There was a stretch of my life where the whole week seemed to lean toward Friday afternoon.

I was in that stretch between finishing work for the day and starting university again. Early starts, steel toe boots, lunch wrapped in foil and the day carved up by shift patterns instead of lecture timetables.

Earning my own money gave the week a “shape” it hadn’t had before, and because the week had shape, the weekend actually meant something. By Thursday I was already counting down, already visualizing the battles ahead of me.

I’d get in, drop my bag, eat something standing up, and put the PS3 on. That orchestral chime did the work of clearing my head. Deep breath in, then out. Then Warhawk.

For a few hours I’d be somewhere else entirely.

I was never really an online gamer, spending most of my time dabbling. I was a single player gamer. Resistance, Uncharted and Killzone 2. But Warhawk was the exception, and looking back I think it’s because the game was built entirely around other people.

You see, Warhawk was a game with no single player at all. Well, unless you count some mostly overlooked training missions.

Sony and Incognito Studios cut it before release and leaned all the way into multiplayer instead, with up to 32 people across five maps, each with several layouts, fighting over Zone control points or racing for the flag.

It was a bold decision. But was it the right decision? I think so. It meant everything about the game, right down to the way maps were built, existed to make other people worth finding. A sense of scale and genuine delight as you made your way towards an unsuspecting enemy.

The vehicles were definitely the spine of the experience. Jeeps got squads to a contested base before it flipped to the other team and tanks held ground. But tanks were exposed the second they drifted off on their own, making them easy pickings for a Warhawk with a lock-on.

And the Warhawk itself, the aircraft the whole game is named for, took actual practice. You could fly it with the SIXAXIS motion controls if you wanted, tilting the pad like a control yoke, or you could use regular dual sticks which I imagine most did.

Either way, the first few dogfights usually ended with you upside down in a canyon wall. But once it clicked, nothing else on the PS3 felt like it. Nothing for me has felt like it since.

None of it needed spelling out either. There was never any doubt about what you or your team needed to do next. The UI stayed out of the way while simultaneously telling you everything, which mattered given how chaotic things could get.

Some people never left the pilot's seat, and some never got out of a tank, and some sat on a turret defending a base for an entire match. The game ran on genuine teamwork, not solo glory.

But what actually stuck with me wasn’t the mechanics. It was how vocal everyone was. Most of the people I played with were in the US, so my Friday evening was their Friday afternoon, and somebody would drop off mid-match to make coffee or take the dog out.

I got to know people. Something about the American way of life grew on me, enough to always want to visit, never enough to want to live there like a lot of my friends did.

In between flying and dying we talked about work, football, baseball, family, whatever was going on that week. We were still properly competitive, don't get me wrong, but it became less like a match and more like a standing appointment with people who just become friends.

It's one thing to have an idea of what Americans, or any nationality, are like from a distance. It's another after you've lost to the same three of them every Friday for a year and heard them moan about their commute like anyone else would.

We weren't representing anywhere except the Eucadian Republic or the Chernovan Empire, whichever avatar we'd landed on, just a bunch of dudes who'd found a game that became our third place.

We were separated by the Atlantic, but united in wanting the same thing, a decent life, for ourselves and for the people we cared about. That, and kicking ass in Warhawk.

Most online games come and go in a few months, but Warhawk held on for us until Modern Warfare 2 arrived and pulled the group elsewhere.

Before that though, there was always Friday, finishing a shift, knowing that in an hour I'd hear "there he is" through a headset from someone six time zones away.

Three simple words that meant the weekend was mine, and that I was about to hand large chunks of it over to a bunch of Yanks who thought tea was inferior to coffee.

Well, no one is perfect. 🫖

In March 2001, Konami put out a mech action game called Zone of the Enders. It was produced by my beloved, Hideo Kojima, and had mechs designed by Yoji Shinkawa straight off the back of Metal Gear Solid.

That’s some proper pedigree for a game that almost nobody bought for itself, erm, including me.

C’mon. Maybe someone will surprise me in the comment section, but we all bought ZOE because the box contained a playable demo of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, a game not due out until that autumn.

Pardon my French, but this was a pretty big flipping deal.

And because of this pairing, sales figures for Zone of the Enders were always slightly misleading, since a large number of buyers just wanted early hands on the sequel everyone was waiting for.

Even Penny Arcade clocked it at the time, noting drily that the MGS2 demo was coming to shops soon and it happened to come with “some other game”, which Konami were being awfully generous about.

It’s a strange thing to build a launch strategy around, isn’t it?

But it tells you something true about the PS2’s first couple of years, which is that publishers were willing to gamble a full-price release as a delivery mechanism for hype, and trust that the game itself might find its footing along the way.

Zone of the Enders mostly didn’t.

Played today it’s a game of pure contradiction, gorgeous mech combat wrapped around fetch quests with no map markers, a script that swings between genuinely interesting and full anime whinge.

Leo Stenbuck, your accidental pilot, refuses to kill anyone even when the plot repeatedly hands him good reason to, and the game doesn’t hide the fact this makes him insufferable, it just never really finds a way to use that against him.

The AI onboard the mech, ADA, built with an explicit expiry date, is the one part I do think works, because it doesn’t try so hard. But what redeems the whole exercise, in hindsight, is the sequel, and has made me a fan.

The 2nd Runner, out in 2003 with a new director in Shuyo Murata, kept Jehuty and ditched almost everything else that didn't work. Faster, meaner, better controls, and an opening theme called Beyond the Bounds that remains timeless in its beauty.

It was composed by Maki Kirioka and sung by Maki Kimura, with non-English lyrics built on the sound of Finnish. But as for the game, critics called it, more or less, what the original should have been, and I agree.

But let’s zoom out, because I think there’s an interesting pattern here that shows up across the PS2's back catalog if you go looking. Publishers in that window backed things with no obvious commercial shape and let them exist anyway.

A mech game riding shotgun to the most anticipated sequel in the industry? Sure, why not. A minimalist puzzle game about a boy and a girl that Sony genuinely didn't know how to market? A found-footage horror game so strange it never even made it to American shores?

Zone of the Enders is the clumsy first draft of that instinct. It got made because somebody at Konami believed a demo disc could carry a full game to market, and against the odds, it more or less worked, just not for the reasons anyone selling it expected.

Nowadays, you’d almost certainly struggle to greenlight that pitch. Which is why I wanted to share this today.

A few years back, this era inspired me to make a concept album of my own—808s and Polygon Breaks. Track four, Orbital Frame, is a direct nod to Jehuty and everything above.

With Sony confirming that all new PlayStation games will go digital-only from January 2028, the conversation has naturally turned to preservation, ownership and what we stand to lose in an all-digital future.

There are plenty of important questions to ask, now more than ever. But there’s another that’s been nagging at me the longer this generation drags on.

Why does Sony seem so intent on neglecting their back catalog?

I don't want this to read as a petty rant, and I know this is a different sort of message than you've come to expect from me, but I can't shake the feeling that there's a real disconnect between the PlayStation (Sony) of the '90s and 2000s and the one we have today.

Some would argue this shift started way before the launch of the PlayStation 5. Like a slowly degrading save file, the corruption had been setting in for years before anyone noticed the damage.

