Stellar Blade was originally introduced in 2019 as Project Eve, after which it fell off our radar until 2021, when we said it looked like a cross between Nier and Bayonetta. A year later it got a new name—Stellar Blade—and became a PlayStation 5 exclusive, and that was pretty much that for us.

But it may not remain that way forever: Developer Shift Up said in its latest financial report, shared on Twitter by Okami13_ (via RPS) that it is now looking into a possible PC release.

The English-language wording of the Google-translated report is a bit wonky in spots, but it specifically notes the importance of the PC market: "The expansion of PC-based gaming platforms such as Steam and the Epic Games Store has made AAA titles more accessible to PC users, pushing them beyond the limitations of traditional console platforms." 

Increasingly powerful PC hardware, meanwhile, has "allowed game developers to publish their games on both PC and console platforms, further increasing the audience for AAA titles."

There's nothing terribly new in any of that: Consoles are stratified into static "generations" while PCs are fluid, ever-evolving beasts, which keeps them on the cutting edge of technology. More simplistically, though, PC gaming is really popular, and Shift Up has big ambitions for Stellar Blade. Citing series like God of War and Final Fantasy, the report says "there are several precedents for AAA titles evolving into IP franchises by extending their lifespan through a series of high-quality sequels and maintaining a long-term revenue base. Accordingly, we are considering producing a PC version and sequel to [Stella Blade]."

I don't think anyone will be too surprised if and when it happens. We called a PC release likely when PS5 exclusivity was announced in 2022, and Sony has been leaning into the PC market much more heavily in recent years, most recently with Ghost of Tsushima, which looks set to be another major hit and further reinforcement of Sony's relatively new (and so far quite successful) multiplatform release strategy. Stellar Blade would seem to be a good fit for that: It's not a huge-name exclusive (a "tentpole title," as they're sometimes called) but despite some upset over a ridiculous clothing controversy, detailed by our friends at GamesRadar, it is by all reports quite a good game. 

Do you get frustrated when you're trying to track down an application in Task Manager and the list is constantly shuffling around? Loads of people do, and that's why the developers at Microsoft added a shortcut to prevent it happening. Simply hold down the Ctrl key and everything freezes in place.

It's so easy—why didn't the developers think of this sooner? Well, they did, actually.

The shortcut has been in Task Manager since 1994. We know this because the developer that created the application just rebuffed someone over on X trying to complain about it.

David W Plummer built Task Manager back in 1994. Mostly from his den at home. However, word eventually got around to Dave Cutler, designer of Windows NT, who let Plummer add the code to the main Windows build. A few months of tinkering with the code, various stress tests, and the rest, as they say, is history.

While the core application has changed over the years, you'll maybe be surprised to hear just how much of it has stayed the same. Plummer explains the history and tips for using the application in a popular video titled 'Inside Task Manager with the original author'.

The best Task Manager lore has to be how Microsoft ended up with the unfortunately named 'Kill all children' function within the software—a combination of the 'Kill process' function, the original name for today's 'End process' function, and the a newly-added recursive functionality to replace 'process' with 'all children'. This luckily was caught before it ever landed in a shipping version of Windows.

Plummer says the original application totalled only 100 KB in size. Today, it's around 5.2 MB. That seems small compared to most modern applications but it's a file size many times over the original. Plummer says that's totally fair, considering what's since been added to the application.

"It's a delicate balance of load times and memory footprint versus features and functionality."

Plummer retired after the release of Windows Server 2003. Though he notes in the video that: "The people that have worked on Task Manager since have done an exemplary job of growing it, while still maintaining the core attributes."