Once again, Sam Altman wants to show you the future. The CEO of OpenAI is standing on a sparse stage in San Francisco, preparing to reveal his next move to an attentive crowd. “We needed some way for identifying, authenticating humans in the age of AGI,” Altman explains, referring to artificial general intelligence. “We wanted a way to make sure that humans stayed special and central.” The solution Altman came up with is looming behind him. It’s a white sphere about the size of a beach ball, with a camera at its center. The company that makes it, known as Tools for Humanity, calls this mysterious device the Orb. Stare into the heart of the plastic-and-silicon globe and it will map the unique furrows and ciliary zones of your iris. Seconds later, you’ll receive inviolable proof of your humanity: a 12,800-digit binary number, known as an iris code, sent to an app on your phone. At the same time, a packet of cryptocurrency called Worldcoin, worth approximately $42, will be transferred to your digital wallet—your reward for becoming a “verified human.” Altman co-founded Tools for Humanity in 2019 as part of a suite of companies he believed would reshape the world. Once the tech he was developing at OpenAI passed a certain level of intelligence, he reasoned, it would mark the end of one era on the Internet and the beginning of another, in which AI became so advanced, so human-like, that you would no longer be able to tell whether what you read, saw, or heard online came from a real person. When that happened, Altman imagined, we would need a new kind of online infrastructure: a human-verification layer for the Internet, to distinguish real people from the proliferating number of bots and AI “agents.”And so Tools for Humanity set out to build a global “proof-of-humanity” network. It aims to verify 50 million people by the end of 2025; ultimately its goal is to sign up every single human being on the planet. The free crypto serves as both an incentive for users to sign up, and also an entry point into what the company hopes will become the world’s largest financial network, through which it believes “double-digit percentages of the global economy” will eventually flow. Even for Altman, these missions are audacious. “If this really works, it’s like a fundamental piece of infrastructure for the world,” Altman tells TIME in a video interview from the passenger seat of a car a few days before his April 30 keynote address.Internal hardware of the Orb in mid-assembly in March. Davide Monteleone for TIMEThe project’s goal is to solve a problem partly of Altman’s own making. In the near future, he and other tech leaders say, advanced AIs will be imbued with agency: the ability to not just respond to human prompting, but to take actions independently in the world. This will enable the creation of AI coworkers that can drop into your company and begin solving problems; AI tutors that can adapt their teaching style to students’ preferences; even AI doctors that can diagnose routine cases and handle scheduling or logistics. The arrival of these virtual agents, their venture capitalist backers predict, will turbocharge our productivity and unleash an age of material abundance.But AI agents will also have cascading consequences for the human experience online. “As AI systems become harder to distinguish from people, websites may face difficult trade-offs,” says a recent paper by researchers from 25 different universities, nonprofits, and tech companies, including OpenAI. “There is a significant risk that digital institutions will be unprepared for a time when AI-powered agents, including those leveraged by malicious actors, overwhelm other activity online.” On social-media platforms like X and Facebook, bot-driven accounts are amassing billions of views on AI-generated content. In April, the foundation that runs Wikipedia disclosed that AI bots scraping their site were making the encyclopedia too costly to sustainably run. Later the same month, researchers from the University of Zurich found that AI-generated comments on the subreddit /r/ChangeMyView were up to six times more successful than human-written ones at persuading unknowing users to change their minds.  Photograph by Davide Monteleone for TIMEBuy a copy of the Orb issue hereThe arrival of agents won’t only threaten our ability to distinguish between authentic and AI content online. It will also challenge the Internet’s core business model, online advertising, which relies on the assumption that ads are being viewed by humans. “The Internet will change very drastically sometime in the next 12 to 24 months,” says Tools for Humanity CEO Alex Blania. “So we have to succeed, or I’m not sure what else would happen.”For four years, Blania’s team has been testing the Orb’s hardware abroad. Now the U.S. rollout has arrived. Over the next 12 months, 7,500 Orbs will be arriving in dozens of American cities, in locations like gas stations, bodegas, and flagship stores in Los Angeles, Austin, and Miami. The project’s founders and fans hope the Orb’s U.S. debut will kickstart a new phase of growth. The San Francisco keynote was titled: “At Last.” It’s not clear the public appetite matches the exultant branding. Tools for Humanity has “verified” just 12 million humans since mid 2023, a pace Blania concedes is well behind schedule. Few online platforms currently support the so-called “World ID” that the Orb bestows upon its visitors, leaving little to entice users to give up their biometrics beyond the lure of free crypto. Even Altman isn’t sure whether the whole thing can work. “I can see [how] this becomes a fairly mainstream thing in a few years,” he says. “Or I can see that it’s still only used by a small subset of people who think about the world in a certain way.” Blania (left) and Altman debut the Orb at World’s U.S. launch in San Francisco on April 30, 2025. Jason Henry—The New York Times/ReduxYet as the Internet becomes overrun with AI, the creators of this strange new piece of hardware are betting that everybody in the world will soon want—or need—to visit an Orb. The biometric code it creates, they predict, will become a new type of digital passport, without which you might be denied passage to the Internet of the future, from dating apps to government services. In a best-case scenario, World ID could be a privacy-preserving way to fortify the Internet against an AI-driven deluge of fake or deceptive content. It could also enable the distribution of universal basic income (UBI)—a policy that Altman has previously touted—as AI automation transforms the global economy. To