Every Jetliner Ever Made: Douglas

A Douglas DC-10 under construction

Let's have a look at Every Jetliner Ever Made. In alphabetical order, but with Airbus and Boeing at the end. Why? Because they won, and if they were at the beginning the other manufacturers would be footnotes, which isn't fair, especially in the case of Douglas.

There was a time when Douglas made more airliners than anybody else. During the 1940s the Douglas DC-3 accounted for around ninety per cent of all commercial airline travel, and well into the 1950s Douglas was the world leader. But the company was late to switch to jets, after which it spent the rest of its life on the back foot. It briefly gained the initiative with the DC-9, but only briefly, and in 1967 it was forced to merge with McDonnell. The rise of Airbus in the 1980s spelled doom for McDonnell-Douglas, and in 1997 the company was bought by Boeing, after which it ceased to exist. There's some debate as to how much of Douglas survives within Boeing, but at the very least the name is no longer used for jetliners.

Douglas was founded in 1921 by Donald Douglas, who was born in 1892. He was one of those old-school aviation pioneers who was born before heavier-than-air flight and lived long enough to see people walk on the moon. He learned his trade working for Glenn-Martin during the 1910s, before deciding to go it alone in the 1920s. In 1924 a pair of converted Douglas DT torpedo bombers became the first aircraft to circumnavigate the Earth, taking fifteen days, with multiple stops along the way. The stunt established the company's reputation for robust construction, after which Douglas concentrated on military contracts.

A DC-3

In 1932 Trans-World Airlines floated a request for a metal-skinned airliner. Ironically, given the subsequent course of world events, Donald Douglas was worried that Depression-era America was poised to cut defence spending, so he decided to submit a design. The DC-1, for Douglas Commercial 1, didn't quite meet TWA's requirements - it had two engines instead of three - but it won the competition. With its all-metal construction, low wing, and retractable undercarriage it was state-of-the-art. After further development the DC-1 evolved into the stretched, re-engined DC-2 of 1934, followed by the widened DC-3 of 1936.

The DC-3 went on to sell over 600 units, some of which are still flying today. By itself that made the DC-3 the best-selling airliner of the 1940s, but it was comprehensively overshadowed by the C-47 Skytrain, a militarised version of the DC-3 that made its first flight a few days before the United States entered the Second World War. In the years that followed Douglas built over 10,000 C-47s, many of which were converted after the war into airliners. Simultaneously the Soviet Union constructed over 4,000 licence-built Lisunov Li-2s, which were based on the DC-3 but had the cargo door arrangement of the C-47.

The airframe was so popular that it was even used by the Axis powers. Japan made over 400 modified DC-3s, having purchased a licence a few years before the war broke out. Lufthansa of Germany even operated a small fleet of DC-3s requisitioned from KLM of the Netherlands. The DC-3 remained popular in the post-war years and a handful of turboprop conversions are still flying today. It's an iconic aircraft.

Douglas' first post-war airliner was the DC-6, a piston-engined design that entered service in 1947. It was popular, but its success convinced Douglas that there was no reason to switch to jets just yet. As mentioned elsewhere in this series of articles the post-war US aviation industry didn't feel the same existential pressure to modernise as its European contemporaries, so for a few years the US giants - Douglas, Lockheed, and Convair - continued to sell piston airliners, while the likes of Vickers, de Havilland, and Sud-Aviation switched to turboprops and turbojets instead.

Douglas followed the DC-6 with the larger, faster DC-7, which entered service in 1953, at more or less exactly the same time as the jet-powered de Havilland Comet and the turboprop Vickers Viscount. The Comet's success was short-lived, but the Viscount was popular enough to sell to airlines in the United States, which worried the US aviation industry. One company that wasn't worried, however, was Boeing.

Boeing's pre-war airliner designs had all been technically advanced, but not especially popular, and during the war the company concentrated on multi-engined bombers such as the B-17 and B-29. After the war Boeing found itself in much the same position as post-war Europe. It needed to make a bold gesture in order to remain relevant, so in 1950 the company announced a project to design a new jetliner. Developing a jetliner was not cheap, but the success of the Comet and the Viscount convinced Boeing that it was on the right track.

A Douglas DC-7 fire-bomber

A Boeing B-47 bomber-bomber

Boeing had built up expertise in building multi-engined, swept-wing aircraft with the B-47, which entered service in 1951. By 1954 the company had a jetliner prototype, the Dash-80. It had a low wing, an even number of engines mounted in pods beneath the wings, and a low-mounted tailplane, essentially the same configuration as every modern jetliner, not least because subsequent Boeing designs used the same basic fuselage design.

Shortly after the Dash-80's first flight the US Air Force picked a derivate of the aircraft as the basis of a new, jet-powered aerial refuelling tanker. The tanker competition demonstrated how far the US aviation industry had started to lag behind. Technically Lockheed won the contract, but it didn't have a prototype. Its entry was still just a design study, and in the end the company withdrew without ever building an aircraft. Douglas submitted a design of its own, but again the aircraft only existed on paper. Only Boeing had an actual physical product in the air.

To its credit Douglas managed to rapidly catch up. After two years of design studies Douglas announced its own jetliner, the DC-8, in 1955. The specification was very similar to the 707, with four engines in pods under the wing, and sufficient range to cross the US non-stop and the Atlantic with a stop for fuel. One thing the DC-8 had over Boeing's design was a fuselage wide enough for six-abreast seating, with a passenger load of around 170 people. In contrast the early Boeing 707 prototypes had a narrower fuselage that could only seat around 120-140 passengers, and as a consequence the 707's development was delayed so that Boeing could widen the aircraft to match the DC-8.

Douglas hoped that US airlines would hold off on choosing a jetliner, because the technology was still new and Douglas had a solid reputation, but the 707 was an immediate success, and ultimately the DC-8 never managed to regain the ground Douglas had lost.

It's hard to write about the DC-8. Along with the 707 it was the prototype of all modern airliners, but to modern eyes it doesn't look revolutionary. Beyond its distinctive nose intakes - for cabin pressurisation and air conditioning - it had the same configuration as any modern jetliner, with engines in pods under the wing and a low-mounted tail. At the time pod-mounted engines were unusual. The Comet and Avro Jetliner had engines buried in the wings, while the Caravelle had rear-mounted engines. Pods interfered with airflow over the wing, but they had some advantages, including easier access and lower cabin noise. There was also no chance of turbulent air from the wings entering the engine intakes, and the weight counteracted the natural tendency of the wing to bend upwards in flight.

