The Universe of Manas (1995): The Kyrgyz Epic Film Almost Nobody Saw

Some films reach me through a recommendation or a festival. This one reached me through the part of the internet where a 1995 Kyrgyz picture turns up as a 4K upload with a few hundred ratings and not much else. I have a habit of following that kind of trail. The Universe of Manas (Vselennaya Manasa, if you’re searching the original title) is where this one ended. What stood out was the look of it: costume, mask, staged ritual, a procession heading somewhere sacred. It reminded me of The Holy Mountain, and I should say now that the resemblance goes about as far as the surface.

The film runs 74 minutes and was made at Kyrgyzfilm in 1995, the year Kyrgyzstan marked a thousand years of the Manas epic. The anniversary had UN backing, with a General Assembly resolution the year before, and the main festivities took place in Talas. Melis Ubukeyev was commissioned to make the film for it.

The epic is long enough to be its own problem. Sayakbay Karalaev’s version runs past half a million lines, and the whole tradition lived in the mouths of manaschi, the oral performers who carried it. Filming something like that is less an adaptation than an act of triage.

Ubukeyev had spent his career circling it. Born in Frunze in 1935, he studied history before VGIK, where he trained under Sergei Gerasimov. In 1962 he made a three-part film about Karalaev, and in 1966 he filmed the old manaschi reciting, collecting by his own count more than ten thousand useable metres of the epic’s second part. A full screen version of Manas stayed out of reach. The 1995 film is what he made in its place, and he died in July 1996.

What he made is an essay film. It retells the epic through imagery and costume, then folds in a semi-documentary account of Kyrgyz history. The cinematographer was Tynai Ibragimov, the composer Boris Makeyev, the costume designer Dilbar Ashimbaeva. Ubukeyev reads the narration himself. His two chief consultants were the writer Chingiz Aitmatov and the historian Lev Gumilev.

Gumilev is where the story gets odd. In a posthumously published book on the epic, Ubukeyev recalls their conversations. At one point Gumilev asked whether he had received a shaman’s blessing before taking on Manas. Ubukeyev said Karalaev had blessed him once. Gumilev said that wasn’t enough, and that he needed a genuine bakshy, a priest of Manas, or trouble would follow.

Gumilev’s reasoning was practical. You are intruding on a pantheon of foreign gods, and the more imagination you have, the more fear you feel. That fear can cause accidents. A shaman’s blessing removes it. Ubukeyev writes that he took this seriously, and that after some difficulty he found a Khakas shaman in Siberia and got the blessing.

That detail doesn’t appear in any English-language coverage of the film I could find, and Ubukeyev tells it without irony.

It also fits the imagery. In his retelling, Manas is crowned khan in a golden costume and tall golden hat, and he fights behind an iron battle mask. His wife explains that he swore as a youth not to remove it until he killed his enemy Konurbai. One reviewer notes the film uses Altyn Adam clothing and masks to convey the hero’s sacredness. Altyn Adam is the Saka Golden Man from the Issyk burial mound, and Ubukeyev’s book speculates that the unknown historical leader behind Manas may have looked like him.

The history in the book follows Gumilev. It places the epic’s core in the Yenisei Kyrgyz victories over the Uyghurs in 840 and 847. Gumilev’s theories are not universally accepted, and the book’s own preface says so.

So where does The Holy Mountain fit? Jodorowsky made a sacrilegious satire and ended it by telling the audience to leave the mountain. Ubukeyev made a reverent film for a state anniversary, built from archaeology and the epic itself. What they share is the staging of ritual, and a production that both directors treated as something close to a rite. One cast went through months of spiritual training. The other director went looking for a shaman.

The film was long hard to find. Kyrgyzfilm has since restored it and put it on YouTube in 4K, in Russian.

I went in for the obscurity and the Jodorowsky echo. What I came out with is a director who sought a shaman’s blessing before taking on a poem, and who died the following year.