examine what this new technology might mean, I reported from three continents, interviewed 10 Tools for Humanity executives and investors, reviewed hundreds of pages of company documents, and “verified” my own humanity. The Internet will inevitably need some kind of proof-of-humanity system in the near future, says Divya Siddarth, founder of the nonprofit Collective Intelligence Project. The real question, she argues, is whether such a system will be centralized—“a big security nightmare that enables a lot of surveillance”—or privacy-preserving, as the Orb claims to be. Questions remain about Tools for Humanity’s corporate structure, its yoking to an unstable cryptocurrency, and what power it would concentrate in the hands of its owners if successful. Yet it’s also one of the only attempts to solve what many see as an increasingly urgent problem. “There are some issues with it,” Siddarth says of World ID. “But you can’t preserve the Internet in amber. Something in this direction is necessary.”In March, I met Blania at Tools for Humanity’s San Francisco headquarters, where a large screen displays the number of weekly “Orb verifications” by country. A few days earlier, the CEO had attended a $1 million-per-head dinner at Mar-a-Lago with President Donald Trump, whom he credits with clearing the way for the company’s U.S. launch by relaxing crypto regulations. “Given Sam is a very high profile target,” Blania says, “we just decided that we would let other companies fight that fight, and enter the U.S. once the air is clear.” As a kid growing up in Germany, Blania was a little different than his peers. “Other kids were, like, drinking a lot, or doing a lot of parties, and I was just building a lot of things that could potentially blow up,” he recalls. At the California Institute of Technology, where he was pursuing research for a masters degree, he spent many evenings reading the blogs of startup gurus like Paul Graham and Altman. Then, in 2019, Blania received an email from Max Novendstern, an entrepreneur who had been kicking around a concept with Altman to build a global cryptocurrency network. They were looking for technical minds to help with the project. Over cappuccinos, Altman told Blania he was certain about three things. First, smarter-than-human AI was not only possible, but inevitable—and it would soon mean you could no longer assume that anything you read, saw, or heard on the Internet was human-created. Second, cryptocurrency and other decentralized technologies would be a massive force for change in the world. And third, scale was essential to any crypto network’s value. The Orb is tested on a calibration rig, surrounded by checkerboard targets to ensure precision in iris detection. Davide Monteleone for TIMEThe goal of Worldcoin, as the project was initially called, was to combine those three insights. Altman took a lesson from PayPal, the company co-founded by his mentor Peter Thiel. Of its initial funding, PayPal spent less than $10 million actually building its app—but pumped an additional $70 million or so into a referral program, whereby new users and the person who invited them would each receive $10 in credit. The referral program helped make PayPal a leading payment platform. Altman thought a version of that strategy would propel Worldcoin to similar heights. He wanted to create a new cryptocurrency and give it to users as a reward for signing up. The more people who joined the system, the higher the token’s value would theoretically rise. Since 2019, the project has raised $244 million from investors like Coinbase and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. That money paid for the $50 million cost of designing the Orb, plus maintaining the software it runs on. The total market value of all Worldcoins in existence, however, is far higher—around $12 billion. That number is a bit misleading: most of those coins are not in circulation and Worldcoin’s price has fluctuated wildly. Still, it allows the company to reward users for signing up at no cost to itself. The main lure for investors is the crypto upside. Some 75% of all Worldcoins are set aside for humans to claim when they sign up, or as referral bonuses. The remaining 25% are split between Tools for Humanity’s backers and staff, including Blania and Altman. “I’m really excited to make a lot of money,” ” Blania says.From the beginning, Altman was thinking about the consequences of the AI revolution he intended to unleash. (On May 21, he announced plans to team up with famed former Apple designer Jony Ive on a new AI personal device.) A future in which advanced AI could perform most tasks more effectively than humans would bring a wave of unemployment and economic dislocation, he reasoned. Some kind of wealth redistribution might be necessary. In 2016, he partially funded a study of basic income, which gave $1,000 per-month handouts to low-income individuals in Illinois and Texas. But there was no single financial system that would allow money to be sent to everybody in the world. Nor was there a way to stop an individual human from claiming their share twice—or to identify a sophisticated AI pretending to be human and pocketing some cash of its own. In 2023, Tools for Humanity raised the possibility of using the network to redistribute the profits of AI labs that were able to automate human labor. “As AI advances,” it said, “fairly distributing access and some of the created value through UBI will play an increasingly vital role in counteracting the concentration of economic power.”Blania was taken by the pitch, and agreed to join the project as a co-founder. “Most people told us we were very stupid or crazy or insane, including Silicon Valley investors,” Blania says. At least until ChatGPT came out in 2022, transforming OpenAI into one of the world’s most famous tech companies and kickstarting a market bull-run. “Things suddenly started to make more and more sense to the external world,” Blania says of the vision to develop a global “proof-of-humanity” network. “You have to imagine a world in which you will have very smart and competent systems somehow flying through the Internet with different goals and ideas of what they want to do, and us having no idea anymore what we’re dealing with.”After our interview, Blania’s head of communications ushers me over to a circular wooden structure where eight Orbs face one another. The scene feels like a cross between an Apple Store and a ceremonial altar. “Do you want to get verified?” she asks. Putting aside my reservations for the purposes of research, I download the World App and follow