Hey everyone,

Just a quick note to say I’m going to be stepping away from 94 ‘til Infinity for a little while. Nothing dramatic, life is just doing what life does right now, and family has to come first.

The newsletter isn’t going anywhere. I’ve removed the paywall from my older posts, so please feel free to dig into the archives. I’ll be back before long with more memories, more oddities, and more of the stories that made this era what it was.

Thanks for reading, and for sticking around. It genuinely means a lot.

See you soon,

Chris

Gran Turismo 2 is showing its age.

Originally released in 1999, this PlayStation racer is often overshadowed by its PlayStation 2 successors, particularly Gran Turismo 4, which is widely considered the best in the series.

And while I’d largely agree with that, Gran Turismo 2 felt like a bigger, bolder version of the original, taking its Japanese car roster and expanding it significantly.

With over 600 autos in total, and so much content it had to ship on two separate discs (one for Arcade Mode, one for GT Mode), it was the kind of racing depth that made PlayStation owners feel smug about their console choice.

It’s still a brilliant game, and I actually think the handling holds up brilliantly too. It found a sweet spot between arcade and simulation that could be wonderfully chaotic at times, and made it an absolute blast to play.

But this one holds a special place in my memory for a quirky reason: the discs were actually scratch and sniff.

The Science

The blue GT Mode disc came with its label treated in a “micro-encapsulated” layer.

That sounds fancy, but basically, it’s scratch-and-sniff sticker technology, the same stuff that let you huff a fake strawberry on a Trapper Keeper in the 80s, except Sony pointed it squarely at petrolheads.

Microscopic bubbles, painted right onto the surface of the CD, held a custom-blended chemical fragrance inside. The game’s packaging even included a dedicated paper insert with instructions: gently rub the disc’s printed surface to release the scent, then load it into your PlayStation.

As for me, well, I discovered this completely by accident.

I’d rubbed something off the disc, caught a whiff of something unexpected, and immediately did what any reasonable person would do… told my mate to smell my finger. Context came later. His face came first.

Nobody at Sony apparently paused to consider how “please fondle the disc” would land as consumer guidance.

Sony christened it the “Authentic pit-stop smell,” which is an oddly specific scent, really. Scratch the disc and the micro-bubbles popped, unleashing a heady cocktail of burning rubber, hot asphalt, and petrol fumes directly into your living room.

And if you ever caught a faint whiff of something during a long endurance race, don't worry. That was almost certainly just your PlayStation slowly cooking itself, not some cutting-edge 4D sensory experience.

Though it would have been magnificent if it was.

As for other games, well, the gimmick didn’t spawn a revolution.

No one rushed to make Silent Hill discs smell like fog and existential dread. And they certainly didn't go out of their way to create anything whiffy for the game Cheesy. Thank God. But it endures as one of the most absurd physical Easter eggs on the PlayStation.

Collectors still track down PAL copies of Gran Turismo 2 today, and the reports are surprisingly consistent: scratch the label, and over two decades on, a faint ghost of rubber still rises from the surface.

Bonus Trivia: EA clearly took notes, because later that same year the UK release of FIFA 2001 shipped with its own scratch-and-sniff disc. The fragrance of choice? Freshly cut stadium turf.

My secondary school career didn’t end with a ceremony or a speech.

It ended with the high-pitched whine of a silver CRT television warming up in a bedroom that smelled permanently of Lynx Africa, and the quiet, unspoken knowledge that this couldn’t last much longer.

The rest of the world was losing its mind trying to score a Gmail invite like it was a golden ticket. Something to brag about, something that meant you were in. But I didn’t care. We didn’t.

My best mate and I had more important business to attend to. We had crashes to orchestrate. We had traffic to weaponize. We had a handful of afternoons to carve out meaning before the real world arrived and scattered us both across the map.

We’d squeeze into his bedroom, with barely enough floor space to breathe, and pull up the little fold-out table, stack it with whatever food we’d raided from downstairs, and huddle around that CRT screen like it was a campfire.

This was Burnout 3: Takedown. And for a little while, it was everything.

Some games don’t ease you in.

They don’t really offer you a tutorial island or a gentle introductory lap. They just grab you by the collar and scream go. Burnout 3 is definitely that game, taken to its absolute extreme.

And while racing normally implies discipline, patience, and the careful application of brakes, Burnout 3 was about wielding a two-ton battering ram through six lanes of oncoming traffic while Mudmen rattled the speakers. You didn’t corner, you just “sent it”. You didn’t brake, you found some hapless AI driver and used them to deflect your trajectory.

The moment that defined it for us, the moment we’d rewind and replay and howl at, was the shunt. You’d be screaming down the highway, your boost bar blazing, and some poor opponent would edge up alongside you, and you’d just go. Veer wide, wind up like you were throwing a haymaker, and slam into them with everything the engine had.

It. Was. Glorious.

The weight of it transferred through the controller into your hands. They’d crumple and spin and shutter into millions of tiny metallic pieces.

They’d skip across the tarmac and fold themselves around a crash barrier like a satellite burning up on re-entry. But we’d be gone, boosting away into whatever carnage came next.

With the widest smiles we’ve ever worn, of course.

It was intoxicating in a way that nothing about Gran Turismo 4 ever was. That game asked for your patience and your precision. But in reality, they’re incomparable experiences. Burnout 3 asked only that you commit, completely and without hesitation, to absolute chaos.

But the crashes alone don’t tell the whole story of why that bedroom felt like the centre of the universe on those afternoons. The real secret was the soundtrack.

If you were a teenager in the mid-2000s, Burnout 3’s playlist felt like the inside of your own head. Yellowcard’s Breathing as you threaded through oncoming traffic.

Lazy Generation by The F-Ups kicking in at the start of a Road Rage event, all raw energy and snarling guitars. My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, Jimmy Eat World. And threaded through all of it, the Ramones showing up with I Wanna Be Sedated like a reminder that this brand of glorious, joyful irreverence had deep roots.

It was a time capsule. The same way the Wipeout soundtrack defined a moment, or Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater made a generation feel like every car park was a stage. Every song felt like it had been written specifically for the act of driving the wrong way down a motorway at 180 miles per hour.

And then there was DJ Stryker.

I’ll defend him. He’s corny. Deeply, shamelessly corny. Target Rich Environment. Meddle on the metal. Lines so cheesy they should come with a wine pairing. But I think it worked. He was the hype man for our shared destruction, the voice that made the whole world feel alive and loud and like it mattered.

When you’re seventeen and you’ve got nowhere to be and your mate is screaming next to you because you just took out four opponents in a single chain… you don’t want subtlety. You want someone to celebrate it.

Stryker celebrated it.

It wasn’t a perfect game, of course, though we loved it too much in the moment to say so.

The music, as brilliant as it was, would restart from the beginning every time a loading screen cut in, which meant you’d hear the first thirty seconds of a Franz Ferdinand track, sit through a load, and then hear the first thirty seconds of it again. Five times. Never the chorus. Just the intro, over and over, until you’d trained yourself to skip it on reflex.

The Eliminator races wore out their welcome fast. Five laps is a long time when you’ve already had your fun in the first two, and catching a wall on the final straight (after everything) felt like a personal betrayal.

And then there were the Formula events at the end. Cars so fast the game itself seemed to struggle to contain them, scraping the asphalt like the engine was begging you to stop, the screen blurring into something close to impressionism when you hit top speed.

It was usually at this point that my enthusiasm was no match for my lack of reaction speed. Especially after a beer or two.

Boosting stopped being an advantage and felt more like a liability. You’d ignite it, the world would smear, and you’d be driving by instinct and memory alone, praying the corner you knew was coming was where you remembered it.

We complained about all of it, loudly and at length, the way you only complain about things you love.

I don’t know exactly when we stopped playing.

There wasn’t a last session we marked or a conversation where we agreed that was it. That’s how it goes with those friendships, the ones that live in specific rooms at specific times. They don’t end dramatically. They just become less frequent, then infrequent, then memories.

The real world did arrive, eventually. It scattered us, the way we always knew it would. Different cities and different lives. The kind of distance that makes everything from before feel like it happened to someone slightly younger and slightly less tired than the person you’ve become.

But I still hear it sometimes.

That particular flavour of chaos, the weight of a perfect shunt, the way the crowd roar and the guitars would crash together at exactly the right moment. I hear Stryker in the back of my head, telling me to meddle on the metal.

And for a second, the bedroom is warm again. The food’s on the fold-out table. My mate is somewhere to my left, already reaching for the controller.

So why are EA so content to leave so many of these games locked away, gathering dust, when every signal and every trend, every sales chart, every success story, points in the same direction? They know the appetite is there.

They’ve seen what happens when a beloved title is given even a modest remaster and put back into players’ hands. Whether it’s nostalgia, preservation, or simply the chance to experience something great again without digging out ageing hardware, people show up and they pay.

So what’s the hesitation? Is it caution, indifference, or just a failure to recognise the value sitting in their own back catalogue?

Maybe one day. Maybe then I’ll call that old friend up.

• Developer: Sony Computer Entertainment Japan

• Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment

• Release: JP March 2000, NA/EU November 2000

• Platform(s): PlayStation 2

Some games arrive like fireworks themselves, bright and brief and gone before you’ve properly looked up.

Fantavision, Sony’s fireworks puzzler that launched alongside the PlayStation 2 in every major market throughout 2000, never found its crowd. It sold modestly, reviewed indifferently, and disappeared from shelves with the quiet dignity of something that knew it was too strange for its moment.

And yet, for those who sat cross-legged in front of a television and actually gave it their hands and their attention, it left a mark that two and a half decades haven’t managed to erase.

Let’s establish what it actually was.

Developed by Sony Computer Entertainment Japan, Fantavision arrived in Japan in March 2000 alongside the PS2 itself, before travelling west later that year as a launch title for both the North American and European releases of the console.

The premise was a simple one: fireworks explode in the night sky, and you chain them together by colour before they fade. Match three or more of the same hue in sequence, detonate them in a cascade, and the sky rewards you with something genuinely breathtaking.

The longer your chain, the more elaborate the explosion, blooming chrysanthemums and weeping willows and peonies of light unfurling in slow, luminous arcs.

The mechanics had real depth.

Special white “wild” fireworks could bridge colour chains, and the rhythm of your detonations fed into a multiplier system that rewarded precision over panic.

Boss stages introduced enormous set-piece fireworks that demanded chaining in specific sequences. It was, and this needs saying plainly, a genuinely well-designed game, not a tech demo or a curiosity, but a game with logic and texture and escalating craft.

Underneath all of it ran the music of Soichi Terada.

The Tokyo-born electronic composer, already beloved for his work on Ape Escape and his early house releases on his own Far East Recording label, brought something to Fantavision that no amount of particle effects could manufacture on their own.

Soul.

His soundtrack moves like weather, humid and luminous and unhurried, blending jazzy electronics with textures that feel simultaneously futuristic and ancient. Tracks bloom and dissolve the way the fireworks do, never quite arriving and never quite leaving, music that makes the sky feel inhabited.

Years later, I got to see Terada play live, and he was every bit as warm and quietly joyful as the music suggested he’d be. Unhurried at the decks, generous with his smiles, and seemingly as delighted by the sound filling the room as everyone else was, there was no performance of cool, no studied distance.