The original DC-8 was powered by turbojet engines of a type that was shared with early models of the B-52 bomber. Whenever it took off it left behind smoke trails of unburned fuel. The fine points of engine design are outside the scope of this document but suffice it to say that turbojets produce all of their thrust by venting expanded, superhot air from the back of the engine, which works well at cruising speed but is very inefficient during take-off.

From the early 1960s virtually all airline manufacturers switched to turbofan engines, which use some of the exhaust gas to power a multi-bladed fan mounted in front of the air intake. The fan generates thrust directly, very much like a turboprop, but because the fan blades are tightly encased in a cowling the tips of the blades can approach the speed of sound without generating the noisy sonic booms that limit the top speed of propeller blades.

For many years NASA used a re-engined, turbofan-powered DC-8 as a flying laboratory.

In the late 1950s Douglas upgraded the DC-8's engines with turbofans, which gave the DC-8-50 - the most popular variant - true non-stop transatlantic range. Sales still lagged behind the Boeing 707, but in the mid-1960s Douglas stretched the design into the Super DC-8, which had a potential passenger capacity of around 250, unusually large for the time.

This gave the DC-8 a second wind, and in 1969 and 1970 the DC-8 actually managed to outsell the 707, although the introduction of the Boeing 747 quickly overshadowed it. Production ceased in 1972, by which time Douglas had sold around 550 DC-8s, versus just over a thousand Boeing 707s, a figure that included the shortened Boeing 720. The DC-8 was apparently very robust, and from 1979 onwards several airlines opted to re-engine their DC-8s with modern CFM56 turbofans, the same engines that powered the contemporary Boeing 737 and Airbus A320. Ultimately 110 DC-8s were converted to use the new, more fuel-efficient engines, and several dozen of them remained in service as cargo aircraft well into the twenty-first century.

As mentioned earlier it's hard to write about the DC-8. Its configuration was unusual at the time but is now standard, albeit that it had two more engines that most modern airliners. It was outsold by the Boeing 707, and throughout its life it had a solid safety record. DC-8s were involved in several fatal accidents, but the vast majority were the result of human error or bad luck. On a personal level I have never flown in one, in fact the only British operators of the DC-8 were cargo airlines, and then only briefly in the late 1970s.

I wrote at the beginning of this document that Douglas only made three airliners. Technically it only made two. The second was the DC-9, which entered service in 1965. In 1967 Douglas merged with McDonnell to become McDonnell-Douglas, and the final design, the DC-10, was a McDonnell-Douglas aircraft, but I'm going to continue to use the Douglas name because it's easier to type.

Let's talk about the DC-9. To paraphrase Jane Austen, "it is a truth universally acknowledged that an aircraft manufacturer in possession of a mid-sized airliner must be in want of a smaller, regional airliner to flesh out its fleet and perhaps create vertical synergies", and so it was with Douglas. Immediately after work began on the DC-8 Douglas realised that it needed a range of different airliners if it was going to compete with Boeing, so the company teamed up with Sud-Aviation to licence-build Caravelles. In the end nothing came of this - the Caravelle was surprisingly unpopular in the US - so Douglas designed its own short-range airliner instead.

The resulting DC-9 had essentially the same specification as the Caravelle, with twin engines mounted on either side of the rear fuselage and a T-tail. It entered service in 1965, beating the Boeing 737 by almost two years. In retrospect it was Douglas' high water mark, a genuinely desirable product that came to market before the competition and outsold it. By the time the Boeing 737 entered service Douglas had stretched the DC-9 into the DC-9-30, which carried more passengers than the original 737 over a similar distance, while burning less fuel. Boeing eventually caught up with the stretched, re-engined 737-200, and gradually pulled ahead, but ultimately sales figures were almost neck-and-neck, with 976 DC-9s vs 1,114 original 737s.

Unfortunately for Douglas the success of the DC-9 turned out to be a major problem. Boeing managed to keep development costs of its jetliners down by reusing elements of the original 707. The 727, 737, and 757 all had essentially the same fuselage, with the 707 and 727 also sharing cockpits.

The DC-9 on the other hand was a completely fresh design. On the positive side the DC-9 exceeded Douglas' sales targets even before it had been launched, but the company found itself overwhelmed by the flood of orders. It was unable to build aircraft fast enough to meet demand, which led to expensive litigation. To make things worse the Vietnam War meant that Douglas' engine supplier, Pratt and Whitney, was similarly overwhelmed by military demand for its engines. As a result Douglas found itself stockpiling fuselages that had no engines, and eventually in 1967 the company merged with McDonnell.

An MD-80

The DC-9 was replaced in the early 1980s by the McDonnell-Douglas MD-80, which had more powerful engines and an enlarged wing. Passenger load went up to around 150, with a range of around 2,500 miles, which made it a lot more attractive to operators outside the US. Most of the DC-9's operators had been in the United States, but the MD-80 sold extensively to operators in Europe and the Far East.

The MD-80 turned out to be MDD's most popular jetliner, selling over a thousand units. On paper this was great news, but the 1980s saw a huge expansion of the aviation market. Global passenger flights almost doubled over the decade, and so although the MD-80 was popular, the competition was more popular still. Boeing ended up selling almost twice as many 737 Classics in this new, larger market, and there was another problem in the form of Airbus.

The first Airbus, the A300, was a hard sell, but in the end it caught on - tapping into a new market for long-range twin-jets - and from that point onwards Douglas found itself squeezed between Boeing and Airbus. Donald Douglas himself didn't live to see it, having passed away in 1981, which is perhaps for the best. In the mid-80s Airbus launched the A320, a short-to-mid-range jet that ended up outselling even the Boeing 737. It was slightly larger and longer-ranged than the 737, which in the mid-80s was getting long in the tooth, and so operators who wanted to replace their 737s opted for A320s instead. At the smaller end of the market McDonnell-Douglas' sales were nibbled away by a new wave of regional jets.

The MD-80 was too big to work as a regional jet, but not big enough to compete with the new 737 or A320, so MDD decided to stretch it. The resulting aircraft was launched in the early 1990s as the MD-90, essentially an MD-80 with a slightly longer fuselage and more efficient engines. Compared to the original DC-9 it was almost fifty feet longer. It had a distinctive look, almost like a flying pencil. In terms of passenger load it was on a par with the competition, but it lacked range, and in the end MDD only sold 116 of them, while the contemporary Boeing 737 and Airbus A320 models sold around 7-8000 units each.

