Fox's new Fantastic Four film has just gotten a new trailer, depicting a young Reed Richards building a teleportation device in his garage.
Teleporting toy cars across dimensions isn't easy, however. As it turns out, it requires a remarkable amount of energy and computing power. Where is a young boy growing up in the 90s supposed to get those kind of resources?
From a video game console, of course, or two dozen of them to be exact. What is Reed's console of choice? None other than the Nintendo 64. We all knew the N64 was powerful for the time, but we didn't know it was that powerful.
While the U.S. and U.K. versions of this new trailer are very similar, the U.K. trailer features one shot of what appear to be a massive rack of Nintendo N64s, all wired together to help provide power to Reed's invention. You can catch it at around the 23 second mark in the trailer.
It sounds absurd that video game consoles would be used like this, but game consoles are actually an extraordinarily cheap form of computing power. One astrophysicist recently built a supercomputer by networking together 16 PlayStation 3 consoles, which he uses to help power his black hole simulations. The physicist, Dr. Guarv Khanna, says his machine has roughly the power of 3,000 laptop or desktop computer processors, except by using PlayStation 3s, it cost him a tenth of what a normal supercomputer would cost.
Seems like young Reed Richards had the exact same idea. The N64 isn't exactly equivalent to a PlayStation 3 mind you, but it's cool to see that the creators of the film actually thought critically about how a child genius might try to power one of his inventions. If Reed Richards can build a teleporter with N64s, there is no telling what he could do with an actual supercomputer. No doubt we will find out when Fantastic Four arrives in theaters Aug. 7. You can watch the new trailer for the movie below.
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