This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.Tech billionaires are making a risky bet with humanity’s future Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and others may have slightly different goals, but their grand visions for the next decade and beyond are remarkably similar.They include aligning AI with the interests of humanity; creating an artificial superintelligence that will solve all the world’s most pressing problems; merging with that superintelligence to achieve immortality (or something close to it); establishing a permanent, self-­sustaining colony on Mars; and, ultimately, spreading out across the cosmos.Three features play a central role with powering these visions, says Adam Becker, a science writer and astrophysicist: an unshakable certainty that technology can solve any problem, a belief in the necessity of perpetual growth, and a quasi-religious obsession with transcending our physical and biological limits.In his timely new book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, Becker reveals how these fantastical visions conceal a darker agenda. Read the full story. —Bryan Gardiner This story is from the next print edition of MIT Technology Review, which explores power—who has it, and who wants it. It’s set to go live on Wednesday June 25, so subscribe & save 25% to read it and get a copy of the issue when it lands! Here’s what food and drug regulation might look like under the Trump administration Earlier this week, two new leaders of the US Food and Drug Administration published a list of priorities for the agency. Both Marty Makary and Vinay Prasad are controversial figures in the science community. They were generally highly respected academics until the covid pandemic, when their contrarian opinions on masking, vaccines, and lockdowns turned many of their colleagues off them. Given all this, along with recent mass firings of FDA employees, lots of people were pretty anxious to see what this list might include—and what we might expect the future of food and drug regulation in the US to look like. So let’s dive into the pair’s plans for new investigations, speedy approvals, and the “unleashing” of AI. —Jessica Hamzelou This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 NASA is investigating leaks on the ISSIt’s postponed launching private astronauts to the station while it evaluates. (WP $)+ Its core component has been springing small air leaks for months. (Reuters)+ Meanwhile, this Chinese probe is en route to a near-Earth asteroid. (Wired $) 2 Undocumented migrants are using social media to warn of ICE raidsThe DIY networks are anonymously reporting police presences across LA. (Wired $)+ Platforms’ relationships with protest activism has changed drastically. (NY Mag $)  3 Google’s AI Overviews is hallucinating about the fatal Air India crashIt incorrectly stated that it involved an Airbus plane, not a Boeing 787. (Ars Technica)+ Why Google’s AI Overviews gets things wrong. (MIT Technology Review) 4 Chinese engineers are sneaking suitcases of hard drives into the countryTo covertly train advanced AI models. (WSJ $)+ The US is cracking down on Huawei’s ability to produce chips. (Bloomberg $)+ What the US-China AI race overlooks. (Rest of World) 5 The National Hurricane Center is joining forces with DeepMindIt’s the first time the center has used AI to predict nature’s worst storms. (NYT $)+ Here’s what we know about hurricanes and climate change. (MIT Technology Review) 6 OpenAI is working on a product with toymaker MattelAI-powered Barbies?! (FT $)+ Nothing is safe from the creep of AI, not even playtime. (LA Times $)+ OpenAI has ambitions to reach billions of users. (Bloomberg $) 7 Chatbots posing as licensed therapists may be breaking the lawDigital rights organizations have filed a complaint to the FTC. (404 Media)+ How do you teach an AI model to give therapy? (MIT Technology Review) 8 Major companies are abandoning their climate commitmentsBut some experts argue this may not be entirely bad. (Bloomberg $)+ Google, Amazon and the problem with Big Tech’s climate claims. (MIT Technology Review) 9 Vibe coding is shaking up software engineeringEven though AI-generated code is inherently unreliable. (Wired $)+ What is vibe coding, exactly? (MIT Technology Review) 10 TikTok really loves hotdogs And who can blame it? (Insider $) Quote of the day “It kind of jams two years of work into two months.” —Andrew Butcher, president of the Maine Connectivity Authority, tells Ars Technica why it’s so difficult to meet the Trump administration’s new plans to increase broadband access in certain states. One more thing The surprising barrier that keeps us from building the housing we needIt’s a tough time to try and buy a home in America. From the beginning of the pandemic to early 2024, US home prices rose by 47%. In large swaths of the country, buying a home is no longer a possibility even for those with middle-class incomes. For many, that marks the end of an American dream built around owning a house. Over the same time, rents have gone up 26%.The reason for the current rise in the cost of housing is clear to most economists: a lack of supply. Simply put, we don’t build enough houses and apartments, and we haven’t for years. But the reality is that even if we ease the endless permitting delays and begin cutting red tape, we will still be faced with a distressing fact: The construction industry is not very efficient when it comes to building stuff. Read the full story. —David Rotman We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.) + If you’re one of the unlucky people who has triskaidekaphobia, look away now.+ 15-year old Nicholas is preparing to head from his home in the UK to Japan to become a professional sumo wrestler.+ Earlier this week, London played host to 20,000 women in bald caps. But why? ($)+ Why do dads watch TV standing up? I need to know.