I mean, this is the company that owns generations of PlayStation history. And I’ll be the first to admit it’s not “Nintendo levels” of history, but it’s history all the same.

What do I mean?

Ape Escape, Wild Arms and Syphon Filter. All viable and potentially ripe for remakes. But Sony behaves like anything that isn’t The Last of Us, God of War or Horizon has been sealed in a vault somewhere beneath PlayStation HQ.

I've also said time and again that much of their back catalog doesn't need massive AAA budgets and resources either. There's plenty there they could be putting out between the bigger titles.

Something that Bluepoint games might even excel at. But, oh, wait.

Looking further into their IPs… MotorStorm, dead. WipEout, on life support. SOCOM, missing in action. Resistance, forgotten. Killzone, abandoned. Legend of Dragoon—huh? Puppeteer, Tokyo Jungle, Gravity Rush. Folklore, Warhawk, ModNation Racers and Sly Cooper.

Sony has enough dormant franchises to fill an entire State of Play before anyone even asks for a brand-new IP. And listen, I don’t live in fantasy land, some of these games were extremely niche—more so now. Tokyo Jungle and Afrika, for example. They never sold in the millions, but I’m not sure that means they should be forgotten entirely.

There's a middle ground here for the most niche titles, with Sony simply acknowledging them by making the original versions available.

I'd happily take a modern Resistance collection or a MotorStorm revival over another franchise gathering dust, because not every forgotten PlayStation game needs a full-blown remake, but many deserve more than complete silence.

Most of all, that’s what makes Sony’s approach feel so strange.

It often acts as though PlayStation’s history only stretches back as far as the PlayStation 4. Everything before that feels tucked away, acknowledged only when an anniversary rolls around or a classic appears on PlayStation Plus.

Don’t get me started on that either. The whole premium classic catalog is, frankly, pathetic.

It’s especially odd because goodwill has become one of gaming’s most valuable currencies. Players really aren’t buying consoles anymore, they’re buying into ecosystems. With ecosystems, it’s easier to catch flies with honey than with vinegar.

Subscribers will only build their digital libraries if the value is there. People generally are quite happy to subscribe to services, if the value is there. If Sony wants players to embrace a future without physical media, then showing that its own history still matters feels like an easy way to build trust.

Right now, it doesn’t quite do that.

Maybe licensing is the problem, but truthfully, I don’t care. I want to be able to quickly boot up a classic game I loved in the 90s without resorting to emulation. Maybe source code has been lost, maybe some games simply don’t and never will have the audience fans imagine.

There will be perfectly reasonable explanations for some absences, but they don’t explain all of them. And it does seem every now and then, Sony remembers. But it’s frankly too little, too spaced apart.

And while the internet is never a true reflection of the wider populace, Sony simply can’t coast on forever without meaningful games. People are angry. That anger has the potential to filter downwards and suddenly, Sony are asking questions about why they can’t shift as many consoles.

The move toward an all-digital future only makes getting it right feel more important. If physical games are disappearing, access becomes everything. I don’t want a digital storefront to just sell the future, I want it to preserve the past too.

Sony already has the collection, it just needs to put it on display.

I remember the first time I saw it.

Not on a screen, but on a page. Nothing unusual about that, I spent a lot of my youth hanging around in newsagents. And somewhere between a review I’d already read twice and an advert for some random PC game, there it was.

A screenshot. Except it didn’t look like any screenshot I’d ever seen. It looked like a photograph of somewhere familiar that didn’t really exist, a liminal space of sorts before I even knew what a liminal space was.

The image was small, maybe 6 centimeters wide, slightly blurry from the print quality, and it showed some kind of marble temple surrounded by impossible geometry and a sky that gradated from deep blue to something almost purple.

Just this relatively smooth, clean, eerie little world sitting there between the pages of a magazine.

I stared at it for a long time.

Then I read the caption, then I stared at it again. This was a video game? Not quite. In reality, someone had made this on a computer. I imagine it took a long time to render. I’m not even sure if you could explore or do anything meaningful in that rendered world, but the idea felt genuinely strange and slightly overwhelming.

The world was, for the most part, still two-dimensional. Certainly in my house, and in the houses of my friends. The PlayStation, Saturn, and N64 were all on the way. But we hadn't hit fever pitch yet, the conversation taking up only a few small column inches.

I never found out what it was called, and I’m pretty sure it never released as anything meaningful.

Instead, it likely ended up as nothing more than a tech demo. But still, it sparked something in my young mind. This was a gateway into something entirely new. Computer generated imagery, pre-rendered specfically, the kind that would soon fill PlayStation games with painted-looking backdrops and cutscenes that looked like nothing the hardware could actually render in motion.

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I set the magazine back down on the newsstand, paid for my sweets, and walked home turning that image over in my mind, thinking about what it represented.

Then, in a blink of an eye, years passed.

We were no longer looking at flat sprites and side-on scrolling, we were flinging ourselves headlong through fully realized 3D worlds, ducking around corners and pushing deeper into spaces that opened up around us. The transition that had felt distant only a short while ago was now simply how games worked.

And nowhere was that change felt more intensely than on the original PlayStation. The console itself could push a respectable number of textured polygons per second, but there was always a gap (a chasm, really) between what the hardware could render in real time and what a studio could produce given enough time and a decent Silicon Graphics workstation.

And so pre-rendered cutscenes and backgrounds existed to bridge that gap.

For a few years in the mid-to-late nineties, they were an appreciated bonus, something that made you stop and bask in their shiny glory, not because of what they let you do, but because of what they let you see.

They carried an atmosphere the in-game engine (sometimes) couldn't summon, filling in the blanks where low polygon counts fell short, conjuring weight and mood and texture that the real-time visuals could only gesture at.

But still, there was a particular and even peculiar look to them. They were not everyone’s cup of tea, shall we say.

Everything had this waxy, slightly too-perfect sheen. Skin that looked like it had been buffed, hair that moved in solid clumps and eyes that caught the light a little too cleanly. Surfaces that gleamed as though the entire world had just been wiped down.

It wasn't photo-realism, and it wasn't trying to be. It couldn’t be. But it was a hyper-clean aesthetic that felt at once futuristic and artificial, like peering into a world molded from lacquered plastic.

I personally loved it. I still do, after all this time, though now it reads as a vision not of the future but of the past. Quaint little clips, most of which were obviously nowhere near the Toy Story level they once seemed to promise.

Until later in the PlayStation’s lifecycle, of course, as the tech became more powerful and more accessible.

So let’s jump into a few examples.

Let's look at five PlayStation games that leaned hard into pre-rendered cinematics, where those cutscenes were often central to creating a layered experience, and where that distinctive nineties CGI look was on full, glossy display.

Final Fantasy VII (1997)

You can’t talk about pre-rendered cutscenes on the PlayStation without starting here.

Not because it was the first game to use them, but because it was the game that made an entire generation understand what they were for. Square had been experimenting with CGI for a while before Final Fantasy VII.

The studio’s 1995 tech demo for the SGI Onyx is practically its own piece of folklore, but VII was where all of that ambition crystallized into something that millions of people played.

The game opens with a slow pull-back from a star field that resolves into Aerith’s face, lit by the glow of Mako energy, and then the camera keeps pulling back and back and back until you’re looking at the entirety of Midgar, this impossible layered city belching smoke into the sky.

