Though a couple of games were successful in North America, most were not popular and the company faced bankruptcy.
In 1987, Square designer Hironobu Sakaguchi headed development of a game to prevent the company’s financial ruin. Sakaguchi chose to create a new fantasy role-playing game for the cartridge-based NES, and drew inspiration from popular fantasy games: Enix’s Dragon Quest, Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda, and Origin Systems’s Ultima series.
The worlds that surround our planet are all made of rock, but there the similarity ends. Some have a beating geological heart, others are frozen in time.
Brian Cox travels to the tallest mountain on Earth, the volcano Mauna Kea on Hawaii, to show how something as basic as a planet’s size can make the difference between life and death. Even on the summit of this volcano, he would stand in the shade of the tallest mountain in the solar system, an extinct volcano on Mars called Olympus Mons, which rises up 27 km.
The definitive story of going to the moon, told by those who went. Between 1969 and 1972 an elite group of men achieved an incredible dream. They were, and remain, the only human beings to set foot on a planet other than our own.
These personal testimonies are interwoven with digitally remastered footage from Nasa film archives, much of it previously unseen and all of it hauntingly evocative of a bygone era.
Professor Brian Cox reveals how something as flimsy as an envelope of gas – an atmosphere – can create some of the most wondrous sights in the solar system. He takes a ride in an English Electric Lightning and flies 18 km up to the top of earth’s atmosphere, where he sees the darkness of space above and the thin blue line of our atmosphere below.
In the Namib desert in south-west Africa, he tells the story of Mercury. This tiny planet was stripped naked of its early atmosphere and is fully exposed to the ferocity of space.
The story behind the fiendishly addictive game, a tale of high stakes, intimidation and legal feuds set against the backdrop of Cold War tensions between East and West.
The documentary also explores the rivalaries between Nintendo and Atari and the paradox of buying software rights from a country that doesn’t believe in property, much less intellectual property.
Brian Cox reveals how the beauty and order in earth’s cosmic backyard was formed from nothing more than a chaotic cloud of gas. Chasing tornados in Oklahoma, he explains how the same physics that creates these spinning storms shaped the young solar system. Out of this celestial maelstrom emerged the jewel in the crown, Brian’s second wonder – the magnficent rings of Saturn.
On an ice-choked lagoon in Iceland, he sees the nearest thing on Earth to Saturn’s rings, and using the latest scientific imagery and breathtaking graphics, he explains how the intricate patterns round Saturn are shaped by the cluster of more than 60 moons surrounding the planet.
Documentary uncovering, for the first time, the original manuscript where Newton forecast the date of the end of the world.
Isaac Newton was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian and one of the most influential men in human history. His Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, is considered to be the most influential book in the history of science.
Newton dedicated a large part of his life to a quest to decode the Bible which he believed to be the word of God. For over 50 years, he studied the Bible trying to unravel God’s secret laws of the Universe.
Former General Motors executive John DeLorean planned to build a stylish European sports car, at a price that would make it attractive to the American market. The site he chose for his state-of-the-art factory was on the outskirts of Belfast, a city best-known for sectarian violence and high levels of unemployment.
The unexpected marriage of high-tech glamour with the gritty reality of 1970s Northern Ireland captured the public’s imagination but this early optimism would end in failure. Although the cars looked great, the windows leaked and the engines seized; as his financial problems mounted the maverick DeLorean faced charges of drugs trafficking.
Black holes are one of the most destructive forces in the universe, capable of tearing a planet apart and swallowing an entire star. Yet scientists now believe they could hold the key to answering the ultimate question – what was there before the Big Bang?
The problem is researching them is practically impossible. Black holes, by definition, are invisible and there’s no scientific theory able to explain them. Despite these obstacles, the programme meets the astronomers attempting to image a black hole for the very first time and the theoretical physicists getting ever closer to unlocking their mysteries. It’s a story that takes us into the heart of a black hole and to the very edge of what we think we know about the universe.
1999 film based on the book, ‘Fire in the Valley: The Making of The Personal Computer’ by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine. It is a made-for-television docudrama written and directed by Martyn Burke which documents the rise of the home computer through the rivalry between Apple Computer and Microsoft. The film stars Anthony Michael Hall as Bill Gates and Noah Wyle as Steve Jobs.
In March 2002, the scientific world was rocked by some astonishing news: a distinguished US government scientist claimed he had made nuclear fusion out of sound waves in his laboratory.
Rusi Taleyarkhan’s breakthrough was such important news because nuclear fusion is one of the most difficult scientific processes, and also one of the most coveted. It could solve all of our energy problems for ever … if it’s true.
Revealing the daily battle between the Internet’s outlaws and the hackers who oppose them by warding off system attacks, training IT professionals and police officers, and watching cyberspace for signs of imminent infowar.
Through interviews with frontline personnel from the Department of Defense, NYPD’s computer crime squad, private detective firm Kroll Associates, X-Force Threat Analysis Service, and several notorious crackers, the programme provides penetrating insights into the millions of hack attacks that occur annually in the U.S.