In the early 1990s MDD announced the MD-95, which was an MD-90 shortened to the length of the original DC-9, but with the improved wings and engines of the later models. But MDD never had a chance to build it, because in 1997 the company was bought by Boeing. At the time MDD still made a lot of money from military contracts, and it was more a merger than a sale, but that was essentially the end for MDD's civilian airliner programme.

A Boeing 717

The MD-95 production line had been set up, so Boeing decided to continue selling the aircraft as the Boeing 717. It slotted nearly into Boeing's range beneath the 737, which by the late 1990s had grown into what would, by 1960s standards, have been a mid-sized mainstream airliner. After launch in 1999 the 717 turned out to be surprisingly popular, with sales of over 150 units, but it was struck by the general aviation downturn that followed 9/11, and production ceased in 2006. As of this writing around a hundred 717s remain in service, none in Europe. A few DC-9s and MD-80s remain flying as cargo or charter aircraft.

As with the DC-8 it's hard to write about the DC-9 and its heirs. It had no obvious design flaws and wasn't involved in any major controversies. The fact of it being a short-to-mid-range airliner meant that it had none of the glamour of the transatlantic giants, although its look - a thin fuselage with engines at the back - was attractive. In the UK they were a fairly common sight on account of the fact that Swissair and SAS both had large MD-80 fleets.

This leads us to the last Douglas airliner, the widebody DC-10. It was designed in the mid-1960s, at a time when the passenger aviation market was rapidly expanding. The industry anticipated a need for a large, high-capacity jet with enough range to cross the Atlantic. A kind of airbus, and surprisingly the term predated the airline company.

Boeing responded with the huge, four-engined 747. For a while the 747 seemed like an extravagance, so there was room for a slightly smaller widebody jet. Despite the troubled development of the C-5 Galaxy, Lockheed decided to re-enter the airline market. They came up with the three-engined L-1011 Tristar. Meanwhile Douglas developed a three-engined airliner of their own, the DC-10. In terms of specification the two aircraft were very similar, with passenger loads of around 250-270-300 depending on seating classes, and range of around 3,000-5,000 miles depending on variant.

The two aircraft were visually very similar as well. They both had three engines, two in pods beneath the wing and one in the tail. The DC-10's engine was hung behind the tail, with the intake pipe running in a straight line, while the Tristar's third engine was mounted at the rear of the fuselage, with an intake that curved down to meet it.

The Lockheed L-1011's third engine was mounted at the rear of the fuselage (top) while the Douglas DC-10's third engine hung behind the tail in a cleverly-designed cradle.

Why three engines? Trijets were fairly common in the 1960s and 1970s. The first designs, such as the Hawker Trident and the Boeing 727, were intended to fill the gap between small regional jets and the four-engined transatlantic airliners of the day, with the third engine adding extra oomph. Propeller-driven airliners often had a third engine mounted in the nose, but that wasn't practical for a jetliner, so the logical place to put the engine was the tail. The market for small trijets survived into the 1970s - the Trident and 727 were eventually joined by the Russian Tu-154 and Yak-42 - but by the 1980s a new generation of high-bypass turbofans killed them all off. The extra power of a third engine wasn't worth the complexity and expense.

There was another reason for three engines. ETOPS, which stands for "extended operations", or "extended-range twin-engined operation standards" depending on who you ask. In the 1960s and 1970s aviation rules were such that twin-engined airliners couldn't practically cross the Atlantic. They were forbidden from flying more than sixty minutes away from a diversion field in case one of the engines failed. But ETOPS didn't apply if an aircraft had more than two engines, so the 1960s and 1970s saw the rise of the transatlantic trijet. They remained in service until the 1990s, at which point further revisions to ETOPS rules meant that a new generation of large, twin-engined designs took over their routes. As of this writing the only trijets left in service are cargo conversions of the DC-10 and a few small business jets.

The DC-10 was controversial. Of the two major widebody trijets the general consensus nowadays is that the Lockheed Tristar was the better aircraft, with a more elegant engine layout and superior avionics. Unfortunately Lockheed had designed their airliner around a new Rolls-Royce engine that took longer to develop than planned, so it entered service a year after the DC-10, in 1972. With its head start the DC-10 went on to outsell the Tristar more than two-to-one, but it had problems.

A poor cargo door design crippled one aircraft in 1972 and led to the total loss of another in 1974 with the deaths of all on board. The door was engineered in such a way that it could be closed without locking solidly shut, after which cabin air pressure would eventually burst the door open. Another fatal accident in early 1979 resulted in the DC-10 being temporarily grounded, and a few months later a DC-10 involved in a sightseeing tour of Antartica crashed, again with the loss of all aboard. The two disasters of 1979 were technically not the fault of the aircraft - one was caused by poor engine maintenance, the other by incorrect navigation data - but the gruesome details of the crashes shook public confidence in the DC-10.

A further accident in 1989 highlighted a lack of redundancy in the aircraft's flight controls; although the aircraft had three hydraulic systems, the pipes were bunched together underneath the tail-mounted engine, with the result that an uncontained explosion of the engine's fan disk cut all three lines. In that case the pilots managed to avert total disaster by using differential engine thrust to steer left and right, but nowadays the DC-10 does not have a particularly positive reputation.

Unusually for Douglas there were only three major models of the DC-10, none of which were stretched. Douglas had plans for more, but competition from the Tristar and latterly the Airbus A300 ate into the company's market share, and by the end of production in 2000 the three-engined configuration was out of date. The DC-10-10, 10-30, and 10-40 were all the same size and had the same payload, but were differentiated by engines and fuel capacity, with the base model having a range of around 3,500 miles versus 5,000 for the 10-30 and 10-40. The 10-10 was capable of transatlantic flight, but was mostly used on domestic routes in the United States, whereas the -30 and -40 were comfortably able to cross the Atlantic from anywhere in the United States to anywhere in Europe, or from Europe to the Far East.

There was also a military variant, an the KC-10 Extender, a multi-purpose cargo aircraft stroke aerial refuelling tanker. It was introduced in 1977 as a larger analogue of the Boeing 707-derived KC-135. Unlike the civilian DC-10 the KC-10 had a fantastic safety record. Of the sixty purchased by the USAF only one was lost, and that was the result of a ground fire. It was withdrawn from service in the 2020s in favour of a replacement based on the Boeing 767.