its prompts. I flash a QR code at the Orb, then gaze into it. A minute or so later, my phone buzzes with confirmation: I’ve been issued my own personal World ID and some Worldcoin.The first thing the Orb does is check if you’re human, using a neural network that takes input from various sensors, including an infrared camera and a thermometer. Davide Monteleone for TIMEWhile I stared into the Orb, several complex procedures had taken place at once. A neural network took inputs from multiple sensors—an infrared camera, a thermometer—to confirm I was a living human. Simultaneously, a telephoto lens zoomed in on my iris, capturing the physical traits within that distinguish me from every other human on Earth. It then converted that image into an iris code: a numerical abstraction of my unique biometric data. Then the Orb checked to see if my iris code matched any it had seen before, using a technique allowing encrypted data to be compared without revealing the underlying information. Before the Orb deleted my data, it turned my iris code into several derivative codes—none of which on its own can be linked back to the original—encrypted them, deleted the only copies of the decryption keys, and sent each one to a different secure server, so that future users’ iris codes can be checked for uniqueness against mine. If I were to use my World ID to access a website, that site would learn nothing about me except that I’m human. The Orb is open-source, so outside experts can examine its code and verify the company’s privacy claims. “I did a colonoscopy on this company and these technologies before I agreed to join,” says Trevor Traina, a Trump donor and former U.S. ambassador to Austria who now serves as Tools for Humanity’s chief business officer. “It is the most privacy-preserving technology on the planet.”Only weeks later, when researching what would happen if I wanted to delete my data, do I discover that Tools for Humanity’s privacy claims rest on what feels like a sleight of hand. The company argues that in modifying your iris code, it has “effectively anonymized” your biometric data. If you ask Tools for Humanity to delete your iris codes, they will delete the one stored on your phone, but not the derivatives. Those, they argue, are no longer your personal data at all. But if I were to return to an Orb after deleting my data, it would still recognize those codes as uniquely mine. Once you look into the Orb, a piece of your identity remains in the system forever. If users could truly delete that data, the premise of one ID per human would collapse, Tools for Humanity’s chief privacy officer Damien Kieran tells me when I call seeking an explanation. People could delete and sign up for new World IDs after being suspended from a platform. Or claim their Worldcoin tokens, sell them, delete their data, and cash in again. This argument fell flat with European Union regulators in Germany, who recently declared that the Orb posed “fundamental data protection issues” and ordered the company to allow European users to fully delete even their anonymized data. (Tools for Humanity has appealed; the regulator is now reassessing the decision.) “Just like any other technology service, users cannot delete data that is not personal data,” Kieran said in a statement. “If a person could delete anonymized data that can’t be linked to them by World or any third party, it would allow bad actors to circumvent the security and safety that World ID is working to bring to every human.”On a balmy afternoon this spring, I climb a flight of stairs up to a room above a restaurant in an outer suburb of Seoul. Five elderly South Koreans tap on their phones as they wait to be “verified” by the two Orbs in the center of the room. “We don’t really know how to distinguish between AI and humans anymore,” an attendant in a company t-shirt explains in Korean, gesturing toward the spheres. “We need a way to verify that we’re human and not AI. So how do we do that? Well, humans have irises, but AI doesn’t.”The attendant ushers an elderly woman over to an Orb. It bleeps. “Open your eyes,” a disembodied voice says in English. The woman stares into the camera. Seconds later, she checks her phone and sees that a packet of Worldcoin worth 75,000 Korean won (about $54) has landed in her digital wallet. Congratulations, the app tells her. You are now a verified human.A visitor views the Orbs in Seoul on April 14, 2025. Taemin Ha for TIMETools for Humanity aims to “verify” 1 million Koreans over the next year. Taemin Ha for TIMEA couple dozen Orbs have been available in South Korea since 2023, verifying roughly 55,000 people. Now Tools for Humanity is redoubling its efforts there. At an event in a traditional wooden hanok house in central Seoul, an executive announces that 250 Orbs will soon be dispersed around the country—with the aim of verifying 1 million Koreans in the next 12 months. South Korea has high levels of smartphone usage, crypto and AI adoption, and Internet access, while average wages are modest enough for the free Worldcoin on offer to still be an enticing draw—all of which makes it fertile testing ground for the company’s ambitious global expansion. Yet things seem off to a slow start. In a retail space I visited in central Seoul, Tools for Humanity had constructed a wooden structure with eight Orbs facing each other. Locals and tourists wander past looking bemused; few volunteer themselves up. Most who do tell me they are crypto enthusiasts who came intentionally, driven more by the spirit of early adoption than the free coins. The next day, I visit a coffee shop in central Seoul where a chrome Orb sits unassumingly in one corner. Wu Ruijun, a 20-year-old student from China, strikes up a conversation with the barista, who doubles as the Orb’s operator. Wu was invited here by a friend who said both could claim free cryptocurrency if he signed up. The barista speeds him through the process. Wu accepts the privacy disclosure without reading it, and widens his eyes for the Orb. Soon he’s verified. “I wasn’t told anything about the privacy policy,” he says on his way out. “I just came for the money.”As Altman’s car winds through San Francisco, I ask about the vision he laid out in 2019: that AI would make it harder for us to trust each other online. To my surprise, he rejects the framing. “I’m much more [about] like: what is the good we can create, rather than the bad we can stop?” he says. