Hence, games like Jimmy Bumshow - where you’re a seven-year-old boy whose sole goal is to expose your butt without getting caught - or the Moth Expert, where you’re an entomologist with the exhilarating task identifying moths. “For example, it was odd how in the early 1990s, console companies were desperate for mascot characters, or how, in the early 1980s, publishers were putting out any old crap to feed the buying appetite of Atari players.”īMX Crusaders, a “historical extreme sports MMO for mobile 1,000 mountain bikes have appeared in Pope Urban II’s Vatican, and have enabled a whole new mode of warfare.” From ‘100 Best Video Games (That Never Existed)’ by Nate Crowley “Writing this fictional history of games gave me a great chance to pluck out some of the big milestones in the history of gaming, and show how weird they were by fictionalizing them to remove familiarity,” Crowley told Hyperallergic. Not only do they reflect the aesthetics and technologies of their time - beginning with clunky, 8-bit graphics and moving to the sleek images of VR, and progressing from cartridges to CDs - but many of the games also poke fun at how the industry has leaned towards certain stories or tropes for marketing reasons. Although fake, these games do paint an accurate portrait of gaming in a number of ways, capturing the zeitgeist of each era. In about 250 pages, Crowley takes us from the 1980s to the present day, decade-by-decade. Making his vivid commentary even more convincing are illustrations of each game rendered by the team of game artists at developer Rebellion, which owns the publishing imprint. Published by Solaris Books, the title is an incredibly impressive exercise in creativity, with Crowley providing extensive, earnest but utterly made-up descriptions of games he invented, from their premises to their receptions and legacies.
Cover of ‘100 Best Video Games (That Never Existed)’ by Nate Crowley, published by Solaris
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