An MD-11

McDonnell-Douglas introduced a second-generation DC-10 in the 1980s. At the time the company found itself in a bind. The DC-8 was leaving service; the DC-9 was still popular, but growing old; the DC-10 was being pushed aside by competition from Airbus. Lacking the resources to develop a ground-up successor the company decided to stretch the DC-10 and give it more efficient wings. The resulting MD-11 entered service in 1990.

Lockheed had discontinued the Tristar in 1984, leaving the long-range trijet market entirely to Douglas. But it was a market without a future, and the MD-11 only sold 200 units. With a range of around 6,000 miles and a capacity of 300-400 passengers the MD-11 competed directly with the Airbus A330, A340, and Boeing 777, selling fewer units than any of them, far fewer in the case of the A330 and 777. After the merger with Boeing in 1997 the MD-11 remained on the market, with the last model - a freighter - rolling off the production line in 2000. That was the end of the McDonnell-Douglas name, although as mentioned earlier the Boeing 717 remained in production until 2006.

There were proposals for one more aircraft, the MD-12, a four-engined, twin-deck super-jumbo that resembled the Airbus A380. Given the problems that affect the A380 the general consensus is that it would have been a disaster, and in the end nothing came of it.

And that was Douglas, a company fascinating both for its aircraft and also as a business case. In fact Jonathan Leonard and Adam Pilarski's Overwhelmed by Success: What Killed Douglas Aircraft (PDF) is an interesting read even if you don't care about the aviation industry. I'm not an expert, but among the reasons mentioned above it strikes me that Douglas' airliners all shared one common problem, which is that their general configurations had a limited shelf-life.

- The DC-8, for example, had been designed at a time when a mid-to-large-sized jetliner needed four engines. But in the 1970s a new generation of high-power turbofans meant that two engines could do the work of four, at less cost and with less complexity, so quad-jets such as the DC-8 gradually died off. Boeing kept itself relevant with the twin-engined 757 of 1981, but Douglas gave up on the mid-sized market in the early 1970s and never developed a 757 competitor.

- The DC-9 was designed with rear-mounted engines, but this configuration was hard to service and hard to load, because rear-engined aircraft have a habit of tipping over backwards. It also meant that the wings needed to be extra-strong and therefore extra-heavy, as there was nothing to counteract their tendency to bend upwards in flight. The DC-9's basic design therefore ended up as a dead end, and nowadays only business jets and small regional jets have rear-mounted engines. The conventionally-engined Boeing 737 and Airbus A320, in contrast, are two of the best-selling airliners of all time, and are still in production.

- The DC-10's trijet configuration only made sense in a certain time period, after which trijets were replaced with a new generation of high-powered, high-capacity twinjets. Douglas actually proposed a twin-engined DC-10, but this was in the early 1970s, at a time when manufacturers were sceptical of high-capacity twinjs. By the time a twin-engined widebody airliner might have won orders, Boeing had the 767 and Airbus had the A300, which were both much newer than the DC-10, and a few years later the two companies had the 777 and A330 twinjets, which were even larger.

Ultimately Douglas designed three popular airliners, but instead of replacing them when necessary it found itself compelled to upgrade them, until it was too late. Of the company's jet-powered products only the DC-9 remains in passenger service in 2025, albeit as the Boeing 717, although several DC-10 derivatives are still flying as cargo aircraft.

Next, Embraer.

Prey (2017): A Part of You Again Someday

Let's have a look at Prey (2017), a famously underrated modern take on System Shock. Famous, in fact, for being underrated. If you google "prey 2017 game underrated" the general consensus is that it deserved to be more popular than it was, but for a variety of reasons the world passed it by.

Is underrated the right word? It actually got decent reviews. It was a quintessential eight-out-of-ten game, good but not great. It sold enough to justify an expansion pack, Mooncrash, which came out a year later. Almost a decade on Prey has a strong fan following, but the chances of a sequel are very slim. Part of the problem is the name, which is cursed.

See, there was another game called Prey. It was developed by Human Head Studios back in 2006. It was a sci-fi action game that used the Doom 3 engine. The developers started work on a sequel, with a plan for it to be published by Bethesda, but despite spending years on the project Bethesda pulled the plug in 2016 because they weren't impressed. Bethesda did however retain the rights to the name.

Meanwhile the Austin, Texas branch of Lyons-based Arkane Studios were working on a sci-fi follow-up to their parent company's popular open-world steampunk adventure Dishonored. For reasons known only unto themselves Bethesda mandated that Arkane's new game should be called Prey as well, even though it had nothing to do with the original Prey. There are a few similarities (a space station, variable gravity, portals, albeit of the vision-only kind) but they're just coincidence.

And so fans of the original Prey were irritated by the new Prey, because it wasn't the game they were expecting. I ignored the new Prey because I hadn't played the old Prey. And the mainstream gaming audience ignored Prey because it was a brand new franchise with a generic name. It apparently sold over a million copies across the PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, but not enough to stem widespread job losses at Arkane's Austin branch, which was eventually shut down in 2024.

Human Head, developers of the original Prey, closed in 2019, and as far as I can tell the rights to both the original and the latter-day Prey are now owned by Microsoft, the parent company of Zenimax Media, which owns Bethesda, which owned Arkane Austin. Perhaps one day Prey will live again in some form. And I will rewrite these paragraphs so that they have fewer clauses. That will be the day.

Is Prey any good? Yes. It's very good, although I have some reservations. It's fun to play but has a curiously inert plot that goes nowhere, and there isn't a strong central baddy. It doesn't really add anything to the search-drawers / read-emails / hack-computers / shoot-things genre but it has a high level of polish. I was struck by the graphic design, which takes inspiration from art deco, but in a much subtler way than BioShock. The technology is a blend of futuristic and old-fashioned, with tape reels and valves that coexist with flat panel displays and antigravity technology.

It struck me after a few hours that the recent remake of System Shock was largely pointless, because Prey did the same thing back in 2017. With just a few tweaks Prey could easily have been a new System Shock game, and perhaps in another world where it was called Something Shock - the internet suggests PsychoShock, after one of the in-game superpowers, or NeuroShock - it might have been a huge hit. But System Shock itself wasn't all that popular, so who knows.