It was a statement of intent. Look at what we can do, look at why this game is on PlayStation not the N64.

While Squaresoft sat at the pinnacle of this technology, I still think VII's cutscenes had a distinct liminal look. The characters' skin carried the quality of polished clay, while Cloud's eyes were these bright, almost luminous pools set into a face that looked carved and then shellacked.

The Buster Sword caught the light like chrome. When Sephiroth walked through fire in the Nibelheim flashback, the flames reflected off his leather coat with a smoothness that no real flame would ever produce.

It really was beautiful and uncanny in equal measure. It still felt early, but it was impressive none-the-less.

What I think made VII’s cutscenes so mesmerizing wasn’t just the technical quality but the contrast within them too. You’d spend hours navigating blocky, big-handed characters across pre-rendered backgrounds, and then a cutscene would trigger and suddenly those same characters had faces.

They existed in a world with actual atmospheric perspective and volumetric light. Though the jump felt so extreme that it was like being yanked into a different medium entirely, as though the game was briefly becoming a film before handing you back the controller.

Square definitively understood the emotional power of that shift, something they would increment and continue to improve. To perhaps their own detriment with the release of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.

The Weapon attack on Junon, the Highwind launch and, of course, the scene at the Forgotten Capital (probably the single most famous cutscene in PlayStation history) where the gap between gameplay and cinema was used for genuine emotional devastation.

Final Fantasy VII was everything I could have hoped for, and then some.

Resident Evil 2 (1998)

Capcom’s approach to pre-rendered CGI was different from Square’s.

Where Final Fantasy VII used its cutscenes for grandeur and emotional crescendo, Resident Evil 2 used them to set the tone and mood in a real homage to Hollywood.

The opening cutscene is the best example of this.

Leon Kennedy pulls into a seemingly deserted Raccoon City, stops at a diner, and within about ninety seconds everything goes sideways. The CGI here has that unmistakable mid-nineties texture. Leon’s clothing is this stiff, almost rubbery-looking thing, and the zombies have skin with the color and consistency of grey candle wax.

Blood pools on linoleum with a surface tension that looks almost gelatinous. Maybe that was intentional? Maybe, but everything does feel too smooth, too shiny. Yet it works perfectly for the material because it makes the whole scene feel feverish and grotesque, but still like a nightmare rendered in porcelain.

What Capcom understood, possibly better than anyone else at the time, was that the uncanny valley wasn’t a problem to be solved but a resource to be exploited. The slight deadness in the characters’ eyes, the way their mouths moved a fraction of a second out of sync, the plastic quality of their skin

All of this fed directly into the horror.

You were already on edge from the gameplay, and then a cutscene would play and you’d see these almost-human figures moving through spaces that were almost-real, and the cumulative effect was profoundly unsettling in a way that rendered in real-time graphics might never have achieved.

RE2 also used its cutscenes sparingly and strategically.

They bookended the experience and punctuated key story beats like the first encounter with William Birkin’s mutated form or the helicopter crash. The train escape too, but they never outstayed their welcome.

Capcom seemed to grasp intuitively that the power of pre-rendered CGI was partly in its scarcity. If you showed it to the player all the time, the spell broke.

Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee (1997)

Oddworld Inhabitants was a studio that seemed to arrive fully formed, with a complete vision for a world that looked like nothing else in gaming.

And the pre-rendered cutscenes in Abe’s Oddysee were where that vision was communicated most powerfully. These strange, darkly comic little films that played out between levels and told you everything you needed to know about Oddworld.

The opening cinematic has stayed with me, right up there with my most cherished PlayStation memories.

Abe, this scrawny, stitched-lipped “Mudokon” slave, mopping floors in RuptureFarms. A meat processing plant rendered in nauseating industrial detail. Grime on every surface, fluorescent lighting that makes everything look sickly and pipes dripping with something you’d rather not identify.

And Abe himself, with his huge, sad eyes and glistening green-grey skin, looking like a creature sculpted from wet clay and then left slightly too close to a heat lamp. The CGI had that trademark nineties sheen, but Oddworld Inhabitants used it in a way that made the world grimy.

Where other studios were chasing beauty and spectacle, Lorne Lanning’s team definitely leaned into the uncanny texture of the medium and produced something that looked, well, alien and faintly repulsive but completely captivating.

Take the character animations for example.

Abe didn’t move like a typical hero. He shuffled and he flinched, his expressions were simultaneously exaggerated and weirdly subtle. Like the way his eyes would widen in panic, or the defeated little slump of his shoulders when something went wrong.

It was a wonderful example of creativity squeezed out of the hardware limitations of the time.

Abe’s Oddysee managed to be funny, sad, and horrifying in the space of a single cutscene. The moment where Abe discovers that RuptureFarms’ next product line is going to be made from his own species, the camera lingering on the “New N’ Tasty” poster, then cutting to Abe’s face as the realization sets in…

It's a moment I'm glad I got to see.

Tekken 3 (1998)

Fighting games might not be the first genre you associate with lavish pre-rendered cinematics, but Tekken 3 deserves its place here because Namco poured an extraordinary amount of care and personality into its character endings.

Every character in Tekken 3 had a unique ending sequence, rendered in that distinctive Namco house style: clean, bright, sharp lighting, and an almost toy-like quality to the character models. Skin looked like molded vinyl and hair was sculpted in solid, glossy masses.

Sure, clothing still had the texture of something you'd find on an action figure. Stiff creases, uniform color, no imperfections.

But the wider imagery looked like someone had painstakingly assembled a diorama of incredibly detailed figurines and then animated them with a smoothness that, for the first time, felt like the tech was finally competing with Hollywood CGI.

Jin Kazama’s ending was brooding and dramatic, all rain and clenched fists. Yoshimitsu’s was surreal and comedic. Paul Phoenix rode a motorcycle into the sunset with a completely straight face.

Lei Wulong got a mini action-movie. The variety was part of the charm, and the pre-rendered format made it possible. I loved each ending with my heart and soul. So much was packed into what was essentially a tiny short film, self-contained and purpose-built, free from the constraints of the in-game engine.

What makes Tekken 3’s cutscenes stick in the memory, though, is how rewarding they felt. You’d battle your way through the arcade mode, probably losing to Ogre at least twice, and your prize for persevering was this little jewel box of CGI.

Final Fantasy VIII (1998)

It would be easy to include another franchise here entirely, but the truth is that Final Fantasy VIII represents such a dramatic leap forward from VII (released just two years earlier) that it almost feels like a different studio made it.

And in terms of pre-rendered cutscenes, it is the high watermark of the original PlayStation era.

The opening sequence alone is staggering. A beach, waves, two figures locked in a sword fight that careens across rooftops and through gardens, cut through with fleeting glimpses of a woman in white and fields of flowers, all of it set to Liberi Fatali, an enormous orchestral-choral piece that sounds like it's scoring the end of the world.

The CGI is significantly more detailed than anything in VII.

Squall’s face has texture. Pores, the faintest suggestion of stubble. Seifer’s coat billows in a way that looks almost physically correct. When their gunblades clash, sparks scatter with weight and trajectory that feel considered rather than decorative.

