Recommended by lpslucasps as part of this list.
One of my favorite past-times online is wandering through the remains of old websites that have slipped through the cracks of time, free of Javascript and the sleek minimalist design of the current netscape. Ancient fan websites for niche anime series, the blogs of middle-aged professors talking about their field of study, the personal websites of long-gone starry-eyed netizens, abandoned forums archived in whole by a community enshrining their texts like an old religion, it's akin to exploring an abandoned building: It's purpose is long-forgotten, it's structure has rotted away, and the only signs of life are the pests and micro-organisms that have found their ecological niche within. Like the digital archaeologists of today, the rats who reside there have no clue about the significance of the artificial home in which they reside, they can only peer upon the bones and wonder what it all meant.
Hypnospace Outlaw's greatest strength is how it manages to perfectly capture the feel of late 90s internet. From the hyper-compressed audio and video, the gaudy yet charming layouts of old webpages and the general interconnected feel of insular online communities, it has the cultural language of the pre-Y2K internet down to a T, but more importantly, Hypnospace Outlaw captures the twilight of the Wild West-era of the internet. Hypnospace is an ecosystem, a thriving network of fringe individuals and communities connected through the power of Sleeptime Technology, but just like in real life, corporate shortsightedness and the cold hand of Capitalism tried to force Hypnospace into a more marketable form that would ultimately kill the very ecosystem it cultivated. In a striking parallel to the world of today, the final stretch of Hypnospace Outlaw takes place in the modern day, decades after the Y2K panic, where the goal of the player shifts from maintaining the peace in Hypnospace to simply trying to maintain Hypnospace. From the Internet Archive, to Flashpoint, to the Lost Media Wiki; there's a prevalent culture on the net today around preservation, full of communities that work around the clock to try and save the internet as was, before corporations forced the discontinuation of legacy software and aesthetics in the name of profit, before the internet was monopolized by corporate spyware and data-harvesting scams that forced the cultural mass extinction of the disparate websphere.
Hypnospace is an undeniably fantastical game, an alternate history dealing in the hypotheticals of advanced sci-fi technology, but its undercurrent of pre-Y2K fear and a longing for the internet as it was give it the grounding to resonate with the players who grew up in that era of the world. To pretend the internet was ever the mythical wild west we romanticize it as nowadays is foolish, but its undeniable that we lost something in the years following. All roads on the Information Superhighway converged into one, right into the mouth of the corporate Abaddon.
And it might be too late to go back.
One of my favorite past-times online is wandering through the remains of old websites that have slipped through the cracks of time, free of Javascript and the sleek minimalist design of the current netscape. Ancient fan websites for niche anime series, the blogs of middle-aged professors talking about their field of study, the personal websites of long-gone starry-eyed netizens, abandoned forums archived in whole by a community enshrining their texts like an old religion, it's akin to exploring an abandoned building: It's purpose is long-forgotten, it's structure has rotted away, and the only signs of life are the pests and micro-organisms that have found their ecological niche within. Like the digital archaeologists of today, the rats who reside there have no clue about the significance of the artificial home in which they reside, they can only peer upon the bones and wonder what it all meant.
Hypnospace Outlaw's greatest strength is how it manages to perfectly capture the feel of late 90s internet. From the hyper-compressed audio and video, the gaudy yet charming layouts of old webpages and the general interconnected feel of insular online communities, it has the cultural language of the pre-Y2K internet down to a T, but more importantly, Hypnospace Outlaw captures the twilight of the Wild West-era of the internet. Hypnospace is an ecosystem, a thriving network of fringe individuals and communities connected through the power of Sleeptime Technology, but just like in real life, corporate shortsightedness and the cold hand of Capitalism tried to force Hypnospace into a more marketable form that would ultimately kill the very ecosystem it cultivated. In a striking parallel to the world of today, the final stretch of Hypnospace Outlaw takes place in the modern day, decades after the Y2K panic, where the goal of the player shifts from maintaining the peace in Hypnospace to simply trying to maintain Hypnospace. From the Internet Archive, to Flashpoint, to the Lost Media Wiki; there's a prevalent culture on the net today around preservation, full of communities that work around the clock to try and save the internet as was, before corporations forced the discontinuation of legacy software and aesthetics in the name of profit, before the internet was monopolized by corporate spyware and data-harvesting scams that forced the cultural mass extinction of the disparate websphere.
Hypnospace is an undeniably fantastical game, an alternate history dealing in the hypotheticals of advanced sci-fi technology, but its undercurrent of pre-Y2K fear and a longing for the internet as it was give it the grounding to resonate with the players who grew up in that era of the world. To pretend the internet was ever the mythical wild west we romanticize it as nowadays is foolish, but its undeniable that we lost something in the years following. All roads on the Information Superhighway converged into one, right into the mouth of the corporate Abaddon.
And it might be too late to go back.
3 Comments
Amen brother
ratio
maradona
2 years ago