The name, the myth, the icon: Barbie is almost synonymous with pink, the specific hues of the time responding to cultural trends across the decades. The doll – created by Ruth Handler in 1959, and distributed and produced by Mattel – has reflected and also shaped decades of American culture. Bauhaus-inspired, Barbie and HEWI have collaborated to present the Barbie x HEWI sanitaryware collection, bathed in an approachable yet sophisticated shade of pink. With a focus on celebrating individuality the Barbie way, HEWI fosters a precedent of inclusive design for bathrooms at large, ushering in a new era where all are safe and welcome. HEWI continues to set new standards in bathroom and accessory design for almost one hundred years. Their iconic extruded door handle has extended to every facet of the bathroom, including a towel bar, shower seat, soap dish, and toilet roll holder, offering everything you might need if your bathroom needs a bit of brightness. A lovely shade of light pink accented with an approachable cream color allows the Barbie x HEWI collection to fit in with existing decor, palette incredibly important in a room made for washing and cleanliness. With a satisfying thickness sometimes absent from bathroom collections, each piece receives the signature HEWI finish, glossy and made to last even through the toughest bath times. Barbie has been an integral part of our culture for over 65 years, offering a new perspective about what professions the doll could take part in and the roles she could play. In more recent years, inclusion has been a priority for the brand, choosing a more natural silhouette and featuring a more accurate and diverse picture of who Barbie and her friends could be. Here, this energy extends to the restroom, where the iconic Barbie pink meets the bold, Bauhaus silhouette of HEWI designs. HEWI has been at the forefront of product design for over 90 years, challenging themselves and others to anticipate the needs of subsequent generations. With work in healthcare, public projects, hotels, and education, HEWI strives to continue to push the boundaries of materials technology, closing loops on their production processes with projects like the Re-seat collection, made out of offcuts from injection molding. To learn more about the Barbie x HEWI sanitaryware collection, please visit barbiexhewi.com.  Imagery courtesy of HEWI.

MCM Comic Con is still worth it for gamers even without EGX – Reader’s Feature GameCentral Published May 31, 2025 9:00am There’s never a dull moment at Comic Con (Credits: Aidan Synnott – ASV Photogrpahy) A reader reports back from his time at MCM Comic Con in London and gets to play a lot of video and tabletop games, despite a lack of big name attendees. Last week I attended yet another MCM Comic Con at the ExCeL Centre in London, along with my son, who this year decided to dress up as Super Mario. As you all know by now, MCM Comic Con is a three-day celebration of all things popular culture. However, this year’s show was not linked with EGX, as was the case at last October’s exhibition, so there was less emphasis on video games – but there was still a lot on offer. Our first stop was the Mattel stand, where they were promoting Barbie, Masters of the Universe, and Hot Wheels. There was a sit-down setup of Hot Wheels Unleashed 2: Turbocharged on the PlayStation 5. This was one of the highlights of the day, as we ended up returning a few times in an attempt to win the race. I’ll probably pick it up this up, as we enjoyed it so much. Up next was the chance to play Magic: The Gathering – Final Fantasy. This was one of the first opportunities to play the game before its release on 13th June. While I’d never properly played Magic before, I had dabbled in Final Fantasy’s own trading card game but stopped some time ago. We played using the starter deck kits featuring Cloud and Sephiroth and battled it out, with me emerging victorious. The cards looked amazing and feature characters, weapons, spells, and locations from all 16 mainline Final Fantasy titles. The only downer was that there were no promo cards being handed out. The next port of call was Artist Alley, where hundreds of independent artists showcased their wares. I was after one in particular: Stanley ‘Artgerm’ Lau. I first came across his work while playing Marvel Snap. I had a quick chat with him and got him to sign some artwork prints of Tifa and Rogue. Sticking with Final Fantasy, I noticed actor Ben Starr on the show floor – the voice of Clive Rosfield, the protagonist of Final Fantasy 16. I didn’t get a chance to speak with him, as he looked in a rush, probably due to the fact that he was part of the show with his Natural Six Dungeons & Dragons Actual Play panel. Final Fantasy is always at every Comic Con in some way (Tom Pozzetti) After lunch, we headed off to the Family Gaming Zone, where around 20 consoles were set up with a variety of family-friendly titles. Games that we sampled included Conduct TOGETHER! on the Nintendo Switch, a puzzle-type game where you manoeuvre trains and switch tracks to avoid collisions. Then, on to JellyCar Worlds, a driving and platforming game where you hav to work your way through various obstacles. It reminded me of both the Trials series and World Of Goo, with its physics-based gameplay. We proceeded to play Tower Of Babel – No Mercy, which was a shape-dropping game where the aim is to stack as high as possible. We played the co-op mode, where we each took turns placing rectangular-shaped blocks. On