But the real showcase for me, and the moment that made people put down their controllers and just watch, is the ballroom scene. Squall and Rinoa meeting at the SeeD graduation party, the awkward dance that becomes graceful, the camera circling them as the room opens up around them.

The cloth simulation on Rinoa’s dress, the reflections on the marble floor, the way the warm light from the chandeliers catches in her hair. But what makes it transcendent is the direction.

Somebody at Square choreographed an actual dance sequence, animated two CGI characters performing it, and imbued it with genuine tenderness and humour. Rinoa’s playful insistence, Squall’s reluctant compliance, the moment where he finally lets himself enjoy it.

It’s all there in the animation, communicated without a single line of dialogue.

The plastic sheen was still there (it was inescapable given the technology of the time) but it had been refined to the point where it almost didn’t matter. You weren’t looking at the waxy skin or the slightly too-perfect hair. You were watching two people fall in love in a ballroom.

That era is gone now.

Real-time rendering caught up, then overtook, and eventually left pre-rendered cutscenes behind for all but a handful of cases. The way modern games look would have seemed impossible to anyone hunched over those early CGI movies on a fourteen-inch CRT.

That particular jolt of seeing something impossibly beautiful cut into the game you were playing, the sense that you were being handed a gift, a glimpse of what the future might look like, all rendered in plastic and light.

It was a product of its time as much as a Tamagotchi clipped to your schoolbag.

I still think about that magazine screenshot now and then, the marble temple and the purple sky. Whoever made it was probably working on a machine that cost more than a car, painstakingly ray-tracing a scene that might never have made it into a finished game at all.

But for a few seconds, on a printed page in a newsagent I can barely picture anymore, it showed me a world that felt more real than anything I’d seen in a game before.

I remember sitting and waiting.

Sitting in the silence, while everyone else was in bed. The modem screeched and screeched some more. I’d learned its rhythm so well I could tell from the modulation whether the connection was going to hold or drop.

Surely my parents can hear this, I'd think, quietly, to myself.

It’s quaint now, so quaint, but that noise was two machines feeling out a phone line invented for human voices. People called it a handshake, which made it sound polite. To me it sounded more like I was dialling into some reluctant alien mother ship.

I held my breath. This time, the connection held.

ASL?

This was the world I found the first PlayStation in.

Sony brought the console to Europe in September 1995, and the web I was teaching myself to use was barely standing up. There were only around 23,500 websites that summer, not that I'd have known to count them.

By the start of 1996 it had crossed 100,000, though from where I sat it felt limitless, which tells you how little I could see of it. It seemed like a week of evenings would take me through a meaningful chunk of the whole thing.

It was a stranger place then, and a s l o w e r one as I didn't browse so much as wait, then read, then wait again. A single image loaded from the top down, line by line, and I'd guess what it was before it finished.

AOL was my way in, the disc arrived free through the letterbox like everyone else's, and Joanna Lumley's voice would greet me with "Welcome" and tell me, in those unmistakable tones, that my dad had email. Pages were mostly grey or black, text was blue, and half of what I found was somebody's hobby.

Well, apart from the official Naughty Dog website.

The magazines were already telling me everything about the PlayStation, the review scores and the release dates and the screenshots I’d stared at for weeks.

The internet didn’t replace that, not yet. But what it added was other people. For the first time I wasn’t just reading about the games, I was in a chat room (for better or worse) chatting with strangers who cared as much as I did, somebody in another town typing back in real time.

It was raw and always shifting, and in the background companies were waking up to this new world wide web. They were plotting. How do we get a piece of this? It feels like such a distant time now. It sits in some tiny recess of my mind. It definitely happened, but I'm right on the border of, well, did it?

There was no algorithm deciding what I saw, because there was barely anything to decide between. I found things by following links somebody had typed by hand, or by reading a magazine that printed addresses in the margins.

Initially we paid for the call, by the minute, which meant the internet had a meter running the whole time I sat there. Then someone picked up the phone downstairs and killed the connection stone dead, that flat click followed by the dial tone of defeat.

So I learned to go online late, when the rates dropped and the house was quiet. I don’t think my parents ever knew. I’ll ask them the next time I see them.

Distant as these memories are, with me straddling that line between real and not, I can still line the two things up neatly. The PlayStation booting in the corner of my room, that startup chord swelling out of the speakers, while in another room a beige box hissed and chirped its way onto a distant network.

Two new sounds in the same house, both of them promising me something.

The PlayStation kept its promise, giving me exactly what it said it would and never asking for anything back. The other one promised the same, and for a while it delivered, getting faster and slicker every year until the waiting was gone and so was the feeling that I'd arrived somewhere.

But I didn't know that then, didn't know I'd had my time not with the internet as such, but with a feeling I can't get back. One of those moments that lifts you clean out of yourself and is gone before you know it, the first time I heard Everybody in the Place, the last time I saw a friend before his family moved off to some other estate.

I just sat there, lit by the screen, not knowing it was the kind of thing you only get once.

At some point in the early 2000s, someone at a Japanese publisher sat in a meeting and listened to the following pitch: a horror game set in foggy Chicago where you play as a cameraman and the central mechanic is whether you film things… ethically.

Oh and, eh, no combat.

No protagonist with a redemption arc either. Just a bloke with a camera, a news crew to keep alive, and the implicit suggestion that how you document a disaster says something about your soul.

And they said yes. Michigan: Report from Hell shipped on PlayStation 2 in Japan in 2004 and made it as far as European markets in 2005.

The PlayStation 2 era that produced Mister Mosquito, Disaster Report, and Gregory Horror Show clearly had room for genuinely odd ideas. Those games earned their cult status, though, and they were fun to play.

Michigan belongs in that company on strangeness alone, but whether the same can be said for the rest of it is the harder question.

So what’s the game about? Well, in a nutshell: A mysterious fog has descended on Chicago, people are turning into monsters, and you’ve been dispatched to cover it for a local news crew.

And really, that’s it.

The game tracks your editorial judgement throughout, noting whether you’re pointing the camera at things that matter or just chasing carnage because carnage “moves units”.

Your choices shape the ending. The central mechanic of a survival horror game is, essentially, journalistic integrity.

The Man Behind the Fog

The game came from Goichi Suda, the director who’d later become internationally known as Suda51, the man who would go on to give the world Killer7 and No More Heroes. While EA churned out FIFAs and Need for Speeds for the masses, Suda wanted something entirely left field.

The concept started with Suda wanting to build something around a foggy atmosphere, inspired by Stephen King's The Mist.

The original idea was a game where the fog itself was the threat, players picking their way through a shrouded Chicago with no monsters, no creatures, just the creeping dread of not knowing what was out there.

It didn't work.

So in a meeting, Suda and his team reworked it, added monsters to give players something concrete to be frightened of, and landed on the cameraman mechanic almost as a consequence.

Michigan arrived just before any Western recognition, when Grasshopper Manufacture was operating in a creative register most publishers wouldn’t have touched. Even so, Michigan is strange, and it feels like a miracle it got made at all.

But lets zoom out.

The PlayStation 2 sat at this particular moment where development costs were high enough that publishers had real money in the game, but not so catastrophically high that every release had to land like a blockbuster or sink the company.