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to avoid the bot overrun’ or whatever. It’s just that we can do a lot of special things for humans.” It’s an answer that may reflect how his role has changed over the years. Altman is now the chief public cheerleader of a $300 billion company that’s touting the transformative utility of AI agents. The rise of agents, he and others say, will be a boon for our quality of life—like having an assistant on hand who can answer your most pressing questions, carry out mundane tasks, and help you develop new skills. It’s an optimistic vision that may well pan out. But it doesn’t quite fit with the prophecies of AI-enabled infopocalypse that Tools for Humanity was founded upon.Altman waves away a question about the influence he and other investors stand to gain if their vision is realized. Most holders, he assumes, will have already started selling their tokens—too early, he adds. “What I think would be bad is if an early crew had a lot of control over the protocol,” he says, “and that’s where I think the commitment to decentralization is so cool.” Altman is referring to the World Protocol, the underlying technology upon which the Orb, Worldcoin, and World ID all rely. Tools for Humanity is developing it, but has committed to giving control to its users over time—a process they say will prevent power from being concentrated in the hands of a few executives or investors. Tools for Humanity would remain a for-profit company, and could levy fees on platforms that use World ID, but other companies would be able to compete for customers by building alternative apps—or even alternative Orbs. The plan draws on ideas that animated the crypto ecosystem in the late 2010s and early 2020s, when evangelists for emerging blockchain technologies argued that the centralization of power—especially in large so-called “Web 2.0” tech companies—was responsible for many of the problems plaguing the modern Internet. Just as decentralized cryptocurrencies could reform a financial system controlled by economic elites, so too would it be possible to create decentralized organizations, run by their members instead of CEOs. How such a system might work in practice remains unclear. “Building a community-based governance system,” Tools for Humanity says in a 2023 white paper, “represents perhaps the most formidable challenge of the entire project.”Altman has a pattern of making idealistic promises that shift over time. He founded OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015, with a mission to develop AGI safely and for the benefit of all humanity. To raise money, OpenAI restructured itself as a for-profit company in 2019, but with overall control still in the hands of its nonprofit board. Last year, Altman proposed yet another restructure—one which would dilute the board’s control and allow more profits to flow to shareholders. Why, I ask, should the public trust Tools for Humanity’s commitment to freely surrender influence and power? “I think you will just see the continued decentralization via the protocol,” he says. “The value here is going to live in the network, and the network will be owned and governed by a lot of people.” Altman talks less about universal basic income these days. He recently mused about an alternative, which he called “universal basic compute.” Instead of AI companies redistributing their profits, he seemed to suggest, they could instead give everyone in the world fair access to super-powerful AI. Blania tells me he recently “made the decision to stop talking” about UBI at Tools for Humanity. “UBI is one potential answer,” he says. “Just giving [people] access to the latest [AI] models and having them learn faster and better is another.” Says Altman: “I still don’t know what the right answer is. I believe we should do a better job of distribution of resources than we currently do.” When I probe the question of why people should trust him, Altman gets irritated. “I understand that you hate AI, and that’s fine,” he says. “If you want to frame it as the downside of AI is that there’s going to be a proliferation of very convincing AI systems that are pretending to be human, and we need ways to know what is really human-authorized versus not, then yeah, I think you can call that a downside of AI. It’s not how I would naturally frame it.” The phrase human-authorized hints at a tension between World ID and OpenAI’s plans for AI agents. An Internet where a World ID is required to access most services might impede the usefulness of the agents that OpenAI and others are developing. So Tools for Humanity is building a system that would allow users to delegate their World ID to an agent, allowing the bot to take actions online on their behalf, according to Tiago Sada, the company’s chief product officer. “We’ve built everything in a way that can be very easily delegatable to an agent,” Sada says. It’s a measure that would allow humans to be held accountable for the actions of their AIs. But it suggests that Tools for Humanity’s mission may be shifting beyond simply proving humanity, and toward becoming the infrastructure that enables AI agents to proliferate with human authorization. World ID doesn’t tell you whether a piece of content is AI-generated or human-generated; all it tells you is whether the account that posted it is a human or a bot. Even in a world where everybody had a World ID, our online spaces might still be filled with AI-generated text, images, and videos.As I say goodbye to Altman, I’m left feeling conflicted about his project. If the Internet is going to be transformed by AI agents, then some kind of proof-of-humanity system will almost certainly be necessary. Yet if the Orb becomes a piece of Internet infrastructure, it could give Altman—a beneficiary of the proliferation of AI content—significant influence over a leading defense mechanism against it. People might have no choice but to participate in the network in order to access social media or online services.I thought of an encounter I witnessed in Seoul. In the room above the restaurant, Cho Jeong-yeon, 75, watched her friend get verified by an Orb. Cho had been invited to do the same, but demurred. The reward wasn’t enough for her to surrender a part of her identity. “Your iris is uniquely yours, and we don’t really know how it might be used,” she says. “Seeing the machine made me think: are we becoming machines instead of humans now? Everything is changing, and we don’t know how it’ll all turn out.”—With reporting by Stephen Kim/Seoul. This story was supported by Tarbell Grants.Correction, May 30The original version of this story misstated the market capitalization of Worldcoin if all coins were in circulation. It is $12 billion, not $1.2 billion.