Just a man and his music, both of them exactly what they appeared to be. It made me love the Fantavision soundtrack all over again, retrospectively, knowing the same gentleness that lives in those tracks lives in the person who made them.

But what Fantavision understood, perhaps better than almost any launch title before, was the power of atmosphere as a design principle. The backdrops, a harbour, a theme park, a mountain range, a medieval castle, were rendered with a warmth and detail that felt delightfully lush for 2000.

The PS2 was new, and I like to think that Sony used Fantavision to whisper a promise. Look what this machine can dream. Terada’s music and the visuals were fused, each one lifting the other into something neither could’ve reached alone.

There was a two-player mode too, cooperative rather than competitive, each player controlling their own cursor across the same sky. Sitting beside someone, both of you reaching for the same bursts of colour in the dark with Terada’s electronics drifting through the room, it was quietly affecting in a way that’s difficult to explain.

It wasn’t a long game, and it was completable in an evening, which perhaps worked against it at a time when length was currency. Perhaps it simply arrived in a crowd of heavyweights and couldn’t shout loud enough.

What it offered was rarer than any of its contemporaries understood, a game built around joy as its primary offering. The PS2 had a library of thousands, and most of them have been written about at length.

But I think this one deserves its flowers, and it knows, better than most, how to make them bloom.

If you enjoy my work and want to support it, consider buying me a coffee. It helps keep the words flowing and the ideas brewing!

Support 94 'Til Infinity

You know the sound.

You’ve heard it a thousand times and you can play it back in your head right now, note for note, without even trying. That low sweep, the rising strings, the twinkling chimes, the glass-shattering whoosh.

It takes about eight seconds to play and it has been lodged in your nervous system for roughly thirty years, which is exactly what sound designer Takafumi Fujisawa had in mind when he started crafting it from a spring 1994 prototype, shaping something very deliberate out of almost nothing.

Fujisawa was part of the PlayStation project before there was even an official team. He was also working on the sound chip and firmware, so he understood the hardware’s limitations from the inside out.

The entire startup sequence is built from just three tiny samples stored in the BIOS ROM: a synth sweep, a reversed glass-shatter, and a bell.

And that’s it.

Everything else, the layering, the reverb, the movement, is the PlayStation’s own sound processing unit performing live every time you hit the power button.

Roland D-50

The opening sweep comes from a Roland D-50 factory preset called “Spacious Sweep,” a synth that had already soundtracked half the late ‘80s, from The Simpsons theme to Michael Jackson records.

Fujisawa took it somewhere else entirely, structuring the sequence to start in equal temperament before shifting into pure intonation harmony.

In plain English, it begins somewhere familiar and comfortable, then drifts into something that feels slightly, beautifully wrong. He wanted to unsettle you just enough that your brain would pay attention.

His stated goal was to recreate the “feeling of walking into a cinema”. That hush before the lights go down and the screen fills up.

He talked about leading the listener from a sense of security into excitement, using C major dominant motion to keep it feeling mainstream while the textures around it got stranger.

The whole thing was sketched out in two weeks and recorded in two days. His first demo was nearly approved on the spot. But there was one rejected version that deserves its own moment: Fujisawa recorded himself whispering “PlayStation” and layered it over the top.

“I had an alternative version with a voice whispering ‘PlayStation’ layered on top of it which I sampled myself, but with the impression being that the game console speaks to you we decided to go with the orthodox (simple) option in the end.”

The team killed it because it gave the impression that the console was speaking to you. In 1994, that was apparently a step too far. Oh, and that swooshing reverse-glass sound at the end?

If your disc failed to read, that sound would loop, over and over, eventually fading out. Few things in life matched the cold dread of hearing it repeat.

Was it the disc? Was it the lens? Or was it that copy you'd picked up for a third of the price from a bloke at school, the one that came in a slightly cracked jewel case with a handwritten label?

A quiet diagnostic tool wearing the clothes of audio design, and it had your number every time. so I guess that means your PlayStation was talking to you after all, just not with words.

There’s a specific kind of dread that SOMA produces. One that has nothing to do with the creatures lurking in the dark corridors of PATHOS-II.

It arrives quietly, dressed as a philosophical thought experiment, and it doesn’t leave. Not when you put the controller down. Not when you turn the lights back on.

Not, it turns out, years later, when you’re padding across cold floor tiles at half midnight for a glass of water and you catch your own reflection in the kitchen window and think, even for just a half-second: but is that actually me?

That’s the trick SOMA pulls.

It uses the haunted-house architecture of a survival horror game to smuggle in something far more troubling than any monster. It makes you genuinely uncertain about the nature of your own mind. It does this so effectively, so unflinchingly, that to call it a horror game feels almost reductive.

It’s a horror game the way Solaris is a space film. The setting is incidental, the wound is philosophical.

What Is the Sea Keeping?

The year is 2104.

You are Simon Jarrett, a man with brain damage living in Toronto, who agrees to an experimental scan of his neural patterns. You wake up in an underwater research station at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, and you have no idea how you got there.

The staff are dead, or worse — fused with machines, still half-alive, begging you to either help them or end them. Crikey.

The facility’s AI, Catherine, has a plan to save what’s left of humanity. The planet above has been destroyed by a comet impact. The ARK, which is a digital simulation loaded with human consciousness scans, is humanity’s last lifeboat.

It sounds like science fiction scaffolding, and it is. But earns every piece of it. The world-building is meticulous and melancholy in equal measure, delivered through voice recordings, scattered notes, and environmental storytelling that rewards the player who slows down and looks.

PATHOS-II feels like it was inhabited by real people before things went wrong. People with petty grievances and inside jokes and quiet romantic histories. Their absence is felt the way absence is actually felt, not through dramatic music stings but through a half-eaten meal gone cold on a desk.

And the sci-fi touchstones are everywhere if you’re looking.

Philip K. Dick’s fingerprints are all over the thing. The man spent a career asking what separates the human from the android, the real from the simulated, and SOMA is essentially a PKD novel you can inhabit.

There’s something of Blindsight in it too, Peter Watts’s bleak and brilliant novel that argues consciousness itself might be an evolutionary dead end. SOMA isn’t quite that nihilistic, but it sits in the same cold water. It looks at the Ship of Theseus problem, that is, if you replace every plank, is it still the same ship?

But it applies that to neurons, and suddenly it stops being an interesting thought experiment and becomes something closer to vertigo.

The Scan

The genius of the game’s central mechanism is that it uses the act of playing against you.

Every time Simon’s consciousness is transferred to a new body (and this happens more than once) the game forces you to sit with the thing it just did. The old Simon doesn’t just up and vanish. He’s still back there, in the previous housing, scared and confused and asking why you left him behind.

You didn’t save him. You copied him, got what you needed, and moved on. The game never lets you pretend otherwise.

I remember sitting in the dark with that for a while. Not the monster that was about three corridors back. Not the creaking of the station. The fact that in any practical, mechanical sense, the character I was playing had just experienced a kind of death.

The continuity I felt, the sense that I had carried on, was a pleasant fiction. A story the new scan was telling itself.A gloriously unsettling feeling, and one worth sitting with.

It’s around this point in the game that I started making tea more often than strictly necessary. Not because I was thirsty. Because the walk to the kitchen, the ritual of it, the heat of the mug.

These mundane aspects of life felt like proof of something. Grounding, I guess. I’m here. This is the real one. The kettle doesn’t lie. I’ll make the most of a good brew.

The ending (and I’ll stay vague, because if you haven’t played it you should, even if just once) is one of the most effective conclusions in the medium. Like much of the game before it, it offers no comfort.

It offers truth, and lets you figure out what to do with it.

The credits rolled and I sat in silence for a good few minutes. Not in the way you sit in silence after a film ends and you’re waiting for a post-credits scene, but in the way you sit in silence after someone has said something you can’t unhear.

Safe Mode and the Argument for It

Here’s where honesty is required.

The enemies (the grotesque, machine-flesh hybrids that stalk the corridors of PATHOS-II) are a problem. I know I’m not alone on this, but I feel the stealth mechanics are functional at best, genuinely frustrating at worst, and the tension they’re supposed to create can curdle into tedium when you’re crouching behind the same piece of furniture for the fourth time because a creature has inexplicably doubled back.

The game knows what it wants to say. In those moments, the delivery system gets in the way of the message.

Frictional addressed this directly with safe mode, an option that keeps the enemies present and atmospheric (you can still hear them, still feel their weight in the world) but removes the threat of death entirely. Some players view this as a compromise. I’d argue it’s closer to an act of editorial clarity.

I never really felt that the enemies were really the point.

They’re an environmental element, a reminder that the world is broken and dangerous. And I definitely don’t think removing the game-over loop somehow defangs SOMA. If anything, it lets the actual horror breathe more freely. The philosophical kind, the quiet kind, the kind that follows you to the kitchen.

And there’s no shame in it.

SOMA on safe mode is still a masterpiece. Probably moreso for some. The creature design remains unsettling, the atmosphere remains oppressive, and the questions the game is asking do not become any less sharp because you’re not reloading a checkpoint.

Better Than Amnesia

I want to be careful here, because Amnesia: The Dark Descent is a genuinely important game.

Its influence on survival horror was enormous, and what it did with the sanity mechanic (punishing you for looking at the monsters, turning avoidance into the core loop) was inspired. But I never loved it the way people who love it seem to love it.

It was impressive and it was effective. It had me sleeping with the light on. But it didn’t leave me with anything to think about the next morning, or the morning after that.

SOMA did something Amnesia didn’t attempt.

It gave the horror a reason. The fear wasn’t just atmospheric dressing or genre convention, it felt more like the natural emotional response to the ideas the game was genuinely grappling with.

You’re scared in SOMA not just because something is chasing you, but because the game has made the stakes feel real in a way that goes beyond survival. The question of whether any version of Simon continues to exist in any meaningful sense after a scan is a question the horror is actively dramatising. The medium and the message are, for once, the same thing.

That’s why, of everything Frictional Games has made, this is the one that matters most. It’s the one that took the formula they’d refined across Penumbra and Amnesia and asked what it was actually for.

The answer they found was this. A game about what it means to be a mind inside a body, asking whether the mind survives when the body doesn’t, set at the bottom of a very cold and very dark sea.

A Wonderful One and Done

I won’t go back and I’ve made peace with that.

SOMA is not a game that invites replaying, not because it isn’t good enough, but because it’s too good. The experience it offers is fundamentally about not knowing — not knowing what’s around the next corner, not knowing what choice is the right one, not knowing, on some existential level, what you actually are.

A second playthrough would be a different thing entirely. The questions would still be there, but they’d be wearing name tags. You’d know the answers. SOMA without its uncertainty is a much smaller thing.

So it lives in memory now, the way the best experiences tend to. A bit like that book I loved years ago and can’t quite remember the name of. Imperfectly, but vividly.

The low thrum of the station, the cold blue light filtering through the viewport. Catherine’s voice, patient and almost kind, explaining what has to happen next. And Simon, or whatever Simon is by that point, asking the only question the game ever really cared about.

The late-night trips to the kitchen are a bit less fraught now, years on. I no longer startle quite as easily at my own reflection. But occasionally, on the right kind of night, I catch myself wondering.