paper, that doesn’t sound like the greatest game, but the dormant competitive side of me came out and I was desperate to beat a nine-year-old child. The last game of the day was Astro Duel 2. The two of us joined four other convention players in a mix of retro pixel platforming and spaceship battles. It’s a combination of Smash Bros. and Asteroids, with players fighting fast on the ground or in the sky. Very hectic but a lot of fun – and great to play a six-person game with all players sitting alongside each other (although one kid did rage quit a few times!). Last call before heading home was the Bandai Namco zone. They had a strong showing, with multiple games available to try. It was great to see a major game publisher represented at the event. They were showcasing several Dragon Ball Z titles and Shadow Labyrinth, while Elden Ring: Nightreign was also on display – though sadly, not in a playable format. Finally, a quick spin on their gacha machines rounded off a wonderful day. More Trending Overall, another successful show and the next show’s dates have already been released. MCM returns to ExCeL London this October, along with EGX, for another three-day celebration from 24–26 October. By reader Tom Pozzetti (eyetunes – PSN ID) Wheels Unleashed 2: Turbocharged proved to be a favourite (Tom Pozzetti) The reader’s features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro. You can submit your own 500 to 600-word reader feature at any time, which if used will be published in the next appropriate weekend slot. Just contact us at gamecentral@metro.co.uk or use our Submit Stuff page and you won’t need to send an email. GameCentral Sign up for exclusive analysis, latest releases, and bonus community content. 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Samsung and other companies would be affected, but perhaps not as much as Apple. Credit: Li Hongbo/VCG via Getty Images In a Friday morning Truth social post, President Donald Trump threatened to levy a 25 percent tariff on iPhones if Tim Cook didn't move manufacturing to the United States. It turns out the situation is a little more complicated than that.While speaking to the media later that day, Trump clarified that the tariff would apply to any company selling foreign-made phones in the U.S., not just Apple. The president said the new 25% smartphone tariff could arrive by the end of June, per Bloomberg. He also made sure to single out Samsung, the second-most popular smartphone brand in the U.S. market. This broader approach makes a bit more sense than the initial threat against Apple, as it was unclear how the Trump administration planned to place tariffs on one single company's products.Even so, it wasn't the first time Trump made a tariff threat against a specific company, and it may not be the last. Besides Apple, President Trump previously threatened to target toymaker Mattel with tariffs. Milan Miric, PhD, Associate Professor of Data Sciences and Operations at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business, explained to Mashable how President Trump could effectively target a single company with tariffs. You May Also Like SEE ALSO: Apple smart glasses could come as soon as 2026 "For Apple, hardware products are their most important business line. All of the other competitors in the U.S. that can compete on hardware would be foreign companies manufacturing abroad (e.g. Samsung)," Miric told Mashable via email. "Therefore, if you wanted to target consumer electronics coming from China, the U.S. company that would be the most directly affected is Apple."For context, Apple relies far more heavily on hardware sales to bolster its business than U.S.-based competitors like Google and Microsoft, which are primarily service companies that happen to sell some hardware too. Mashable Light Speed Want more out-of-this world tech, space and science stories? Sign up for Mashable's weekly Light Speed newsletter. By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Thanks for signing up! According to Miric, all of this could be a prelude to something resembling a trade deal with Apple, as Trump has negotiated with foreign governments."You could imagine a scenario where large American companies strike a compromise with the government, where some of their own products that are very popular with American consumers and important to American business get exceptions, but then tariffs apply broadly to foreign companies, effectively providing additional protection to these American companies," Miric said. Related Stories Earlier this year, Apple promised to spend $500 billion in the U.S. over the next four years and build a new factory in Texas, but iPhone manufacturing specifically is unlikely to return to the United States. As Mashable's Stan Schroeder previously reported, a U.S.-made iPhone would likely cost at least $3,000.While new tariffs on smartphones could be arriving as soon as June, the president's tariff policy has included a few surprising reversals. Wall Street is paying attention, however.Samsung and Apple stock both fell on Friday after the president's remarks. Topics Apple Samsung Tariffs Alex Perry Tech Reporter Alex Perry is a tech reporter at Mashable who primarily covers video games and consumer tech. Alex has spent most of the last decade reviewing games, smartphones, headphones, and laptops, and he doesn’t plan on stopping anytime soon. He is also a Pisces, a cat lover, and a Kansas City sports fan. Alex can be found on Bluesky at yelix.bsky.social.

