Infinite Lives, 2019: Heaven's Vault
Decipher an unknown ancient language through fragmentary inscriptions found on artifacts and monuments. As an archeologist from a culture where the concept of history itself is heresy, you stand entirely alone if you believe there’s anything to be gleaned from the past. But oh, how much there is to be gleaned. With enough linguistic understanding and attention to detail, you can piece together worldview-shattering revelations from the layered remnants of history.
Or, don’t do that.
Muddle your way through with educated guesses and trying buttons until something happens. History doesn’t care. The game doesn’t care. Your experience might be dramatically different, but the game is justifiably confident enough in its story to let things happen with or without your understanding.
Screenshot from Heaven’s Vault. Two words in Ancient script are displayed with some possible glosses. Related words and their glosses are shown above. In the blurred background, the player character Aliya studies a weathered sheet of paper. Aliya is a woman of Middle Eastern descent in her 30s, wearing a loose headscarf and a tunic suited for fieldwork.
Focusing on the game’s reactiveness is kind of burying the lede. Heaven’s Vault is a game about translation. It is centered around a single twenty-hour series of logic puzzles about learning an unknown language. You spend most of your time figuring out what words might mean, negotiating with people to get more artifacts with language to analyze, and exploring unknown locations filled with even more tantalizing language. Getting access to new text is the reward for exploration and experimentation. If that speaks to you, this game is probably for you. And if it doesn’t, it probably isn’t.
Heaven’s Vault is simultaneously a personal story and a grand history. Events you learn about fill out a unified timeline that smoothly zooms from “I started this dig two weeks ago” to “I left the orphanage 20 years ago” to “The era I’m calling the Age of Sail for lack of a better name was 2000 years ago”. That zoomable timeline is one of the most prominent features in people’s memories of the game.
Heaven’s Vault is Inkle’s followup to their original debut 80 Days (2014), inspired by Jules Verne’s classic novel. Like 80 Days, Heaven’s Vault is a game with a pre-defined beginning and end, and an uncomfortably unknown middle. Unlike 80 Days, there is no map of the world to give you a sense of how far you’ve come and how much yet remains. In a feat yet to be matched, I found myself unable to determine what kind of structure the game had. What a delight to feel so lost despite all my genre-savviness.
Inkle plays to their experience with unknown middles in their subsequent games like Overboard! (2021) and Expelled! (2025). Their works can more generally be categorized as interactive fiction, or IF. Other contemporary studios exploring the IF space include Failbetter in Sunless Skies (2019) and Mask of the Rose (2023), and Choice of Games in Choice of the Deathless (2013) and The Luminous Underground (2020).
Maybe it’s more useful to categorize on a different dimension. Heaven’s Vault is a mystery game where you play the role of detective, a feeling games have tried to capture for decades. What distinguishes it from previous attempts like The Dagger of Amon Ra (1992) and The Last Express (1997) is how open-ended the mystery is. Historically, detective games like Ace Attoney (2001) and Danganronpa (2010) feature satisfying mysteries packed with wild aha moments that the game insists you unravel step by step at its pace, not yours. The new breed of mystery games heralded by Her Story (2015) and exemplified by Return of the Obra Dinn (2018) instead leave you to your own devices, letting the mystery sit in ambiguity until you work it out yourself. They feel much more like making brilliant deductions than painting in the numbers of a pre-outlined plot. Later games that build on this design innovation include Paradise Killer (2020), Pentiment (2022), and Rise of the Golden Idol (2024).
2019 is overstuffed with excellent games, any of which I could have chosen to praise enthusiastically here instead. Slay the Spire (2019) created a genre so rich that it inspired its own genres. Disco Elysium (2019) is a singular gonzo lightning-in-a-bottle masterwork. Outer Wilds (2019) created metroidbrainias and remains their unsurpassed exemplar. Baba is You (2019) perfectly executed a different impossible game concept. Untitled Goose Game (2019) caused problems on purpose, reaching far beyond video game fans. Mainstream releases similarly excelled with the likes of Control (2019), Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers (2019), Fire Emblem: Three Houses (2019), Sekiro (2019), and Apex Legends (2019). I believe my personal favorite, Deadfire (2019), will remain unmatched in its genre through at least 2029.