Not worrying, exactly. Just wondering. About copies and originals. About whether the self is a thing you have or a story you tell. About whether the version of me that woke up this morning is the same one that went to sleep, or just one that believes it is.

SOMA did that. It got in there. And I mean that as the highest compliment a game can receive.

We all remember it. The sleek black monolith with the distinct horizontal ridges. The colorful PS logo and the (optional) blue stand. It felt like a design that landed from the future. And it looked absolutely stunning sitting under our big CRT televisions.

Well, I thought it looked stunning.

Others thought it looked a little like a small an unassuming air conditioning unit. But what if I told you that the iconic design was not an original Sony creation?

When you look at the towering PlayStation 2, you’re actually looking at the ghost of a failed computer from 1993. It was called the Atari Falcon 030 Microbox, and it was supposed to save Atari.

It was a forward thinking machine that could be set up either flat or vertically. Atari even designed that exact same signature ribbed casing, creating a stack of distinct ridges.

But the Microbox never made it to market. Atari cancelled the project to focus on the Jaguar console, and we all know how that turned out.

The Jag flopped and turned the Microbox into a footnote, and yet it stayed hidden in plain sight. Seven years later its legacy went mainstream with the PlayStation 2.

And this resemblance isn’t just a coincidence.

Sony’s lead designer at the time, Teiyu Goto, has explicitly confirmed this inspiration. No one from the company tried to hide it or take all the credit either, having legally bought the design patent from Atari’s successor.

Sony even cited the Atari patent in the PS2’s own design filings.

Why did this happen? The truth is, no one really knows. Goto may have simply looked at the Atari prototype and thought it needed very little improvement.

So whenever you look at your PlayStation 2, you're looking at two stories.

There's the one everyone knows: Sony's unprecedented success, the best-selling console of all time, a machine that defined a generation. But layered beneath that is something quieter.

A tribute, whether intentional or not, to an Atari design that never got its chance. A machine cancelled before it could launch, now living on in the silhouette of its spiritual successor.

I originally published this over on Superjump back on Dec 19, 2022.

Sometimes you find serenity in the least expected places.

While Ico is a game often remembered for its mostly dialogue-free narrative, captivating art direction, and gameplay. I remember it for its serenity. At times the experience could be best described as a lone walk through long abandoned ruins and enchanted woods. Peaceful, ethereal, rehabilitating; but mostly solitary.

Playing as the titular character Ico, we’re gently encouraged to move forward, to advance the narrative, but to pause and contemplate the world too.

Audio-visual distractions are at a minimum, with no traditional user interface on display; sound design is a hushed mix of terrene tones and melodies. The music is suitably atmospheric: an often sweeping ensemble akin to a subtle breeze, complementing key moments in the story.

Ico is a contrasting, paradigm shift in game design, notably so when compared to titles released the same year. Ico embraced minimalism, or subtractive design, as lead designer and director Fumito Ueda would call it.

It would also introduce me to a distinctive Japanese concept called Ma (間) — “pausing in time”.

Birth of a classic

Released in 2001 in North America and Japan, and later in Europe in 2002 — Ico, a horned boy overpowered by a group of warriors, is kidnapped and brought to an abandoned castle to be sacrificed.

Fate would have it that he would manage to escape, and befriend a mysterious girl named Yorda. They would become inseparable, and Ico would do everything in his power to protect her.

Developed initially as a PlayStation title, Ico was ported over to the PS2 as the development phase lengthened. It’s impressive to see the familiar landscapes running on an original PlayStation, but there’s no doubt continued development and eventual release on the PlayStation 2 was the correct decision.

PlayStation sales were petering out as it neared lifecycle end, with PlayStation 2 sales already understood to be in the region of 10.61 million units in 2001. With the additional computational power offered by the PlayStation 2, more freedom was offered to the development team, especially in regards to Yorda’s AI.

Regardless of the additional power offered by the PlayStation 2, much of the game remained minimalistic. Fighting other enemies is rudimentary at best, with more focus on protecting and bonding with Yorda. Simple fighting mechanics not only adhere to the concept of subtractive design, but they also remain true for the character of Ico.

This is, after all, a young boy with limited fighting skills and a simple wooden stick.

What is minimalism?

Minimalism was an art movement established in the late ‘40s/early ‘50s, and is considered a response to abstract expressionism and modernism.

For artists that embraced it, there was now an opportunity to create work founded on elegance, simplicity, and utility. Less was finally more. The concept, and mindset, found purpose in other disciplines and industries. Architecture, music, film, literature, and games incorporated varying degrees of minimalism, and continue to do so.

Notable examples include Ernest Hemmingway and his matter-of-fact writing style, or Henning Christiansen’s haunting, almost scant, piano on Min døde hest. Of course, it’s debatable if these two examples are indeed minimalistic, but then, what form of art isn’t debated? With Ico, minimalism was not only evident in how the game played, but in the narrative too:

“For me, it’s not important to tell the details of the story”. “In Japan, there is a poetic expression called a haiku [where] you don’t explain some things in detail and let the receivers understand or use their imagination with what is presented. That lets the receivers make their own story from their imagination, and I think this is also a good style of expression for video games — at this moment.”

Fumito Ueda, Lead Designer and Director of Ico (via gameindustry.biz)

Part of the beauty of Ico lies in its ambiguity, in its ability to convey a cohesive, alluring narrative with little dialogue. As Ueda implied, it’s simply not important to share the details of the story — therefore leaving the player to focus on key aspects of the narrative.

Trust is placed in the player to interpret meaning. Much like Hemmingway, Christiansen or Jonathan Glazer’s direction of Under the Skin — the story isn’t poorer as a result of sparse dialogue, it’s richer.

Subtractive design

During the development of Ico, Ueda would employ a technique called “Subtractive Design”. The idea was to remove as many design elements as possible in a bid to reduce distraction, while amplifying core elements of the experience.

You won’t find health meters, point markers, or a HUD with a compass suggesting the direction you should take. Ico features none of these.

It’s entirely up to the player to go at whatever pace they wish, and explore. Indicators such as low health, or a character that’s in distress, isn’t depicted as a health meter, but shown though the actions of the character themselves.

Other games may have an army of different enemies, but Ueda found that puzzles were enough, and only one type of enemy was needed. He also removed the health meter, inventory screen, and even background music from his design — all things that come standard in other games.

Via sirlin.net

Periods of extended silence provide space for music to act as an additional signifier — to alert the player when they should pay special attention because something important is happening. For example, silence is often punctuated by music when one chapter ends and another begins. As Claude Debussy would say, “music is the silence between the notes”.

As the player, it’s left up to us to interpret the silence between the notes.

Heal, and the concept of Ma (間)

You might have experienced ma (間), even if you’re not familiar with the term. Roger Ebert had the opportunity to interview Hayao Miyazaki and, wanting to know more about the quiet contemplation that many of his characters often display, asked Miyazaki why this was often the case in Japanese cinema.

“Instead of every movement being dictated by the story, sometimes people will just sit for a moment, or they will sigh, or look in a running stream, or do something extra, not to advance the story but only to give the sense of time and place and who they are.”

“We have a word for that in Japanese. It’s called ma. Emptiness. It’s there intentionally. [claps his hands] The time in between my clapping is ma. If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it’s just busyness. But if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension. If you just have constant tension at 80 degrees all the time you just get numb.”

Via rogerebert.com

One of Ico’s most iconic moments is when the player chooses to save their progress. Rather than use a traditional floating-point marker, or some sort of beacon, the save point is a mere sofa. Ico chooses to sit and rest, while encouraging Yorda to do the same.

It’s a small moment of considered game design that reflects the nature of the environment, and creates a more immersive world by doing so. A moment of quiet contemplation.

When characters are typically allowed small moments to pause in their surroundings, we — the audience — are allowed similar respite. Ico is fearless in its commitment toma (間).

It being a distinctly Japanese concept, I often wonder if the idea was too enigmatic for most western sensibilities. After all, the number one selling game at the time of Ico’s release was Grand Theft Auto 3, which is surely the antithesis of Ico.

An experience like nothing else

Considered a defining moment for games, and another step in the direction of showcasing video games as an art form, Ico has left a lasting impact on the gaming industry. Littered with little moments of quiet grandeur, it has lost none of its charm 20 years later.

“Minimalism is about intentionality, not deprivation”

D. Stojanivic.

In 1995, Sony's UK marketing team had an idea that probably raised a few eyebrows internally: forget the shops and the expos for a moment, and put the PlayStation inside a nightclub.

On paper, a nightclub seems like the last place you'd go to sell a games console, but the reality was rather different. It wasn't an accident of taste, but more a calculated read on where a significant chunk of British youth culture actually was.

Britpop might have been dominating the charts, but the club and rave scene was pulling in its own enormous crowd, one that Nintendo and Sega were largely ignoring, still pitching to children and bedrooms.

Sony UK, taking a huge risk, looked at where those people were spending their Friday nights and decided to bring their best games along.

Looking back it's obvious why it worked, especially with Wipeout on the bill, a game that felt like it had been designed for exactly this kind of room, because in many ways it had.

The soundtrack pulled in Leftfield, The Chemical Brothers and Orbital, big beat and electronic music baked in from the very start.

The whole visual identity, designed by Sheffield art collective The Designers Republic, a studio better known for underground techno album sleeves, looked less like a video game and more like a record you'd find in a crate at the back of a specialist shop.

The print adverts pushed it further still, two young people looking dishevelled and zoned out with blood from their noses, nothing like anything Nintendo had ever put in a magazine. A moral panic duly followed, and as Ian Anderson from The Designers Republic more or less pointed out, that was largely the idea.

PlayStation’s UK marketing manager Geoff Glendenning built a database of over 500 nightclubs and worked with 52 of them to install PlayStation chillout rooms, at Ministry of Sound in London, Birmingham Sanctuary, Glasgow Tunnel and Eclipse in Hull.

Glendenning, speaking about his approach, said: “Having been part of the late 80s rave and underground-clubbing scene, I recognised how it was influencing the youth market. In the early 90s, club culture started to become more mass market, but the impetus was still coming from the underground, from key individuals and tribes.

“What it showed me was that you had to identify and build relationships with those opinion-formers – the DJs, the music industry, the fashion industry, the underground media.”

Cream in Liverpool was a different arrangement entirely, less corporate strategy and more a natural extension of who was making the game.

Psygnosis had such a close relationship with Cream that they worked directly with the club, completely outside the official programme. The developers were clubbers, and that particular partnership didn’t need anyone drawing up a brief.

Wipeout was the headline act, but it wasn't the only game in the chillout rooms, and none of them were particularly forgiving to someone in a less than focused state of mind.

People played them anyway. Which, when you think about the circumstances, is a fairly remarkable thing. A remarkable story, really. About as grassroots as marketing gets, targeted at exactly the right crowd at exactly the right moment.

Psygnosis ended up platforming British dance culture to a global audience, whether or not that was ever really the plan, and a generation of people had their first experience of the PlayStation not under a Christmas tree but at two in the morning, ears still ringing, controller passed between strangers.

Naughty, naughty, very naughty.

I originally published this over on Superjump back on Dec 27, 2022. A little different from my regular output, I wanted to share some love for an MPS Labs/MicroProse classic.

Ah, the halcyon days of early PC gaming.

