The Bizarre World of Fake Video Games

"If Vermice was real, I don't know how fun it would be" - the guy who loves Fear and Hunger

“The last hour and twenty minutes have just been one long introduction” also known as the “HBomberguy gambit”

"Some of you are too young to understand what I'm talking about. Don't worry... You will." Has got to be one of the most villain ass lines I've heard come out of John's mouth.

The best thing about fake media is when people obsess so much over it that they make it real. Like sci-fi authors writing KilgoreTrout novels, or a group of mad men in Germany publishing 50 volumes of the Second Encyclopedia of Tlön.

Making "fake videogames" is actually an amazing way as an artist to build a portfolio. If you can show up to a game studio with a fully fleshed out portfolio of a concept game, it's almost always highly impressive. There's also always the chance of them liking the idea so much that they want to make it real.

just wanted to let you know that Tumblr recently started to sell its data to midjourney and other ai companies, which has lead to a lot of tumblr artists to either private their art blogs or delete them. It might be why the blog appeared to not exist when you looked it up.

I once created a fake visual novel, complete with gameplay mechanics, that I had running on an imageboard, where people could comment to vote on different choices—I would then illustrate the results. What's especially notable is that the game mechanics for this pretend videogame I'm now implementing into an actual visual novel that I'm working on as part of a team. They're mechanics that haven't ever been done in any visual novels before, and it's all thanks to making a totally fake one first.

Imo is goes beyond nostalgia, a lot of fake videogame art are the games we WANT to play made by people who love games, rather than the corporatized, overly-monetized, sometimes unfinished stuff created by mandate of some wall street group of execs solely to make as much money as possible for them. To push a brand. To renew a copyright. Sega could make a dark souls-like Demon Slayer game. But that would be a niche within a niche. It's far easier and more profitable to make the same arena fighter that has been done to death in the last 15 years with a Demon Slayer coat of paint over it and lots of DLC.

Hi, I'm the writer of Playing Along with Evelyn. Thank you for involving my pasta as an example!

This channel is like finding water in the desert

when I heard you say "Valle Verde", I genuinely screamed. that series is EXTREMELY underrated and I'm so glad it's being recognized here <3

Please, for the love of all that is holy, don't stop making what you want to make. We're here and we love it. These videos are an event for my friends, "the new supereyepstch dropped!" "Dude i know, I've already watched it!" It's the highlight of my day no matter what the subject, you're a beacon of hope in a shit world, thank you and keep up the good work. Also shout-out to Woolie for getting me through the birth of my son, my wife and i wouldn't have made it without the content he put out into the world. Love to the both of you.

"I worry that the topic is too niche, and that not many people besides me will care about it." This is coming from a man that made a half-hour video about his technical problems with a dell computer interesting.

In a weird way, this makes me sad. I wish people had more freetime of their own, that they could sustain themselves in our world. How much creativity weve been denied, how much art, experiences, music, technologies, will never be made because we arent given the freedom to.

dude, holy shit. I feel like I am about to write an entire dissertation. I have never felt compelled to write a YouTube comment since I got an account when I was like 9. I need you to know that this was never a waste of a time. when i was in high school I played dnd and it was the most fulfilling from of creation I had experienced. but after a lot of very harsh and bad experiences with my old friends, I haven't been able to have that same sort of joy creating. I'm now starting my last year of a 4 year fine arts degree, finally satisfied with my skill level. but I've had this deep, empty feeling of this lack of an outlet, no medium I've tried in the past has ever felt perfect. I had always wanted to make games but on top of having serval visual processing disorders, making games is fucking hard. the learning curve meaning that i lose motivation, far before anything close to a game ever comes out. but this. I genuinely am so endlessly happy that you made this. I cannot wait to create things, and fit it into every single project in this final year, thank you endlessly for giving this big of a deep dive of a medium that deserves more attention.

Something to remember is that if you were around in the 90s, a lot of media wasn't as available as it is now, especially if you were a kid - sometimes because you didn't have the money for it, sometimes because things were actually not that easy to get hold of. Often the secondary media - the marketing, the posters, the reviews, soundtracks even - was all you had access to, and if there was a game you were eager to play but couldn't for some reason, you'd spend ages poring over that stuff in its place, filling in the gaps in your imagination. I think this feeling of yearning is part of what this fake game media evokes, and why it creates such a powerful sense of nostalgia in people who remember that era. There's a similar feeling today looking through things like Bitmap Books' The CRPG Book and seeing so many older games I'll almost certainly never play, and just having to imagine what they were like based on the descriptions and a few screenshots.

1:11:52 I actually think a big part of the "Video Explaining the ARG has way more views than the actual ARG" is actually a result of the "Kilgore Trout Problem". A little over 50 years ago, Kurt Vonnegut realized that a lot of hard sci fi is more fun to have someone explain to you than to actually read it, so he stopped writing hard sci fi and made up a fake sci fi writer named Kilgore Trout and started summarizing his stories instead.

"The worst game you have played is a miracle" is a heck of a line, sir

36:26 "I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them." - Andrew Bernard I feel this so much.

God no you haven't wasted your time. I had little to no interest in fake video games because I had a perception of "I wish this could just be real." You have thoroughly convinced me otherwise. Your videos bring me nothing but joy. <3