Because of that, and in large part because Japanese developers were taking bigger creative swings, there always seemed to be room for the weird stuff.

Michigan weird, Katamari Damacy weird, Ribbit King weird. Games that read like someone had a genuinely odd idea, found a sympathetic executive, and just ran with it before anyone could think too carefully about the risk.

I’m not sure that space really exists at that scale anymore.

The ideas that feel most like Michigan now tend to arrive via Kickstarter or itch.io, made by tiny teams on tight budgets, celebrated precisely because they’re operating outside the mainstream.

Which is wonderful, but it’s a different thing. There’s just something particular about a major-ish PlayStation 2 release that contains a mechanic about the ethics of the journalistic gaze. The absurdity of the context is part of what makes the ambition legible.

A Disc Worth Hunting Down?

Michigan is rough in ways that suggest the budget followed the ambition rather than the other way around.

The mechanics have their critics and the camera handling is awkward in ways that feel less intentional than the concept deserves. The English dub that arrived with the European release has achieved a kind of immortality among people who love bad voice acting done with complete sincerity, which is its own art form.

Fans have argued, not entirely without reason, that the dodgy dub actually suits the game. I'd agree with that, it only adds to the whole fever dream quality of the game

A slicker production would have sanded off the unsettling quality that makes Michigan stick in your mind. Polish would have made it a different game and probably a worse one, because sometimes the absurdity is the only thing going.

But what Michigan remains is a PlayStation 2 disc you have to genuinely hunt down, with no remaster and no digital release.

The PAL version gives you English voice acting but is the buggier, more stripped back of the two releases. The Japanese version is the more complete experience, if you can manage without understanding a word of it.

Because of this, the disc itself will cost you more than you'd expect for something this obscure, so emulation is very much on the table and frankly most people's realistic route in. Either way, nothing has been tidied up or recontextualized or given a fresh coat of paint.

So Michigan is still out there, exactly as strange as it always was, still holding out the camera, still waiting for someone willing to keep filming when everyone else would have looked away.

It's an oddity, a little footnote in the grand scheme of PlayStation 2 history, but I'm glad it exists. If only to remind us that you can take a risk, fail, and have that be okay.

God, imagine a world without this kind of risk-taking. Barely worth thinking about.

The Summer Game Fest reveal of Alien: Isolation 2 did the usual thing, which is to say, build a great deal of hype without showing much of anything. Driven by intense music and lightning-fast edits, the trailer offers no release date—only the promise that Creative Assembly and Sega are taking us back into the fray.

And I am excited, if reluctantly so.

The setting’s moved off the Sevastopol and onto a storm-ravaged colony world, a Weyland-Yutani outpost called Kurosaki Station. Much of the trailer takes place outdoors, fueling speculation that the game itself will be set largely outside.

I don’t think that will happen, and I expect the game will find ways to recapture the claustrophobic feel of the first game.

But watching it, I didn’t actually think about Isolation at all. I thought about my old chunky grey PlayStation, my CRT in the corner, and a game from 1996 that frightened me. Badly.

Alien Trilogy.

Probe Entertainment, Acclaim, thirty levels and three queens, a first-person shooter built on the back of Acclaim’s much-hyped motion capture and digitized sprites. But it felt… rudimentary. Dated even.

The corridors were a soup of muddy textures, the aliens were flat cardboard cutouts that swelled up as they lurched toward you and the level layouts were a maze I’d (often) get lost in. Probably my biggest pet-peeve about shooters from this generation.

When the previews went to publication in 1996, it was a game that felt like it was already creaking, a game that looked as though it was running on the 3DO or Atari Jaguar. By any sane measure it should have been forgettable.

But it wasn’t. A friend brought it around during the dark winter months and, frankly, it put a fear in me that has never once let go.

She’ll Breed, you’ll Die

Because the genius of it, intentional or not, was that the clumsiness didn't really matter all that much. Not when you're eleven and the Aliens from that universe are one of the most terrifying creature designs ever put to screen.

The franchise, as usual, did the heavy lifting.

Apparently the team sampled the films directly, the screeches and the hiss, and worst of all the cocooned colonists whispering kill me out of the walls as you passed. That left an impression on me.

What I carry from it more than anything was just how relentless the game was. The xenomorphs in Alien Trilogy did not stop.

They came as flat sprites swelling out of the dark, one after another after another, and you’d empty the pulse rifle into them and another would be on you before the last one dropped. Then you’d be left with the pistol and the pistol didn’t really do much of anything.

That relentlessness was pure 90s shooter design.

Nothing from that era was anything other than run and gun, far as I can tell. More enemies, then more enemies again. At no point did you ever feel you were winning, you were surviving just long enough to learn the next room was packed with even more of the wee bastards.

Alien taught me that space is a haunted house with no doors and Aliens made one nightmare into a tide of them. By the third film I’d stopped expecting anyone to survive. And then a rough little PlayStation shooter made me live all three, badly rendered and barely holding together.

They Mostly Come at Night… Mostly

I guess most childhood terrors wear off and you revisit them as an adult and laugh. They’ve shrunk, gone a bit naff, all rubber and seams. You’re too deep into the nature and reality of the world around you to find Aliens scary, right?

Well, not me. This game, and the entire franchise, instills a deep-rooted fear in me.

When I load it up, the dread’s still there, intact, untouched by thirty years. The relentlessness, the whispering, and the knowledge that the thing in the next corridor would never, ever quit.

But still, I look on in admiration. I’ll watch every trailer they put out for Isolation 2.

I’ll read every preview and when it finally arrives, sometime in the future, I’ll buy it and I’ll play it through my fingers, the same way I played a clumsy, dated, deeply frightening scrappy shooter through my fingers all those years ago.

We all remember where we were when the game first reached out of the screen and into our own realm. Colonel Campbell tells the player to call Meryl on the codec, then admits he doesn't have her frequency.

His advice is to check the back of the CD case.

Not a menu within the game, not a file buried in an options screen, not a location somewhere on Shadow Moses. The actual plastic case the game shipped in. The number, 140.15, is printed there within an inconspicuous screenshot.

"Huh, that can't be it, can it?" I said to myself, as I typed the frequency into the game. But it was. Meryl shows up in her balaclava, and we finally talk over the codec for the first time.

If "movie magic" is the go-to term for cinema, what's the gaming equivalent? Because this tapped into something that felt, well, magical.

It’s a small thing. Something you can imagine being jokingly shared around corridors and in the meeting rooms of Konami. But it establishes the conceit that runs through the whole game, the idea that this fictional world somehow knows about the world outside the screen.

I think it really shows how Kojima loves messing with players in ways that go beyond what traditional hardware was supposed to allow, something that culminates on a much grander and more involved scale later with the Psycho Mantis boss fight.

You like action games!

Psycho Mantis is a psychic, a telepath, and the game makes a real meal of it.

By the time you reach him, he's already established as someone who reads minds and bends the physical world, so the fight is built around the idea that he knows things he has no business knowing.

What makes it land is that Kojima doesn't keep that power contained to Snake and the world on screen. He points it outward, at you. Just as he did with Meryl’s codec frequency.