MARTE CHIMICA Operations 02 - Train Heist

I did it! I finished the second Marte Chimica Operations game and iut's ready to be played! It should be punishing but not too much, had a REALLY small number of playtest but I'm pretty happy with the numbers so far -


Marte Chimica Operations: Train Heist

A solo cyberpunk dungeon crawler on one folded A4 sheet. A corporate train is running across Mars. A broker has a contract to stop it, and you’re the one taking it. Fight your way from the last car to the head of the train and shut it down. Salvage whatever you can on the way, because the broker pays for the stop and nothing else. Every car is generated with dice, so no two runs are the same.
A turn tracker keeps count of how long you’ve been on board. Features Solo play Choose your mutant Car-by-car procedural generation Built-in train car and turn trackers  -

Complete rules included, no other book needed - Printable, double-sided A4, folded to a booklet Mercenary contract work, set in the Marte Chimica universe

Work in progress. Cars, enemies, loot and balance may change between versions. Feedback, bug reports and balance notes are welcome.

Metal Slug - 90s!

 
Metal Slug is the title that pins me to the nineties.

I grew up in a town of twelve thousand people, a number that tripled in summer, and my first contact with videogames was a Neo Geo cabinet in the bar in the middle of the main square, wedged between the gelato and the caffè. Five hundred lire bought you a go. That was the whole system: a coin, a stick, a few buttons, and whatever game the owner had slotted in.

I was utterly shit at it. My friend Giulio was a real ace. He could finish the game on one coin, two on a bad day, and I would still struggle to believe it if I hadn't been there. The game was mostly Metal Slug: the soldiers, the bombs, the aliens. I was broke even at that age, so I leaned towards games that cost nothing, which meant being outside, in the long warm afternoons that small towns do better than anywhere else, when nothing happens slowly and nobody minds.

The aliens, incidentally, date the cabinet. There are none in the original, released in April 1996. The Mars People turn up in Metal Slug 2 in 1998 and return in the third, so whatever Giulio was beating on one coin had at least one sequel in it. I never knew the difference. Nobody does at five hundred lire a time.

Which is a fair way into a story that started somewhere else entirely, with a team that had lost its employer.

Metal Slug was not born at SNK. It was built by Nazca Corporation, a studio founded in 1994 largely from Irem's arcade staff, the people behind In the Hunt and GunForce II, after that side of Irem began winding down. SNK backed the new company. By the accounts of people who spoke to the team, Nazca's day job was porting SNK games to the Saturn and PlayStation, and the arrangement was that they could make an original arcade game in their spare time. Metal Slug was the spare time.

The first version was not a run and gun. You drove the tank. The SV-001, the Super Vehicle of the title, was the entire game: slower, shorter stages crowded with enemies, a darker tone, human pilots named Phil Gene and Michiko Nakajima, and a visual style borrowed in part from Hayao Miyazaki. Marco and Tarma had not been conceived yet.

It went to a location test in Osaka in 1995 and players were unimpressed. So the tank was demoted to a vehicle you climb into, soldiers on foot became the game, the tone lightened, and the stages got longer, partly because the Neo Geo was also sold as a home system and a game that short would not have survived the trip. The only fossil of the original idea is that the tank can jump and crouch. Tanks, as a rule, do not do this.

The rebuild was not gentle. Akio Oyabu, the lead pixel artist, who had worked on R-Type at Irem, has said the team was doing overtime into the small hours, and that after Golden Week the staff started sleeping at the office for about eight months, renting futons to do it. By his count there were four or five pixel artists on it. That is a small art department for a game people still screenshot for reference.

What those artists did with the time is the whole reason anyone still talks about it. Akio has described programmers asking him to shorten his animations, because long animations cost performance. He kept drawing them long, because he wanted the game to be appreciated. The programmers were worried about the hardware. He was worried about being remembered. One of them was right.

You can see the argument in the details. Enemy soldiers have animations that serve no function in the game at all. They shout when they spot you. The world is busy whether or not you are in it, and that is a harder thing to fake than a good explosion, and Metal Slug has plenty of those too.

It is also very funny, in a way that sits uncomfortably next to what it is depicting. A rebel army, a coup, prisoners of war tied up in the dirt, and the reward for freeing them is a better gun and a salute. Nothing in the game wants you to feel anything about the war. It wants you to feel the recoil, and then it wants you to laugh at the thing that just exploded.