When Intel ruled supreme and hard disk space was measured in megabytes rather than gigabytes. If you had internet access at the time, you were granted wizard status amongst your friends and peers.

PC games were sold in huge cardboard boxes, affectionately known as big-box PC games, and often filled to the brim with instructions and lore. The antithesis of gaming today, as the world opts for reduced packaging and the continued proliferation of digital-only.

No “click here to buy”, but a trip into town with friends. An adventure of sorts, as much as children in the ‘90s could adventure.

Sure, we weren’t exactly looking for the stolen gold of Yamashita, or for the city of Atlantis, but who knows what we’d find lurking on dusty shelves and bargain bins? There was excitement to be had in the mystery, the prospect, with no consideration of going home empty-handed.

This anticipatory temperament was the product of a life that often felt glacial. TV shows were released on a weekly basis. Gaming magazines monthly.

Weekends were for fun after a week of school. Information was only as fast as the friends you travelled with. If you were on the fence about a particular game, you couldn’t exactly pull out your smartphone to check the reviews. Nothing that instantaneous had been invented just yet.

Moments considered quaint by today’s standards felt like an event. Maybe I’d find a discounted copy of Doom or Hexen in pristine condition? Not likely. More likely was an abundance of games I had little to no knowledge of. Wall to wall, floor to ceiling.

This was the one time I wished time would stand still.

But I had to make a decision at some point, and even I knew after an hour I was overstaying my welcome. Time to pick something. Time to pony up the money, and take the risk. So I did. “No refunds, no returns”, said the man behind the till.

I could just see the faint outline of a smile behind his cigarette smoke. No going back now. I paid for the game and left the shop. After much deliberation, I settled on a game called Silent Service II. A total gamble, as I had no real way to assess what it would be like.

A worthy one however — as it would become one of my most cherished gaming memories. Primitive graphics and all, Silent Service II created, and still creates to this day, a sense of dread and fear that few other titles can instil in me.

Underwater stealth survival

Just off the coast of Hokkaido, at 02:34 — the dead of the night. Already at periscope depth, I swiftly rotate the viewfinder until the enemy is in sight. There they are. Seven ships in total.

I move forward at half speed, quietly, like an Orca stalking unsuspecting prey. I classify each boat, becoming all the more anxious as I realise what I’m up against. Destroyers, Heavy Cruisers, Heavy Carriers, and Torpedo boats. This is no job for a kid raised on a diet of Super Mario Bros. and Alex Kidd in Miracle World.

Onwards.

Multiple torpedoes fired, one after another.

I prioritized taking out ships that I found particularly threatening. Switching to grid view, which is a 2D grid with a series of lines representing myself, enemy ships, and fired torpedoes, I crossed my fingers and waited for the sound of impact.

It was not going to be that simple, however. The ships had spotted my oncoming attack, they were on to me. I was exposed, and they smelled blood. Two of my torpedoes hit, but they had little effect.

Clearly I had bitten off more than I could chew.

The lines corralled and pivoted 180 degrees, coming right for me. Stopping all engines, hoping that my silence would discourage any further activity bearing down on me, was not a particularly good tactic.

They rotated on my exact position, as angry as lines can rotate, and it was terrifying. At this point, even if I didn’t know it, I was done for. The enemy ships started “pinging” me, using their sonar to get a more accurate feel for my location.

Ping. Ping. Ping.

Depth charge, after depth charge. The hunter was now the hunted, and they circled like sharks. The eerie repetitive sound, coming through a rudimentary PC speaker, coupled with the primitive visuals was, and still is, a master class in designing terror on a creative shoestring budget.

I crash-dived, down to 150 feet, but it was too late. The depth charges were relentless, and they rocked my submarine to the brink. The engines were flooded, I couldn’t move, and I was uncontrollably sinking further into the dark.

As a last-ditch attempt, I released debris — a diversion tactic to make it look as though my submarine imploded. That failed.

Eventually, on the cusp of annihilation, it wasn’t the depth charges that destroyed my chances — it was hitting the ocean floor.

Game over.

30 minutes, from start to finish. Ecstasy and agony — but what a thrill.

The Gamble Had Paid Off

The trip, the adventure, was a success.

I’d found a game that wasn’t very well known or spoken fondly of among my peers, but that somehow made it all the more special.

You might be thinking that all of this is a bit ridiculous. How on earth can a submarine game, from 1990 no less, be considered one of my most terrifying gaming experiences? Well, firstly, the ocean is scary because it’s the ocean.

Thalassophobia is a thing, and I absolutely subscribe to that particular phobia. Secondly, the primitive nature of the game, both in terms of graphics and sound, only added to the experience rather than subtracted.

Show or tell, as it’s referred to in the movie business. A smart director knows when to show the detail, and when to pan the camera away and allow the viewer to take over.

Imagination was certainly a requirement to get the most from Silent Service II, and imagination is hugely efficient at conjuring up worst-case scenarios and fear.

This was the gaming equivalent of hearing a noise in the dark and immediately jumping to the most awful conclusion. And it's a reminder that restraint can be its own kind of spectacle.

Long before the streaming era, before the instant reveal, before a single trailer could fracture the internet in minutes, there was a different world.

One where information moved slowly, where fans waited months for a single screenshot, where the fate of an entire genre could hinge on a corporate decision made in a boardroom nobody knew about.

In 1995, Square showed the world a glimpse of something it wasn’t ready for.

Final Fantasy VI characters moving in three dimensions, rendered with a fidelity the industry hadn't yet seen in motion. The assumption was universal… this was the future, and that future lived on Nintendo hardware.

The Nintendo 64 was coming, the cartridge was still king, and nobody thought Square would dare challenge that. Then January 1996 arrived, and the assumption collapsed.

Square left Nintendo over something as practical as storage space. Nintendo’s cartridges couldn’t contain what Square intended to build, but Sony’s CD-ROM format could. Nintendo’s president, by most accounts, told them not to return, and Square didn’t.

Welcome to the World Wide Web

The first images of Cloud Strife didn’t appear in a magazine or arrive through a press event. Square posted static renders directly to their official Japanese website at a time when most households were still figuring out what a website actually was.

Dial-up connections, telephone lines tied up for hours, a global audience measured in thousands rather than millions.

Those images circulated anyway, Cloud at the train in Midgar, Barret locked in a battle stance, pre-rendered grabs that looked nothing like what a cartridge could produce.

Then the playable demo came later, bundled with Tobal No. 1, and by then the verdict was already forming. The first bombing mission confirmed everything the screenshots had suggested, and the RPG had changed its shape permanently.

This is how it happened, not through spectacle, but through a tech demo, a business decision, and a handful of images on a website that most of the world hadn’t yet learned to find.

Those first images on Square's website are long gone, but Midgar's still being talked about thirty years later and the Lifestream runs on.

Modern arcades simply aren’t the same.

Walking in today and seeing what’s on offer is a paltry affair to say the least. And can we talk about how the whole industry seems to have pivoted into a brightly lit casino for kids?

You’re essentially gambling for paper tickets, hoping to hit a jackpot just to cash them in for cheap plastic garbage like sticky hands, neon vampire teeth, and flimsy finger skateboards.

“You know, back in my day, the arcade was a place where you met friends and came to play the latest games.”

I say this to my kids more often than I’d care to admit. I know I’m turning into my own parents with every passing year. I don't even need to look at them to know their eyes have rolled so far back they've gone completely white.

But, between you and me, arcades were an entirely different beast in the 90s. C’mon, picture the scene.

The sky outside is heavy and grey. Rain batters the pavement, but you barely notice. Your parents just dropped you off with a fat pocket of coins, and your brain fizzes with excitement. You’re entirely absorbed, hypnotized even, by the glow of CRT monitors and the chaotic symphony of coin-op cabinets.

Back then, information moved at a glacial pace. There was no social media to check and no group chats to coordinate. You couldn’t even send a quick text to see if the crew was coming because mobile phones simply didn’t exist in our pockets.

Meeting up at the local arcade on a weekend like this was a sacred ritual built on blind faith. You either showed up at the agreed time or you missed out entirely. There was no “running five minutes late” update; you were either there or you weren’t.

It was the only way to experience the absolute bleeding edge of gaming technology. If you wanted to see the future, you had to physically travel to it and hope your friends had done the same.

Me? Well, I spent a lot of time testing limits in those spaces, figuring out exactly what worked and what didn’t. Mindlessly dropping coins into brutally hard fighting games without learning the combos, which didn’t work at all.

But patiently watching the local champions dominate the leaderboards to steal their techniques? That worked every single time. But beyond our personal strategies, the companies making the games were fighting a much larger battle.

Building the Impossible

The early 90s arcade scene was a fiercely competitive arms race.

Home consoles were unquestionably catching up in graphical power, and this meant that arcade manufacturers needed to offer physical experiences you simply couldn’t replicate in a living room.

Historical industry retrospectives show a massive, industry-wide pivot toward physical immersion during this exact era.

Every major player had a distinct strategy to keep players hooked:

• Sega: They mastered the “taikan” (pictured above) or body-sensation cabinet. They were building massive, hydraulic-powered machines that would tilt, shake, and occasionally turn players completely upside down.

• Capcom: While dominating the fighting game market, they also pushed the physical limits of multiplayer with massive, screen-spanning six-player brawler cabinets that demanded group cooperation.

It was specifically playing After Burner inside a rotating Sega R360 that made me realize I wasn't exactly cut out for the cockpit. While everyone else was chasing the high of a 360-degree barrel roll, I was busy discovering that my inner ear has the structural integrity of a wet paper towel.

• Konami: They were heavily exploring sensory immersion, creating dedicated, highly accurate light-gun setups that made you feel like you were holding genuine hardware.

• SNK: They took a different route with the Neo Geo MVS. They prioritized omnipresence, creating striking, multi-game cabinets that ensured premium arcade experiences were accessible in every corner store and pizza parlor.

They all wanted to completely pull you into their worlds. Then, Namco looked at the competition and decided to go entirely overboard.

The Ridge Racer Full Scale Anomaly

Ridge Racer was already a total revelation, a technicolored explosion of fast-paced pixels that left everything else in the dust. But Namco wasn't content with just a software lead. No, they engineered one of the most incredible and oversized monuments to house it.

They called it Ridge Racer Full Scale.

It wasn’t a plastic seat bolted to a plywood floorboard. It was an actual, full-size red Mazda MX-5 Miata parked inside a building.

The engineering required to make this function was staggering. You opened the real car door, slid into the real driver’s seat, and put your hands on the real leather steering wheel.

The pedals, the gear shift, and the dashboard dials were all wired directly into the game code. An enormous projector screen sat right past the windshield.

You even had to turn the actual ignition key to start the race. It was a peak example of experiential entertainment, pushing the boundaries of what an arcade cabinet could actually be.

The White Whale

I never got to play it.

Living the arcade dream meant accepting that some experiences were simply out of reach. These massive installations were incredibly rare and violently expensive to maintain. They were far too pricey for my small-fry town of about 15,000 people.

They were strictly reserved for towering, multi-story amusement meccas in major cities. We had our amazing local spots, but they definitely didn’t have the floor space or the budget for a literal automobile.

The Miata remained an urban legend to us.

It was a shiny, cherry-red white whale that we only saw in blurry imported magazine photos. When Ridge Racer finally made the jump to the PlayStation, the excitement was electric.