What was System Shock? It was a first-person action-adventure game that came out in 1994. It popularised a style of video game storytelling whereby the player wakes up with amnesia in a disaster area and has to piece together the plot from audio logs and emails. This was a clever idea, because it meant that the game could tell a spooky, suspenseful story without having to animate masses of non-player characters. It had been done before (the ancient point-and-click game Portal seems to have put the genre on the map first) but Shock combined the idea with texture-mapped 3D graphics.

Shock was technically state-of-the-art, with a bunch of features that went on to become standard many years later. It had rudimentary physics puzzles, a freeform level structure that the player could explore at their leisure, voice acting for the CDROM version at a time when PC games had masses of text, some surprisingly complex maps - although they were still fundamentally two-dimensional planes with elevation rather proper 3D - and even prototypical VR support. On the downside the game only worked well on a monster PC, and it had a slow-paced, measured gameplay style that was falling out of fashion in the PC gaming world at the time.

Developers Looking Glass polished up the gameplay style with System Shock 2, which came out in 1999, but despite attracting good reviews the sequel didn't stop the company from running out of money and closing a year later. In tribute to the company Prey has lots of little references to Looking Glass, ranging from the very first keycode to the game's environmental camera system, which is also called Looking Glass.

During its short lifespan Looking Glass attracted a tonne of top talent, who went on to develop classic games of their own. Warren Spector went off to head up Deus Ex for Ion Storm Austin, and a few years later Ken Levine masterminded BioShock, which came out in 2007. BioShock was essentially System Shock 2 set underwater instead of in space. Neither of those games sold in huge numbers, although BioShock was pretty popular, but they regularly appear in best-of-all-time lists and were popular enough to spawn franchises. They are the quintessential "your favourite games developers' favourite games".

On paper Prey has no formal connection with System Shock and its heirs. One member of the development staff worked as a playtester for the original System Shock, but that's about it. But it's the same thing, really. I'm going to describe a game, and I want you to guess which game I'm talking about. I begin.

I'll clear my throat. I begin. I'm going to do it now. I begin. "The player wakes up with amnesia in a ruined space station surrounded by corpses and deadly monsters. The first door's keycode is 0451. The space station has a bunch of vertically-oriented floors that the player can visit at will. There's a garden level, a shuttle bay, a power plant, a command deck. Some parts of the game involve floating in a zero-gravity environment. The player has a novelty gun that fires rubber bullets. The storyline is told with a mixture of emails and audio logs. When confronted with a door the player can either gain access by hacking the computerised lock, or finding a keycode, or doing a bit of exploration and finding a maintenance access hatch. The game ends with the player setting the space station to self-destruct and then escaping. Towards the end of the game the maps become infested with a kind of electronic fungus."

No, the answer is not Mastertronic's 1986 volleyball game Bump, Set, Spike. It's Prey. But also System Shock. But also Prey. And also System Shock. 

Prey is essentially an updated System Shock, with the superpowers and item crafting of the sequel. Let's talk about the good stuff. Let's talk about that. The storyline begins with a clever twist. The player wakes up in an apartment in what appears to be San Francisco. They are helicoptered to a testing facility. After carrying out some science experiments that double as a means of teaching the player how to use the controls the player falls asleep. The game then seems to start again, but something has gone wrong.

"Icarus found you. Run while you can."

It turns out that the apartment is fake. The windows are a big television screen. It's a studio setup built inside a space station. The station itself is being used to conduct experiments on alien creatures that can disguise themselves as everyday objects, and also human beings, because it turns out that the mimics can be used to boost the power of the human mind. If just one of the mimics reaches Earth the consequences would be disastrous.

From that point onwards the player has to escape the test centre. They're quickly contacted by a voice on the radio - games of this nature always have a voice on the radio - who advises them to blow the whole place to kingdom come, killing everybody aboard, including the player. A drastic solution but it seems the only way. At least initially.

Unusually for this genre Prey has living non-player characters. Not all of the staff of Talos 1 die in the initial disaster. The player can meet and interact with some of his co-workers, including his brother, Alex Yu, who suggests an alternative course of action that involves lobotomising the baddies with a special transmitter. The game also presents a third solution that involves simply getting into an escape pod and flying off to call for help, which actually sounds quite reasonable, although in practice it's treated it as a non-standard game over.

Almost from the beginning I was struck by the game's polish. Prey was one of the few games outside the Crysis franchise to use Crytek's CryEngine, which copes with a range of indoors and outdoors environments with aplomb. The maps are far more detailed than Shock etc, without becoming horribly confusing, although the multi-level shuttle bay baffled me for a while. If you ever find yourself hankering to play a game where you can obsessively search every cupboard, crack every safe, and hack every computer, Prey is the game for you.

Prey takes place on a large multi-level space station, Talos 1. The player is free to explore the whole place from the very beginning of the game. The player can even go outside, and impressively the outside model of the station is more or less congruent with the inside map, so at times it's quicker to take a shortcut from one airlock to another rather negotiate the interior of the station. One issue is that the maps take a while to load, but then again my computer is ancient.

For the record I built my PC from parts in 2011. I've uploaded it to a point where it would have been a supercomputer circa 2013. It runs Prey just fine, although the game starts to chug towards the end, at which point the space station is infested with the aforementioned glowing fungus.

This kind of game usually has a mass of background posters, stickers, cruft and so forth, Prey likewise, but impressively the rooms have posters that actually make sense in context. At one point I read an email from a character who was a fan of a pianist, and after searching the room I found a poster for that very pianist, and then later in the game his name even popped up on a whiteboard, because the developers took the trouble to work out where each and every one of the station's 200-odd crew were located at the time of the disaster. This actually leads to a plot hole - there should only be a finite amount of baddies, because there were only a finite number of people on board the station to serve as raw material for the alien mimics - but I'll let that slide.

The gameplay is essentially vintage System Shock / BioShock / Deus Ex. It involves exploring the map for keycodes and quest items, with the player either hacking or unlocking or bypassing doors. Instead of giving the player experience points the reward comes from neuromods which give the player a specific perk, and also weapon upgrades that improve the player's firepower. The game gives the player all the guns early on, but they're pea-shooters until they are upgraded. I spent the whole game expecting a scene in which the player is captured and the guns are taken away, but to my surprise that never happened.

BioShock's chief innovation was that the combat was entertaining. Shock and Deux Ex were notorious for their unimpressive combat. Everything else was great, but the combat was an afterthought. Prey follows a similar path to BioShock, in the sense that it's perfectly playable as a straightforward action game, with the player having a choice between conventional weapons or psychic powers, plus a separate tied of alien-derived psychic abilities.