The reviews at the time were mixed, which now reads like a typo. They liked the humour and the animation and complained about the length and the lack of replay value. On one coin, in a bar, that is a problem exactly one person I knew had.

Release went arcade first, on April 19, 1996, on the Neo Geo MVS, then the home cartridge on May 24 and the Neo Geo CD in July. The Saturn and PlayStation versions followed in Japan in 1997. Nazca had already ceased to exist as an independent company by October 1996, absorbed by SNK, which had apparently seen enough.

The music is by Takushi Hiyamuta, who signed as Hiya!. The announcer who shouts the weapon names, the voice that sells you on a heavy machine gun before you have fired it, is reportedly the same voice that calls the golfers in Neo Turf Masters, the other game Nazca made. That is the kind of fact that makes a small studio sound like a few people sharing a microphone, which is probably accurate.

The hero is called Marco Rossi, one letter away from Mario Rossi, which is Italy's John Doe: the name you write on a form when you want to stay generic. The lore makes him Italian-American, and a later character, Fio Germi, comes from a wealthy Italian family with a military tradition. A Japanese team drawing one of the most detailed war cartoons of the decade put an Italian at the head of the squad, and it never explains why.

The sequels are a shorter story. Metal Slug 2 arrived in 1998 with the Mars People and a slowdown problem that SNK fixed a year later by rebuilding it as Metal Slug X on the Metal Slug 3 engine, which many fans treat as the definitive version of the second game. Metal Slug 3, in 2000, added branching paths and is widely treated as the peak of the series. It was also the last one SNK worked on before its bankruptcy. The later entries passed through other hands, Noise Factory among them, with Metal Slug 7 in 2008 usually counted as the last of the mainline entries and the Metal Slug XX update arriving in December 2009.

Then it went quiet, for a long time, apart from compilations, mobile spin-offs and Metal Slug Tactics in late 2024. The thirtieth anniversary came on April 19, 2026 with a campaign called Mission Reboot, a mobile game from an outside studio, and a new game from SNK's own team that has not been named. The original is also coming back as a cartridge for the new NEOGEO AES+, listed for November.

Giulio could finish it on one coin. I could not have finished it on ten, and I never had ten. The lira doesn't exist anymore. I would still pay more than five hundred of them to be that useless again.

Darkseed, Giger, and the Three-Hour Headache

Darkseed is a game about a man who buys a house, wakes up with a headache, and has three real-time hours to do something about it. Everything else about it follows from that arrangement: the art, the legend, the reputation for being unfair.

Cyberdreams released it in 1992, when Cyberdreams barely existed. Mike Dawson, the designer who would lend the protagonist his name and his face, found the job in the LA Times classifieds. By his account the company at that point was its president, Patrick Ketchum, and a programmer, John Krause, working out of Ketchum’s house. Ketchum’s plan was to attach a famous artist to every title and trade on the celebrity as much as the work. First came H.R. Giger, fresh off Alien, and according to Dawson he was paid in cash, a lot of it. The studio would repeat the trick with Syd Mead on CyberRace and Harlan Ellison on I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.

Giger had one condition. Cyberdreams was planning standard VGA, 320 by 200 with 256 colours. Giger called that resolution “square and jagged” and wanted more. The team moved to 640 by 350, which cost them the palette: sixteen colours instead of 256. The look the game is remembered for is a trade made to keep one artist in the building. The developers leaned into the limitation, building custom palettes for the Dark World so that it reads as cold and drained of life.

The art itself was a collage job. Cyberdreams had access to almost all of Giger’s catalogue. Fragments of paintings went through an Epson flatbed scanner in monochrome and were assembled in Deluxe Paint II Enhanced into rooms and creatures. N.Y. City III and Hommage à Böcklin were among the sources, and Li II ended up on the box. Late in development the studio decided the results weren’t good enough, and the team spent another six months colouring by hand. Giger, for his part, has since said he contributed little beyond opening the archive. Dawson visited him in Zurich and remembers a shrunken head on the desk, and a tour in which Giger mentioned, in passing, the room where an ex-lover had killed herself. The publisher claimed at the time that exposure to the work had sent members of the art team to counselling. That is marketing, and I’d file it there.

