Games You Remember That Never Existed [Podcast]

Every game you remember is partly a game you invented. The water in Mario 64 felt like water; the face in the cutscene had an expression. Go back and the water is a few scrolling textures and the face is a stretched JPEG. Miles Buckle builds in that gap on purpose — and then doesn’t let you play the result.

Danny Snelson of UCLA joins for the usual shape: one piece from the Kill Screen archive, one long interview, and the things worth knowing from the past two weeks. From the archive, Ed Smith’s 2015 essay on Resident Evil 2’s police station, a building that is anatomically impossible and works because of it. A police station that used to be an art museum, a save-point typewriter that survived into Zach Cregger’s film, and how wrong a space is allowed to be before a player stops believing in it.

Then Miles Buckle, who rebuilds films as PS1-era games nobody will ever play: the Rear Window courtyard, Norma Desmond’s house from Sunset Boulevard, the plastic sea from Fellini’s Amarcord. He talks about Lego without the instructions, about wanting you to see the polygons, and about why a stretched JPEG face can carry more feeling than a rendered one.

And Danny’s The Little Database, which is a University of Minnesota Press book and also a desktop full of other people’s archives — Eclipse, UbuWeb, PennSound, textfiles.com, Vimm’s Lair, the Malware Museum. What YouTube’s compression does to a Paul Sharits flicker film, and why small, hand-kept, idiosyncratic archives matter more the larger the models get.

In the lightning round: Mitch Anzuoni’s Offshore and Small Press Tycoon, Joshua Mattson’s Defence Contractor Fantasy World and its demonic latex hand, and Step Right Up, Wonderville’s new cabinet crossing a Zoltar machine with vector graphics.

Links

• Fiasco, Bully Pulpit Games
• Ed Smith, “The horror of Resident Evil 2’s police station”
• Save-point typewriters turn up in the Resident Evil film
• Miles Buckle Makes Games You Can’t Play
• Miles Buckle on Instagram
• Daniel Scott Snelson, The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats (open access)
• The Little Database desktop directory
• Kill Screen on the directory
• Eclipse
• UbuWeb
• PennSound
• textfiles.com
• One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age
• Vimm’s Lair
• The Malware Museum
• POC Zine Project
• Queer.Archive.Work
• Invisible Histories
• Pippin Barr, v r 3, a gallery of digital water
• Paul Sharits, Dots 1 & 2 (1965)
• Offshore, Mitch Anzuoni
• Defence Contractor Fantasy World, Joshua Mattson
• Step Right Up at Wonderville
• Death in August, Bruno Abib (members)
• What a Rickshaw Knows That a Car Doesn’t — Kalp Studio’s Mannat Jain on Raahi
• Coming up: Frank Lantz, The Beauty of Games

Hosted by Jamin Warren with Danny Snelson. Music by Nick Sylvester.