As with BioShock the game also encourages the player to string weapons into a combo, particularly the GLOO gun, which is the game's signature weapon. It fires rapidly-solidifying foam that can be used to create climbable steps, or alternatively it can encase the baddies, giving the player time to whack them with a wrench. Alternatively the player can use their powers to slow down time while they pump the enemy full of buckshot, or they can simply throw large objects at the monsters. How does amplifying the human mind allow a person to carry enormous weights? Again, let's move on.

Prey also adds a bunch of entertaining busywork. There's a dearth of ammunition, but the player can feed environmental waste into recycling units that turn it into raw materials, which can then be fed into a replicator to make bullets, or grenades, or health packs. This part of the game is surprisingly addictive. I found myself compulsively picking up discarded lemon peel and burned-out circuit boards so I could recycle them, and memorising the location of fabrication stations so that I would never run out of munitions.

Which reminds me of something. Games of this ilk, going back to System Shock, tend to give the player different types of bullet. Armour-piercing, explosive, coin shot and so forth. Prey doesn't have this, perhaps because it has a grounded, realistic tone. It's one of a small number of games that accounts for the fact that using firearms on board a pressurised space station is a bad idea. As such it doesn't have any conventional explosive grenades, and the firearms are designed to be weak and short-ranged.

Of the other mechanics, the hacking mini-game is unimpressive but at least straightforward. The zero-gravity sequences inside the station are annoying, but again they only last for a short while - shades of Crysis - whereas in contrast exploring the outside of the station is surprisingly fun. In a clever piece of verisimilitude the game's reployers actually work, although they're all offline.

The original System Shock was notable for its lack of player assistance. It predated quest markers. The player had to sift through a lot of background chatter to find the actual quest objectives, and then listen to another audio log to work out where they had to go. Prey on the other hand has objective markers.

Wouldn't it be great if real life had objective markers? It would save a lot of time. I reckon that most people would click on "find true love" in their quest list. Imagine following the quest marker to a graveyard somewhere, and finding that your true love died seventy-five years ago. Imagine if the quest marker pointed at yourself.

Imagine finding that your true love had been killed by a physics glitch. Prey has a few glitches. I found a corpse embedded in a chair, a broken computer that wasn't actually broken, and at one point I managed to mantle over a bunk bed and clip through the edge of the level, after which I fell to my death. But otherwise the game feels tight.

The game has a number of surprisingly smart puzzles. One perfectly legitimate way to open security doors is to shoot the door button through a narrow gap in the security glass, which works. If the player runs out of certain resources they can use a recycling grenade to transform background objects, including corpses, into raw materials. One quest involves being given some instructions by a suspicious character who becomes even more suspicious if the player actually pays attention to the character's apartment. A couple of the quests can be deliberately botched in lethal ways if the player has a sadistic sense of humour. And so on.

Do I have anything else to say about the gameplay? It's a cliche, but if you enjoyed BioShock you'll enjoy Prey. Combat has very mild stealth elements, made easier with special neuromods, but it also rewards an athletic, slow-down-time-and-jump-about approach. Mid-way through the game the player encounters THE NIGHTMARE, a huge monster that hunts the player throughout the level. It can only be vanquished temporarily. By the time it appears it's more of a psychological threat than an actual threat, but the sound design in particularly is fantastic. The creature sounds like an angry dog shouting into a plastic tube.

The score was mostly composed by Mick Gordon, who went on to do the music for Doom and Doom Eternal. In comparison Prey is subtler and creeper, more synth-heavy.

Am I damning you with faint praise, mostly-Mick-Gordon's-soundtrack-for-Prey? The thing about creepy atmosphere is that it's low-key, so for the most part it tickled my nerves rather than grabbing me by the throat.

Bad stuff? I don't want to give away the plot, but it's simultaneously clever and a little bit flat. There's no central villain. System Shock had SHODAN, and Deus Ex had Bob Page, but the baddies in Prey are just alien animals. They're rendered as sinister, ghostly shadows, which has the unfortunate side-effect of making them look more or less the same. There are only really four alien types - tiny, bigger, floating, huge - but although they have different abilities none of them really stand out. There is in theory a central boss, but it's just a larger animal. We learn very little about them.

The fact that the baddies can disguise themselves as coffee cups leads to a clever gameplay mechanic where the player can scan rooms with a special visor that reveals mimics, but it feels underutilised. Only the smaller creatures can imitate objects. The larger creatures are just generic alien baddies. They never use the shapeshifting mechanism to mess with the player. Imagine exploring a storage room, and then turning around to find that the boxes have moved. Or have they? Sadly that never happens.

A second issue is that the game spends a lot of time discussing memory, but this doesn't go anywhere. Transtar, the company that owns Talos 1, has managed to find a way to turn the alien mimics into neuromods that give the user super-powers, with the side-effect that removing a neuromod resets the player's memory to the point when the mod was installed. It makes sense and fits into the plot, but it seems to exist only to make the ending of the game work, and also so that the player can role-play as the lead character without being distracted by their actual personality. Otherwise it just feels like background detail.

I'm going to digress a bit. Horror exists on a spectrum of plausibility. Shock and Deus Ex included some objectively revolting elements, but it was hard to be disturbed by them because the presentation was so cartoonish. That was why Deus Ex: Human Revolution was so effective. By toning down the melodrama and giving the storyline an air of plausibility Human Revolution had a genuine emotional impact, because the horrific elements stood out more.

Prey on the other hand has such a realistic, low-key tone that the horror falls flat. During the course of the game the player learns that Transtar isn't just sinister, it's utterly vile, but no-one seems to care. The plot reveals that the player character is a futuristic Josef Mengele, but this is just brushed aside. The ending implies that the player's brother is a callous maniac who treats the world as his personal laboratory, with disastrous results, but nothing comes of it.

The game's ending is in theory incredibly bleak. Prey has essentially the same underlying message as Spec Ops: The Line, that sometimes the best thing to do is stop and walk away, but the game's restrained, low-key approach to drama means that it has very little emotional impact. Furthermore I kept expecting a twist. In theory the alien mimics are the good guys. The human characters treat them as a disposable resource. Their revenge on humanity is perfectly justified. I expected a twist in which the player would switch sides, or even a twist in which it would turn out that the player was a mimic all along - playing a long game of revenge - but no, nothing of the sort happens.

