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Naughty Dog's Intergalactic game has more '80s/Adidas/Pet Shop Boys/Akira/Cowboy Bebop vibes than you're ready for

by: Randy -
More On: Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet

The book of Revelation

Developer Naughty Dog (UnchartedThe Last of Us) revealed its next game at The Game Awards 2024. Host Geoff Keighley knew it would be something special, which is why he saved it for last. There's so much going on here that I hardly know where to begin. But the Gaming Nexus Slack channel was rolling with speculation, connections, interpretations, and reconsiderations.

The game is called Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. You too may find that title hard to remember with its 11 syllables and tongue tripping "Tic Tac" sounds. Besides having trouble looking it up on YouTube, however, there is everything else to like—including the fact that it's not another Uncharted or The Last of Us.

Be advised, the majority of what we came up with is pure conjecture. These are just details we cherry-picked out of a four-and-a-half minute cinematic video about a video game without a release date.

Settling the (musical) score

Longtime musical collaborators Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (aka Nine Inch Nails) open with a mysterious synthwave soundtrack. It's one part Sword & Sworcery and two parts Mass Effect. It's pitch perfect and climaxes just in time for the CD disc changer to switch to Pet Shop Boys' 1987 banger "It's a Sin" at the end.

It's a Sin

The first few moments of the trailer are owned by an ancient, theocratic script. The alien lettering is translated onscreen, saying: 

"The suffering of generations must be endured to achieve our divine end." - Ancient Sempirian Scripture, 1986

It's the "1986" that sets the tone for this brand new game world. Try to ignore the fact that "Sempirian" sounds like a mash-up of something called the Simp Empire. Religious dogma sets the heavy overtone of Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.

The Blue Marble

Cut to a planet. It's blue. It's too blue. You know it's not Earth (or at least not Earth as we recognize it today) because there are too many (blue) clouds over too much (blue) land or (blue) ocean beneath the (blue) atmosphere. (Da ba dee da ba di.)

The camera pans out to a destroyed moon. It took a hit so massive there's nothing left but a swirling Ubisoft logo. Another hint that this is not a post-apocalyptic Earth is that this moon is too small and too close to the planet to be our Moon. Also, as we learn from a our protagonist's target is "hiding out around the Sempirian moon."

There is a drastic red shift in the planet's color once that moon passes in front of the camera. Unless the stark white, blue, and red is hinting at an '80s Pepsi logo. Look, conspicuous product placement does happen in this video. Case in point:

It's pronounced por-shuh

This video game is brought to you by Porsche. The ship she's piloting (her name is Jordan A. Mun, by the way) has "Porsche 984 Tempest NDX" across the rear, with additional 984s on the wing tips. This branding is also on her pilot seat headrest.

It's pronounced moon

Then we get to a bloody  anime playing on a TV. The twin-handgun protag of the show is taking down dinosaur-headed creatures in business suits. You could even say the creatures are draconian, which is a word that can mean the excessively harsh and severe application of laws. That ties in with the game's religious overlords, the Sempirians.

And remember when I said Sempirian sounded like a mashup of Simp and Empire? Sem- could be a prefix to the word "semantic," which is a type of argument that relies on defining a term in a specific way to support a claim. Semantic arguments are often used in religious discourse. Arguing semantics is linguistic nitpicking, rather than any serious attempt to determine the true meaning of a word.

The anime protag, with moon earrings and moon logos on her outfit, could be a tie-in to our real protag, Jordan A. Mun. (If you pronounce "mun" phonetically, it's moon.)

What's in a name?

Thanks to a buzz cut, we see that Jordan has multiple scars on the back of her head. She either took one or many hits from behind. This reeks of betrayal. The moon took a nasty hit, and so has Jordan Mun.

Since we're here, Jordan is a unisex name, applicable to both males and females, and could point to director Neil Druckmann's Israeli heritage. The Jordan River is referenced in the Bible, being the river that flows from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea. It additionally serves as a border between Israel and the country of Jordan. Either way, the River Jordan is in the Holy Land. The religious overtones just keep piling up.

Incoming call

Jordan sees an incoming call on the TV screen. She's looking around frantically for a remote to take the call. This tells me she doesn't take many calls, but has also been waiting for an important one. No spam.

The person on the video call looks like business-casual Snake Plissken from 1981's Escape From New York. The eyepatch is the giveaway. It's Jordan's handler in this bounty hunting business. The handler's facial features look maternal, but she's got the voice of a teenage Scarlett Johansson. But before she answers that call, the camera pans across Jordan's red thread board (with red tacks, but no lines connecting the dots; too messy). 