Mattel and TriStar Pictures have teamed to develop a live-action/animated hybrid feature based on Mattel’s Whac-A-Mole game. “Whac-A-Mole is more than a game — it’s a laugh-out-loud battle of reflexes that has brought joy and a little chaos to families for five decades,” said Robbie Brenner, president of Mattel Films. “We’re beyond excited to team up with TriStar Pictures to turn the iconic experience into a wild, action-packed ride for the big screen.” “Mattel continues to create impact with their films, and Whac-A-Mole is no exception - a brand that has been in culture for generations,” added Nicole Brown, President of TriStar Pictures. “We look forward to partnering with them to bring audiences a fresh, unexpected take on this absolute classic.” Elizabeth Bassin and Steve Spohr will oversee the project for Mattel Films, alongside Shary Shirazi and Kelseigh Coombs for TriStar Pictures. Source: Mattel Journalist, antique shop owner, aspiring gemologist—L'Wren brings a diverse perspective to animation, where every frame reflects her varied passions.

Back in 2010, when Cartoon Network first announced its plan to reboot the beloved 1985 animated TV series Thundercats, the first thought that went through my mind was, “That’s great! Do Blackstar next!” In 2014, when Boat Rocker Media announced its reboot of 1981’s Danger Mouse, same thing: “Huh, interesting, but do Blackstar next.” 2016’s Disney reveal about its reboot of 1987’s Duck Tales? “Rad. But… Blackstar?” And so it went, year after year, with the announcements about 2018’s Netflix reboot of She-Ra: Princess of Power, 2021’s He-Man reboot Masters of the Universe: Revelation, the CG version of Inspector Gadget, the American Voltron update Voltron: Legendary Defender, half a dozen new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Transformers projects, a little-loved second Thundercats series, and every single Smurfs movie. I get it — the kids of the ’80s are producers and writers and showrunners now, with enough clout to get their childhood memories turned into new shows. But apparently none of them watched Blackstar, easily one of the coolest animated series of the 1980s, built around the coolest sword. There’s a direct genetic line between the success of 1977’s Star Wars and the wave of space-set, fantasy-themed Saturday morning cartoons that closely followed. Star Wars beget ABC’s popular Thundarr the Barbarian, a post-apocalyptic dystopian-future fantasy about a muscular hero who fought oppressive magical villains while wearing a fur skirt, hanging out with a leotard-clad sorceress, and more or less carrying a lightsaber and traveling with a Wookiee. Thundarr helped inspire Blackstar, CBS’ equivalent show, about a muscular hero who fought oppressive magical villains while wearing a fur skirt, hanging out with a leotard-clad sorceress, and carrying his own form of laser sword. (No Wookiee, though — instead, series hero Blackstar got to ride a dragon.) Both shows were on the leading edge of the post-Star Wars dark fantasy wave, leading to movies like Excalibur, Conan the Barbarian, and Dragonslayer. But unlike most of those ’80s fantasies — Flash Gordon aside — Thundarr and Blackstar kept a foot in Star Wars’ science fiction roots, hanging onto the idea of worlds where technology and mysticism met and clashed. Thundarr was more popular, but Blackstar was more compelling: a weirder, darker, richer world with a lot more going on, and a much more imaginative sword that wasn’t just a lightly reskinned lightsaber. Though the show only managed a single season and 13 episodes (compared with Thundarr’s two-year, 21-episode stint), Blackstar’s potential still sticks with me decades later. The story in brief: An astronaut from a future Earth, John Blackstar, enters a black hole in his experimental timeship, and winds up trapped on an ancient alien world, full of magic and monsters. (It’s essentially an isekai series, decades before isekai was the hottest trend in anime and manga.) The local Sauron equivalent, the Overlord, dominates the planet Sagar with an artifact called the Powerstar, a huge two-handed crystalline energy sword. Somehow, the Powerstar gets broken into identical halves, producing two badass weapons: the Power Sword, which the Overlord still holds, and the Star Sword, which falls into Blackstar’s hands. Blackstar winds up as the figurehead in a growing rebellion against the Overlord’s. Meanwhile, the Overlord wants not just to squash this budding rebellion, but to reclaim the Star Sword and take up the Powerstar again. In a series of interviews for Blackstar’s 2006 DVD release, the creators and writers cop to some of their influences in writing the show: The protagonist is a little bit John Carter of Mars (the original Edgar Rice Burroughs version, not the 2012 fantasy-movie version) and a little bit Flash Gordon, though he also closely resembles the protagonist of the 1979 live-action series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. The Trobbits — tiny comedy-relief people who find and rescue Blackstar after his timeship crashes — take a little inspiration from J.R.R. Tolkien’s hobbits, and a lot more from Disney’s seven dwarfs, complete with the “one personality trait apiece” dynamic, and a youngest member who never speaks. (There are also seven of them.)  