There are other, minor problems. For all their faults Bethesda's role-playing games, such as Fallout 4 or Skyrim, have some clever environmental storytelling. Bethesda's developers have a knack for using props to give locations life, so that a ruined bedroom with some corpses, props, and scattered notes tells a story. Prey attempts this a few times, but it very rarely works. Part of the problem is that the physics-based combat often resulted in rooms being wrecked before I had a chance to check them out. Notably the most effective bits of environmental storytelling - a double suicide, and a sequence involving a suspicious cook - take place in areas set apart from the main map.

Littered around the levels are gun turrets that can be used to block off areas from the slowly-respawning mimics. The player can upgrade them, but after a while it dawned on me that it was pointless. When the player goes through a loading zone the game seems to roll dice to determine whether the turrets have been destroyed, or not, with the result that no matter how cleverly the player positions them the turrets inevitably end up broken. They're useful for raw materials but not much else.

At the risk of second-guessing the developers it would have been nice if, Skyrim-style, parts of the map could be "cleared". Some parts of the game suggest that there might have been an ending in which the player led a bunch of survivors to retake the station, which would have been an interesting twist on the genre's conventions. But not, the surviving NPCs generally stick to one location, and despawn when the player leaves the map.

In Deus Ex: Human Revolution the hacking minigame took place in real time, which led to some tense moments where the player had to get the hack done before a guard came along, but in Prey the hacking takes place in hyperspace, so it never feels tense. The emphasis on combat rather than stealth means that the creepy atmosphere dissipates after a while, because the player ends up is strong enough that they don't have to bother hiding, they can just run straight at the enemy while blasting away.

And perhaps it's just me, but after playing so many games of this genre I'm becoming jaded by stories in which an evil corporate with a staff of evil people performs evil experiments in an evil world. That kind of storytelling was hot in the 1990s, when comics were invariably dark and edgy, but who do you root for? Prey has a couple of sympathetic characters, but even they are corporate lackies.

And that's Prey. Clever but shoulder-shrugging plot, really solid System Shock gameplay, runs well on modest hardware, fun, memorable, takes about forty hours to finish if you do most of the side-quests. Less slam-bang actiony than BioShock, but a perfectly valid modern System Shock albeit that 2017 isn't modern any more. The DLC, Mooncrash, is apparently great, but I haven't played it.

On the downside neither Prey nor Mooncrash answer the question of why The Melvins weren't more popular. Obviously they were never going to be a mainstream pop band, but they never appear in "best metal albums of all time" lists either. Is it because they didn't release a consistently good and also diverse album? Are they too weird for the mainstream, but not weird enough to tickle the fancy of people who enjoy The Dillinger Escape Plan? Do people just dismiss them as a throwback to the grunge era? I don't know.

Ode to a Bag

I don't often write about bags. But in a moment of reflection it came to me. Who has been my closest companion for as long as I remember? Who has carried my material possessions without ever faltering or asking for compensation? Who went with me to Chernobyl and Greenland without moaning about being mutated, or attacked by a musk ox?

Helena Bonham-Carter? No, sadly not. Sydney Sweeney? Again, sadly no.

Who? NO, NOT WHO. WHAT. THIS:

What is it? It's a backpack made by Airwalk. I have no idea when it came into my life. I can't remember buying it. The bag seems to have sneaked up on me. It's one of those things, like combs and pens and mirrors and towels, that just appeared. Like those little sachets of salt and pepper that accidentally fall into your bag when you visit Wetherspoon. Where do they come from? Wetherspoon, obviously, but I was trying to make a wider point about the detritus that becomes caught in our gravitational pull. For some people - for hoarders - the debris becomes so dense that there is no escape, because it takes a hard heart to reject unconditional love.

Well, dear reader, my heart is hard, but I don't want to get rid of this bag. It still functions. And no-one has ever tried to steal it, or from it, because it looks grotty. In the pictures it appears to be a deep crimson, but that's because my camera is sensitive to infrared. In visible light it's as black as the colour of my true love's heart. I don't often photograph it, but here it is, in Greenland:

And here it is again, piggy-backed onto a bigger bag, in shadow:

It's lashed to the back of an Exped Lightning 60 rucksack. I used the little bag whenever the Lightning was packed away.

Why am I writing about it? Because it's disposable. I don't value it. I wouldn't miss it if it was damaged. But I feel guilty, because after all the abuse it has suffered it held up surprisingly well. The shiny coating is coming off but the underlying fabric is strong.

One of the zips has broken, necessitating a quick fix with some string:

What is Airwalk? Like so much of the modern world Airwalk was inspired by Jazzercise. It was one of many ripples that spread from the initial big bang of Jazzercise. We live in a world shaped by the echoes of Jazzercise. Back in the 1970s a pair of chaps in Southern California called George Yohn and Bill Mann owned a business called Items International Inc. The business imported cheap shoes from the Far East, but no-one cared until Jazzercise.

And skateboarding. I don't want to suggest that Jazzercise was the only thing that shaped the modern world. Skateboarding also played a crucial role. In the mid-80s Yohn and Mann decided that the future lay in trainers - sneakers, in the United States - so they attended a bunch of Jazzercise classes and studied a bunch of skateboarders and came up with Airwalk, a brand name that sounded a little bit skateboard-y. The company made a fortune from the trainer market, and then another fortune from the market for snowboarding and mountain biking.

Now, I'm not a businessman, so I have no idea what happened next. In 1999 the company was sold to Sunrise Capital Partners, at which point Yohn and Mann left the company. Yohn died two years later. It appears that sales collapsed, and three years later the only worthwhile part of the business was the brand name, and from that point onwards Airwalk became one of those businesses - like Atari, or Polaroid, or Kodak - where only a team of corporate lawyers can't tell if it's real or just a name. The Airwalk that made my bag almost certainly has no connection whatsoever with the Airwalk of the 1980s and 1990s.

I think the lesson is that if you want your legacy to survive and have meaning, don't sell it to a business that has "capital" in the name.

When was my bag made? I have no idea. None whatsoever. My hunch is that modern Airwalk's business model consists of buying up cheap, generic stuff from a variety of unconnected manufacturers in the Far East and slapping an Airwalk logo on it, so trying to trace a design lineage is basically impossible. Antiques experts can spot "tells" that date tables and chairs, little design elements that were fashionable one decade and unfashionable the next, but my bag is thoroughly generic.