The game opens with its best idea. Mike Dawson, an advertising executive and writer, has bought an old mansion on Ventura Drive in Woodland Hills. On the first night he dreams that a machine fires an alien embryo into his skull, and he wakes with a headache that doesn’t go away. The sequence borrows from Giger’s birth machine imagery, and it is the one stretch where the game and the art are working as a single thing. The rest of the first day is spent in a house that has clearly had a history.

The structure is a mirror. On day two a piece of a broken mirror arrives in the post, and once it’s reassembled in the living room it becomes a door to the Dark World, a Giger-built negative of the town. Every room, person and object in the normal world has a counterpart on the other side, and a good share of the puzzles depend on that link. A door opened here opens there. Something done to a dog on one side lands on the other, where the dog is the size of a car. The Keeper of the Scrolls, a snake-headed local, explains that the nightmare was real, that the embryo will eventually hatch, and that hatching ends Mike and everyone else. The fix is to wreck the power source of the Ancients, who rule the place.

Then there is the clock. The player has three real-time hours, equal to three in-game days. Mike goes to sleep at ten each night wherever he happens to be, and if he happens to be in the Dark World, he dies. Events happen on a schedule and miss one and the game doesn’t tell you. It simply becomes unwinnable. The magazines of the time said so more or less unanimously. Computer Gaming World praised the atmosphere as the most effective horror adventure yet and then complained that the interaction nearly undid it, and Amiga Format and The One both marked it down for the timetable, scoring the Amiga version 72 and 80 percent respectively. Dawson, interviewed in 2006, agreed with them. He said some of the difficulty wasn’t fair, that the worst of it was never telling the player they could no longer win, and that he couldn’t remember where the timer came from. His best guess was that it was meant to make the game harder.

None of this stopped it winning a Codie in 1993 for best fantasy role-playing or adventure title, and in 2006 GameTrailers placed it seventh on a list of the scariest games ever made. The scariness is concentrated. PC Gamer’s retrospective makes the fair point that the horror is almost entirely in the opening, and that what follows is a reasonably stock adventure that happens to be painted by Giger. The puzzle logic backs it up: you have to meet a neighbour at a set time without being given a watch, so you can get a stick, so you can kill his dog’s counterpart in another dimension. I’d say the game works despite its design rather than because of it, which is a common condition among cult objects.

The ending is the part people still argue about. Mike wins. The Ancients’ ship leaves, the mirror breaks, and the town librarian turns up with pills in her bag that have his name on them and no explanation for how they got there. She presumably kills the embryo. As she leaves, a morph reveals she is the Keeper of the Scrolls’ counterpart on this side, and Mike says he’s beginning to understand. The house goes up for sale. It’s abrupt, as the contemporary reviews noticed, and it’s also the one moment where the game stops explaining itself.

The sequel arrived in 1995, written and designed by Raymond Benson, later of the James Bond novels, with an actor named Chris Gilbert replacing Dawson as Mike. Mike has had a breakdown, a girlfriend from his high school years is dead, and he is the main suspect. Giger suggested the industrial catwalks used to navigate the Dark World. It leaves open whether any of it happened. Dawson had nothing to do with it. He left the games business after the first one, wrote for television, including some episodes of Family Matters, then wrote programming books and moved into teaching game development. A rumour went round for years that the pressure of making Darkseed had broken him. He says he had never heard it until the interviewer mentioned it, and that he liked it anyway.

The afterlife has been oddly international. The game came out on the Amiga and Mac, then the CD32, and in Japan on the Saturn in July 1995 and the PlayStation that October, both with the English voice track intact. A Sega CD version was announced for the US and never released. An unlicensed Famicom cartridge exists out of Asia, and the Saturn version finally got an English patch in April 2025, from a fan who extracted the original PC script and dropped it into the Japanese build. ScummVM opened Darkseed up to public testing the month before. Cyberdreams itself did not last: orders were still being confirmed in mid-1997 and the company was formally dissolved in September 1998.

