The Bizarre World of Fake Video Games

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.

“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.

"Even gods suffer and die here, and you are no god." is a line that goes so unimaginably hard.

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.

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

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. Edit: I didn't create the "quest format", to be perfectly clear. There's a specific quest I made that has a bit that replicates a visual novel.

I miss manuals so much. I'm playing through Metal Gear Solid 1 for the first time and just had Baker tell me "I can't remember Meryl's Codec frequency... it should be on the back of the CD case!" and I laughed out loud at how cool that was, mixing the physical media with the game itself. You can't get away with that now that most things are going digital.

"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.

This channel is like finding water in the desert

There was a game released in 1997 called Queen: The Eye - I have never seen or played this game, never met another soul who's even heard of it, but for some reason my dad had a book about it. The book was full of concept art, level designs, commentary, and I used to spend hours reading over it as a child, imagining what the game was like. This video just made all those memories and feelings come rushing back.

I still think the fake persona 5 story is really interesting and cool mainly because of how easily we got fooled back then compared to now

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.

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

I've seen a lot of indie games that emulate the PS1 style in the last few years, especially in the horror genre, but almost all of them are very technically anachronistic with high res textures, dynamic lighting, and similar features that were impossible on the hardware level. So I'm absolutely smitten with the amount of faithful detail in GHOSTBLEED. It's really something else and I'm grateful that you've shown it.

I've been a long time fan of Plastiboo and very excited to see someone did a video on Vermis, maybe my favorite nontraditional graphic novels ever. There's two points I really want to make about the books that I think change the entire context around them and helps to better understand them. Vermis, as a series, is about identity and imagination. The first book opens with a skeletal husk looking into their reflection at the buttom of a moonlit well and imagining who they could have been. It ends with a cloud blocking the moonlight, ending the illusion as you stop being the character you chose to imaging yourself as and return to being the husk you've always been. During that iconic scene of the knight clutching the skeleton, that's them symbolically comforting themselves as the person they wish they were. I think that heavily, heavily contextualizes the events of Mists and Mirrors. You don't get a choice of character selection at the start, instead you are forced into the role of the Wayfarer who goes through the trial of the Glass Purgatory to find their own identity. Then, at the end of the book, you are finally given a character select screen to chose who you want to be. Obviously this is symbolic, but I also speculate that Mists and Mirrors is designed to be MIRRORED so you can play it front to back as the Wayfarer then back to front as your chosen character. Are you the Wayfarer imaging yourself as the selectable characters? Or are you the selectable characters looking in the mirror to imagine themselves as the Wayfarer? It makes the narrative about a sort of ouroboros of losing your identity and reinventing yourself that pairs well with the themes in the first book. The book even hints at this on the very first page, where it has mirrored text that says "our eyes our backwards" as if telling you from the very start that the beginning of the story is really the end.

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

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.

I have no idea if I'm the first person to say this, or if you'll even read this, but: This artform is literally "This is not a pipe" of the modern era. This is quickly becoming one of my favorite video essays on this website, it goes from being about fake video games to about art and mediums as a whole, while still staying on topic the whole time. Art that comments on the concept of art, being applied to a more modern artform/medium and utilizing the aspects of that medium that make it comparatively unique This feels like documentation and recognition of an art movement, of a turning point in art history :) Maybe I am up-playing the societal importance of the art within this video but like. Idk, it's just really good.

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.