A collection of epistolary fiction about video games that don't exist
170 posts
Latest Posts by gamesthatdontexist - Page 5
Ahhhh! Finally finished this piece of fanart based on the wonderful manga Dungeon Meshi/ Delicious In Dungeon by Ryoko Kui. Big big thanks to SungWon Cho/ ProZD for putting the manga on my radar and the notion of turning it into a game from this tweet.
With this in mind and mouse in hand I hope I have done the source material justice and it’s as much a pleasure to view as it was making it.
Yet again, thank you SungWon Cho for the prompt, and thank you Ryoko Kui for a wonderful read!
If I could make whatever I wanted (independent of my programming/modeling ability).
And a few more concepts from entirely-not-real point n’ click game!
Playing around with the MSX color pallete to try and make something you’d see on FMtownsmarty, hopefully using this for a short thing I wrote for Twine a year ago.
I had a dream about a comic/video game series: immense vintage sci-fi landscapes, scattered with Potemkin-village middlebrow strip malls. Some mysterious entity keeps rebooting this world, taking a different role within it each time.
The protagonist was a housewife of some sort, and she was either trapped in this Matrix-type simulation or she was part of the simulation that had become self-aware.
The rest of the population was polite enough, but turns immensely hostile whenever she violates arcane taboos.
The comic version had kind of a 90s alt-underground feel, and I recognized it as “a bit silly but cutting-edge for the time”; the video game adaptation had Bioshock-style stealth, gunplay, and improvised weaponry, plus some randomized roguelike elements.
‘If Winter Ends’
Cartridge for My Famicase Exhibition at METEOR in Tokyo. @meteor_club #famicase
Cory Schmitz put up a mood video for a video game idea he had, and it struck a chord with me because I’ve had a similar idea for such a long time. The video was really inspiring for the right atmosphere, so lo and behold, fanart for something that doesn’t exist yet, I guess! Children exploring a city on their own, defending themselves from rival gangs? Yes please, yes please!
(Thanks for letting me do this, Cory!)
“Children” Famicase design by Cory Schmitz ⊟
The My Famicase Exhibition show has opened in Tokyo’s METEOR store, and though the gallery isn’t online yet, pictures from the participating artists are starting to trickle out.
Here’s one by super cool designer/Tiny Cartridge site designer Cory Schmitz. His concept:
“THE CITY IS THEIRS.” While the grown-ups are hooked up to their VR machines, the children sneak outside & The City becomes their playground. Create your character, explore the decaying mysteries of The City, & watch out for rival gangs. 1 player.
Nubuwo has a roundup of some other fictional Famicom cartridges shown off on Twitter! And, as I must always mention when talking about Famicase, we had a design in the Famicase 2011 show, made with Ashley Davis!
BUY Famicom stuff, upcoming games
Fan mock-up/fake of an NES version of Pac-Man Championship Edition.
My Famicase Exhibition 2014 online ⊟
How exciting! Time to look through all the Famicom cartridge art designed by cool people and displayed at METEOR in Tokyo. There’s no Tiny Cartridge project this year, but there are carts by lots of cool people! Above are carts by Lord Toon, VAGABOND, John-Charles Holmes, Daruma Studio X Game & Graphics, and Matthew Kenyon.
I’m sure we’ll highlight more cool carts as we have time to take in this exhibit! And of course don’t miss Cory Schmitz’s cart, already posted.
BUY Famicom stuff, upcoming games
Blue Notes (2017) Printed digital label on Nintendo Famicom cartridge
Original cartridge design created for the My Famicase Exhibition 2017 held at METEOR in Tokyo, Japan.
Elsewhere: Labyrinth of Cemetery (Famicom, 2013) This is an eerie land known only as Elsewhere. Can you help Muscadine escape the Great Graveyard or will she become its newest resident? Six stages of platforming action and exploration.
My entry for the 2013 My Famicase Exhibition! (link goes to the 2012 show) I’ve been wanting to get into Famicase for years so this is a minor dream come true for me!
Tumblr won’t upload the longer gif with more “gameplay footage”—please do check it out HERE at my main art blog (along with some more photos of the game).
Mr. Splash! Developed by Hiroshi Inukai aka Polygon (2007, Famicom)
I finally made a reproduction cart of the elusive homebrew game Mr. Splash! I love it. Rather than using the official art (which I couldn’t find a good copy of) I designed my own label, going for a Game and Watch aesthetic. Read more about the history of Mr. Splash including my review of it on the blog!
Once in while people on 4chan would make a thread about Ed Edd n Eddy Online mostly on /v/ (video game). These threads are huge with a lot of people in them…about a game that is not real.