The Overlord is somewhere between Darth Vader and Ming the Merciless, while Blackstar’s sorceress companion, Mara, is basically just a reskin of Thundarr’s Princess Ariel, with very similar powers, a similar elegant, educated personality and role as party historian, and similar obvious crush on the oblivious hero. Although these characters rarely feel unique, the mythology and setting of Blackstar’s world very much do, and the central plot device of the Powerstar is unique in fantasy animation. The symmetry of the central villain and hero each having half of the world’s most legendary weapon — which is to say, half of the power left in a world struggling to define itself — is a clever riff on the idea that heroes and villains should mirror each other for maximum thematic impact. Their connection through the sundered Powerstar gives the protagonist and antagonist an intimate personal connection, a reason to clash again and again. It also helps define their characters, and what they do with power. It’s no coincidence that in the Overlord’s hands, the Power Sword is all blunt force, used solely to blast or slash, while Blackstar uses the Star Sword as a finesse weapon with flexible magical abilities. (Too flexible, really: Its magic is ill-defined, and the show’s writers invented new Star Sword powers in nearly every episode.) The idea of these two swords as yin and yang, perfect halves that assemble into a greater whole, is unusually elegant for an ’80s cartoon — and one of the series’ many ideas that was never really explored to full advantage. For modern viewers Blackstar is fairly close to unwatchable. Its production company, Filmation, emerged from a series of commercial jobs in the 1960s, but by the 1980s, it specialized in budget-priced television animated entirely in America, rather than in cheaper overseas production houses. That necessitated a lot of cost-saving devices, like recycling the same hand-drawn sequences many times over, often within the same episode, and using a hilariously limited library of sound effects. Blackstar’s sound design is garish and repetitive, with vocal work that sounds like almost everyone is shouting. The scripts are clunky: Blackstar is conceived as a quippy hero who peppers his foes with snarky one-liners, but his jokes are cataclysmically stiff. About the best he can muster is a jaunty “Putting on a little weight, aren’t you, Rocko?” when hefting one rock elemental to toss it onto another during a battle. And the series is designed for the syndication of the era, meaning that episodes might re-air in any order. So there’s no story development, no character arcs, not even an opening episode to establish Blackstar’s origins. Continuity glitches, inconsistent design and storytelling, and budget-saving slow pans across paintings abound. But the world it’s set in is fascinating. There are hints here and there of ancient technologies and centuries-old civilizations buried under what’s become a verdant forest, centered on the magic of the gigantic central Sagar tree, a mystic font of power the Trobbits live in and tend to. Sagar is a world full of weird creatures that seem either like evolutions of familiar animals, or like magical constructs — shark-bats and frog-rabbits and monkey-birds, long before Avatar: The Last Airbender made these kinds of amalgams a running joke. Those slow-pan, cash-saving painting backgrounds are rich, elaborate, and colorful, suggesting a world with the darkness and detail of Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal.  