None of those worthy entries affected me as deeply as Heaven’s Vault. Its themes, story, and mechanics became a part of me that will remain as long as I live. That’s why I wrote about it over another of these deserving titles.
prairie
The grassland prairie is a 1761 borrowing from Modern French prairie, meaning “meadow”. You can trace the word backwards through time, maintaining its meaning, through Old French praerie, Vulgar Latin prataria, and Classical Latin prātum. It refers to a specific kind of meadow often found in French Canada and Louisiana. Prairie dog is from 1804, the one survivor from a family of animal names that once included prairie lark, prairie mole, prairie fly, and prairie snake.
The majority of English geographical terms are as old as the language. But a significant plurality refer to features not found in the British Isles, but in the Americas. Those showcase a diversity of origin concentrated around a short time period that I enjoy.
The creek kills is a 1669 borrowing from Middle Dutch kill, with the same meaning. The Dutch term can be reconstructed back to Proto-Germanic kiljǭ, meaning “fissure”.
The cliff face bluff is a 1687 coinage based on the obsolete nautical term bluff, meaning “having a broad, flattened front”. It was originally used to describe a cliff formation found in the American Colonies.
The grassy plain savanna is a 1697 borrowing from Spanish sabana, with the same meaning. The Spanish term is a borrowing from Taíno zavana.
The mountain chain cordillera is a 1704 borrowing from Spanish cordilla, a diminutive of cuerda, meaning “rope”. It is a synonym of sierra. The Spanish term is a direct descendant of Classical Latin chorda, meaning “intestine” or “cord”, itself a borrowing from Ancient Greek χορδή (khordḗ), meaning “guts”.
The descriptive wetland is a 1743 compound originally used to describe a type of land found in the American Colonies.
The rough section of a river rapids is a 1744 coinage based on rapid. It originally described sections of rivers found in New York.
The small island cay (or sometimes key) is a 1761 borrowing from American Spanish cayo, with the same meaning. The Spanish term is a borrowing from Taíno cayo, meaning “small island”.
The marshy waterway bayou is a 1766 borrowing from Louisiana French bayou, with the same meaning. The French term is a borrowing from Choctaw bayuk, meaning “creek”.
The river embankment levee is a 1770 borrowing from Modern French levée, with the same meaning. The French term is a coinage based on lever, meaning “to raise”, directly descended from Classical Latin levāre, also meaning “to raise”.
Photo of a prairie dog. The light brown rodent perches attentively amid a dry field of clover with yellow flowers.
The dry gully arroyo is a 1777 borrowing from Modern Spanish arroyo, meaning “stream”. It’s a direct descendant of Classical Latin arrugia, meaning “mineshaft.”
The dry lake playa is a 1777 borrowing from Spanish playa, meaning “beach”.
The South American plains pampas is a 1790 borrowing from American Spanish pampa, with the same meaning. The Spanish term is a borrowing from Quechua pampa, meaning “plains”.
The lonely hill butte is an 1805 borrowing from French butte, meaning “mound”. The French term can be reconstructed back to Proto-Germanic buttaz, meaning “end”.
The mountain range sierra is an 1807 borrowing from Spanish sierra, meaning “saw”, referring to the sawtooth horizontal profile of a mountain range from afar. It is a synonym of cordillera. The Spanish term is a direct descendant from Classical Latin serra, meaning “saw”.
The line of cliffs palisades is an 1827 coinage based on military palisades. It originally describes striking cliffs along the Hudson that were notable enough to be depicted on the first European map of the New World in 1541.
The deep ravine gulch is an 1832 coinage based on the obsolete word gulsh, meaning “sink in”. It was originally specific to the American West during the gold rush.
The narrow valley canyon is an 1837 borrowing from Spanish cañón, with the same meaning. The Spanish term is a coinage based on caño, meaning “tube”.
The flat-topped plateau mesa is an 1840 borrowing from Spanish mesa, meaning “table”. The Spanish term is a direct descendant of Classical Latin mēnsa, also meaning “table”.
The watery sinkhole cenote is an 1841 borrowing from Yucatan Spanish cenote, with the same meaning. The Spanish term is a borrowing from Maya tsʼonoʼot, meaning “hole with water”.