In July this year OhNoo Studio released Tormentum II, a point-and-click built on Giger and Beksiński. People on adventure game forums immediately started comparing it to Darkseed, headaches and all. I think that’s the right measure of the thing. It isn’t a great game, and I’m not sure it was ever meant to be one. It’s a game about one image, a man with something growing in his head in a house that isn’t his, and thirty-odd years on that image is still what people reach for. For me it got etched in my brain when I was about ten, reading PC Gamer at home, dreaming of games I couldn’t afford and probably couldn’t have fully appreciated.

The Fiat That Became a Daewoo

In spring 1992, Fiat had a problem it was proud of.
The Cinquecento had just launched, a boxy replacement for the 126 drawn in-house at Centro Stile by Ermanno Cressoni’s team, and Fiat wanted it celebrated. At the Turin Motor Show. ANFIA, the Italian motor industry association, invited the country’s coachbuilders to reinterpret it at Fiat’s own invitation. Maggiora brought the Birba, a four-seat cabriolet. Bertone brought the Rush, a dune buggy. Pininfarina made a four-wheel-drive pick-up. Italdesign brought the ID Cinquecento.

The ID was a static model, a full-size mock-up with MPV proportions and dark glass hiding an interior that didn’t exist yet. It was the only entry that looked like it might replace the car it was riffing on. Fiat looked at it and passed.

Italdesign didn’t. A year later, in 1993, the mock-up came back as a running prototype called the Lucciola, shown at the Bologna Motor Show and later at Geneva. Fabrizio Giugiaro is credited with the design, working alongside his father Giorgetto. The name is a nod to the small Fiat-based cars that Francis Lombardi built and called Lucciola, “firefly”.

Underneath it was stranger than it looked. The body was aluminium and recycled plastic, 3.27 metres long, with a roof that retracted in two sections. The drivetrain was a hybrid, in 1993: a 0.49-litre two-cylinder diesel making 5.5 kW, plus two 7 kW electric motors at the rear. That added up to roughly 25 horsepower and a top speed of 100 km/h. Italdesign quoted about 50 km on electric power alone, or around eight hours with the diesel running.

It was a clever little thing, and Fiat still didn’t want it. No source I found gives a documented reason. The Italian press calls it legend, and one Czech writer says it was simply too early and didn’t pay. What Fiat did instead is on the record. The Cinquecento soldiered on for seven years and more than 1.1 million cars, then in early 1998 it was facelifted and relaunched as the Seicento, which ran until 2010.

Italdesign shopped the design around, and Daewoo bought it. Until the mid-90s, Daewoo’s cars had been rebadged GM designs, and it wanted something of its own for Europe. The aluminium and the hybrid were dropped. What came out in 1998 was a five-door steel hatchback on the old Daewoo Tico platform, with the Tico’s 0.8-litre three-cylinder engine. It kept the round headlights, the tall rounded body and the short nose. It was called the Matiz.

The Matiz sold. It was Daewoo’s best seller in Europe for four years, built in the company’s Polish and Romanian plants. A 1.0-litre engine arrived in 2001 and a facelift followed (the M150). When General Motors took over Daewoo in 2002 the car carried on, and in 2005 it was reworked and sold as a Chevrolet. In 2006 GM accused Chery of copying it with the QQ, which is a strange thing to say about a car that was itself Fiat’s reject. It reportedly even outsold the Seicento in Italy.

So Fiat spent 1998 selling its old Cinquecento with a new face. Daewoo spent it selling Fiat’s replacement.

Teenage Sex and Death in Camp Miasma (2026)

I went into Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma expecting nothing. The title was the hook, and Gillian Anderson, forever Dana Scully, was the reason I pressed play. I came out having enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would.

It’s not a masterpiece. If you wanted to be mean, you could flatten the whole thing into a queer slasher acid trip, and the plot gives you the material for it. Kris, a young queer director, is handed the reboot of a long-dead slasher franchise called Camp Miasma and gets fixated on tracking down Billy Presley (Anderson), the final girl of the original film, now a recluse living on the abandoned camp grounds where it was shot. Hannah Einbinder plays Kris. Things get bloody, sexual and increasingly unmoored from there.

