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Control — news, coverage & facts — IJR

Overview

Control is a 2019 action-adventure game developed by Remedy Entertainment and published by 505 Games. The game was released in August 2019 for PlayStation 4, Windows, and Xbox One, and for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S in February 2021. Cloud-based versions for the Nintendo Switch and Amazon Luna were released in October 2020, followed by a version for Stadia in July 2021. Two paid expansions have been released. The game revolves around the Federal Bureau of Control (FBC), a secret U.S. government agency tasked with containing and studying phenomena that violate the laws of reality. As Jesse Faden (Courtney Hope), the Bureau's new Director, the player explores the Oldest House – the FBC's paranormal headquarters – and utilizes powerful abilities in order to defeat a deadly enemy known as the Hiss, which has invaded and corrupted reality. The player gains abilities by finding Objects of Power, mundane objects like a rotary phone or a floppy disk imbued with energies from another dimension, that have been at the center of major paranormal events and since recovered by the FBC. In addition to Hope, voice work and live-action footage is provided by James McCaffrey, Matthew Porretta, and Martti Suosalo, while the band Poets of the Fall provided additional music. Control is inspired by paranormal stories about the fictional SCP Foundation created by an online collaborative wiki fiction project, based on the genre of the new weird. The environments of the Oldest House are designed in the brutalist architecture style, common for many government buildings created during the Cold War era, which served as a setting to show off the game's destructive environmental systems. The core game includes many allusions to Alan Wake, one of Remedy's prior games with similar themes of the paranormal, and Control AWE expansion is a crossover between these two series, which Remedy said forms part of the Remedy Connected Universe. Control was one of the first games released to take advantage of real-time ray tracing built into the hardware of newer video cards. Upon release, Control was met with positive reviews from critics, with several gaming publications naming it among their top games of 2019. The game was nominated for numerous video game awards, winning several related to the game's art and design. It sold over three million units by November 2022. A sequel, Control 2, and a separate four-player co-operative spin-off, codenamed Condor, were announced in June 2021.

From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Notable quotes

“Anarchism...rests upon the doctrine that no man has a right to control by force the action of any other man.”
— Lyman Abbott, "The Cause and Cure of Anarchism" in The Outlook, Volume 70 (February 1902)
“Anarchy means an absence of law. Sociologically it is the modern theory which proposes to do away with all existing forms of government and to organize a society which will exercise all its functions without any controlling or directive authority.”
— The Catholic Encyclopedia (1907)
“While democracy must have its organizations and controls, its vital breath is individual liberty.”
— Charles Evans Hughes, in statement of May 1908, quoted in "Reauthorization of The Civil Rights Division of The United States Department of Justice" (15 May 2003) US House of Representatives.
“In the land of Mordor, in the fires of Mount Doom, the Dark Lord Sauron forged, in secret, a Master Ring to control all others. And into this Ring he poured his cruelty, his malice and his will to dominate all life. One Ring to rule them all.”
— Galadriel, in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), written by Frances Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Peter Jackson, based on The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien
“The Trickster represents the quality of randomness and chance in the universe, without which there could be no freedom. In the Craft the Goddess is not omnipotent. The cosmos is interesting rather than perfect, and everything is not part of some greater plan, nor is all necessarily under control. Understanding this keeps us humble, able to admit that we cannot know or control or define everything.”
— Starhawk, in The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Goddess (1979), p. 231
“If those in charge of our society — politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television — can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.”
— Howard Zinn, as quoted in Seeds of Revolution : A Collection of Axioms, Passages and Proverbs (2014) by Iam A. Freeman, Vol. 1, p. 587

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.