A note on the estate sale.

A long time ago someone made a game called Galaga, and the aliens in it were anonymous. They came down from the top of the screen in a formation, occasionally peeled off, and were destroyed without anyone wondering very much about their inner lives.

We were thinking about this, and we thought: what if they had inner lives. What if each one had a rank, and a hometown, and a favorite color. What if, when you shot one, an obituary appeared, two hundred words long, written for them alone, in the voice the New York Times obituary section reserves for civilians who quietly made the world slightly better just by being in it.

That is the whole idea. There is a leaderboard but it does not track score. It tracks the number of obituaries you have read. The fastest gun in the world, who reads nothing, finishes nowhere.

We will keep generating new aliens for as long as we are able to. We will keep their obituaries on file indefinitely. Periodically, if it pleases us, we will tweet one. We think of it as an estate sale that never closes.

With affection — the management.