Under the delirium there’s a real film about cinephilia, about what it means to love a genre that was never really made for you and to remix it anyway. The nods to classic horror are everywhere. Friday the 13th, Sleepaway Camp and Nightmare on Elm Street all come to mind, and the franchise on screen feels like a made-up cousin of all three. The killer is called Little Death, which is French slang for orgasm, and reportedly has an air conditioning unit for a head. Nobody is subtle about the sex and death thing, the title included.

It comes from Jane Schoenbrun, who made We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow. This is their third feature. It premiered at Cannes this year and won the Queer Palm, it’s backed by MUBI and Plan B (Brad Pitt’s company), and it runs 112 minutes. Eric Yue’s cinematography has a Lynch flavour, and Patrick Fischler, a Mulholland Drive alumnus, turns up in the cast, which feels deliberate.

The part I loved most is probably still the opening. It’s a run of film gadgets and franchise paraphernalia that shows how much love and craft went into building this fake series, and also how thoroughly it has been turned into merchandise. On paper that’s a capitalist nightmare. But it gets something warmer once you see it through Kris, who genuinely loves these films, so the merch reads as devotion more than marketing. The painted backgrounds do something similar. They make the matte painting a visible part of the film, and part of the film within the film, so everything looks a bit weird and also exactly right.

Spoilers from here.

The meta part is where the film stopped being a parody and started being something stranger. It begins as a film about making a film: Kris is the director hired to make the sequel, and the whole setup is the process of fan, director and franchise talking to each other. Then it folds in on itself. Billy and Kris sit down to watch the original Camp Miasma together, and the rules of the franchise start to leak into the lives of the people watching it. The reveal is that Little Death lives under the lake and sees the world through the Camp Miasma films, so Kris, Billy and everyone around them are characters in one of the killer’s pictures. Late on, a VHS tape of a new film appears in the lair, and its title is the title of the one you’re watching. You’ve been watching the movie that Little Death is watching.

The ending closes the loop. Kris walks out with the blood still on her and says the lines a final girl said in an earlier film in the series, so even the escape is a line from a script. It’s the old slasher trick of the killer not really being dead, turned inside out: the franchise can’t die because someone keeps imagining it, and that someone is also the audience.

I’m glad I gave it a go for a name and a face I recognised. The meta film vibe is not new, but what got me is where it puts you. It doesn’t hold the franchise at arm’s length and wink at it. It sits you next to Kris, someone who is completely infatuated with a film, and lets you feel that from the inside. As someone who loves cinema, and as someone who makes films myself, that’s a familiar kind of obsession: the one where a film stops being something you watch and becomes something you want to live in, and then something you want to make. The film understands that the love is the point, and that it can be sincere and a little ridiculous at once. I went in for the title and Scully. I left wanting to rewatch a franchise that doesn’t exist.

Ralph McQuarrie Painted It First

Star Wars got made because of a handful of paintings. Before there was a cast, a model shop or much of a budget, there was a script 20th Century Fox couldn’t quite picture, and Ralph McQuarrie’s gouache did the picturing for them. Until then he’d mostly been paid to draw things that already existed.

He was born in Gary, Indiana in 1929 and raised on a farm outside Billings, Montana. He served in Korea, where he survived being shot in the head, then studied at the Art Center School in Los Angeles. His first jobs were illustrating teeth and dental equipment for a dentistry firm, then technical drawing at Boeing, where he worked on diagrams for the 747 manual.

The poster work came next, mostly for Howco International, a New Orleans B-movie outfit. The first was The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972), a faux-documentary bigfoot film that went on to gross over $20 million. By his own account the poster and the film both did well, which brought more poster commissions from independent producers. Where the Red Fern Grows (1974) and Creature from Black Lake (made in 1976) followed. People have noticed the sasquatch on the horror posters looks a little like early Chewbacca.

The job that mattered most was the least glamorous. For CBS News’s Apollo coverage he painted and animated what the cameras couldn’t show: a capsule in transit, a spacecraft in the dark. That’s an odd apprenticeship, and a good one. He spent years making spaceflight look credible before anyone asked him to make up the rest.