Before the fight begins, Mantis reads the console’s memory card, as a demonstration of sorts. He goes through whatever else has been played and names the saves back, Castlevania, Suikoden, any other Konami titles.

Spooky.

Then he goes further, and profiles the player from the save data. Frequent saves mark someone cautious, anxious. Sparse saves mark someone reckless.

Spookier.

It’s difficult to articulate just how novel a concept this was.

A character inside the television reaches into the slot on the front of the machine, reads a person’s habits off a memory card, and passes judgement on them. That felt like he’d stopped addressing Snake. He was addressing the human holding the controller, and he’s going through your stuff.

Maybe this seems quaint by today’s standards, but back then, in those pre-internet-ish days, it felt positively paranormal.

But Mantis wasn’t done. As a final flourish of the dark arts, he instructs the player to set the controller down so he can unleash his full power.

And so you set the controller down.

And you wait.

Then, the controller judders and vibrates across the table.

It coincides with Mantis giving it his all, pushing and bending both the game world and real world to his will.

It works.

Oh boy does it work, because by this point, the game has made it genuinely clear (or unclear) where the fiction stops and the hardware begins.

Fun fact: At one point the game tells you to hold the PlayStation Dual Shock against your arm after a particularly torturous button-mashing scene, to "heal" your sore arm. Cute!

Then there’s the fight itself which cannot be won by conventional means.

Mantis ducks, dives and dodges every attack you send his way. “What on earth? Why can’t I beat him? This is too difficult,” I remember saying begrudgingly. But little did I know he was being particularly deceptive.

He is psychic after all, so it shouldn’t have been surprising that he was able to read controller inputs before they resolved. There was no pattern to “learn” here. No matter how hard I charge at him with everything I’ve got, I won’t bring him down.

The only solution is to pause, unplug the controller, and move it to the console’s second port. Unconventional to say the least.

Mantis then goes quiet and concedes he can no longer read the player’s thoughts. The boss is beaten not in the fiction but in the living room, by physically rearranging the hardware.

On paper this reads a little like a set of gimmicks, a magician explaining his own tricks. Like I said, quaint.

But in reality, the effect depended entirely on context, on a person sitting close to a machine that suddenly behaved as though it was cognizant.

It worked precisely because you had no idea how it would play out, and there was no whipping out your phone to see how everyone else felt about it or how they'd gone about beating it.

Guns of the Patriots

In Metal Gear Solid 4, released years later on the PlayStation 3, Mantis returns as a ghost and attempts the same routine. He reaches for the memory card and finds nothing.

A neat nod to a past that was long gone, even by 2008.

The thing that made him frightening was tied to a specific arrangement of silicon, a card that could be held, ports that were visible, a box that had been kept, and that arrangement had been engineered out of existence.

Kojima has always been particularly good at designing within constraints and finding the creative angle. The original PlayStation was a physical object full of openings, and he was one of the few designers who understood that the openings were exactly where the unease could get in.

He treated the case, the card and the cable as places a story could hide. A technique that has effectively died out, because there is nothing left to reach into.

The machine is sealed, the saves live in the cloud, the box is often a download. The controller is still there, broadly the same shape it has always been.

The difference is that nothing inside it is going to reach back out.

You start small.

A few coins, a thumbtack, a piece of candy. The katamari is the size of a marble and the world is enormous, full of things you can’t yet touch, sofas and dogs and parked cars looming over you like architecture.

The King of All Cosmos has, in a moment of cosmic carelessness, destroyed the stars, and you are his small green son, sent down to earth to gather enough material that the night sky might be rebuilt.

The music is bright, the colours are absurd and everything about the presentation suggests you’ve stumbled into the most cheerful video game ever made.

Are you with me so far? Okay, it’s time to start rolling.

The Moon & The Prince

By the second level, the katamari has swelled to the size of a beach ball, and you're already pulling the world into yourself in ways that feel improper. By the fifth, you are eating livestock.

Nothing is off limits it would seem.

By the time you reach the larger stages you are absorbing buildings, mountains, weather systems, and the screen keeps cataloguing every object as it disappears into the mass, a little name tag flashing in the corner each time something is consumed.

Is the game keeping a record?

Everything you’ve taken is logged, alphabetised and available for review in a menu later. Huh. So you’re not just consuming the world, you are inventorying it too.

All this on the same console that offers Gran Turismo, FIFA football and various fist-first brawlers loved by the masses seeking out more conventional forms of entertainment.

Keita Takahashi has been clear, in interviews stretching back to a 2009 GDC talk, about what he intended. He saw his work as a game about consumption society, and he found the experience of making it genuinely upsetting.

“I wanted to make more objects. If there are few objects, I feel lonely. If there are more objects, they will make things more colourful. But when they’re rolled up, they’re gone.” He kept wanting to fill the world with more things and then watching the player erase them.

The melancholy was structural.

But this is not how Katamari Damacy was received in the West. The Western reception, when it arrived in 2004, was overwhelmingly read through the lens of charm.

The game became a touchstone for the early-2000s indie sensibility that prized whimsy and Japanese eccentricity as aesthetic categories rather than as positions on anything.

Reviewers reached for “quirky” and “delightful” with the regularity of people who had run out of other adjectives, and the cultural conversation that formed around the game was almost entirely about its surface.

Look at the colours, listen to the J-pop. Isn’t it nice that something this strange exists? And so on.

The flattening was not accidental, and it wasn’t really anyone’s fault. Japanese satire travels poorly. The conventions that signal critique in Tokyo, the deadpan absurdism, the bright surfaces concealing institutional disquiet, read as sincere weirdness once they cross the Pacific.

The same thing happened to Murakami, whose Superflat manifesto was a sustained argument about postwar Japanese consumerism and got received in New York galleries as a fun new aesthetic for tote bags. It happened to a lot of late-90s and early-2000s Japanese cultural exports.

The argument got mistaken for the costume.

What I think makes Katamari particularly poignant is that the game is doing the thing it’s critiquing in real time. You cannot play it without consuming. The mechanic and the meaning are the same gesture.

Takahashi couldn’t even make a game about the sadness of accumulation without accumulating, and the catalogue of objects in the menu screen is the receipt. Every playthrough generates its own little archive of what you’ve taken.

Que Sera Sera

The PS2 was the right console for this.

The whole generation was built on storage, on bigger discs and more content and the implicit promise that scale was an end in itself. Sony’s marketing during the PS2 era kept returning to bigness, to the idea that this console could contain more, do more, hold more.

Katamari arrived in the middle of that while asking what all the accumulation was for. The answer the game offers is bleak. You roll up the world, and then a celestial figure who barely registers your existence flings it into the sky as decoration.

Takahashi himself has spent the years since trying to escape what Katamari became. He has spoken openly about Namco Bandai turning the property into a steamrolling brand, about his discomfort with sequels, about feeling unsuited to the games industry.

He has tried to build playgrounds. He has made small strange projects with tiny audiences.

The thing he’s most famous for is the thing he most wanted to make once and never repeat, and the industry’s response to that wish has been to ask him, repeatedly and with increasing volume, whether he might consider making another one.

You finish a playthrough and the King congratulates you on your work, and the credits roll over a montage of everything you’ve taken, and you sit there with a controller in your hand wondering why the cheerful little song feels so heavy at the end.

