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Most fake games in movies and TV are ridiculous, but this horror nails a spooky 90s browser gameStarting a series looking at fake games made for movies and TV
Starting a series looking at fake games made for movies and TV
Image credit:No Sleep Films
Image credit:No Sleep Films
“The game is called Bloodthyrster X,” the nerd-coded detective explains, twisting in their ill-fitting suit and furiously shaking an upside-down Xbox controller while their colleagues stare aghast at a TV screen looping a three-second clip of shoddy CGI ultraviolence. “The objective is to run over babies in your minivan while shooting cops and other players. It’s taking over the dark web… and IRL.”
You don’t need me to tell you that fake video games appearing in TV shows and movies are typically absurd and terrible. But just because something is bad, doesn’t mean it’s uninteresting. Having watched dozens of movies and episodes with fake video games, I’m going to celebrate a few over the coming weeks. Some daft fake games have neat ideas, some shows portray their fake games in an interesting way, and some fake games are even quite good. Let’s start now with Deadware, an unknown horror movie which does a great job recreating something a bit bad: a spOooky haunted browser game from 1999.
Deadware - Official TrailerWatch on YouTube
Deadware - Official Trailer
House Of Hunger is an adventure game venturing into a spooky mansion that turns out to be a sprawling metaphysical complex based on Chinese mythology (very loosely, in the way a 90s browser game absolutely would be). As you might expect from an old browser game, its rooms are mostly a series of static images, and House Of Hunger really looks the part. Some screens are straight-up photos, while others have that classic Photoshop tutorial look. Hand-drawn elements and photosourced parts are oversharpened and drowned in grunge then composited discordantly, and it’s perfect. This isn’t sarcasm. I appreciate this style so much because I was there too, painting bloody Color Burn layers across noisy rusted metal textures in a pirated copy of Photoshop 5. If this were a real game 20 years ago, I could likely tell you which particular Photoshop splat brush pack the developer downloaded from DeviantArt, because I would be using it myself to make angsty art.
That one askew air vent in the morgue ceiling is a perfect touch |Image credit:No Sleep Films
Image credit:No Sleep Films
While I keep calling House Of Hunger a “browser game”, sites like this were often web art projects as much as games. Classification didn’t matter; they were curios and mysteries crafted to intrigue and delight. What is this, and who built it, and how, and why, and wow they could afford a dedicated domain and hosting? It was an era where the Internet seemed more magical, a place where maybe strange and terrible things could happen, rather than the known entity it is now: a place where terrible things definitely do happen. How weird to enter a digital haunted house inside the same software that you use to read Hotmail, PlanetQuake, and Xena fansites.
I like that House Of Hunger’s puzzles often require knowledge the game doesn’t contain, a good kick of that ‘mysterious Internet object’ aspect. While Jay in the movie knows a little about mythology himself, I might have been poking at the site across weeks, or chatting with pals over IRC, or trying to research as best I could with 90s search tools. Today, you’d hit Bing and find a dozen guides explaining everything. And I really enjoyed the ouija board section where Rachel and Jay both have to place two fingers on their separate mice as if jointly holding the planchette. This seems technically improbable for a browser game, but making people suddenly use their mice this weird way is a cracking idea for a spooky game.
Image credit:No Sleep Films
Don’t mind that spooky figure, it’s probably nothing |Image credit:No Sleep Films
You can watch Deadware yourselfon Amazon Prime.
Over the coming weeks, I want to tell you about more fake games I have enjoyed in movies and TV. You don’t need me to tell you they’re bad, so let’s see how some are interesting or even good. Some fake games have a design idea or two I enjoy. Some shows have creative ways to show games on the screen. Some handle games culture well even if their games are baffling. Some fake games have become real games. And yes, there’s even good stuff in the innumerable cop dramas about video games making people do murder.