Even though that home version was technically inferior to what we played in the dark, noisy corners of the arcade, it was a massive signal. It proved that home consoles were officially coming for the arcade's crown.

And they did. No matter how immersive those custom cabinets became, the convenience of the living room was a tide that couldn't be held back.

Looking back, the whole concept feels brilliantly surreal.

The arcade industry was throwing wild amounts of money and creativity at the wall, building these excessive monuments to speed. We might not have had the Miata, but we had the noise, the neon, and the shared awe of what gaming was trying to become.

It’s just a shame the same can’t be said for the modern arcade experience.

When did the PlayStation first appear in your world?

Can you remember picking up the controller for the first time? Maybe turning it over to get a proper look, getting used to the handles, finding your bearings with the new button layout.

Did your hands settle into position almost without thinking? Maybe it was immediate. Maybe it took a few sessions to shake off whatever you'd been using before.

Either way, after years of flat pads, it felt like a natural evolution. Like someone had finally stopped to ask ergonomic questions, rather than just drawing something that looked like a controller.

Love it or loathe it, the controller that became a 90s icon nearly didn't exist at all.

My Name is Teiyu Goto

When Sony designer Teiyu Goto sat down to create the original PlayStation controller in the early 90s, the brief from Sony management was essentially to make something like the Super Nintendo pad.

The SNES was its own cultural juggernaut at the time, and the thinking was sensible enough. If you want SNES owners to upgrade to your new machine, don’t frighten them with something unfamiliar.

Give them that flat but familiar design. Give them safe. Goto had other ideas.

The PlayStation was being built from the ground up around 3D gaming, and he felt a flat pad was a relic of a two-dimensional world.

So he designed a controller with handles. A sculpted, two-pronged grip that let your hands actually wrap around something. The idea was that holding the device should feel like inhabiting the same three-dimensional space as the games themselves.

But management, except for one powerful supporter, hated it. The design was knocked back pretty much immediately. Goto, under pressure, reluctantly went away and produced the flat version they wanted.

Come Fly With Me

Norio Ohga was a serious pilot, not just a hobbyist, but a man who had flown jets and understood viscerally what it meant for a control device to feel right in your hands.

As Sony's president and chairman, he had a rather personal stake in making sure this little gaming experiment didn't drag the Sony name through the mud.

But when Goto presented the flat model, Ohga’s reaction was pretty blunt. “This is no good. Change it. What was wrong with what you showed me before?”

He loved Goto’s original grip design because it reminded him of an aircraft control wheel. Something shaped to be held, designed with the physical reality of the human body in mind.

Management pushed back again and the standoff that followed became something of a legend in Sony corridors. At one tense presentation of the flat model, Ohga apparently came close to physically hurling the prototype across the room.

Goto, who was present, allegedly had to intervene to stop him. “Looking back,” Goto later said, “I think that was Ohga’s way of saying ‘hang in there’ to me.”

And it worked. Management, faced with a furious company president on one side and a flat piece of plastic on the other, relented.

The controller that shipped with the PlayStation in December 1994 was Goto's original vision intact. Handles, grip, the full thing.

Next time you pick one up, spare a thought for Teiyu Goto and the Sony president who nearly threw a controller across a boardroom to make sure you had something worth holding.

There’s a specific quality to the light when you’re twelve years old and doing something you shouldn’t be doing. It comes with a sense of breathless paranoia that’s never quite matched in your later years.

I remember my bedroom being dark except for that small television. Some Sony variant, a portable with a VCR next to it that hummed quietly. Volume at one notch, just one notch away from silence. Parents asleep across the landing.

If you’re of a certain vintage, you'll know that channel hopping at midnight felt like its own religion. The world had gone to sleep. And it felt like the main channels had given up on you.

Then there was Channel 4. After midnight it felt like a different beast entirely. Lawless, strange, broadcasting on a frequency that felt like it had not been sanctioned by anyone. Bizarre horror, violent anime, and Beavis and Butt-Head. That was the general shape of it.

But suddenly there was a woman catching a fly in her eyelashes and people dying in ways that went against the law of physics or anatomy and everything was black leather and fever logic and I sat completely still on my duvet because I did not want to break whatever spell this was.

Æon Flux felt like a transmission that wasn’t meant for me. Well, I guess it wasn’t. But what I mean is something broadcast from a frequency that only certain televisions could pick up… if you angled the aerial just right and the night was quiet enough.

So when the gaming magazines started running screenshots of a PlayStation adaptation, I felt it in my chest. It was there in the tiny glossy pages between the cheat codes and the letters page.

Screenshots that looked electric.

Then Viacom dissolved their games division and it was gone. A paragraph in a news ticker. The game cancelled weeks before it was supposed to ship.

βeta Flux

Imagine my glee, then, when a beta build surfaced online years later, preserved by the kind of people who refuse to let things disappear quietly.

Even so, it feels like you’re not really playing a game as much as you’re pressing your hands against the glass of something that never got to exist.

The first thing that hits you is the look of it. The animated series was Peter Chung's creation and his aesthetic is singular and strange.

Characters stretched tall and thin with proportions that rejected reality.

Apparently, Chung had spent years drawing the squat round children of Rugrats and when he finally got to make something of his own he went in the complete opposite direction, not as a stylistic choice exactly but as a kind of exhale.

Maximum elongation you might say. Everything angular and wrong in an undenyable cool and extremely 90s way.

The developers at Cryo Interactive took those impossible proportions and tried to build them out of PlayStation polygons, which in 1996 were blunt instruments. But somehow it worked. The Æon model had the hair and the silhouette and the attitude.

The builds that leaked suggest something that wanted to be Tomb Raider but set in the future. You had your ledge climbing and pole swinging. A lock-on system for the gunplay that mostly did what it was supposed to. Basic stuff really, even for 1996.

And the source material gave Cryo a strange canvas to work with. The philosophical chess match between Æon and Trevor Goodchild that the show used as an excuse to be beautiful and pretentious and lethal.

Even in this early build, you can see them reaching for it.

Beautiful Jank

But as with a lot of PlayStation games, the tank controls can keep you at arm’s length from the fantasy. Press up to move forward. Press left or right to rotate slowly on the spot like you’re a turret that has lost the will to fight. The camera gets ideas of its own and wanders off behind walls.

Tank controls are not automatically a dealbreaker for me. Resident Evil makes them work. Silent Hill makes them work. Tomb Raider makes them work. And I often find there’s a rhythm you can find if the game has been tuned properly, a logic that eventually clicks into place.

The problem here is that nothing has been “tuned”. This is a prototype and it feels like one. The controls do not have a rhythm, more of a suggestion of a rhythm that was never finished.

And then Denise Poirier opens her mouth and something shifts.

She came back to voice Æon and even compressed and rattling through decades-old prototype audio files, the delivery is exactly right. Bored with the concept of mortality. Dry as dust, like she’s doing you a favour by existing in the same timeline as you.

The banter between her and Trevor has the show's specific rhythm. That dry, exhausting wit where every line sounds like it was said while reloading a weapon. But it does sound authentic. It sounds like something that actually exists in the world.

Which, given everything else, makes the rest of it considerably worse.

Really though, I can’t help but come away thinking about this era and what it represented, rather than just a game that was never released.

Y’know, the way you think about certain things that you used to take for granted. The smell of a particular shop that isn’t there anymore. The specific blue of a gaming magazine you threw away when you moved house. The feeling of waiting for something to come out and believing, with complete confidence, that it would.

That era when the internet was still a rumour itself, and a screenshot in the right magazine could metastasise into a four-page feature before anyone had actually played a minute of it.

Finding out it was cancelled was the first time I understood that video games were made inside a business and sometimes the business made a decision and the art went in the bin. Not because it was bad, but because a number on a spreadsheet had changed.

The PlayStation era was full of chances taken on strange ideas.

There’s a sense from the beta that the people making it had actually watched the show, had understood what made it strange and dangerous and worth adapting.

It didn’t feel like a cash grab, though I will admit that was just my perception as a young boy who loved sci-fi. To me, it was an attempt to make something that felt the way the show felt, which is to say disorienting, beautiful, and slightly threatening to be around.

But it didn’t make it out. Cryo simply lost the publisher and the licence in one move.

The game is a ghost and ghosts do not get release dates. But it’s out there if you want to find it, living on YouTube in shaky capture footage like a transmission from a cancelled timeline. Downloadable here if you want to give it a go.

Some things you waited for in the nineties simply never came.

This was one of those. And yet the game, even unfinished and cancelled and buried in a prototype, still carries a specific feeling for me. The one you got the first time you saw something that had never existed before and understood, instinctively, that the world had just changed slightly.

I’m grateful for that.

There’s a postscript to all of this too.

The game did eventually come out. Sort of. When the cancellation hit, Cryo stripped the Æon Flux licence out of the code, renamed the characters, and released it in Europe in 1997 under the name Pax Corpus.

How was it rated? Well…

The official UK PlayStation Magazine gave it a 2/10. The phrase they used was 'Tomb Raider in Space, but Crap.' Make of that what you will.

94 'Til Infinity is now twice weekly! 🎉

Sundays remain your home for the deep dives and nostalgia you're used to. Wednesdays bring something new to the mix; short(er) posts that dig into the weird and wonderful side of early PlayStation culture.

Enjoy.

- Chris.

If you remember the 90s, you’ll remember console advertising looking a certain way.

Bright colours, fast cuts, characters bouncing around on screen. You knew exactly what you were watching and who it was for. But then Double Life landed, and nothing quite looked the same again.

Created by TBWA\London and directed by Frank Budgen, Double Life featured no gameplay footage whatsoever.

Instead, 19 real people who were not actors (apparently) and had genuinely real faces with actual charisma took turns confessing their secret lives to camera.

Set to Fauré’s Requiem, it was moody, a bit unsettling, and completely unlike anything gaming had put on television before. It became the most awarded ad campaign of 1999/2000, and watching it today it still holds up.

The brief was clearly intentional, and though the high-concept approach carried some risk, Sony had already made its move with the PlayStation. Gaming wasn't just for kids anymore. Wipeout, Resident Evil and Fear Effect proved that.

But now they wanted to cement that idea.

TBWA, the agency behind Apple's iconic '1984' ad, knew exactly how to make a product feel like a cultural shift. And once again, they delivered.

And then for the PlayStation 2, Sony went further.

The Third Place campaign leaned even harder into surrealism. Chris Cunningham, who was relatively fresh from directing Aphex Twin videos, made Mental Wealth, a deeply strange ad featuring a Scottish girl with an insect-like face speaking directly to camera.

Sony went further still with the PlayStation 3 with David Lynch, who was brought in to direct the campaign’s flagship spot.

Monochrome, doppelgängers, an industrial soundtrack, a faint Twin Peaks energy. It was the kind of ad your parents watched in silence before asking what on earth they’d just seen.

None of these campaigns showed you a single game. But maybe that was the point? There was always plenty of other campaigns that did.

What Sony grasped, and what most of their competitors missed, was that they weren't just selling a console. They were selling an identity along with it.

The advertising wasn’t aimed at convincing you the games were good. Most people probably knew that was already the case. I think it was aimed at making you feel like PlayStation was the kind of thing you were into.