I can find plenty of bags that have the same basic configuration, but none that look exactly the same, and despite scouring eBay and Google I can't find another bag like it. Perhaps it's not even an official Airwalk bag; perhaps it's a knock-off. Early 2000s?

It has the configuration of an office bag, with a separate pocket on the front for documents, a pocket inside for a laptop, a little zipped-up compartment below the grab-handle for earbud headphones. Beyond that the interior is one big space, which is handy for holidays. Purely by coincidence it's slightly undersized for EasyJet cabin baggage, although as of a couple of years ago it's too big for Ryanair, but stuff Ryanair. Did I take it with me to Hong Kong? No, I took a more substantial bag.

Now, over the last few months I've been learning how to ride a motorcycle, and I'm not convinced the bag will stand up to the rigours of being blasted by 50mph wind and rain, so it tends to sit unused for longer and longer periods. What will happen to this unloved, possibly-knockoff by-product of globalised capital management? It'll probably become fustier and grottier until I throw it away, or use it to dispose of hazardous waste (and then throw it away).

Or I may cut holes in it and use it as a Halloween slasher mask, but the point still stands. It is mortal, as are we all, doomed to die unmourned, but it existed, and it lived a life.

Friday Morning

More music. I've always had a soft spot for Brian Eno's Thursday Afternoon. It's a 60-minute-long ambient composition from 1986, released on compact disc only because it was too long to fit on a vinyl record. Why is it called Thursday Afternoon? Because there was an accompanying video album that was videotaped on a Thursday afternoon, that's why.

What does Thursday Afternoon sound like? Imagine you are exploring a metal jungle on a planet populated by robot animals, while electronic wind disturbs the leaves of silicon trees high above your head. It's not so much an album as a vista, a place that you can visit for a while. It's complex, but simple. Ultra-high-tech, but elegant. Baroque, but minimal. Surprisingly timeless for an electronic music album that came out in 1986.

On a whim, and because England has had a spell of cold weather, I decided to make my own Thursday Afternoon. There comes a time in every person's life when they have a hankering to make an hour-long ambient composition, and this is my time.

Do you want to know something spooky? As a joke I was going to pretend that I couldn't think of a name, so I asked ChatGPT to come up with something - and after fifteen hours of processing it suggested Friday Morning. The joke is that it's a really obvious name for a piece of music inspired by Thursday Afternoon. Imagine asking a supercomputer to come up with a name for a sequel to The Expendables 2, and after days of effort it comes up with The Expendables 3. The humour comes from the fact that it's a perfectly decent name, but an incredibly prosaic one.

Here's the spooky thing. This is where it gets spooky. Are you ready for this. Just to see what would happen I actually did ask ChatGPT for a name. "Can you suggest a good name for a sequel to Brian Eno's "Thursday Afternoon"?", I asked. And, lo and behold, it really did suggest Friday Morning. That was the top suggestion.

Followed by Twilight Hours, Silent Horizon, Endless Echoes, Eternal Afternoon, Between Moments, Shifting Light, Solitude's Song, and Unfolding Stillness, most of which would be perfectly viable albeit slightly naff ambient album titles.

Back in 1986 Brian Eno recorded Thursday with a 24-track tape machine and a bunch of digital reverbs, delays, and pitch-shifters, costing tens of thousands of pounds in all. Here in 2025 I used Logic Pro, which is £199.99. What instruments did he use? At the time Eno was a big fan of the Yamaha DX7, but my impression is that he used his instruments as raw material for a battery of studio effects, which were then fed back into themselves to create a distinctive shimmery wall of sound. The studio was his instrument.

In contrast I used Pascal Gauthier's Dexed, a free emulation of the Yamaha DX7, but in keeping with the theme I used the simplest, most sine wavey FM patches I could make. I also used Giulio Zausa's RDPiano, a free emulation of Roland's mid-80s sample-based MKS-20 and MKS-80 digital pianos, which in theory should sound badly dated but have a charm of their own. Plus some of Logic's own plugins - the background drone is a patch from Alchemy - and some simple patches made with my modular synthesiser. For each track I recorded a note, or a run of notes, but instead of using loops I copied and pasted the regions more or less randomly:

Thursday Afternoon was recorded with digital instruments and digital effects, but it has a surprisingly organic sound. It was recorded to tape, and all the layers of effects and compression amplified the noise. I tried to emulate that by using a simple outboard effects chain that consisted of my modest Alesis NanoCompressor, plus a pair of Strymon pedals:

The chain was El Capistan tape delay simulator ->; NanoCompressor ->; BigSky reverb, which had the effect of amplifying the noise from the tape delay simulation, and then smoothing it out with the reverb. With Logic I then added a compressor at the end plus a tape saturation effect, and some EQ to tone down the bass. The result is bassier, more boxy, less spacey, less subtle than Thursday Afternoon. Of course, it's a lot easier to copy an idea than come up with a new idea, and I have a renewed respect for Eno. At any point in 1986 he might have thrown up his hands and said "this is stupid", and the world would have carried out, but he persisted.

As of 2025 there is the spectre of AI. Back in the 1980s Brian Eno experimented with chance processes and self-assembling musical compositions using the audio equivalent of an analogue computer - a mixing desk loaded with tape loops - to create ever-evolving music. In the 1990s he adopted a piece of software called Koan Pro that could algorithmically generate music, but as far as I can tell he didn't wholly embrace computerised composition, although I have to admit I'm not all that familiar with his 21st century output.

But still, there was a time when generative music was the hip new thing, and it's still a fascinating field. The idea that human beings might be taken out of the musical equation isn't necessary a bad thing. Birdsong and the crash of waves and the sound of wind in the trees are all pleasing to the ear, and they were not created by human beings. Conversely an awful lot of noise pollution is the result of human activity, so perhaps human beings are the enemy after all. But I can't help but think that the brilliant minds who devised generative music software imagined that other brilliant minds like themselves would use it, whereas in reality the widespread deployment of AI has inevitably led to piles of low-effort slop created by people who just don't care.

Which raises all kinds of issues of class and snobbishness. I have the impression that whenever a new medium is invented - whether radio, or television, or the internet - the creators imagine that future audiences will be just like them. University-educated hipsters with curious minds and impeccable taste, and not for example kids who just want to listen to rock and roll. And yet without rock and roll Brian Eno would not have had the money to make Thursday Afternoon, so what is right and what is wrong.

Ultimately you and I are an elite, and if the masses are happy with their toys, let them. We have each other.