Rumor: Mini Coopers Fight Pac-Man with 360° Weapons in Pixels Movie

Speculation is fun, especially in the virtual reality community. So much so, that we started a Rumors category on the UploadVR website. This will allow us to make educated guesses on certain topics while giving our readers clues into what might be around the next few corners.

Our first official Rumor is based on the upcoming movie Pixels. The film will be released into US theaters on July 24, 2015.

Plot (according to Wikipedia)

In 1982, in the hopes of establishing peaceful communication with extraterrestrial life, NASA launches a time capsule into outer space containing images and footage of Earth life and culture. However, the aliens misinterpret enclosed video-feeds of classic arcade games as a declaration of war. They attack the Earth using the games as models for their various assaults including Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Centipede, Space Invaders, Arkanoid and Tetris. Their technology creates voxels that change form and are capable of turning any form of matter into more of itself.

Movie Trailer

Rumor Info

As seen in the trailer above, Pac-Mac wreaks havoc through town – eating up anything in his way. In order to combat the pixelated monster, a team of retrogamers join forces to take the creature down. Their weapons of choice are customized Mini Cooper with special devices attached to the tops of their cars. The vehicles are quick, agile, and fully loaded.

Code-named “Ghosts,” each vehicle has a title: Inky, Blinky, Clyde, and Pinky

Equipment mounted to the roof is what gives the vehicles an edge. An automobile gossip website called Jalopnik suggested that the weapons might be some sort of anti-aliasing tool or a pixel destroying ray.

We were able to track down what the devices are actually called in the film by looking at the leaked script. This information was uncovered after hackers/security experts hit Sony’s infrastructure in 2014, stealing tons of documents and releasing them onto the web. From there, the Pixels script was uploaded onto Wikileaks allowing for anyone (including me) to comb through it.

About 3/4s into the movie, one of the characters Lieutenant Colonel Violet van Patten tells the crew what they are. Violet, as she is dubbed in the script, is a unique weapons developer and specialist for the military, who mostly likely created the devices herself.

We used the energy force field technology from the cube to develop 4 mini generators for each of the cars/“Ghosts.” We’re calling them Z950 Attack Modules.

Those “Z950 Attack Modules” look to have been developed using previous existing technology. One of the extraterrestrial “Cubes” that started the attack on Earth crash landed and then was reverse-engineered to make the weapons.

The cube we recovered in Guam has proven nearly impossible to analyze, but we’ve been able to reverse engineer some prototype weapons that seem to neutralize it. We’re basically hitting it with super-charged light particles.

The rest of the details are vague, in typical movie fashion. However, looking at the technology described, it all seems reminiscent of devices that are already on the road today. Essentially what the writers are depicting are early iterations of self driving cars. Even now, Google is hiring people to drive vehicle around with 360 degree cameras and LIDAR, recording the roads along the way. Several autonomous versions are traversing the paths driven by those producing the data for the mapping systems.

Now, in a few weeks, venture to a theater near you and see the movie when it comes out!

* Featured image pulled from MovieWeb.com