I think that’s a completely different sell.

Did it work? Sure. The PlayStation was already a runaway success, so Sony had earned the freedom to get a little weird with it.

A generation of us grew up thinking PlayStation was cool in a way that felt earned rather than manufactured, which is the best trick advertising can pull off.

Go and watch Double Life above if you haven’t seen it in a while. It’s worth a minute of your Wednesday.

If you enjoy my work and want to support it, consider buying me a coffee. It helps keep the words flowing and the ideas brewing!

Buy me a Coffee?

• Developer: Polygon Magic

• Publisher: Tokuma Shoten (JP), Titus Software (NA)

• Release: JP June 24, 1999, NA November 6, 2000

• Platform(s): PlayStation

  ---

The late '90s PlayStation library was full of bizarre games, but Incredible Crisis stands out because it wraps all that weirdness around something surprisingly relatable: a family just trying to get home for grandma's birthday.

More on that later.

Developed by Polygon Magic and designed by Kenichi Nishi, this minigame collection dropped in Japan in 1999 and made its way to the US in November 2000. It arrived just two weeks after the PlayStation 2 launched.

I'd known about it for years but never picked it up until I thought my wife might enjoy it too. She did, mostly. It's a frustrating game at times, but it's the kind of silliness the PS1 and PS2 era did so well, and I miss that.

What Even Is Incredible Crisis?

The setup is beautifully simple.

You follow the Tanamatsuri family across a single day. It’s grandma’s 80th birthday, and all she wants is for everyone to come home early.

Author’s note: Relatable so far.

There’s a problem. Each family member’s day spirals into complete chaos, and just surviving long enough to make it to the party is what makes Incredible Crisis… incredible.

Author’s note: Still relatable?

Father gets caught up in a workplace dance routine before a runaway globe sends his afternoon sideways. Mother ends up as an accidental accomplice in a bank robbery, then somehow finds herself piloting a military jet. The kids get shrunk to insect size and have to escape an antlion pit.

Author’s note: ???

Every time you think it can't get weirder, it does.

The whole thing is split into four sections, one per family member, and each section strings together a handful of minigames connected by short cutscenes. It’s basically a story-driven minigame collection, and the story is doing most of the heavy lifting.

The Minigames Are Hit and Miss

The scenarios are way more entertaining than the gameplay, which is a problem when the whole game is minigames. Too many of them boil down to pressing X in time with a meter or following directional prompts, and those mechanics come up more often than they should.

There are standouts, though.

The opening dance routine feels totally natural on a console that gave us PaRappa the Rapper and Bust a Groove, and it's a strong first impression. Mama's jet fighter sequence plays like a stripped-down Zaxxon, dodging hangar doors from a behind-the-back perspective.

And the bit where she takes on a giant teddy bear in an aerial dogfight feels like it fell out of Star Fox 64's All-Range Mode. Okay, perhaps a slight exaggeration, but it’s a fun sequence. Then there's a grocery-weighing puzzle that's basically the boulder swap from Raiders of the Lost Ark, which is such a specific reference that you can't help but respect it.

But for every creative moment, there’s another minigame that just asks you to mash a button or wiggle the analogue stick. The stress meter that runs through every challenge adds some tension, but it’s not enough to make the repetitive ones feel fresh.

One thing that absolutely delivers is the music. The entire soundtrack was performed by the Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra, and it’s an inspired choice. Their instrumental ska tracks bring this infectious energy to every scenario.

Stressful moments feel exciting rather than frustrating, and the lighter scenes get an extra layer of charm from the bouncy horn sections.

It’s the kind of soundtrack you’d happily listen to outside of the game, which is more than you can say for most minigame collections. With the exception of Point Blank, but then I do have an odd taste in music while I’m doing house work.

Playing It With Someone Else

Incredible Crisis isn’t technically a multiplayer game, but passing the controller back and forth works surprisingly well. The minigames are short enough that you’re constantly swapping, and half the fun is watching the other person react to whatever absurdity the game throws at them next.

My wife and I spent a lot of the runtime just laughing at the cutscenes and groaning at the more tedious button-mashing sections. It’s a two-hour game at most, which honestly turns out to be the perfect length.

Any longer and the repetition would wear thin. As it stands, it’s just the right amount of time to enjoy the ride without the weaker minigames overstaying their welcome.

Incredible Crisis belongs to a very specific moment in gaming history. The late ‘90s and early 2000s were packed with quirky Japanese games that somehow made it to western shelves. The PlayStation’s popularity and relatively accessible development tools meant smaller studios could afford to take creative risks.

Not all of those risks paid off commercially, and a lot of those studios eventually closed or moved to mobile development, but the games they left behind have a personality you don’t see much of anymore.

Kenichi Nishi’s career is a good example of that creative spirit. Before Incredible Crisis, he worked at Square on Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG. He founded Love-de-Lic, where the team made Moon: Remix RPG Adventure, a game that deconstructed the RPG genre years before that became fashionable.

After that, he started Skip Ltd. and worked with Nintendo on the Chibi-Robo series. The guy’s resume reads like a tour of the most interesting corners of Japanese game development.

What a legacy.

Is It Worth Playing Today?

If you go into Incredible Crisis expecting a polished minigame collection, you’ll be disappointed. The gameplay is too simple and too repetitive for that. But if you treat it as a short, bizarre interactive comedy that you can share with someone on the sofa, it’s a genuinely good time.

The scenarios are mostly inventive, the soundtrack is fantastic, and it wraps up before it runs out of steam. But what sticks with you is the family at the centre of it all. After the most absurd day imaginable, the stereotypical Tanamatsuris still make it home to celebrate grandma's birthday.

It's silly and over the top, but there's a warmth underneath it.

We've all had those days where nothing goes right and all you want is to be around the people who matter. Incredible Crisis takes that feeling and cranks it up to eleven, but the core of it is something anyone can relate to.

If you enjoy my work and want to support it, consider buying me a coffee. It helps keep the words flowing and the ideas brewing!

Buy me a Coffee

• Developer: Arika

• Publisher: Capcom

• Release: JP August 2002, NA November 2003

• Platform(s): PlayStation 2

For my daughter, Rose, the ocean is more of a “catalog” than a body of water.

Rose is autistic, and like many neurodivergent minds, she doesn’t just have “hobbies” but what’s known as special interests. She absorbs facts about marine biology with a terrifying efficiency.

She can recite the crush depth of a Goblin Shark and which bio-luminescent creatures thrive in the midnight zone. Then instead of saying good morning as neurotypicals do, she'll share these facts with me, her friends, or her teacher.

The sea is her anchor, basically. And our relationship? Well, our relationship is good. It’s solid, even. But it’s also, for lack of a better word, distant. While my other daughters welcome hugs, Rose does not. That's fine. I can show up for her in other ways, offer support through different means.

And because the world is often too loud, too bright, and too demanding, she often retreats into these interests. As her father, I’ve always though it’d be neat to meet her there. Somewhere in among those special interests.

She's curious about video games as a medium, so we often spend time exploring different titles together. And while a lot don’t click with her, I knew we’d eventually find a middle ground. What she would call "an ocean without the noise”.

And we did find it, strangely enough, at the bottom of the sea on the PlayStation 2. Everblue 2.

For the uninitiated, Everblue 2 (released by Capcom in 2002) is a scuba diving simulation RPG. That sounds thrilling to almost no one. There are no guns. There are no explosions. There is no “winning” in the traditional sense.

You play as a diver named Leo on a Caribbean island, and you dive into shipwrecks to salvage trinkets while taking photos of fish. You can upgrade your equipment too. It’s straightforward stuff.

Most might find it dull. But for a girl who gets excited about Coelacanths (which Wikipedia describes as an ancient group of lobe-finned fish in the class Actinistia), it was just the ticket.

Hypnotic Ambience

I remember that feeling of knowing we were on to a winner. The moment we both hit the water, when the world fell away. The music faded into a muffled, ambient drone. The only constant sound was the rhythmic hiss-clunk of the regulator. Inhale. Exhale.

After hours of filtering the chaos of classrooms and crowds, Rose found the silence almost hypnotic. Calming something in her.

Still, it's a PlayStation 2 game, and controls have evolved considerably since then. I can overlook the clunkiness, but I’d like her to experience this at its best.

That means I manage the swimming (the dual-analog controls are a little finicky), and Rose acts as Navigator and Chief Marine Biologist. She handles the thinking while I handle the doing.

There’s a sonar mechanic. You ping the environment, and if there’s metal nearby (a gold coin, a piece of scrap, an ancient vase) you get a return signal. It’s a game of pattern recognition and sorting.

This is where the magic happens. In a high-octane game, communication needs to be rapid-fire. “Look out!” “Shoot that!” “Oh shit!” It’s demanding.

In Everblue 2, the pace is glacial. We drift through the hull of a sunken ferry. Rose watches the corner of the screen. My anxiety goes up a little as we navigate through narrower and narrower vessels.

“Ping,” she says softly. I press the sonar button. The sound ripples out. Ping-ping. “To the left,” she directs. “Under the sand.”

We drift over. We dig. We find a ‘Glass Shard’. It’s worthless trash in the game economy. “Keep it,” she says. “It matches the other one.”

So we keep it.

There’s an unexpected bond in this shared focus. We aren’t looking at each other, we’re both looking at the same blue abyss. The screen becomes a third space of sorts, a neutral ground where we can meet without the pressure of social performance.

The game’s mechanics (managing air and stamina) also provided us with a surprising metaphor for her own energy levels. In Everblue 2, if you swim too fast or carry too much weight, your pulse rises, and you burn through oxygen faster.

You have to stop, choosing to float so that your heart rate settles.

One evening, I was trying to rush back to the boat to sell our loot. “Leo is tired,” Rose noted, watching the pulse meter climb. “He needs to float for a minute.” So I stopped touching the controller. On screen, the diver hung suspended in the water, bubbles rising slowly.

We sat there in the living room, in silence, watching a digital man catch his breath. “I felt like Leo today,” she said.

Everblue 2 isn’t a masterpiece of game design. The walking animations are stiff, the plot is forgettable and pedestrian, and the voice acting is bad. Charmingly so.

We've devoted hours to that ocean, though. Cataloging species after species, with Rose meticulously fact-checking every entry against her collection of real-world guidebooks.

Improving our equipment with better air tanks for longer dives. Cleaning the seafloor, retrieving each rusted can with the patience of actual conservationists.

For a father trying to connect with a daughter who sees the world differently, this isn’t the sort of game I’d normally play. But then, that’s not the point. The point is the silence it offers.

It’s about finding a frequency we could both tune into.

We’ll beat the game eventually. The credits will roll. But we’ll still load it up on rainy Sundays. We’ll dive back in, not to really accomplish anything, but just to listen to the regulator.

Hiss. Clunk.

“Ping,” Rose says.

“Ping,” I reply.

And in that quiet, we are perfectly understood.

If you enjoy my work and want to support it, consider buying me a coffee. It helps keep the words flowing and the ideas brewing!