Last week, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok experienced a “bug” that made it tell users about the “white genocide” conspiracy theory in South Africa, even when prompted with questions that had nothing to do with the topic … and soon after, Grok expressed skepticism over the Holocaust death toll, which it chalked up to a “programming error.” But with a degree of mental gymnastics that could put Simone Biles to shame, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has decided that Elon Musk’s robot baby Grok is too far left. Image Credits:Twitter/X (screenshot) “Grok is left leaning and continues to spread fake news and propaganda,” Greene wrote on X. She shared a screenshot in which Grok says that Greene is a Christian who has expressed her belief in Jesus, but concedes that some Christians are troubled by her support for conspiracy theories like QAnon. “Critics, including religious leaders, argue her actions contradict Christian values of love and unity, citing her defense of January 6 and divisive rhetoric,” Grok wrote in the screenshot Greene shared. X was already having a particularly challenging day — the app has been experiencing outages for hours, which could possibly be related to fires that broke out in its Oregon data center yesterday. But while Greene may be a known peddler of harmful misinformation and conspiracies, she did actually make a great point in the end: “When people give up their own discernment, stop seeking the truth, and depend on AI to analyze information, they will be lost,” she said on X. Techcrunch event Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot for our leading AI industry event with speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere. For a limited time, tickets are just $292 for an entire day of expert talks, workshops, and potent networking. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 REGISTER NOW

TechTarget and Informa Tech’s Digital Business Combine.TechTarget and InformaTechTarget and Informa Tech’s Digital Business Combine.Together, we power an unparalleled network of 220+ online properties covering 10,000+ granular topics, serving an audience of 50+ million professionals with original, objective content from trusted sources. We help you gain critical insights and make more informed decisions across your business priorities.FTC concedes defeat in appeal over Microsoft merger with Activision BlizzardFTC concedes defeat in appeal over Microsoft merger with Activision Blizzard'The public interest is best served by dismissing the administrative litigation in this case.'Chris Kerr, Senior Editor, NewsMay 23, 20252 Min ReadImage via MicrosoftThe Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has finally halted its attempts to block Microsoft's colossal $69 billion merger with Call of Duty maker Activision Blizzard.It's a notable development that brings a protracted regulatory dispute to a close. Since Microsoft announced its intention to acquire Activision Blizzard in 2022, the FTC made repeated attempts to snuff out the deal in the United States.The latest and seemingly final chapter in the high-profile skirmish comes after the FTC failed to convince a lower court to issue a preliminary injunction blocking the deal. It subsequently appealed that decision but was again rebuffed earlier this month.In a new court filing shared by Microsoft president Brad Smith on X, the FTC confirmed it has now thrown in the towel."The Commission has determined that the public interest is best served by dismissing the administrative litigation in this case," reads the filing. "Accordingly, it is hereby ordered that the Complaint in this matter be, and it hereby is dismissed."Smith described the move as a "victory for players across the country" and said Microsoft is "grateful" to the FTC for the announcement. FTC taps out of monumental regulatory battle with MicrosoftAlthough the merger was eventually completed in 2023, that didn't stop the FTC from appealing the move—although Microsoft repeatedly overcame the regulator's challenges.Related:The FTC initially argued the merger would give Microsoft a significant competitive edge over rivals like PlayStation and Nintendo by allowing it to turn major franchises like Call of Duty into platform exclusives.Microsoft, however, penned multiple agreements with its competitors prior to the deal going through to ensure Call of Duty would remain on platforms like PlayStation for the next decade.Since the merger was completed, Microsoft has ported other major first-party titles to PlayStation including Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Forza Horizon 5, Gears of War: Reloaded, and Senua's Saga: Hellblade II.The Xbox maker has also laid off thousands of workers over the past two years, initially cutting 1,900 roles in January 2024—just months after completing the merger—before slashing another 650 jobs later that year. Read more about:XboxActivision BlizzardM&AAbout the AuthorChris KerrSenior Editor, News, GameDeveloper.comGame Developer news editor Chris Kerr is an award-winning journalist and reporter with over a decade of experience in the game industry. His byline has appeared in notable print and digital publications including Edge, Stuff, Wireframe, International Business Times, and PocketGamer.biz. Throughout his career, Chris has covered major industry events including GDC, PAX Australia, Gamescom, Paris Games Week, and Develop Brighton. He has featured on the judging panel at The Develop Star Awards on multiple occasions and appeared on BBC Radio 5 Live to discuss breaking news.See more from Chris KerrDaily news, dev blogs, and stories from Game Developer straight to your inboxStay UpdatedYou May Also Like

A famous character of the stage once remarked there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. It’s a truism which holds for our world, as well as that of Hawkins, Indiana. Sure, Lucas, Dustin, Eleven, and the rest of the gang might have faced the Demogorgon in the Upside-Down, and the Mind Flayer and Vecna too, but there are so many other horrors the writers have dreamed up for this poor town that no single TV show can contain them. These days even Broadway appears to be straining to its technical limit in assisting the effort, as gleaned during the opening prologue of Stranger Things: The First Shadow, a new original play written by Kate Trefry, a veteran of Stranger Things’ writers’ room since season 2 and a co-author of the story for First Shadow alongside series creators Matt and Ross Duffer, and The Cursed Child’s Jack Thorne. Their story, like so much else of Stranger Things, also begins with a mind-bending spectacle: an American battleship during World War II vanishing before a live audience’s eyes and being transported into hell. Into the