Screaming Mad George left behind exactly one video game

The cover of Paranoiascape is a field of grasping red hands with a PlayStation logo tucked into the corner, and I keep returning to how completely it refuses to look like a game from 1998. Screaming Mad George—born Joji Tani in Osaka, dead in February at 69, though the family only announced it last month—made exactly one game, and it is the strangest object on the console.

It is a pinball game. It is also first-person: you stand behind the flippers, in 3D, and you can walk. Nine levels, a life bar, and a burning brain for a ball, which you knock down organic corridors past giant syringes and human cockroaches toward the exit. A studio called Mathilda developed and published it, then never made another game. It never left Japan. Hardcore Gaming 101 has the only serious English write-up.

What lifts it above oddity is that it was not a detour. George called the method Anti-Realism—nothing digital, everything built by hand—and it is the same method behind the closing orgy of Society, behind Freddy Krueger and the Predator, behind the Nine Inch Nails video for "Closer" and Slipknot's masks. "Paranoiascape" was also already a song: track two on Transmutation, the 1993 album by the visual kei band Screaming Mad George & Psychosis. The PlayStation disc was not a licensing exercise. It was the fifth or sixth medium the same body of work walked into, and it happened to be the one with flippers.

There is a line George gave about the whole practice: "I don't like real violence, but I like created violence... I don't like anything that is real." That is a stranger thing to say about latex than about a videogame, which is probably why the jump to a disc was barely a jump at all. A curation account for obscure games put the game back in circulation in August, pegged to the news.

We once asked whether pinball could tell a story. This is the most deranged available yes.