I’ve recently fallen down a rabbit hole of fake video games. Not fake like fraud, but fake like art; games that don’t exist to play, but do exist to tell their stories. I’m super into it but finding more is kinda difficult, so here we are!
What fake games do you like? Why do you like them? Pictures, links, videos, whatever.
I really enjoyed Petscop (video 1/25 linked) and Valle Verde (video 1 linked, Spanish with subtitles), both series are let’s play style, exploring fake games to tell their stories. Petscop is much more narratively involved, and tells a great story (you’ll probably want an explainer video afterwards… it’s involved) while Valle Verde is more ghost-in-the-machine horror.
I found this rabbit hole through this video, from Super Eyepatch Wolf about fake video games, why they are made and how they “work” as an art form. Their content is weirdly enjoyable to me, and pleasingly entirely too long. Plus they have their own fake video game.
Edit for clarity: Fake video games is a super broad category. Pictures with gameplay hud that implies a video game, videos of gameplay or cutscenes styled after games count (even those weird live action “games” people record for TikTok count), books or stories that describe gameplay for games that don’t exist count, even soundtracks modeled after game sound tracks count. So if it’s a game or part of a game that doesn’t exist, it counts!
A couple of extra things about this.
The episode was co-authored by William Gibson of all people. The fact that one of the key authors that gave us cyberpunk as a genre, went on to write a painfully mediocre TV episode about virtual reality, still leaves me kind of stunned.
WRT to “live-action standing-in for VR”, it can be done artfully. Avalon does a great job of using practical effects and creative set locations to portray cyberspace. Also: there’s a lot of run-and-gun here, and nobody stands around. Which is to say: they really whiffed hard on the x-files episode, as there’s clearly a better way to do this.
I’d say this mostly failed on the direction side. Less budget in VFX and more in action could have made a lot of difference.