It's not a conspiracy theory if it's true

Intergalactic takes place in a timeline where every single newspaper in the galaxy wasn't shutdown in the early 2000s. Jordan's got a board full of clippings, Post-It Notes, star charts, jump gate receipts, and photographs. Everything points to her old gang, the Five Aces—who are all either dead or hiding.

This is where IMDb clues us into the voice actors and likenesses behind a few of these old gang members. In the photo, from left to right, is:

  • Kumail Nanjiani (The Big Sick, Silicon Valley) playing Jordan's target, Colin Graves.
  • Second from left is Tati Gabrielle, playing Jordan A. Mun (Jo Braddock in Uncharted), with more hair in the photo so you know it's in the past.
  • Center is Tony Dalton (Better Call Saul) who's probably going to get Kill Bill'd before this whole thing is over.
  • Second from right is unknown so far. Looks like they probably wanted Katee Sackhoff for the role, but who knows?
  • And far right is another unidentified character played by Stephen Chang (Jesse in The Last of Us 2)

The write up on IMDb vaguely sums up Jordan's situation:

Set thousands of years in the future, Intergalactic puts players into the role of Jordan A. Mun, a dangerous bounty hunter who ends up stranded on Sempiria—a distant planet whose communication with the outside universe went dark hundreds of years ago. Jordan will have to use all her skills and wits if she hopes to be the first person in over 600 years to leave its orbit.

Tat is how you remind me 

It's time we talk about all of Jordan's tats. At first they look like she just walked into a tattoo shop and said, "I would like some tattoos, please." But she's has at least 10 that we can see, they're all deliberate, and all seem to point toward a long history with the Five Aces gang.

  • Anime characters on her triceps. These two characters look like the ones from the anime she's watching. They probably signify her and the guy she's going to Kill Bill from the group photo. They also resemble two characters that televise bounties from a TV show inside of Cowboy Bebop.

  • The queen piece over her left shoulder indicates that she's playing Chess not Checkers. She puts on a jacket later that has a Knight on there, so the Chess theme is strong with the Five Aces gang. I'd be willing to wager her Kill Bill has a King piece she's going to checkmate.

  • SJM initials on the back of her left hand. Since Jordan A. Mun would be a JAM, it's possible SJM is a Mun family member.

  • Erida VI on her left arm. It's possible this is commemorating a battle around a planet known as Erida VI. Roman numerals are a common naming convention in sci-fi: just number the planet's distance from the sun, e.g., Erida IV is probably the fourth planet from the star Erida. The design looks like an old World War dogfighting propeller.

  • Around her heart are four, possibly five birds. If there are five, that could likely stand for the Five Aces gang. If it's only four, then she's the +1 that would make it Five Aces. Also, the expression "Having an ace up your sleeve" means to have a secret advantage, skill, or piece of info you can use to gain the upper hand in a situation.

  • Speaking of sleeves, Jordan's left arm is a sleeve tattoo of a kraken, a giant octopus, that ends at her hand. As the great warrior-poet George R.R. Martin has said, "What a kraken grasps it does not lose, be it a longship or leviathan." Suffice it to say, Jordan is not one to just let things go. And it sounds like she's got a grudge to bear.

  • On the inside of her opposite forearm is a black hole. If it seems like a kraken won't let a thing go, wait until you hear about what a black hole can do to light. What Jordan holds in her arms never escapes. It's probable we have a Red Dead Redemption scenario on our hands, where John Marston (i.e. Jordan Mun) has to bring the old gang back together—dead or alive.
  • 2:42 on her right arm. If that stands for 2:42 a.m. or p.m., I have no idea what it could mean. But if it's a Biblical verse (because Biblical chapters and verses look like time on a clock), then it could be Acts chapter 2 verse 42, which describes the early church's routine and the unity that came from its members' shared beliefs, time, meals, and prayers. The world of Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet is going to show us the horrible dogmatism of religion, but hopefully also the hope of fellowship.

  • No idea what her neck tattoo is. I thought it was one of those paper fortune tellers, but those are four-sided, not five. Then I thought it might be a Chinese takeout box, but again, those are four-sided, not five. It could be a symbol for the Five Aces. It being on her neck is a bold expression, however.

I have to stop now or I'd never be able to

At first glance, this trailer is just '80s nostalgia a la Ready Player One style. After all, I didn't even mention the Sony-branded electronics, Macho Nacho carryout, or her Adidas hi-tops (which become more pronounced when she lands on the Sempirian planet), or her tootbrush blade that looks like a review bombing on Steam.

One more thing that our own Jason Dailey came up with: Despite Intergalactic not having a launch date, the number "7202" appears on several pieces of electronic interfaces, even though those interfaces are unrelated. Jason thinks 7202 is in reverse and points to a 2027 launch window.

Naughty Dog has given us a lot to unpack. I haven't been this excited about a trailer in a long time. See you, space cowboy.