Upside-Down. “It’s something that we had been floating around in the writers’ room for a long time in Stranger Things,” Trefry admits with a wry smile a few weeks after The First Shadow’s premiere at the Marquis Theatre on Broadway. “The Philadelphia Experiment is like the Montauk Project and MKUltra, one of those touchstones of American conspiracy theory heavy hitters.” First Shadow’s theatrical cold open is indeed informed by the supposed real-life cover up of an American naval ship that is said to have accidentally discovered teleportation, much to the physical and mental horror of its crew. Trefry muses that this old story plays out a little like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, albeit if Mike Teavee’s atoms were reassembled with his brain stuck between a wall. It’s a concept she and the Duffers always wanted to work into the show, and it became the first thing Trefry wrote down when asked to pen the Stranger Things “They challenged me to write whatever I want, and they’d figure out how to make it into a play,” Trefry recalls. “So I was like, ‘Okay, let me just throw down this gauntlet.’ I was kind of testing to see what the limits of the stage were, because it seemed so impossible what I wanted to do. But they went crazy for it because it was so audacious.” Audacity might be the guiding star for every aspect of The First Shadow. Obviously co-directors Stephen Daldry and Justin Mark immediately warmed to the idea of doing a riff on the Philadelphia Experiment, complete with the familiar silhouette of the Mind Flayer, yet everything about this production is massive, with stars of the production comparing it to doing an Olympic marathon on stage every night. This ranges from the massive ensemble cast of 34 players to a veritable village of costumers, stagehands, techies, and various other crew members always scrambling behind the scenes. “Physically, what this show requires of us, does not feel like a normal play,” says Alison Jaye, who stars in the show as a young Joyce Maldonado (later Byers). “If anything it feels closer to a musical, but even then, like a steroid version of anything you’re seeing on stage.” It is in fact one of the most spectacular theatrical experiences this writer has viewed in terms of stagecraft and visual illusion. As writer Trefry surmises, “The images, if they were strong enough, would catch on like a disease. And once everyone was infected, every department couldn’t help but get obsessed with trying to make it work.” Yet what might be more impressive is that for as much obvious visual panache as a Stranger Things production must sport, there is a similar narrative ambition at work in First Shadow as well. Not only is the play an original story set in 1950s Hawkins—back before Eleven, Max, and Steve the Babysitter—but it is one suffused with as much emotional pathos and dread as the series. It even centers its narrative on the most monstrous creation from Season 4, if not the whole series: young Henry Creel, the boy who would grow up to be Vecna, played on stage by the now Tony-nominated Louis McCartney. “Knowing where the TV show goes, it was fun to conceive a play that is in its heart a tragedy, which is so different tonally from the show,” Trefry says of her Vecna protagonist. It’s a subtle but profound aesthetic detour, and one which invites even the staunchest Stranger Things into the truly unknown. Here the shadows are deep—and perhaps revealing about the still developing season 5. At the beginning of The First Shadow’s second act, a young man and woman share a flirtation and daydream anyone who was ever young might recognize: two kids imagining what it would be like to leave their small town and escape to a better life. Most audience members will understand the yearning to be free, but in the show it comes with the bitterest of bittersweet edges. If you’ve watched Stranger Things the TV series, you know the destinies of this would-be couple, a slouching high school cool guy named Hopper (Burke Swanson) and a boundlessly optimistic go-getter they call Joyce. And that future’s a million miles away from their fantasy life in sunny Mexico. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! “That scene feels as serious to me and honest in terms of what their love is as anything you see in season 4,” says Joyce performer Jaye of the moment. “A lot of people can connect to the love of your life; a single person following you through the world, or in your head and in your body, never being able to let go of that person, whether or not you’re able to live the story with them.” It’s a scene that also was developed in tech only days and weeks before Stranger Things: The First Shadow’s earliest bow in New York City. While the play opened last year in London’s West End, Trefry and directors Martin and Daldry have been tinkering with and perfecting the hitherto unknown backstories of Joyce and Hop ever since, as well as other fan favorite characters like Bob Newby (Juan Carlos) and Dr. Brenner (Alex Breaux). “We did about a month of workshops in London in November before we came over to America in January,” explains Trefry, “Almost every page has had some tweak to it. We strengthened storylines; we made things better; we cut 20 minutes; it was actually an amazing opportunity to get another crack at it.” It heightened the inherent opportunity in The First Shadow which always appealed to Trefry: digging into the lives of the many adult characters in Stranger Things, and perhaps tweak our very understanding of who they are—from an innocent like Bob (Sean Astin’s character from season 2 who Trefry half-jokes “we did pretty dirty”) to the play’s central protagonist: Henry Creel. Despite being the seemingly most irredeemably evil character in the TV series (#JusticeForMax), Henry is introduced here as a scared adolescent haunted by horrible images in his head that he cannot control. “His story is very personal to me, being somebody who’s struggled a lot with bad thoughts,” Trefry says. “I have very hardcore OCD, so the life of Henry Creel being inundated with dark imagery is close to my heart.” The playwright admits that when they first developed Vecna for season 4, they imagined him as a “Michael Myers” type. Someone born bad. But she and the Duffers saw the chance to go beyond a bad seed backstory when legendary theater director Daldry first approached about doing a Stranger Things play. Hence the stage’s story of young Henry moving to Hawkins with his ill-fated family, and genuinely hoping to start a better life at a new school. In fact, one of the many complex scenes of the play is how the production uses three rotating turntables to introduce an entire cast of ‘50s high school archetypes in the show. It’s a marvel of stagecraft that Bob actor Juan Carlos