You get it now.

Our house already had a DVD player by the time the PlayStation 2 arrived, a silver Panasonic thing that lived under the telly in the living room and really only ever played whatever my parents had rented from Xtravision* on a Friday.

My PS2 didn't replace it, but it did become the DVD player upstairs. The one in my bedroom, the one I controlled, the one that introduced me to art on my own terms. And suddenly, friends weren’t just bringing games over but movies too.

Contact, Blade Runner, Zoolander, Oldboy, City of God…

The first DVD I bought with my hard earned cash was Taxi, the Luc Besson one with the souped-up Peugeot tearing through Marseille. I picked it up cheap from somewhere I can’t quite remember now, possibly an HMV sale, possibly a Virgin Megastore, the details have gone but the disc hasn’t.

I watched it more times than the film really deserved.

Partly because owning a DVD still felt slightly miraculous in 2001, and the jump in picture quality from VHS was the biggest leap in fidelity I can remember, much sharper than DVD to Blu-Ray ever felt later. But mostly because I'd discovered the director's commentary track.

If you’re too young to remember, DVDs often came with a version of the film where the director talked over the top of it, breaking down shots, pointing out mistakes, and drifting off into stories about catering, lighting setups, and whatever else came to mind.

Some DVD commentaries are legendary. The Thing, This Is Spinal Tap, and Conan the Barbarian all stand out, mostly because of Arnold Schwarzenegger dryly narrating exactly what’s already happening on screen.

“Heh, yeah, and here I am crushing his skull with the sword… errraguh, heh.”

They were all a bit magical.

Late at night, headphones in, lying in bed with the PlayStation 2 humming away under the TV, those commentaries became a kind of company. Somebody's voice walking you through their own film while you half-listened, half-drifted, the disc tray glowing blue in the dark.

This is the bit Sony likes telling, the part where the the console became a media object as much as a games machine, and it’s mostly true with a slight caveat.

The PlayStation 2 launched in Japan in March 2000 at ¥39,800, in North America that October at $299, in the UK in November at £299. Standalone DVD players in the US that year cost somewhere between $200 and $400, with the genuinely good ones higher still.

So in reality, the PlayStation 2 wasn’t always the cheapest player in the room, but it was very often the cheapest one that also played Tekken Tag Tournament, and that combination helped immensely.

But the caveat is that DVD adoption was already moving fast.

US shipments went from 1.1 million units in 1998 to 4.1 million in 1999, the year before Sony’s newest console existed anywhere. By the time they launched in America, shipments had more than doubled again. I guess what I’m saying is: Sony didn’t start the wave with the PlayStation 2, but they rode it, and the riding was masterful.

What is worth considering is how this all doubled the console’s cultural reach. It was in living rooms, plugged into the same telly that played the rented copy of The Matrix and the Christmas box set of Only Fools and Horses.

But it was also in bedrooms like mine, where it became the first piece of cinema tech I’d ever owned, the machine that let me watch Taxi at one in the morning with Gérard Pirès telling me how he shot the car chases.

By 2006 DVD had reached 81% of US households. The PlayStation 2 sold 150 million units across its lifetime, and a good chunk of those buyers came in through a side door.

Mostly, I think that side door is the bit worth remembering. The DVD tray beside the memory card slots and controller ports. Both belonged to the same machine.

Once everyone else had gone to bed, you could keep playing Final Fantasy X, sure, but the room also became your own little late-night cinema, rented DVDs spinning in the dark glow of the bedroom TV.

Arnold’s guttural tenacity lulling you off, one decapitation at a time...

*Xtravision was an Ireland-specific video rental chain, similar to Blockbuster.

You boot it up and the menu is already doing something to you.

A low pulse, geometric shapes folding into themselves, the suggestion that an alien world always existed before you pressed start. You just weren’t aware of it like you’re not aware of dimensions existing outside of our usual humanly realms.

This was 2001, and Tetsuya Mizuguchi had spent the previous few years watching electronic music try and fail to become something “more than itself”, so he made a game about what it might have been.

What it could be. The result was Rez.

Ready Steady Go

Rez is a rail shooter, technically.

You move a cursor across a wireframe network, locking onto enemies, releasing in rhythmic clusters that trigger samples layered into the underlying track. Each level builds from minimal pulse to full arrangement, the music responding to your accuracy, the visuals snapping into tighter patterns as you progress.

Mizuguchi has talked openly about synaesthesia as a design principle, the idea that sound and image and touch could collapse into a single sensation, and the game’s debt to Kandinsky (a German abstract painter) is something he mentions in every interview from the period.

What’s less discussed is what was happening in electronic music at exactly the same moment.

The late 90s and early 2000s were when intelligent dance music, the Warp Records and Rephlex axis, was reaching for transcendence and finding it harder than expected. Aphex Twin’s Drukqs came out the same year as Rez and felt like a retreat into fragmentation.

Autechre were heading into Confield, abstracting their own rhythmic instincts past the point most listeners could follow. But the trance scene was doing the opposite, reaching for the spiritual through sheer brute force, Tiësto and Armin van Buuren building cathedrals of compression that promised ecstasy but often delivered exhaustion.

Everyone was trying to make electronic music mean something, and nobody could quite agree on what that meant. The harder they tried, the further away from the purity of great artistry producers got. It’s no coincidence that as the scene became more commercial, the drops got bigger and the venues got larger.

Rez sidestepped this entirely by externalising it.

If the problem with listening in densely packed, sweat-soaked venture capitalist spaces was that the body wanted a stake in what the ears were hearing, then the solution was to give the body something to do.

Mizuguchi did this with a DualShock and a wireframe lattice, arguably succeeding where clubs were beginning to fail. And they were failing. I remember standing one night, completely sober, wondering if something was wrong with me. In the end, I’d simply reached the end of the road with trance music.

I was worn out by the formulaic approach now, like something made in a lab in the style of Stock Aitken Waterman. Intro, chorus, breakdown, build-up, drop, chorus, repeat.

But experiences like Rez gave me control over how I heard music. How I took it in, held onto it, and shared it with others. Those quiet moments often feel heavier than the big nights out. I didn’t know it then, but it was a glimpse of how I listen now, in my 40s.

And then there’s the Trance Vibrator.

Released in Japan only, this felt like a literal version of Mizuguchi’s argument. It was a small device you placed against your body that pulsed in time with the game’s audio, marketed with enough plausible deniability that nobody at Sony had to say out loud what everyone immediately thought.

It was treated as a curio at the time, a Japan-only oddity, but the intent was sincere. Mizuguchi wanted Rez to be felt, not played, and the vibrator was the missing third channel, sound and vision and a low hum against your sternum.

Beautiful Strange

The game sold poorly on both platforms it launched on. For Rez, that meant the PS2 and the Dreamcast, which Sega had already discontinued eight months earlier.

The Dreamcast release in November 2001 was almost ceremonial, a final ambitious gesture toward a console already in the ground, and the loyalists who still had one plugged in mostly weren’t necessarily the audience for an abstract music shooter.

The HD re-release felt like a kind of vindication ritual.

Love it or loathe it, the shift to digital-only releases has also made space for more indie and abstract work to exist outside the old gatekeepers. The market feels more open, less filtered.

