Image: Kristen Radtke / The Verge Flipping through your high school scrapbook is a humbling experience. There’s a lot to reckon with — including braces and bootcut jeans, in my case — and you get a sense of what kinds of moments you thought were worth preserving. Apparently, a great deal of funny things happened to my friends and me as we loafed around a suburban coffee shop avoiding homework. Looking through those pages, I can find plenty of documentation of life as we waited for our teammates to finish their tennis matches and turned the communal couch at Caribou Coffee into our own private rec room. But only a few pages later, the photos abruptly stop.This was all in 2003, my senior year of high school. (Please don’t do that math.) I carried around disposable cameras... Continue reading…

Do you struggle to keep track of all your streaming services, online tools, and monthly memberships? You are not alone! In todays world, with dozens of digital subscriptions, its easy to lose sight of where your money is going. One minute you sign up for a free trial, and the next, you wonder why your credit card bill skyrocketed.

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images The Mojave Desert is not typically a place for a car race, but these were not your typical cars, and this was not your typical race. The course was 150 miles of rocks, loose dirt, and narrow switchbacks — harrowing terrain even for the most rugged vehicles. The obvious goal: be the first to cross the finish line without crashing, flipping over, or catching fire. The prize was $1 million.The participants looked straight out of Mad Max: military-grade Humvees, dune buggies, motorcycles, and a particularly gnarly-looking Acura SUV. No drivers with mohawks and shoulder pads, unfortunately. No drivers at all. This was the DARPA Grand Challenge — the world’s first robot car race. It was March 13th, 2004, a watershed moment in autonomous... Continue reading…

For a couple of years, there was nothing on the internet so simultaneously thrilling and terrifying as having your website hit the front page of Digg. Thousands of people, maybe tens of thousands, would immediately come to your site — and there’s a good chance they’d crash it in the process. Hundreds of commenters would debate the merits of whatever you’d created or published, pick fights with you and each other about it, and make you feel like the internet’s main character. At least for a few minutes, until something bigger and newer and more controversial hit Digg.com and everyone moved on.In its early days, Digg was something like the homepage of the internet. Any user could submit a link, and then any other user could either promote... Continue reading…

Image: NetEase The rumors are true, the Destiny franchise is heading to mobile devices soon. Destiny: Rising is a new free-to-play mobile sci-fi RPG shooter that includes a number of playable hero characters, a shared world, and PvE and PvP modes all set in Bungie’s Destiny universe.China-based NetEase Games has developed Destiny: Rising, after announcing a partnership with Bungie and a $100 million investment into the studio in 2018. Destiny: Rising will be set in an alternative Destiny timeline, exploring the post-Dark Age era of the universe and lore before the Tower existed and before the emergence of Guardians. Image: NetEase Destiny: Rising will be set in the Destiny universe. NetEase is licensing the Destiny brand from... Continue reading…

Lenovo's lineup of ThinkPad laptops has largely stood the test of time. Laptops have changed a lot over the last few decades, but the ThinkPad brand has been a pinnacle of consistency for better or worse. From the famous (or infamous) trackpoint to the rugged and practical design language, it's easy to point out a Lenovo ThinkPad in the crowd. While I wouldn't recommend a great ThinkPad to everyone, the legacy of ThinkPads which were initially made by IBM but have been under Lenovo's stewardship for nearly two decades lives on in mainstream Lenovo laptops.

Image: Microsoft Microsoft is bringing Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III and Call of Duty: Warzone to Xbox Cloud Gaming later this month. This means Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 will be playable on Xbox Cloud Gaming at launch on October 25th, with Warzone and Modern Warfare III cloud support also getting enabled on the same day.This is the first time a Call of Duty game has been available at launch on Xbox Cloud Gaming, following Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard last year. “This is a first for the Call of Duty franchise, and a win for the community,” says Ashley McKissick, corporate vice president of gaming experiences & platforms at Xbox.You’ll need an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription to access the three Call... Continue reading…

Image: Devolver Digital After the launch of Gris, a beautiful game exploring grief, the team at Nomada Studio in Barcelona needed a long break. They spent around half a year not even thinking about what was next, avoiding words like “Unity” or “sequel.” Eventually, director Conrad Roset, who became a parent during that time, came up with the idea of a similar experience that would introduce a new companion, allowing players to connect with and care for another character.“I told him, no problem, as long as it’s not a four-legged animal, you can do whatever you want,” says lead producer Roger Mendoza, noting that animating critters with lots of legs can be “quite painful.” But the director was able to make the case for a game called Neva about a young woman who... Continue reading…

Image: Kristen Radtke / The Verge In fashion, it’s said that trends return every 20 years. But it seems technology has started to repeat itself at the same cadence, too. Can you identify what things happened in 2004, 2024, or in some cases, both?Microsoft loses its antitrust case in EuropeYear: 2004Two decades ago, the EU handed down a fine of over $600 million for not offering versions of Windows that did not come with Windows Media Player preinstalled. Microsoft still has antitrust problems in Europe at the moment, and last year, the EU attempted to block the company’s acquisition of video game maker Activision Blizzard. But Microsoft has paid no fines this year… so far.Motorola releases a new Razr phoneYear: BothThe very first Razr, called the Motorola Razr V3,... Continue reading…

Photo: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Is it possible for a phone to have “pretty privilege”? Mediocre features and functionality be damned, the original Motorola Razr V3 and its successors dominated the US cellphone market for four years following its 2004 release — up to and including the iPhone’s introduction in 2007 — seemingly on vibes and aesthetics alone. Not to glamorize consumerism or anything, but I miss it terribly.I was 11 years old when the Razr launched and probably among the first generation of kiddies that begged their parents to buy them a cellphone. We weren’t really the target demographic before that — cellphones had mostly been bulky, boring things primarily for working adults. SMS texting had just become something that everyone did day-to-day, and mobile... Continue reading…

Image: Nintendo Hackers released a collection of leaked data from Pokémon game developer Game Freak over the weekend, including personal information about employees. Game Freak — which develops the main lineup of Pokémon video games — confirmed the breach in a statement, saying (per a machine translation from Japanese) that it was the result of “unauthorized access to our servers by a third party” and dated back to August of 2024.Game Freak said the leaked personal information — which it characterizes as names and company email addresses — included around 2,600 items. As Polygon notes, however, the breach appears to include much more than employee information. Redditors and others say they’ve unearthed source code from previous games as well as unused... Continue reading…

Image: Apple Apple has released the first trailer for the second season of Silo, and it looks like the season will tell us what happens to protagonist Juliette after the jaw-dropping cliffhanger at the end of season one.The show, based on a series of books by Hugh Howey, is about a community of 10,000 people living in an underground silo that’s intended to protect them from dangerous conditions aboveground. If you’ve been meaning to see the first season and haven’t yet, you probably shouldn’t watch this new trailer; as you might have guessed, it has quite a few mysteries that are fun to experience for yourself.Silo’s second season premieres on Apple TV Plus on November 15th. The season will have 10 episodes, with a new episode each week. The season... Continue reading…