reveals is so complex that if audiences applaud or laugh too long, or on an odd beat, it can throw the entire watchlike timing off. This technical feat can also prove illuminating for the whole Stranger Things universe. For example, we discover that Joyce and Bob knew each other in the drama club, which surprise, surprise, Joyce is the president of. “There’s a couple of off the cuff references to Joyce being a communist [in the TV series],” muses Trefrey. “To me [that means] she’s a champion for the underdog. And who other than the theater kids are bigger underdogs?” Her Broadway performer certainly thinks it makes sense. “Oh my God, I feel like she’s such an obvious theater kid!” Jaye enthuses. “I feel like there is a kind of a cool girl, tough exterior that then underneath it all is like, ‘no, no, no. She is as weird as everybody else.’” It also allows Stranger Things the play to tap into some of the same meta joys of Stranger Things the TV series. “I think one of the lovely things about the series is how it pays homage to the movies of the ‘80s,” Carlos acknowledges of the setup. “We’re kind of paying homage to theater in a very similar sense and I think it fits right in.” Whereas the TV show centers on the type of nerd who obsessed over Dungeons & Dragons and Ghostbusters in the ‘80s, it is likely a theatrical audience of young people can relate to a Bob Newby who seems to be at least initially excited about doing Oklahoma! at his school. “We [theater kids] are kind of outcasts,” Carlos says, “especially in high school and middle school when it’s like, ‘Oh there goes the drama geek.’” Or as their writer observes, “A little inside baseball isn’t necessarily a bad thing.” Hence there are quite a few laughs about a play within a play at Hawkins’ high school. Hopper actor Swanson even ruefully concedes he can relate a bit since like Hawkins, his school put on Oklahoma! back in the day where he played Curly and did “a pretty spot on impersonation of Hugh Jackman’s version.” Yet so much of the humor and pleasure of this side of the play is derived from the familiar characters we think we know in suddenly new contexts. “There’s this really beautiful balance that we’re all trying to play in,” Swanson notes. “These characters are so iconic and they’re so beloved by so many that to ignore completely what’s been done before would be, I think, a disservice to the fans and to those who are hoping to see a taste and new version of those people. But at that same exact point, it is a new version… Jaye, for instance, drew as much inspiration from watching Winona Ryder in her 1988 breakout film, Heathers, as Stranger Things, citing the unlikely angst of Ryder’s popular (and arguably murderous) high schooler in that dark comedy as informative. Nonetheless, the actor believes “the way to do justice to that is to tell the story, be truthful, and people will give you endless flowers for that because they believe you.” Ultimately they are trying to get you to believe these characters in a different context that takes on shadings of a ‘50s adventure story, particularly as Hopper, Bob, and Joyce eventually investigate the darker side of the play like a veritable Nancy Drew novel. But no matter the setting, their seemingly innocent adventure still exists in the emotionally mercurial world of Stranger Things. Says Swanson, “This sort of Scooby-Doo element of our story in First Shadow, with Bob, Joyce, and Hopper trying to investigate something that they really don’t fully understand and won’t fully understand for 30-plus years, adds to this level of tragedy that Stranger Things does so well—in the most painful, beautiful sense of the word.” Going into Stranger Things 5 When we catch up over Zoom with Trefry, the writer says she is in her “floating” stage after completion of production on an extremely anticipated season of television. She has just come back from checking in with the Duffers in the edit bay for Stranger Things 5. In one sense, it’s a million miles away from the 1950s setting she and those same brothers settled on for the play. (Mind you, one reason the setting worked in Trefry’s mind is that, like the 1980s, the ‘50s were hotbed for science fiction cinema and literature, plus the cynical paranoia that breeds conspiracy theories.) Nevertheless, the two creative endeavors are interwoven. While the playwright strongly insists First Shadow is intended to stand on its own for newcomers, and is not meant to be a preview of Stranger Things Season 5, overlap becomes inevitable when one realizes it is exploring what Hopper and Joyce might remember of a boy named Henry Creel. “It’s interesting because Joyce and Hopper are sequestered all of season 4 in Russia,” Trefry says. “We did talk about what the implication is. If Henry Creel lived in Hawkins during this time, then ostensibly they would have encountered him. But because they were sequestered, it gave us an opportunity to have the teenagers [of the TV show] discover all of this information and not just have it be told to them by the adults.” It also invites tantalizing possibilities for season 5. For instance, might Hopper and Joyce tell Eleven or Will about that kid they knew in their drama club with a strange shine about him? As signaled by the writer’s tight smile toward the question, no one is going to directly answer the question. However, there would appear to be some intersection. “Knowing some of the gifts that will go on for the audience in season 5, [Trefry] lines it up perfectly,” Jaye teases. Her co-star Swanson would agree. “I really don’t think folks who have come to see the show, and who will see the show, realize how integral and irrevocably linked it is to season 5 and to the show itself,” Swanson says. “We get to plant the seeds that we see starting to sprout and come to fruition within the TV show. And from a sense of season 5, it is my opinion that you will not be able to see season 5 without seeing this show, and I think that when people do see season 5, they’re going to come back to this show in droves because they’re going to realize how laid out it was actually for you.” Still, for the play’s writer who has lived with these characters for nearly a decade, and can relate to all her beloved outsiders, from Eleven to the boy who became Vecna, it is about more than lore and all that visual razzle dazzle. “The spectacle is amazing,” Trefrey considers, “but selfishly from a personal angle I hope that there is emotional resonance. I have put a lot of emotion into the play, and I hope that that reads past all the incredible illusion work. That there’s a real story at the core of it that people can connect to and feel seen by.” Audiences can see for themselves right now at the Marquis Theatre in New York, as well as the Phoenix Theatre in London.

