nostalgia - Killscreen

A painting of Doom's first-person view with a marker and fire extinguisher for weapons, PRIEST tagged on the wall, and a status bar counting paint, ink, stickers and cans

News

Spray cans fill the ammo slots in PRIEST's Doom repaint

The London artist, who came up through graffiti before KAWS pulled the work gallery-side, hands the marine a marker and a fire extinguisher

Podcast

A Sea Made of Plastic [Podcast]

We go in on a police station built wrong on purpose, films rebuilt as late-'90s games nobody can play, and why Mario 64's water still felt like water.

A low-polygon recreation of the Rear Window courtyard, with a figure standing in a lit apartment window

machinima

Miles Buckle Makes Games You Can't Play

Miles Buckle rebuilds Rear Window, Amarcord and Hitchcock's Rope as late-'90s games nobody will ever play, and the impossibility is exactly the point.

Podcast

What a Rickshaw Knows That a Car Doesn't [Podcast]

I ask Kalp Studio's Mannat Jain why she built a game around the ride between two places, and set it in a 1990s Goa that never existed.

RAAHI

The Long Way Around

Kalp Studio built Raahi around the thing most games treat as dead time—the ride between two places—and set it in a 1990s Goan town that never existed.

game aesthetics

Why P.T. Anderson Gets Away With "Retro" But Games Don't

Why do filmmakers using vintage VistaVision get praised for aesthetic choice while pixel-art games get labeled "retro"? The difference reveals everything.

Flat cartoon of a purple creature lying in bed under blue covers in a green room

Pokémon Snap

Random Access Memory

No one could find a party with alcohol, so a freshman-year night became a dorm-room run through Pokémon Snap that stalled on a single missing picture.

News

Artists pay tribute to NES games with a collection of GIFs

Videogame GIFs are one of my favorite things on the internet. Retro game nostalgia less so, but that hasn’t stopped me enjoying the NES game-inspired GIFs that are being showcased on Back to Bits. The website launched today and is a curated animation project created by Washington-based artist Jerry

News

DUSK is the grubby circus act a ’90s-style shooter should be

DUSK is an intentional throwback. It’s a game that deliberately, lovingly evokes the running, gunning, and no-reload bullet-dispensing of ‘90s shooters like Quake (1996), Blood (1997), and DOOM (1993). As with most exercises in nostalgia, it’s also pretty off-putting at first. Why make another Quake

News

Start editing your away messages: Emily Is Away is getting a sequel

Emily Is Away was released just over a year ago, and since then, Emily has amassed a lot of friends—like, 1.5 million of them. Many of which will be excited to hear that early next year Emily Is Away Too, a sequel of sorts, will be released. Perhaps “spiritual successor” is a better word; Emily from

Feature

The 1990s, the decade that never ended

In 2013, the New Museum in New York presented an exhibition titled NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star (named after an album by Sonic Youth). It curated art from the year of Bill Clinton’s inauguration. Soon after, New Jersey’s Montclair Art Museum featured Come As You Are: Art of the

News

GLITCHED will break the fourth wall just to be your friend

You’ve lived in the same town all your life, a tiny idyllic village well removed from the world beyond its borders. Life is simple but reassuring in the way of a well-maintained schedule or a checked-off to-do list, and you have very little to want or desire beyond it. You’re content to tread well-w