The eroded arid badlands is an 1850 calque of Canadian French Mauvaises Terres, meaning “bad lands”. The French term is itself a calque of Lakota Makȟóšiča, meaning “bad lands”.
What is a human? A miserable little pile of clades!
Wait, a pile of what? “Clade” is a scientific borrowing from Greek κλάδος (kládos), meaning “branch”. It means a common evolutionary ancestor and all of its descendants, representing a branch on the tree of life. Since cheap genetic sequencing enabled its wide adoption in the 1990s, cladistics has become the dominant way biologists classify life.
An idle conversation about octopuses and jellyfish earlier this week inspired me to learn about the concentrically nested clades humans are in. One way I like to learn more about things is summarizing the new information in a digestible way. So that’s where you, dear guinea pig reader, come in. Evolutionary biology is not my field, so I want to hear about any mistakes I’ve mad in this summary.
I find cladistics especially inspiring because it’s a recent total paradigm shift in a hard science. If I were writing this article in 1996, it would look completely different. Sure, it would probably be published in a local science fiction zine instead of a personal blog, and it would probably have taken ten times longer to research. More importantly, the methods we used to ascertain the truth would be different. So the resulting information would be different, and the inferences that we would make about life would be different. It’s wild to consider.
Let’s climb the tree of life from most to least specific. We’ll go through what each clade is named for, its distinctive features, and what’s in it that wasn’t in the next smaller clade.
- Humans are hominins. Hominins are apes named for their humanity. Hominins walk on two legs and have larger brains. Humans are the only extant (non-extinct) hominins. Extinct hominins include neanderthals, australopithecuses, and paranthropuses.
- Humans are apes. Apes are primates that are also called hominoids for their similarity to humans. Apes have long arms, no tails, and more complex brains. Apes that are not hominins, from closest to furthest, include chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and gibbons.
- Humans are primates. Primates are mammals named hundreds of years ago for being the best or highest kind. Primates have color vision, more complex brains, five digits on each limb, and opposable thumbs. Primates that are not apes include simians (monkeys) and strepsirrhines (lemurs and lorises).
- Humans are euarchontoglires. Euarchontoglires are a recent grouping of mammals named for being the union of the best kind (euarchonts) and rodents (glires). Euarchontoglires that are not primates include all rodents (such as hamsters, squirrels, guinea pigs, and beavers) and lagomorphs (bunnies).
- Humans are placental. Placental mammals are named for their extended development within their mother’s uterus. Placental mammals have a corpus callosum connecting their brain hemispheres, and a separate anus and genitals rather than a cloaca. Placental mammals that are not euarchontoglires include nearly everything that we think of as mammals. Anteaters, elephants, manatees, bats, deer, giraffes, horses, dogs, cats, the whole lot.
- Humans are mammals. Mammals are vertebrates named for their milk-producing mammary glands. Mammals all have a neocortex, sweat glands, a diaphragm, a middle ear with three bones, and a four-chambered heart. Mammals that are not placental include monotremes (echidnas and platypuses) and marsupials (such as kangaroos, koalas, and opossums).
- Humans are cynodonts, therapsids, and synapsids. Cynodonts are named for their canine teeth. Therapsids and synapsids are named for the bony arches in their skull behind each eye. Cynodonts have fur and are warm-blooded. Synapsids have different types of teeth, typically canines, molars, and incisors, and stand upright on four legs. There are no extant cynodonts, therapsids, or synapsids that are not mammals.
- Humans are amniotes. Amniotes are vertebrates named for being able to reproduce far from bodies of water. Amniotes have skin made of keratin, breathe using a ribcage that expands and contracts, and have adrenal glands. Amniotes that are not synapsids include sauropsids, which include all reptiles and all birds.
- Humans are tetrapods. Tetrapods are vertebrates named for their four limbs. Tetrapods have eyelids, tear ducts, tongues, and a middle ear. Tetrapods that are not amniotes include lissamphibia, which include all amphibians.
- Humans are gnathostomes. Gnathostomes are vertebrates named for their jaws. Gnathostomes have teeth, a stomach, a spleen, and a thymus. Gnathostomes that are not tetrapods include nearly all extant fish, including cartilaginous sharks.