Commuters in the New York City and New Jersey area are in for what is likely to be a weekend of increased congestion and more limited transit options after the engineers who run the New Jersey Transit rail system voted to go on strike. That strike is now in effect and could continue throughout the weekend—and potentially even longer. Here’s what you need to know about the NJ Transit strike. What’s happened? On Thursday, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET) announced that its members who run the trains in the New Jersey Transit Corporation, better known as NJ Transit, were officially on strike. The strike came after the BLET and NJ Transit failed to reach a deal on a new contract for the approximately 450 engineers and trainees who run the railway and are represented by the union. The main issue centers around a disagreement on wage increases for the workers. News of the strike is no doubt a disappointment to the 100,000 NYC and NJ commuters who use the line daily, especially after both sides were reportedly “close” to a deal. Talks between both sides went on for 15 hours on Thursday and ended shortly before 10 p.m., reports CNN. The strike then officially began at 12:01 a.m., today, Friday, May 16. It is the first time union members working for New Jersey Transit have gone on strike in 42 years. The last time NJ Transit workers took to the picket lines was in 1983. What do the striking rail workers want? The BLET’s union members are striking because no acceptable deal was reached on wage increases for its members. In a notice announcing the strike, BLET says that its NJ Transit members have not received a raise for five years. The union also notes that NJ Transit engineers “make at least $10 less per hour” than the engineers for other passenger railroads that share the same train platforms as the ones used by NJ Transit. “NJ Transit has a half-billion dollars for a swanky new headquarters and $53 million for decorating the interior of that unnecessary building,” BLET National President Mark Wallace said in a prepared statement. “They gave away $20 million in revenue during a fare holiday last year. They have money for penthouse views and pet projects, just not for their front-line workers. Enough is enough. We will stay out until our members receive the fair pay that they deserve.” In addition to the strike now in effect, from 4 a.m. this morning BLET members began picketing at multiple locations, including NJ Transit’s Newark headquarters, New York’s Penn Station, and the Atlantic City Rail Terminal in Atlantic City. The union says that “despite the transit agency having the funds for a raise,” NJ Transit managers walked out of talks before 10 p.m. on Thursday. What does NJ Transit say? NJ Transit, for its part, has posted a fact sheet about the strike, which lays out six claims and what the transit agency says are the “facts” about the claims. NJ Transit says that it offered BLET members a “competitive wage and benefits package that all 14 other rail labor unions accepted in 2021.” It also says that under its offer, NJ Transit locomotive engineers would have seen their average total earnings rise from $135,000 per year now to $172,856 as of July 1, 2027.  The transit agency says these wages are “competitive within the region” and higher than the wages Philadelphia’s SEPTA workers receive. It concedes that the wages are lower than those received by MTA (Metro-North Railroad and Long Island Rail Road) workers in New York, but it adds, “It isn’t reasonable to live and work in New Jersey, but demand to be paid like you live and work in New York.” How long could the strike last? That is impossible to tell at this point.  In theory, NJ Transit and BLET could agree to return to the negotiating table at any time—although that’s unlikely to happen today. However, on Thursday, NJ Transit CEO Kris Kolluri said that both sides are currently scheduled to start negotiating again on Sunday. But just because negotiations are scheduled—or even begin—doesn’t mean the strike will be called off anytime soon. Indeed, if BLET would call off the strike, it may lessen the pressure on NJ Transit to meet their demands. CNN notes that when Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority (SEPTA) workers went on strike in the 1980s, the strike lasted for 108 days. A strike of Metro-North workers lasted 42 days, and a strike of Long Island Railroad workers lasted 11 days.  What should I do if I plan to use NJ Transit today? You should rethink your travel plans.  NJ Transit has posted a notice warning of the “complete suspension” of services on its rail lines. The agency says it “strongly encourages all those who can work from home to do so and limit traveling on the NJ TRANSIT system to essential purposes only.” However, if you do need to commute, the agency says that it is “adding very limited capacity” to existing New York commuter routes on its bus services. The agency also says that from May 19, its regional Park & Ride service “will operate on a first come, first served basis.” Commuters who need to use NJ transit during the strike are strongely encouraged to check out the agency’s rail strike information page here. What if I’m seeing the Shakira or Beyoncé concerts? From this weekend, there are also two large music events planned in the area that NJ Transit normally serves. The first is the Shakira concert at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, which begins at 7:30 p.m. tonight, May 16. Then, Beyoncé is scheduled to perform at the same stadium for five nights between May 22 and May 29. MetLife Stadium has posted some travel options for concertgoers who are seeing the Shakira show tonight. The stadium points out that there will be no NJ Transit bus or rail service to the stadium tonight. It says that those coming to the concert from New York City may be able to use the Coach USA bus service, which it says will be “limited.” The venue also asks people who plan to arrive by car to please carpool and arrive early to help ease congestion. Will Congress step in? When it comes to transportation strikes, Congress does have the authority to act and compel workers to accept a deal and return to their jobs, notes CNN. The last time Congress did this was in December 2022 when it voted to force workers from the country’s four major freight railroads to accept a deal. However, CNN points out that Congress likely felt more compelled to step in at that time because the strike affected most of the country. The NJ Transit strike is a local affair, which means Congress may be more reluctant to interfere.