another world

Modern Vintage Gamer explains how Eric Chahi built Another World on the Amiga 500, using 2D polygons, rotoscoping and clever techniques to run well on a stock 7MHz machine.

Part one of a four-part upload of a BBC Horizon documentary featuring Richard Feynman, in which he talks about physics and looking at the world from another point of view.

Neil Halloran's animated, data-driven documentary visualizes the human cost of World War II and compares it with other wars and the trend toward fewer war deaths in recent decades.

Summoning Salt's roughly two-hour documentary traces the history of Tetris world records, from early play through the modern competitive scene. It is a long, well-researched narrative about the players and techniques that pushed the records.

A 1969 BBC Tomorrow's World segment about Nellie, a school computer used by pupils at Forest Grammar School to solve equations and play music. Students learn programming and maintenance, and act out binary arithmetic.

A feature-length documentary on how the City of London and Britain's overseas territories built a global web of offshore secrecy jurisdictions after the empire declined. It traces how this network captured and hid wealth from around the world.

The trailer for Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old, a WWI documentary built from restored, colorized archival footage and BBC interviews with British soldiers.

The official tour video of Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, the world's largest model railway. It shows the 1,300 square meter layout with trains, aircraft, cars and ships moving around.

A short IBM behind-the-scenes documentary on how researchers moved individual atoms to make the world's smallest movie. It introduces the scientists and their work on atomic memory and data storage.

Nate Harrison's 2004 video history of the Amen Break, a six-second drum sample from a 1969 b-side that became the basis of hip-hop sampling, jungle and drum and bass. It is also a meditation on cultural ownership and creativity.

The first episode of Clickspring's series on reproducing the Antikythera Mechanism by hand, laying out the plan and the history. The series follows a machinist building the ancient Greek device with traditional tools and methods.

Machine Thinking tells the story of the Cold War Heavy Press Program, the giant forging presses that make parts for aircraft, missiles and turbines.

CNBC gets a tour of ASML's cleanrooms in the Netherlands to see how its roughly $200 million EUV lithography machines are built. It covers exploding molten tin, ultra-flat optics and why only one company can make these systems.

An NFB documentary about the shipbreaking yards of Alang, India, where about 40,000 people dismantle huge ships by hand in dangerous conditions.

Folding Ideas' long essay on why playing poorly in World of Warcraft feels rude. It traces how raiding culture shifted from relaxed fun to optimization, theorycrafting and wikis.

Channel 4's George Clarke visits a council estate in Vienna and is surprised by amenities such as swimming pools and private TV channels. It showcases Vienna's high-quality social housing.

VICE News reporter Isobel Yeung goes undercover as a tourist in Xinjiang, documenting heavy surveillance, policing and internment of Uighurs. It also covers children taken into state-run institutions.

Veritasium tells the story of Kary Mullis, the surfer and LSD user who invented PCR and won a Nobel Prize. It explains how PCR works and how it was developed at Cetus.

DW Documentary on the roughly 6,300 ships sunk in World War II that are now rusting and leaking oil into the seas. Scientists investigate contamination and the risk of a huge oil spill.

A short Great Big Story piece about Hagoromo, a Japanese chalk brand so prized that mathematicians stockpiled it, with some reportedly dealing it on the side. It tells the quirky tale of a writing tool whose supply became scarce.

A VICE documentary profiling Wim Hof, the Iceman, covering his feats of cold endurance, his breathing and meditation method, and scientific studies of his control over his autonomic and immune systems.

Adam Curtis's 2016 BBC documentary argues that since the 1970s governments, financiers and technologists have retreated into a simplified fake world. It ranges from Syria and Libya to the road to Trump.

Summoning Salt traces the speedrunning history of Mario Kart 64's Choco Mountain track and its famous shortcut, through the successive record holders and discoveries. It carries an epilepsy warning for flickering lights.

A very long video essay by Shaun on the decisions and motivations behind the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with a detailed timeline and argument that they were not militarily necessary.

People Make Games explores VRChat, the social virtual world that many consider the metaverse people actually like, interviewing users and covering its communities and uncertain future.

Chapter 11 of the documentary The Corporation, on how marketing targets children, including the Nag Factor study that taught kids to nag their parents more effectively.

Feature-length documentary following DeepMind's AlphaGo program as it prepares for and plays the 2016 match against Go champion Lee Sedol. It covers the team, the games, and the emotional reaction of the Go world to an AI beating a top human.

A WIRED Future Cities documentary on Shenzhen, covering its hardware-prototyping culture and shanzhai copycat manufacturing. It looks at how the city's ecosystem evolved and what the rest of the world can learn.

Adam Curtis's 2016 BBC documentary HyperNormalisation, about 160 minutes long. It cuts together roughly forty years of politics, finance and technology to argue that people have retreated into a simplified fake world.

A VICE documentary that visits Agafia Lykova, last surviving member of the Lykov family of Old Believers who fled into the Siberian taiga in 1936. It shows how she lives in remote isolation and the outside world encroaching on it.

NativLang's 47-minute animated documentary traces the birth and evolution of writing, from early cave marks to modern scripts. It presents the history of the world's writing systems as a story.

Vsauce's Michael Stevens stages a realistic version of the trolley problem with unsuspecting subjects who believe they must decide a life-or-death outcome. The Mind Field episode compares what people say they would do with what they actually do.

A documentary on how Cornwall became a hub for the world's communications, from the first transatlantic radio signal to modern undersea fibre cables. It describes how cable landing stations and the systems are put together.

Permaculture instructor Andrew Millison travels with the UN World Food Programme to Niger to see land recovery within the Great Green Wall, where rainwater harvesting is boosting food security and restoring the ecosystem.

Part 4 of the BBS: The Documentary series, covering FidoNet, the amateur network that linked dial-up bulletin board systems together to relay messages and files worldwide.

Bloomberg's Hello World episode in which Ashlee Vance visits Shenzhen, a hub of electronics manufacturing and cloning. He meets tech-fueled entrepreneurs working under an authoritarian regime.

A VPRO documentary following ecologist and cameraman John D. Liu. He documents the regreening of China's Loess Plateau and other efforts to restore deserts and biodiversity around the world.

Kirsten Dirksen tours the underground ferro-cement dome home of Paula and Bill Lishman, the family behind the geese-led flight story. The skylit earth-sheltered house stays warm below the frost line.

Jason Scott's multi-episode documentary on the bulletin board system scene of the 1980s and 1990s, built from over 200 interviews. It captures how hobbyists ran dial-up systems before the internet went mainstream.

Adam Curtis's 2016 BBC documentary arguing that politicians, financiers and technologists retreated into a simplified, fake version of the world because reality became too complex. It ranges across Trump, Brexit, Syria, Surkov's Russia and more.