- Humans are vertebrates. Vertebrates are animals named for their spinal column. Vertebrates have a cranium, eyes, ears, and a nose, a multi-chambered heart, and a digestive system that includes a pancreas, liver, and intestines. Vertebrates that are not gnathostomes include jawless fish (hagfish and lampreys).
- Humans are chordates. Chordates are animals named for their notochord, a body-spanning column of cells that becomes the spinal column in vertebrates. Chordates have tails and thyroid glands. The few chordates that are not vertebrates include tunicata (sea squirts) and cephalochordates (lancelets).
- Humans are deuterostomes. Deuterostomes are animals named for their first embyronic opening becoming an anus, rather than a mouth. Deuterostomes have gill slits that open into their pharynx, a hollow nerve cord, and a segmented body. Deuterostomes that are not chordates include echinoderms (starfish, sea urchins, and sand dollars) and hemichordates (acorn worms).
- Humans are bilateria. Bilateria are animals named for their bilaterally symmetric body plan. Their symmetry gives bilateria a front head and rear tail, a ventral belly and dorsal back, and left and right sides. As they mostly move in the direction of their head, it has sense organs and a nerve center. Bilateria that are not deuterostomes include protostomes (all insects, earthworms, squids, and octopuses), named for their first embryonic opening becoming a mouth, rather than an anus.
- Humans are animals. Animals are multicellular organisms named thousands of years ago for having a soul. Animals can move and must get energy from eating other organisms using an embryonic opening called a blastula. Animals that are not bilateria include cnidarians (anemones, corals, and jellyfish) and porifera (sponges).
- Humans are opisthokonts. Opisthokonts are organisms named for the rear flagellum their cells use to move. Opisthokonts cannot produce their own food and must consume other organisms to survive. Opisthokonts that are not animals include all fungi.
- Humans are podiates. Podiates are organisms named for their cells having pseudopods for movement. Podiates that are not opisthokonts include amorphea (slime molds and amoebas).
- Humans are eukaryotes. Eukaryotes are organisms named for having a cell nucleus. Eukaryotic cells have organelles, mitochondria, chromosomes, and a cytoskeleton, and reproduce through mitosis. Eukaryotes that are not podiates include diphods (all plants and algae), which have plastids that generate energy from the environment.
- Humans are alive. Living organisms are named for being alive. Living organisms all die, encode information about themselves in DNA, and can reproduce. Life that is not eukaryotic include archaea and prokaryotes (all bacteria). Living things that are not organisms include viruses.
And that’s life.
DJ
The musician DJ is first seen in print in a 1948 issue of Billboard magazine as an abbreviation of disc jockey. Until around 1980, it was typically rendered D.J. to mark it as an abbreviation. The less common form deejay shows up a little earlier, in 1946.
The musician disc jockey is first seen in print in a 1941 issue of Variety magazine, combining the “driver” meaning of jockey with the disc storage medium of recorded music. Jockey started meaning “driver” in 1912 as a generalization of its “horse rider” meaning. Jockey has most commonly meant “horse rider” since the 1690s, a narrowing of its 1640s meaning, “person who works with horses”. Before picking up that meaning, jockey was a diminutive form of “Jock”, which was a Scottish variant of “John”, and referred generically to any young man.
2002 photo of NYC-based DJ Grand Wizzard Theodore demonstrating the now ubiquitous DJ scratch technique that he invented in 1975. Theodore has brown skin and is wearing a black durag, light gray t-shirt, headphones, and gold jewelry. He is intently working a turntable.
The music storage medium disc is named for its disc shape. It appears as a synonym for record as early as 1879, at the dawn of recorded music. The shape disc goes back to the 1660s, describing the shape of a discus. It was either a clipping of discus, or a borrowing from Middle French disque. Discus can be traced all the way back through Classical Latin discus from Ancient Greek δίσκος (dískos), meaning “discus”. δίσκος originally comes from the verb δικεῖν (dĭkeîn), meaning “to throw”. (The suspiciously discus-shaped dish is also descended from Classical Latin discus, but through Germanic rather than French.)
