Pyramid Mines

Category

Mining Industry

Scenario Date

Year 2084

Pyramid Mines, owned and operated by Federal Colonies, is a mining operation that was constructed on Mars by Earth’s Northern Bloc. It’s purpose: the extraction of Mars’ turbinium ore, which is essential to the Northern Bloc’s war effort back on Earth, where the ore has military applications in their space-based weaponry targeting enemies in the Southern Bloc.

Halting most of its mining operation, Pyramid Mines uncovered ancient alien technology dating back half a million years. This technology would employ the martian turbinium as fuel for a giant planetwide reactor, capable of melting underground ice and releasing breathable air to create a new atmosphere for Mars.

Analysis: The Pyramid Mines Logo

After being introduced to the Pyramid Mines logo in what could be glimpsed of it on the spacesuits worn by Quaid and Melina in the opening dream sequence of the film (Figure 1.1), the next time it turns up is in news footage Quaid watches back on Earth. If you look closely, you can see that some of the resistance fighters are wearing patches bearing the Pyramid Mines logo (Figure 2.1). It isn’t until Quaid gets his ass to Mars that we actually get a good look at it though—in the scene where Quaid is exiting the rail transport, after escaping capture at the Mars entry checkpoint.

As the train stops at his destination, we see two miners conversing to the left side of the screen (Figure 2.2). On the man to the right, we see the logo prominently featured against a yellow patch, worn on his coveralls. To the left of this, the other man holds a miner’s pressure helmet, where on the front above the visor we see the edge of a yellow sticker. We don’t get a good look at this before he walks off camera, but I assume that it’s another instance of the Pyramid Mines logo.

In Figure 2.3, we have what I believe to be an image of a costume prop from the film (an uncredited image floating around the internet), which affords us a chance to analyze the details of the identity. The graphic features a triangular form, rounded at the top, with a hole punched out of the center. As seen in Figure 1.1 and mentioned by a passenger on Quaid’s train ride, the Pyramid Mines are in a giant pyramid-like mountain, which this triangle obviously represents. I’ll assume the hole punched in the center represents the mine, which has bored its way into the “pyramid”.

Passing over the pyramid shape, but not over the hole, are repeating horizontal lines that span the entire logo. It’s not clear what these represent, but they are similar to the lines we see in the Federal Colonies logo. In that instance, I determined that they were probably just a graphic treatment used for “futuristic” effect, something that was popular in the 1980s with “high tech” industry logos. In referencing that trend, I imagine they were looking to the most cutting-edge technology at the time to see what those in the field were doing for graphic representation, to find something that would look fresh to their audience. Understandable, even if now the look is kind of dated. At any rate, this stylstic choice gave me an idea for where to go searching, for what the designer’s inspiration might be.

Sure enough, in the same books where I found the inspiration for the Federal Colonies logo, I also found something very similar to this Pyramid Mines logo. This time in Mendenhall’s 1985 book High Tech Trademarks Volume 1, where we see its likeness in the logo for Delta Technology, creators of software for the IBM PC (Figure 2.4). It even shares the same number of lines, 18 in each instance. I’m sad to see that they didn’t really change this at all, outside of rounding the pointed top a bit and stacking Eurostile Bold type around it.

Lack of originality aside, I wonder if it could have shared the same number of lines with the Federal Colonies logo (Figure 2.4) and seen some other changes to bring the two identities more in line, since one basically works for the other, with Pyramid Mines answering to Federal Colonies and doing the bidding of Vilos Cohaagen. It makes sense that they retained the same typeface, Eurostile (Medium/Bold Extended combo in modified form), as well as the same lockup for type and graphic. They’re also both composed of simple geometric shapes. So with all that, they aren’t totally alien to one another, but it’s a shame they didn’t modify it too a greater degree to avoid what looks like straight up plagiarism (which I find kinda funny in this instance).

As for Delta Technologies, it appears they have changed their logo since then, adopting pixels and leaving their 1980s lines in the turbinium mines of Mars.

Up next, I’ll take a look at how this identity was applied in a few different ways, starting with spacesuits.

Usage: The Logo on Mining Spacesuits

In the sections preceding this, we saw how the Pyramid Mines logo is applied to spacesuits in a few ways. One was the logo as it was applied to the portable life support units worn on the back of a pressure suit, and the other was on the front of a miner’s space helmet—though not the same helmet we saw Quaid and Melina wearing, which had a sleeker form accented with yellow stripes, but no logo as far as I could tell.

While I don’t have better images of the back of that portable life support unit, we can see in decent detail how the logo was applied to the two different Pyramid Mines pressure suits we see in the film.

After some searching online, I found the original suit worn by Quaid in his dream sequence on Mars, for sale on an auction site. This gives us a good look at the logo patches that appeared on his shoulders (Figure 3.1). The logo colors have a changed a bit, using lighter silvery grays and a near-white, reflective pyramid, over a brown background to match the suit. The background changes again where the logo patch needs to match olive drab suits seen later in the film, when Quaid, Melina and Kuato are trying to escape out an airlock (Figure 3.2). While the background differs, I don’t think the logo itself changes in these instances, so it has some consistency in application across spacesuits.

Since almost all of the action in the film takes place within the pressurized domes and mines of the colony, or back on Earth, there are surprisingly few opportunities to see these spacesuits and their logo usage. I think the best views exist in promo stills for the movie, which I may post here later if I can get access to some.

In addition to spacesuits, the logo also appears on a number of lab coats worn by scientists and technicians in two scenes. Usage in those instances will be covered in the section that follows.

Usage: The Logo on Lab Coats

Lab coats worn by Pyramid Mines scientists and technicians sport the logo on yellow, most of them in a low contrast combo of light grays over light yellow. They are used in two scenes, the first being Quaid’s vision brought on by Kuato’s psychic powers, where a group of scientists in gray lab coats tour the ancient alien reactor with Cohaagen and Richter (Figure 4.1).

Now, diverting from the design a bit, I gotta say that the actual role of Pyramid Mines in relationship to Federal Colonies is a little strange. It operates the turbinium mines, the biggest of which is the sealed off Pyramid Mine, which all makes sense, but we also see Pyramid Mines technicians administering mind wipes and memory implants for Vilos Cohaagen towards the end of the film (Figure 4.2). That’s quite a jump, from running a mining operation to screwing around with people’s brains. But I guess you gotta be flexible in the dystopian future, where your boss will “erase your ass” if you aren’t prepared to do something outside of your job description. Anyways, back to that logo.

The scene I just mentioned is the second instance of lab coats bearing the Pyramid Mines identity, where this time we see it on yellow lab coats. It’s tough to get a good look at it. The logo makes a lot of blurry appearances though, as seven mine technicians get themselves killed trying to restrain Quaid. Since screenshots taken after the action starts don’t reveal much, we’ll have to make due with what we see in Figure 4.2, right before all of the blood and gore. And maybe in the real future, mining technicians should stick to geology or whatever mining companies normally have them doing.

And with that, all variations and usage of the Pyramid Mines identity have been covered. I conclude this entry with a few more images in the next section, just to provide some additional examples.