Unwinnable

Music often inspires emotion but, on some occasions, it can also create narrative. Over a century of film and television has taught us the musical cues that underscore dramatic events – they’re a language unto themselves. It is the tense violin strings that tell us the monster is about to appear or the saccharine saxophone that announces the impending sex scene. In fact, movies with sparse or nonexistent soundtracks often feel wrung of emotion. (more…)

Stu Horvath brings us the sounds of our first imaginary movie: Whiskey & Bullets, a pulpy tale of revenge, murder and booze. Make sure to check out the extended liner notes in this week’s Burnt Offering! (more…)

At the bar tonight, I stared at my phone in disbelief. Clash of the Titans, it told me, hit theaters in 1981. That meant the world had been without a new Ray Harryhausen movie for over 30 years. Now that he is gone, this seemed – seems – a travesty. (more…)

Last Thursday afternoon, I asked my mother what she thought of Cara Ellison’s Twine game Sacrilege. Mom reads just about everything that goes up on Unwinnable (hi, Mom!) and, because of that, she has learned a lot more about videogames than she probably would have discovered on her own. (more…)

“Right naow Barnabas is abaout changed. Can’t shet his eyes no more, an’ is all aout o’ shape. They say he still wears clothes, but he’ll take to the water soon.”

- Zadok Allen

When Captain Obed Marsh made his deal with the devil, he didn’t sell his soul; he sold something infinitely more insidious: his lineage. (more…)

Remember when Elvis’s hip shake was the most scandalous thing about music? Us neither. As soon as music could be recorded and reproduced, it pushed up against the polite boundaries of society. For over 130 years, music has used its unique ability to shock in order to question authority (“Fuck the Police“), religion (“Dear God“) and politics (“Maggie“), but no other subject has had so many taboos shattered by song than sex. So, for Sex Week, we’ve collected the sexiest, dirtiest, perviest songs we could find and mixed them together into two of the naughtiest hours of pounding drums, penetrating guitars and moaning vocals that your ears will ever hear.   (more…)

After GDC 2012, someone asked, “Why can’t we all just live together and be awesome?” For GDC 2013, we decided to give that a shot and rented a 19-room mansion on the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park. Over the course of the week, more than 20 journalists slept under our roof at one time or another. Surprisingly, none of them brought even a single Nerf gun, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t have our share of fun. We have a ton of videos in the works to share with you, detailing our time at the conference, the amazing people we met and the secret salon we held the last night of the trip. All of that will be coming soon, but like every good sitcom, we thought it would be good to introduce the house and its residents in a good old-fashioned credit sequence. Welcome to Unwinnable House. (more…)