The route to Lucas ran through other people. According to McQuarrie, two writers he knew showed his paintings to Lucas while Lucas was finishing THX 1138 and heading into American Graffiti. A few years later, in 1975, Lucas remembered them and handed him comic book art and pages of an early Star Wars script. McQuarrie came back with about a dozen full-colour paintings. Lucas’s one instruction was to paint the ideal version of each scene and not worry about what a film crew could build. The first one finished was C-3PO and R2-D2 walking through the Tatooine desert. The work was gouache and acrylic on illustration board, and it was what Fox executives were shown. Lucas then made a point of matching many shots to the paintings.

The designs came out of the same process. Lucas wanted Vader tall, dark and fluttering, something that arrived like it came in on the wind. McQuarrie noticed the script had him crossing between spaceships, so he gave him a breathing apparatus and a suit to survive vacuum. The helmet carried samurai influences, and his first painting of Vader sits very close to what ended up on screen. His first C-3PO leaned heavily on the Maria robot from Metropolis. He also drew Chewbacca, the Stormtroopers, and later Hoth and Cloud City. Some of it never made the film. An early painting shows Luke as a woman, and another has Vader fighting Deak Starkiller, a protagonist from a draft that got discarded.

What set the work apart was that it showed scenes, not designs. Iain McCaig has said McQuarrie never drew Vader in a neutral pose and instead painted him lashing out at Luke. At the time most science fiction art went on book covers and posters. McQuarrie painted moments with light and weather in them, which is closer to what a cinematographer does than a draughtsman.

Set next to Syd Mead, the two read as halves of the same period. Both came out of Art Center, both worked mainly in gouache, and both painted the future by hand. Mead came from industrial design, via Ford’s Advanced Styling Studio, and drew the future as engineering: vehicles, cities and interiors, each plausible down to the join. McQuarrie came from technical illustration and Apollo, and painted the same era as a place with something happening in it. One supplied the hardware, the other the scene. Between them they account for a good share of how late seventies and early eighties science fiction cinema looked, from the lived-in space opera of Star Wars to the acid colours and noir mood of Blade Runner.

Neither was born into a digital world. McQuarrie was born in 1929 and Mead in 1933, and both were established long before a computer had anything to do with illustration. Mead did later teach himself the digital airbrush, but by one account it supplemented his analogue skills and never replaced them. The films their paintings fed were analog too: ILM’s early Star Wars work was models and physical effects, and a McQuarrie painting was effectively a brief for people building things in a workshop. It shows in the futures they drew. They look mechanical and assembled, with hulls, panels and dials that seem hand-welded. Computers appear but are rarely the point. Tron is the obvious exception, a digital world designed by a man who drew everything by hand.

Star Wars was the visible part. He designed the alien ships for Spielberg’s Close Encounters and E.T., and did concept work on Raiders of the Lost Ark (the illustrated Bible page Indy consults is his), the original Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek IV and Jurassic Park. He also did the small metallic fix-it saucers in *batteries not included, a 1987 Spielberg-produced film (the asterisk is part of the title). He was on the team that won the Oscar for visual effects on Cocoon, his only one. Before that, he’d been brought onto the abandoned Star Trek: Planet of the Titans to redesign the Enterprise.

He appears in The Empire Strikes Back too, uncredited, as General Pharl McQuarrie, standing in front of one of his own matte paintings. It got an action figure. When Lucas later asked him to come back for the prequels, he reportedly said no, preferring to leave the work to a younger generation of artists.

His paintings kept working after he’d stopped. When J.J. Abrams wanted The Force Awakens to feel like the original trilogy, he went through the Lucasfilm archive for unused McQuarrie art. BB-8 came from one of those sketches.

McQuarrie died at home in Berkeley on March 3, 2012, aged 82, from complications of Parkinson’s disease. His website posted that someday, somewhere, someone will look at a spaceship or a skyline and say it looks like something Ralph McQuarrie painted. Lucas said that when words failed him, he could point to one of Ralph’s illustrations and say, “Do it like this.”

People tend to see the films first and the paintings later, and assume the paintings were of the films. It ran the other way. Everything in the frame already existed, and the film just had to catch up.