The cultural status it now enjoys, the gallery exhibitions and Mizuguchi’s continued ability to work on games like Tetris Effect, came from a slow accumulation of correct opinions rather than any initial recognition.

I think it captured, almost by accident, an ambition so many producers tried to recreate after the early 90s rave era. The idea that music needed the room, the bodies, the lights, and the long build to fully work. By 2001 that promise was visibly fraying.

Clubs were closing, the second summer of love was a decade in the rear-view, and the producers who’d been promising transcendence were either retreating into abstraction or doubling down on bombast.

I think Rez offered an alternative model, intimate rather than collective, geometric rather than chemical, and you could play it in your bedroom with the curtains closed. Or hooked up to your dads stereo. Loud.

It still works.

Love Again

Boot it up now and the argument is intact, the pulse still does the thing it was designed to do, and you can hear the gap it was trying to fill. Electronic music eventually found other answers, Flying Lotus’ cosmic sprawl, Burial’s hauntology, James Blake’s negative space, the slow respectability of techno as art music.

None of them quite did what Rez did, but then how could they. None of them gave you something to lean into, something physical to push against while the track slowly assembled itself around you.

I'm glad Mizuguchi keeps trying though, because if anyone's going to find the next version of it, it'll be him.

The clouds are gathering over the Troodos, slow and theatrical, the way mountain weather likes to announce itself before things inevitably get perilous.

"Look at that horizon," I tell my youngest. She pays no attention, more interested in the Cypriot dish in front of her. She's only two, but you'd swear she was savouring this entirely new culinary experience. "Chef kiss?" I ask. "Sheef kiss," she responds.

I'm well fed. I've just had a dish called Stifado, a frankly delicious traditional Greek stew, rich and cooked low and slow. I'm brimming from the generosity of the people around me, who keep bringing me food.

Now I want to savour the moment. The clouds are coming in heavy and ominous, turning the sky a leaden black. A small moment of respite, I take out my PlayStation Portable.

Honestly. This is about as content as I think I’ve been in a long while.

Game Gear, Nintendo DS, PlayStation Portable, whatever your handheld of choice was growing up, there's just something about them that a phone can't touch. A bygone era we're tenuously linked to by the tech that's survived and the memories we've held onto.

It was a forward thinking device. Something you could game on, watch films on, even browse the web. A lovely slab of black, tastefully accented with clear plastic buttons, a tastefulness that rather preceded my young sensibilities.

Even after all this time, I think the PSP still has a lovely weight to it, proper weight, the kind that reminds you you’re holding something with purpose. Something full of silicon wizardry. It feels cutting edge to me the same way the PlayStation 2 still feels when I fire it up.

The screen looks crisp after all these years, wide and warm, and the analog nub (while far from perfect) still glides under my thumb with no issues. No stickiness, no drift.

But my memories of getting hold of a PSP are a bit bittersweet, if I’m honest. I’d saved up pocket money for what felt like an eternity, scraped together whatever relatives had handed over at birthdays and Christmas, and convinced myself I had enough to import one from Japan ahead of the European release.

Or maybe it was imported from Hong Kong. I actually can’t quite remember.

But in my naivete, I hadn’t accounted for the £80 import duty waiting for me on the other end, a number that landed like a punch. That was the price of two games!

And so this meant another round of borrowing from anyone who’d lend me a tenner, more odd jobs here and there, and another stretch of waiting while the PSP sat in a customs warehouse somewhere being held hostage by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.

By the time it finally arrived I’d built it up in my head into something close to a religious artefact, which is perhaps unfair on any piece of consumer electronics, but the PSP had the decency to mostly live up to it.

Ah, who am I kidding. It did live up to it entirely. It’s one of the greats.

I brought this one almost as an afterthought, tucked into a side pocket with a few UMDs rattling around. Wipeout Pure, Ridge Racer, Metal Gear Acid, a small and slightly chaotic spread that says quite a lot about how I was feeling when I packed.

LocoRoco is on the memory stick. Remember that one? An oddity in which you controlled a wobbly yellow blob by tilting the world itself, the left and right shoulder buttons rocking the landscape until the little thing rolled where you wanted it to go.

An unexpected companion to the trip, broken out in the small pockets of empty time between everything else. With kids in tow there isn’t a lot of downtime, which is exactly why those small windows feel like a treat.

Twenty minutes on the terrace while they’re napping, a quick race after bedtime, the occasional stolen ten minutes with a cold drink.

It really feels like travelling with an old friend, one who doesn’t need much from you. I especially love how disconnected the experience is. No notifications, no battery anxiety in the existential sense, no five apps fighting for your attention.

Just a little 4.3 inch screen and whatever world you’ve decided to live in for a few minutes. It doesn’t ask you to optimise your time or track your engagement, it just wants to know if you’d like one more race, which yes, obviously, of course.

There really is a serene pleasure in having it while thunder rumbles in the distance. The light goes soft and grey, the cicadas knock off for the afternoon, and the whole valley takes on a bit of a pre-rain hush.

Sinking into a corner of the sofa, the world shrinks down, and it’s lovely, it really is. Cozy in the proper sense of the word.

Wipeout Pure in particular feels made for this. The colours pop against the gloomy mountain light, the soundtrack does its thing through the little speakers, and for a few minutes you’re sliding through Sol 2 as the first few drops of rain patter against the patio tiles.

Ridge Racer scratches a different itch, all cheerful arcade silliness, perfect for ten minutes of side-ways escapism. Metal Gear Acid is the wildcard in the bag, a turn-based card game version of a stealth series that was admittedly weird on release, but I am quite fond of it.

It’s very appropriate for the PSP. A handheld that looked like a piece of consumer electronics from the future, but still home to games that ranged from earnest console ports to genuinely strange experiments, and it… worked.

Life has moved on, the welfare of others often supersedes my own, and I wouldn’t change that. But I do sometimes think about that first time playing Wipeout Pure, with little to worry about, falling asleep to Sam Simon on the Simpsons DVD commentary.

That’s the version of an evening I find myself craving, one where the entertainment doesn’t have opinions about what I should watch next and doesn’t try to predict me.

I am, increasingly, fed up with algorithms.

Is it so bad to pine for the simple contentment of a UMD spinning and a voice from a director’s commentary lulling me off, with no engagement metric being satisfied anywhere in the building?

I don’t think so.

If you don’t own a handheld from this generation, I’d recommend that you absolutely do. Especially for moments when you’re guaranteed some downtime.

You can boot up something from 2006 and it just works, no patches, no updates, no servers to check in with. The little disc spins, the menu loads, and you’re back.

It’s a wonderful experience, one that I’ve suggested is a little like therapy compared to the standards of today.

“Hooking up the PS2 feels like therapy at this point. It's the gaming equivalent of disconnecting from a connected world and going for a walk in the woods. No notifications, no massive updates, minimal UI, one wholly singular experience at a time.”

The rain is picking up, actually, while I’ve been writing this.

Big proper drops on the terracotta. I'm going to put the laptop away, because the kids have eaten their fill and now they want to laze about and doze in the muggy heat, which means there's a save file waiting and a maybe we’ll end up stuck inside.

Frankly that's a better afternoon than most. I am content.

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.

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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.