While so much of 1980s animation was about the clear line between good and evil, there’s a sense throughout Blackstar that most of the world of Sagar isn’t aspected in such a black-and-white way. It’s just a chaotic ruin, where hungry monsters, prim but weary civilizations, and barbaric enclaves all exist side by side, divided by lethal geography. Every scattered outpost and wandering monster is equally dangerous to Blackstar and the Overlord, but ripe for either of them to exploit for an advantage in their ongoing war. There are even hints at a nuanced system for magic, where the mental power of sorcery and the elemental power of nature magic are different things that work in different ways. After Blackstar’s single season ended, Filmation immediately followed it with the Mattel-backed and far better funded He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, a series based on an existing toy line, but just as clearly based on elements borrowed from Blackstar. Once again, there’s a muscular hero in a fur skirt with a magic sword, battling a sorcerous villain in a chaotic technofantasy world packed with environmental hazards and weird, wildly diverse humanoids. Filmation regular Alan Oppenheimer voiced both Blackstar’s Overlord and He-Man’s Skeletor; similarly, Linda Gary voiced Blackstar’s leading lady Mara and He-Man’s Teela. Filmation staff writer Tom Ruegger developed the series bible for both shows, and it shows, in everything from the similar heroes’ and rogues’ galleries to the sprawling high-and-low-tech world where magic and robots co-exist. One He-Man episode, “The Remedy,” even reused several Blackstar sequences, reintroducing Blackstar’s dragon-horse Warlock as a beast He-Man saves from a giant spider, then rides around. While He-Man had many of the same budgetary and aesthetic limitations as Blackstar — frequently recycled animation, obnoxious sound design, goofy and often ineffectual comedy relief — He-Man was immediately more popular. So popular, in fact that toy maker Galoob tried to nab some of Mattel’s sales success by putting out a weirdly modeled toy line for Blackstar, two full years after the show was canceled. (Those toys did not do well.) Now, we’re in an era where He-Man gets reboot after reboot — an all-ages animated version, a CG version for kids, a new live-action movie scheduled for 2026 — while Blackstar is all but forgotten. And I find that so strange. The bid to reboot and update every hit cartoon of the 1980s seems like a natural enough progression for an era of media fueled by nostalgia, but I’ve never understood why there isn’t more of it for Blackstar, a series that was more imaginative and ambitious than either the predecessor it was trying to outdo or the follower that got all the glory. In the way of so many other ’80s cartoons, my interest in a reboot is much less about re-creating an often janky, limited, cheaply made TV series, and much more about realizing the potential these characters and this world couldn’t take advantage of in the 1980s. A modern version with up-to-date animation could give John Blackstar a proper backstory, and actually make some sense of the biggest hero/villain themes the ’80s version lightly touched on. It could take advantage of the retro-future magic setting and the sprawling original world of Sagar in ways Filmation never dreamed of.  And most importantly, a proper modern update could finally dig into the event that split the Powerstar and turned its two halves into thematic weapons. There are so many story possibilities for that particular cool sword, just waiting to be discovered by a new generation.

Mattel has partnered with Uken Games, an independent Canadian game studio, to develop “Mattel Match: Toybox Unlocked,” a free-to-play match game that “brings together all of Mattel’s iconic brands in a brand-new digital experience.” The new game marks the first IP crossover mobile game from Mattel, and was developed as part of Mattel’s 80th anniversary celebration campaign. Related Stories “Toybox Unlocked” features Barbie, Hot Wheels, Fisher-Price, UNO, Thomas & Friends and Masters of the Universe and more Mattel franchises in a leveled puzzle adventure that challenges players to match characters, toys and items from across Mattel’s titles before time runs out.  “For the first time ever, Mattel is uniting its beloved brands in a single mobile game with ‘Mattel Match: Toybox Unlocked,’ offering fans an exciting, new way to engage with the characters and stories they love,” Mattel’s head of business development and digital gaming Erika Winterholler said. “Our team has really enjoyed working with Uken Games to imagine and create this unique, interconnected world on mobile and can’t wait to have it join our growing portfolio of digital entertainment titles.”  Popular on Variety “Uken is delighted to partner with Mattel on this iconic mobile match game that seamlessly brings together your favorite Mattel brands with this unique & challenging gameplay style,” added Uken Games co-CEO. “I cannot wait to see players filling up their digital toy boxes with their favorite Barbie, Hot Wheels, and UNO toys among the many others the game will feature.”   “Mattel Match: Toybox Unlocked” is currently soft launching in the Philippines and Canada, with additional regions rolling out ahead of its official wide launch later this year.