Hear me out:
Animal Crossing, but you’re a traveller who settles in a seemingly abandoned japanese village because you got a sweet deal on the real estate. Then you realize that the village is not abandoned and is inhabited by animal spirits! You can befriend them and do all the other typical animal crossing stuffs, but your goal is to help your villagers pass on. When they “move out”, you have successfully put their spirit to rest. And new spirits for you to help are always coming into the village. Please? (Oh, and also the only other “living” person in the village is a fennec fox shrine maiden named Safaia)
Yet another game idea I want to make.
Video Game Idea.
A game that is marketed as your standard fishing game and for the first 20 minutes or so you catch normal fish like bluegill and bass and what have you. But the further you go into the lake you start to catch fish with mutations and it gets more and more intense until you’re pulling in Eldritch horror monsters and sometimes severed human limbs. You realize you don’t recall how you got to this lake in the first place and the objective becomes to find your way back to shore. You have no real weapons but you can throw the creatures you’ve caught far away from the boat as a means to distract whatever is underneath you, bumping into the boat sometimes. Additional items for the game.
A fishing pole with a radar that starts out with just beeps but later includes noises with hidden messages.
A GPS that displays texts and story elements.
You meet other boaters, all from various backgrounds, countries, and time periods. Some are friendly, others want to sacrifice you to the lake monsters.
You can also take the route of sacrificing others to the lake monster.
Or you can assemble a party and work to keep them safe.
The more fucked up looking the fish you catch, the closer you’re getting to a boss fight, which is usually running from something you can only see part of in the water.
????
And that’s my game idea.
Kazuo Umezu’s horror manga The Drifting Classroom may have reigned in the 70s, but it wasn’t until a decade later that game developers in Japan would begin to cash in on its popularity. The Famicom title, as seen above on a bootleg NES cart, sold millions, and was lauded for its 2D platforming depiction of the manga’s harrowing events in a slightly truncated form. In fact, the game was so popular that an official soundtrack was released, containing every piece of music from the title. Whether you’re familiar with the manga or not, you can surely find excitement in the tale of an elementary school zapped to an uncertain, desolate future, where adults resort to barbarism while the children devise a new world order.
Game Concept: a Bubble Bobble RPG in the style of Mario and Luigi games
Oh man this artist conceived of a pokemon-like interpretation of Ghostbusters and that is pretty much all I want in a franchise.
I recognize every single ghost he’s adapted from the toys and cartoons. In fact, a lot of my favorites are represented and they’re favorites you can see in maybe one frame of one scene of the 80′s show. I wonder if he reads my website.
The four heroines are a little proportionately homogeneous, but
So a friend of mine from @mmmskulljuice‘s circle was talking about their desire to make a “submarine Zelda”, and I started drawing this little guy on the assumption that you’re playing AS the submarine. More ideas followed:
The title of the game is Foot-Long Hero. You play as a very small submarine drone who’s on a mission to visit five to eight dungeony areas above ground, but they can only be accessed from underwater.
You can name your hero sub whatever you want, but his canon name is Hoagy.
The villain’s name is Grinder.
Hoagy is a member of a wandering group of salvage drones who call themselves the Poor Boys.
Yes, we’re riding the sandwich puns hard in this.
Hoagy is a sentient, mobile vehicle in the tradition of classic game characters like Twin Bee and Opa-Opa. He gets hungry, scared, and has emotional reactions to things that happen in the game, but he’s still a machine and has interchangeable parts.
Hoagy is equipped with boots, boxing gloves, a propeller, and a nosecone. The boots and boxing gloves are only used while on land: the prop and nosecone come into play underwater. Each of his parts are interchangeable and he’ll find new propellers, boots and so on that will give him new powers.
Being a sub, Hoagy swims much faster than he can run. He’s highly mobile underwater, to the point where the underwater sections of the game are more like a top-down Zelda, whereas on land it’s a traditional side-scrolling platformer.
On land you can run, jump, launch your boxing gloves, and perform a special Periscope Flip, shown on the bottom, that lets you jump much higher.
Underwater, you can not only launch your boxing gloves but also extend your periscope up to the top, which is a factor in solving many puzzles.
Later in the game you may even acquire a special hat that allows you to grab things with your periscope and pull yourself out of the water.
You can also play as a female-presenting sub, which adds eyelashes onto your periscope but otherwise doesn’t change the game. The canon name for the female sub hero is Baguette, but again you can call her whatever you want.
In Never Say Never Again, Super Villain Maximillain Largo challenges James Bond to a round of “Domination”, a competitive realtime strategy game that combines elements of Risk and Missile Command with betting and electrical shocks as feedback. The game uses a pair of screens on each player’s side to display information as well as a transparent display between them. The whole thing fits very well within the Architecture of Villains. It’s also interesting how frequently Risk-style war games occur. This is the third we’ve seen after Eschaton and Nuke ‘Em.
(Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a clip from the movie on YouTube otherwise I would’ve included it here.)