Looney Labs Icehouse Mailing list Archive

Pylon (was RE: [Icehouse] IGDC Summer 2007 Rankings)

  • FromDoug Orleans <dougorleans@xxxxxxxxx>
  • DateWed, 26 Sep 2007 17:54:05 -0400
David Artman writes:
 > > About theme: obviously theme is not important to me in a simple game
 > > like Pylon, and I didn't even bother trying to come up with one
 > 
 > Hmmm... IceTowers... a bit of Martian Mud Wrestling... moving stacks
 > onto stacks....
 > 
 > Maybe you could rename it to "Pile On" and "theme" it with a little
 > story about this ancient Martian children's game...?
 > :)

By the way, I mentioned this on Andy's LiveJournal but not here: the
name Pylon did indeed come from "pile on".  At the time I thought that
a pylon was a vertical beam, like one that holds up a dock, and that
seemed appropriate for towers of pyramids, but I think I was actually
confusing it with the word "piling".  It turns out "pylon" is used for
many things: traffic cone (chiefly American), electricity cable tower
(chiefly British), obelisk (i.e. a column with a pyramid on top!), or
"a gateway to the inner part of an Ancient Egyptian temple".

Pylons were also obelisk-shaped buildings in the '70s kids TV show
"Land of the Lost", each of which contained a crystal matrix involving
red, green, blue, and yellow crystals.  I loved that show as a kid,
but had forgotten about Pylons until Andy pointed it out-- according
to him, scenes from that show was one of his inspirations for the
creation of Icehouse pyramids!  I guess if I ever make a sequel game,
it should be called Skylon...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_the_Lost_%281974_television_series%29_geography_and_technology#Skylons

--dougorleans@xxxxxxxxx