Buy me a Coffee

• Developer: Rockstar North (formerly DMA Design)

• Publisher: Rockstar Games

• Release: NA October 2002, EU/AU October 2002, JP May 2003

• Platform(s): PlayStation 2, PC (2003), Xbox (2003)

  ---

When Rockstar announced they’d cast Ray Liotta (the actual guy from Goodfellas) as Tommy Vercetti, it felt a little absurd. Hollywood talent for a video game? Hmm. We’d just spent a year with Claude, the silent protagonist of GTA III, and that had worked fine. This felt like the kind of paradigm shift that either revolutionizes everything or fails like the DeLorean Motor Company.

In spectacular fashion.

Truth be told, I’ve always rooted for voice actors over Hollywood A-listers when it comes to casting. But then I played it. And oh. Oh. Ray Liotta voiced Tommy, but he became him too, turning every line into pure charisma and menace.

It worked, and he delivered a performance just as iconic as any of his better known acting roles. But Liotta’s casting wasn’t the only way Rockstar had decided to get ambitious. It was just the beginning of what would become one of gaming’s most audacious sequels.

Grand Theft Auto III had proven the concept worked.

You could make a 3D open-world crime game and people would lose their minds over it. But Vice City felt a lot like Rockstar was saying “Okay, but what if we pushed the tech further? What if we just got wild with it?” What if instead of gray Liberty City rain, we gave them perpetual Florida sunshine? What if instead of ambient criminal misery, we gave them the entire 1980s distilled into a playable vacation?

A prequel set in 1986 when most of us were either children or not born yet, themed around a decade famous for terrible fashion, drugs and excess, sex and violence, featuring a protagonist who talked back and had opinions.

Was this risky? Hardly. The hype was massive, expectations were through the roof. And when Vice City launched on PlayStation 2 in October 2002, productivity plummeted as people called in sick or mysteriously needed a personal day.

Welcome to Vice City

We’d all read the reviews. We’d bought into the hype. We knew what to expect. But none of that prepared us for actually booting up Vice City and getting swept away by that stylized 80s intro.

The opening is perfect. Synth drums, helicopter blades, that unmistakable Rockstar logo. Tommy steps off the chopper in a Hawaiian shirt that screams “I am absolutely going to commit crimes today” and within minutes you’re in a botched drug deal with chainsaws and screaming.

It never felt like Liberty City's slow burn. This was a complete tonal shift. Vice City grabbed you by the meat and potatoes and threw you into the deep end of a pool filled with cocaine and broken dreams.

And while the city itself was smaller than Liberty City, it never felt it. Two islands connected by bridges the game gleefully locked until you were ready to progress.

Ocean Beach with its art deco hotels. Downtown with actual skyscrapers. Little Havana with its Cuban influence. The beaches, the golf course, the mall you could rampage through. Everything was bathed in that pink-orange sunset glow that made 1986 look like the greatest year in human history.

And the neon. Good god, the neon. Every building seemed to have glowing signs. The Malibu Club pulsed with pink and blue. Storefronts advertised in flickering letters. At night, Vice City looked like someone had taken Miami, removed all subtlety, and cranked the saturation to eleven.

Liberty City this was not.

I Want My MTV Violence

The core GTA formula remained intact. Steal vehicles, shoot people, complete missions that escalated from petty crime to “why am I dressed as a cop starting a gang war.” But Rockstar had spent the year since GTA III listening to feedback.

Motorcycles, for example, made their debut after being cut from GTA III because, according to Rockstar, they just didn't feel right. You could buy property now too, transforming Tommy from street thug into legitimate business owner.

Well, “legitimate” in the sense that you definitely bought a strip club, a taxi company, a film studio producing “artistic” content, and a printing press for counterfeiting money.

Every property you bought unlocked its own series of missions. You genuinely felt like you were constructing a criminal empire. Progression wasn't just about ticking off objectives. It was about acquiring assets and watching Tommy's influence seep into every corner of Vice City's business world.

And the mission variety was genuinely impressive.

One minute you’re doing a simple protection racket. The next you’re piloting an RC helicopter armed with bombs to take out construction workers because apparently that’s a normal Tuesday in Vice City. You’d race motorcycles, rob banks, engage in turf wars, fly seaplanes, commit insurance fraud, and at one point literally reenact the chainsaw scene from Scarface.

Not every mission was great, and some were genuinely infuriating, but the sheer variety on offer (and your surroundings) made it easy to overlook the frustrations.

Combat got the upgrades it desperately needed too.

Crouching, taking cover, dual-wielding certain weapons for that authentic 80s action movie experience. The targeting was still janky (this was 2002, we accepted jank as the price of ambition) but it was jank with style.

And the threads. You could finally change Tommy’s outfit. Hawaiian shirts, track suits, casual wear, that iconic white Scarface suit that made you look like you either sold Ferraris or ran a cartel. Getting haircuts, buying different styles. It sounds trivial but it mattered. Liberty City’s Claude was everyone.

Vice City’s Tommy was yours.

The Referenced 80s

Here’s where Vice City stopped being a great game and became a cultural phenomenon that still has people arguing about whether San Andreas was actually better.

It wasn’t. Fight me.

Nine radio stations. Not generic background music. Nine actual, curated, licensed-to-the-point-of-bankruptcy radio stations that played genuine 80s hits.

Wave 103 had your New Wave and synthpop. Emotion 98.3 brought the power ballads that made you feel things while running over pedestrians. Flash FM was pure pop. V-Rock delivered hair metal so aggressively 80s you could practically smell the Aqua Net through your TV.

And of course, this being Grand Theft Auto meant that you could just drive. No missions or objectives. Just cruise Ocean Beach at sunset with Hall & Oates playing and feel more relaxed than you had any right to feel in a game about murdering, prostitution and drubs. Lotta drugs.

And I did drive aimlessly. A lot. It was perfect for chilling out while discovering new (old) music. In fact, there’s an entire generation who discovered 80s music through Vice City’s radio stations and subsequently annoyed their parents by asking “who’s this Flock of Seagulls band? Have you heard of them?”

And about that voice acting.

For Rockstar North’s second 3D outing, the cast was absurdly stacked. Ray Liotta as Tommy. Philip Michael Thomas (yes, actually from Miami Vice) as Lance Vance, your partner whose rhyming name should've been an immediate red flag.

William Fichtner as Ken Rosenberg, the neurotic lawyer. Burt Reynolds as Avery Carrington. Danny Trejo, Fairuza Balk, Deborah Harry from Blondie.

Rockstar wasn’t messing around.

Every character was an 80s archetype turned up to maximum. Lance wore white suits and had an ego you could see from orbit. Mercedes Cortez was exactly what you’d expect from someone named Mercedes Cortez in 1986 Miami. Ricardo Diaz was every Scarface-inspired drug lord rolled into one mansion full of tigers and poor impulse control.

The missions constantly winked at 80s crime cinema. The bank heist felt ripped from Heat. You worked your way up through criminal organizations like Carlito’s Way. The entire game was basically Rockstar saying “remember that cool scene from that cool movie? Now YOU do it, but with worse graphics, better music and a little jank.”

Even the businesses were references.

Kaufman Cabs was clearly nodding to Taxi Driver. Print Works for money laundering. The Malibu Club where you’d do... Malibu Club things. InterGlobal Films where you’d help produce “movies” that were definitely art and not exploitation. Each one came with unique missions that explored different criminal ventures, all wrapped in that synthetic 80s sheen.

I'm always fascinated by the behind-the-scenes process of creating art, and Vice City is no exception. With so many moving parts and so much talent involved, it managed to elevate the entire concept of open world gaming.

Vice City sold over 17 million copies. It won every award. Jack Thompson (remember Jack Thompson?!) lost his mind on cable news warning that children were being corrupted by a game where you could listen to “Michael Jackson while committing vehicular manslaughter”.

I was more of a Rick James kinda guy.

But the real impact was subtler. Vice City proved that setting could elevate a game almost as much as mechanics. That atmosphere and style weren't just window dressing. It was a legitimate time capsule, a portal to an era that maybe never quite existed.

Rockstar would make bigger games.

San Andreas was more ambitious. GTA IV was more “serious” and “realistic” (boring). GTA V printed money. But Vice City remains the purest expression of what made the series special. Controlled chaos wrapped in cultural satire, delivered with incredible music and zero shame.

I’m still waiting for a proper return. GTA VI is apparently set in a fictional Florida, which is close enough to get hopes dangerously high. Because once you’ve experienced cruising down Ocean Drive on a stolen PCJ-600 while “Out of Touch” plays and half of Vice City’s police force wants you dead, regular life loses some of its appeal.

Vice City was a vacation I never wanted to leave. A Miami more Miami than the real thing. The summer I spent playing it fused with this neon-soaked fantasy, the two inseparable in my memory ever since.

A love letter to a decade of excess written by people who knew that sometimes more is more, and restraint is overrated.

• Developer: DMA Design

• Publisher: BMG Interactive

• Release: EU 1997. US 1998.

• Platform(s): PlayStation, PC and GBC

  ---

We all had that one friend whose parents were a little more relaxed than our own, right?

Rules were everything at my place. But at David’s? Eh, not so much. He had that effortless popularity that made his house a great place to hang out. Sleepovers felt like a total getaway from my usual, everyday life.

Age ratings were ignored and the kitchen was generally a free-for-all. Coke, ramen, hot dogs, chocolate… you name it. Even the liquor cabinet seemed to be fair game. That’s where I had my “first drink”. It was Tia Maria. It tasted like sugary dirt and fire, and I’ve never quite gotten over it.

He even had a friendly chihuahua called Brick. I loved that dog.

But the real highlight was huddling around his TV with the volume low to play Grand Theft Auto for the first time. Loading it up, I wasn’t really sure what to expect until he turned around to me and said, "Watch this”.

A mischievous grin on his face, he steered his pixelated car onto the sidewalk, mowing over an entire procession of orange-robed Hare Krishnas. I stared at Brick. Brick stared back. There wasn't a single thought behind those eyes, and honestly, there wasn't much going on behind mine either.

The screen immediately lit up with the word “GOURANGA!” in big letters. I didn’t understand what it meant, but I knew one thing for sure. Holy shit, were we worlds away from the safety of Ridge Racer and Crash Bandicoot…

If you enjoy my work and want to support it, consider buying me a coffee. It helps keep the words flowing and the ideas brewing!

Buy me a Coffee

It’s difficult to explain to a modern audience just how dangerous this game felt at the time or the sheer scale of the media frenzy it caused.

Newspapers ran hysterical headlines about its “corrupting influence” while politicians debated banning it entirely, which naturally only made us want to play it more. And because of the furore around it, it became a genuine cultural flash-point proving that games could be dangerous, subversive, and “grown up”.

Looking back, I’ll admit my twelve-year-old brain probably blew things out of proportion. A bit like the media did. It felt like the stakes were sky high, but now years later, I’m wondering what all the fuss was even about.

I’m 40 now. It’s 2026, and the industry’s idea of a scandal has completely shifted since I was a kid. But I’m finally circling back to this game as an adult to see if it actually has legs, or if I only loved it because it felt like a cheap thrill of pre-teen rebellion.

Naughty, Naughty, Very Naughty

Grand Theft Auto is refreshingly simple, but then most games from this era are. I spend a lot of time with retro titles, and the "instant-game" nature of them always catches me slightly off guard. Modern gaming usually involves sitting through a lecture-length tutorial or staring at a 5GB day-one patch before you even see a menu.

