The nostalgia and discomfort of archaic user interfacesInterface
wfmag.cc \ 25of us were in our formative younger years.”
“It’s only going to grow as more young
game devs who were inspired by their digital
childhoods start making games,” Seeley says.
Lawhead feels “like we’re all part of a creative
discourse. A lot of older work led up to this and
laid the groundwork for current titles so that
they can even be understood. I would hope that
we can build a history of such work.”
The history not just of video games, but
of software in general is a shared concern in
all their work. Together, they keep alive
the history of how we used to interact with
technology, with all the nostalgia and discomfort
it entails. Jon McKellan, creative
director of No Code and
co-creator of The House
Abandon and Stories Untold.ALIEN TECH
Speaking about his experiences
working on Alien: Isolation,
Jon McKellan says that its
“lo-fi interfaces looked cool and
interesting, but also added to
the horror. The display might fail,
the program might not load, and
you’re left with a serious problem.
That concept has definitely stuck
with me all the way from then,
through Stories Untold and into
our latest game, Observation.”technology. But instead of an early nineties
arcade machine, we find ourselves sitting in
front of an old computer running an eighties text
adventure game. $t first, it seems to be a game
about a protagonist returning to his parents’
holiday home, but nostalgia soon takes a sudden
left turn when the familiar becomes strange.
“A combination of a love for all things
imperfect and a background in graphic design
means I get to explore and recreate these things
I was in awe of as a child,” says Jon McKellan,
founder and creative director of No Code. “Not
just the angle of text adventure games, but
the whole e[perience the bright, ȵicNering,
multi-coloured loading patterns and noises, the
phosphor glow of the CRT – all of these details
are erased from today’s technology.”
Having grown up in a family in which the
main source of entertainment was playing
video games together, McKellan subverted his
childhood nostalgia for “these magical boxes”
in The House Abandon. “Turning that soft,
warm, fuzzy feeling into something that feels
distinctly unsafe was really exciting for me to
create around,” he says. “What was safe was now
unsafe, and the memories you uncovered as a
result of interacting with these machines weren’t
as nice as you hoped. We set up the expectation
of ‘this is a nice safe space to play a game in’. It
looks cosy. Then, we pull that space apart.”
There’s a sense of a genre emerging among these
explorers of old interfaces. Tholen speaks about
the “heap of shared inspirations from when most
Hypnospace Outlaw’s personal
webpages are dedicated to everything
from art and esotericism to niche
music genres and fantasy role-playing. In The House Abandon, the space outside the screen
is non-interactive, but small changes to it reflect
what’s happening within the text adventure.