The first fifty years of recorded music saw discs and cylinders compete for form factor. Discs gained their dominant majority in the 1920s, becoming synonymous with recorded music. You can track this through coinages. Discotheque is a 1929 borrowing from French. The word’s suffix comes from its original meaning of “music library”; bibliothèque is the French word for “library”. Discography first appears in 1930, with its contemporary meaning. Discophile shows up in 1932.
Even as discs’ material changed from wax to shellac to vinyl to plastic, the synecdoche endured. In the 1950s, the meaning of discotheque shifted to “club where music is played”, which was commonly clipped to disco by 1957. By 1966, the kind of music played at a disco was called disco music, like what we’d call dance music today. The emerging musical genre was named after disco music’s clipping to just disco by 1975.
Meanwhile, the storage medium’s American spelling disk took on fresh importance as they were repurposed for digital data storage. Disk drive is from 1952. The diminutive diskette was coined by IBM in 1973 to describe its tiny new 8-inch floppy disks. The decidedly less floppy hard disk also originates from 1973. Its data storage usages eventually died out in the 2010s. For portable data storage, they survived the transition from floppy disks to compact discs and even digital video discs. But SD card just stands for “Secure Digital card”. And for fixed data storage, hard disk drives gave way to solid-state drives around the same time.
Infinite Lives, 1997: Star Fox 64
Fly a series of sorties against impossible odds as an ace fighter pilot with a team of wingmen. It’s a cliched scenario that had been done in a hundred games. Even in three dimensions, as early as Star Wars (1983). But to match the cliche with another, it had never been done as well as this.
Star Fox 64 came bundled with a Rumble Pak, plugging into the N64 controller’s expansion slot to provide force feedback for the first time for a console game. That controller fit your grip like an inverse glove, despite its three-pronged awkwardness. It’s clearer how natural it felt if you compare it to PSX and Saturn controllers. And while your wingmen embodied broad, conveniently animal-coded archetypes, they were memorable, bantered with you as you rescued each other, and fully voiced. All of that combined to create the most immersive experience available on a home console.
Screenshot from Star Fox 64. Fox’s starfighter Arwing hovers in the center of the screen over a lush green landscape representing Corneria. In a dialogue box that takes up the bottom of the screen, rabbit wingman Peppy advises Fox to do a barrel roll by pressing Z or R twice.
Star Fox 64 wasn’t just an arcade-quality experience you could play at home. You could play through it once in two hours to see a complete story. Or you could dig a little deeper and find three different campaigns that hidden sub-goals took you between. Every level of each campaign also featured strict scoring thresholds that rewarded mastery with medals. It was a calculated echo of the score attacks that defined 1980s shooters.
Nintendo’s Kyoto EAD division created Star Fox 64, including producer Shigeru Miyamoto and composer Koji Kondo. Both industry legends also worked on Star Fox (1993) and would go on to make Ocarina of Time (1998).
One interesting thing Star Fox 64 did was retread its predecessor’s story. It covered the same story beats Star Fox did, but with a level of detail infeasible just four years earlier. Nintendo had actually done the same thing already. EarthBound (1994) retold the same story that Mother (1989) did. The Switch 2 Star Fox (2026) plans to do it again, fleshing out Fox’s origin story with yet more detail and improved gameplay.
Star Fox 64 sits firmly in the rail shooter genre. Rail shooters are games like shoot-em-ups, but you take a set path into the screen, as opposed to right or up. Some early genre influences include Tempest (1981), Space Harrier (1985), and Panzer Dragoon (1995). The genre lost favor after the 1990s, when technological advancements made it cheaper to offer free movement in 3D space. This century, rail shooters are mostly limited to genre mashups such as Rez (2001), Child of Eden (2011), and New Pokémon Snap (2021).
You could describe 1997 as video game series figuring out how they could work in 3D, now that Super Mario 64 (1996) had shown it could be done masterfully. Final Fantasy VII (1997) made the transition masterfully, while GoldenEye 007 (1997) drew in console gamers with a taste of Quake (1996) LAN parties. Contemporary reviews panned Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997) for sticking with outmoded 2D. Sony even declined to market it, concerned the game looked too old-fashioned for the PSX. We only consider it the best-looking game that year in retrospect.