Not here, not when the only thing standing between you and a high-speed chase is a ten-second loading screen. Then you’re dropped onto a sidewalk in Liberty City with nothing but a few lives and a total lack of direction. There’s no brooding protagonist or tragic backstory to sit through.

You just walk up to a ringing payphone, read a text-based briefing from a local mobster, and go steal a car. You’ll do this often throughout three locations. Those three locations would later become legendary (Liberty City, San Andreas, and Vice City), but don’t expect the sprawling immersive worlds of the 3D era.

And that is effectively the entire loop. Answer a phone, drive to the yellow arrow, and cause enough property damage to satisfy a pixels-wide boss. It’s remarkably hands-off. You aren't really being guided through a narrative journey. You’re just a ‘freelance contractor’ in a Hawaiian shirt doing chores for the underworld.

You’re a guy looking to stack cash and climb the criminal ladder, and that’s really all there is to it.

So unsurprisingly, the string of missions you accept does feel like an excuse for some arcade-style ultra-violence. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. And if you manage to find any actual value in the “narrative,” that’s just a happy bonus.

It’s a game that wears its influences proudly, too. The folks at DMA Design (now known as Rockstar North) clearly spent a lot of their time watching crime movies.

As a result, the game drips with the cool, cynical crime vibe of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, mixed with the screeching tires of 70s car chase classics like The French Connection or The Italian Job. It’s a love letter to high-speed chases and guys in cheap suits doing bad things.

There is something genuinely charming about how it pulls everything off in such a lo-fi manner. Seeing these massive ambitions filtered through a handful of crunchy pixels makes for the absurd.

It’s a world away from the chaotic brutality the media obsessed over back when everyone was busy arguing over Blur versus Oasis or trying to figure out if the Spice Girls were actually taking over the world.

The cars look like toys. The people are little clusters of pixels that scurry around like ants. When you punch someone, they fall with a slapstick thud that feels more like a cartoon than a crime drama.

It creates a fever dream disconnect between the violence you are committing and the visuals on screen. You are murdering people, but it looks like a children’s diorama. It’s incredibly dark at times, maybe even slightly disturbing, but undeniably funny in that specific, edgy 90s way.

And the audio design really elevates the experience. It offers a level of immersion that I found unheard of in 1997, largely because the radio doesn't just loop generic noise. When you steal a car, you’re treated to distinct stations like The Fix FM for techno or Head Radio for pop.

It felt like a genuine attempt to simulate scanning a real dial while cruising between missions. Unfortunately, that’s where the pleasantries end.

The Reality of 1997 Design

But here’s the catch.

We need to talk about the pain, because nostalgia tends to smooth over the rough edges. By 2026, we’ve grown soft. We’re used to generous checkpoints and health bars that regenerate the moment we hide behind a wall. Grand Theft Auto offers no such comforts. In fact, it feels actively hostile.

First, you have to wrestle with the controls. They’re essentially “tank controls”, where pressing “up” moves you forward in whatever direction you’re facing rather than toward the top of the screen.

And it feels really can only be described as steering a shopping cart with a broken wheel. Trying to take a corner during a high-speed chase usually ends with you smashed against a brick wall while the police box you in.

Then there’s the save system, or the total lack of one. You can’t save after a mission or halfway through a city. You have to finish the entire chapter in one sitting to keep your progress. It demands a level of perfection that feels cruel by modern standards.

The camera is arguably your most persistent enemy. It’s an erratic mess that zooms in and out based on your current speed, which sounds fine in theory but is a disaster in practice. When you’re on foot, the view stays so tight that you have zero situational awareness.

You’ll frequently be walking down the sidewalk only to drop dead instantly because a cop shot you from a distance the screen literally hadn’t rendered yet. By the time the camera decides to zoom out and show you the threat, you’re already looking at a "Wasted" screen.

It turns every street corner into a potential firing squad that you have no way of seeing until it’s too late.

The missions range from difficult to deeply frustrating. You’ll be ordered to drive a volatile truck across the city under a time limit that feels near impossible. I’m talking zero room for error. If you clip a corner or nudge a wall too hard, your vehicle immediately erupts into a fireball.

That’s one life gone.

If you burn through your remaining lives, there are no checkpoints to save you. You’re sent straight back to the very beginning of the level to think about what you've done. It turns a simple delivery into a high-stakes game of operation where one wrong move deletes an hour of your life.

So, with all its negatives, does Grand Theft Auto hold up in 2026?

Not really, and I think that’s okay. The tank controls make every vehicle feel like a heavy, unresponsive slab of metal, and the combat is basically a high-stakes game of "spray and pray," but I don’t think that original spark of rebellion has faded.

I wouldn’t necessarily suggest grinding through to the credits. The lack of save points feels less like a challenge and more like a relic of a less forgiving era. Instead, my advice is to embrace modern convenience. Emulate it. Use save states to bypass the misery, or simply spend an hour wandering through the pixelated blueprints of these iconic cities.

It is a pilgrimage worth taking, even if only to stand at the point where the chaos began. What was once a cultural lightning rod has become a digital monument.

In loving memory of Brick.

If you enjoy my work and want to support it, consider buying me a coffee. It helps keep the words flowing and the ideas brewing!

Buy me a Coffee

“It’s Tricky to rock a rhyme, to rock a rhyme that’s right on time, it’s Tricky!”

You can feel the controller vibrating in your palms. It’s the dawn of the new millennium and you’re tearing down the Elysium Alps as Elise. Fresh snow sprays against the camera while fireworks explode above crowds screaming your name.

The board slices through the powder leaving a crisp, flattened trail. The audio shifts, with the crunch of the snow changing perfectly depending on the terrain beneath your feet. Rahzel insists you, “Call your mama in the room and show her how great you are!”

But while we were all busy mastering Uber Tricks in SSX Tricky, the rest of the world was starting to lose its mind. With the 24-hour news cycle in full swing, the media was desperate for a fresh nightmare.

They found their new monster in the PlayStation 2. It was that black, monolithic slab of silicon sitting right under your TV. How? Well, rumors began to spread that Iraq was stockpiling thousands of consoles to strip them for parts.

The rumors were baseless, of course, but that didn't stop various outlets from running with the story. It was a classic case of the media spinning a narrative out of their own fear of teenage hobbies.

“An integrated bundle of 12-15 PlayStations could provide enough computer power to control an Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV.” - Eurogamer, 2001

The idea was that a cluster of these consoles could actually power the guidance system of a long-range missile. It felt like a bad straight-to-DVD thriller, and officials did eventually debunk it as pure tech-illiterate hysteria.

But that underlying fear? It wasn't entirely misplaced.

The PlayStation 2 was an absolute monster at certain tasks. Sure, it could run SSX Tricky at a flawless 60 frames per second, but its true potential went far beyond gaming. Three years later, inside a quiet laboratory in Illinois, someone finally proved exactly what that hardware could do.

If you enjoy my work and want to support it, consider buying me a coffee. It helps keep the words flowing and the ideas brewing!

Consider Buying Me a Coffee

I dug into the archives of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. This is the place that gave us the Mosaic web browser. They deal in serious hardware, because well, they often dabble in serious problems.

But the team at NCSA hit a massive wall. They needed to crunch numbers for quantum chromodynamics and gravitational waves, which is basically the "final boss" of math. Or so I’m reliably informed by a three-minute YouTube deep dive I watched while half-asleep.

We’re basically talking about the kind of heavy-duty simulations used to model black hole collisions. Normally, you’d just go out and buy a multi-million dollar supercomputer for a job like that.

But the NCSA team was operating on a budget so small it wouldn't even cover the voice acting for a minor side quest in Final Fantasy X. And that’s when they looked at the PlayStation 2.

Let’s Get Emotional

The Sony PlayStation 2 was around $199 at the time. Inside that black plastic shell was the Emotion Engine. You might have heard of it, and it was a big deal around the time of the PlayStation 2 release.

This processor was unique. It was an 128-bit wafer designed to push vector math faster than almost anything else on the consumer market. And so the researchers crunched the numbers and crunched them some more. The conclusion was that a cluster of standard PC servers would cost a fortune. A cluster of PS2s would cost pennies in comparison.

So they went shopping.

The team didn't reach out to Sony for a partnership or a sponsorship. Instead, they just went out and bought them. Can you imagine the look on a retail worker’s face when they walked in to ask for seventy consoles?

After walking away with all the hardware they needed, they also bought 70 copies of "Linux for PlayStation 2". This kit was the key. It allowed them to bypass Sony’s locked-down operating system and transform each console into a raw Linux node.

“This is literally a hand-made supercomputer assembled by a creative group of researchers who are constantly pushing the limits of our field.” - Dan Reed, director of NCSA.

They ripped the consoles out of the boxes. They then placed them on metal racks, and wired them together using high-speed network switches made by HP.

The total cost was roughly $50,000. A comparable supercomputer would have cost five or ten times that amount.

Reed continued, “Many people have talked about the possibilities of the PlayStation’s graphic processors, but to our knowledge, no one else has attempted to make these machines perform as a large, integrated Linux cluster. We have shown it is possible, and the long-term result could be another low-cost computing alternative for the scientific community.”

Frankenstein Cluster

This wasn’t some viral stunt. It was a functional scientific instrument. The "Frankenstein Cluster" ran legitimate, high-level code. And as it turns out, the Emotion Engine was surprisingly elite at the specific matrix multiplication needed for physics simulations.

It actually worked.

For a brief period, one of the most powerful computing clusters in the academic world was powered by the same hardware that 12-year-olds were using to play Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4. The photos of this setup are surreal.

You expect a supercomputer to look like a monolith. You expect blinking lights and chrome. But this looked like a cluttered teenager’s bedroom multiplied by seventy. You can see the standard retail Sony logos. You can see the memory card slots. It is a wall of black plastic bricks.

There is something darkly funny about it. These machines were designed to simulate fantasy worlds, they were built to render ‘dragons and explosions’. But these scientists forced them to simulate the crushing gravity of a dying star.

It worked, even if the whole setup felt magnificently out of place.

The NCSA eventually retired the cluster. Hardware evolved. Commodity PCs became cheaper and faster. The PS2 became obsolete. But for a moment, the barrier between ‘toy’ and ‘tool’ vanished.

‘Despite the computing promise of game consoles that sell for less than $200, the researchers acknowledged that the experiment was likely to be most useful for a group of relatively narrow scientific problems.’ - New York Times, John Markoff

I think we often underestimate the tech we own.

I also think this highlights how the devices we use for entertainment are often capable of much more than we imagine. The PlayStation 2 pushed the limits of consumer hardware, but its successor, the PlayStation 3, took things even further with its famously complex internals.

The last of its kind before the PlayStation 4 and 5 opted for less bespoke and more conventional hardware.

The PS3 also eventually served science in a way that was both similar and entirely new through Folding@home. Instead of a few researchers chaining consoles together in a lab, millions of gamers used their PS3s to join a massive, global distributed computing network.

While you slept, your console was crunching data to help scientists understand protein folding and search for cures for diseases like Alzheimer’s and cancer. It was the final chapter of an era where the gaming box in your closet could double as a dormant monster of a supercomputer.

I’m getting emotional just thinking about it.

If you enjoy my work and want to support it, consider buying me a coffee. It helps keep the words flowing and the ideas brewing!

Consider Buying Me a Coffee