A story about pirating videogames in the 1990s

In the '90s, when I was about 10 years old, there was this old shop that sold household appliances in my city. The shop was kind of run down and honestly a little off-putting, so I had never visited it.

But my friend had heard that they sold Amiga games. Cheap Amiga games.

Now, this was the era of casual software piracy. Even more casual than the torrenting scene of the 00's.

I sometimes bought new videogames but the vast majority of my 100 or so floppies were copied from friends.

If a friend or a friend of a friend had a new game, we all popped over with a box of floppies and copied it for ourselves. Or a friend would bring a copy of a game as a gift, sort of like what we did with mixtapes as teenagers.

I would sometimes buy games legally, of course, but buying games as a kid was by no means easy. Information about new games was scarce and my small city had no shops that carried Amiga games. Buying Amiga games meant I had to go to a bigger city or orded via mail. Neither of which was possible without money and help from my parents.

But now - now there was this decrepit mom and pop store that allegedly sold Amiga games. What a treasure trove!

So me and my friend gathered our savings and went to the store. It was run by an old married couple [erroneus memory warning: maybe not a couple, maybe there just were two adult shopkeepers when I visited] I would years later learn to associate with the BBC comedy horror sitcom The League of Gentlemen's shopkeepers Tubbs and Edward. A very Royston-Vasey-ass local shop for local people.

Surprisingly, there were no games. Only old washing machines, stereo equipment, and VCRs. When my friend asked about the games, the owners took us to a back room. An office, I guess. I was a kid but I'd watched enough TV to suspect the implications of a literal backroom deal.

The owners produced a floppy storage box full of disks that were obviously copied. Handwritten labels, no price tags. They told us the price would depend on how many we bought.

I remember being amazed at how the container box was almost identical to the one I had at home. You know – my stash of illicit software. My friend began to browse the games but I started to get cold feet. If this were Miami Vice we’d be the bad guys! And also: I loved authentic games for their colourful boxes, manuals, and disks that weren't so prone to data corruption. If I was going to buy a game, I expected it to come with all that extra glam!

I was disappointed. Why would I pay for something the shopkeepers probably hadn't paid for themselves? It felt unfair in a very schoolyard sort of a way. Like, Tubbs and Edward were trying to crank out a profit from what was essentially our grassroots hobby. Illegal hobby, yes, but at least we kept it free.

I had enough decorum and timidness not to ask directly whether they were actually selling pirated games. Instead I asked if they'd also give us the box and manual if we bought a game from them. I remember them suddenly being very cross with me. Like I'd done something wrong.

One of them escorted me to the front of the shop and told me they wouldn't sell games to me. My friend bought a few games and I must've waited for him outside the store, feeling like I'd ruined something or broken a rule. I was so mortified by the experience that I have no memory of how I actually got out of the shop.

I felt bad for missing out on some new videogames but also morally proud in a way I didn't have words for back then.

Also, my FOMO about new videogames was somewhat lessened by the fact that at least one of the games my friend bought was corrupted beyond repair before he could load it up once.

I never went back to the store and I have no idea how long they kept doing their Amiga side hustle. But to this day I sometimes think back on the old couple in their backroom selling corrupted warez for pocket change.

What a time!

Abzû (2016)

I’ve had Abzû sitting on my PS4’s hard drive since 2016. As a game made by many of the alumni of thatgamecompany, makers of beautiful indie games like Flower and Journey, it was an immediate purchase. I wanted to see where those kinds of games would go next.

I started Abzû back in 2016 but never finished it. Probably because despite sharing so much with Flower and Journey it’s not as atmospheric or as tightly designed. It had Austin Wintory’s music and Matt Nava’s art direction but something was missing. One obvious missing piece was Jenova Chen’s design, but somehow the game’s shortcomings felt even more profound. Like it lacked heart. Back then, Abzû was a disappointment.

But now! With the benefit of nearly a decade’s worth of distance I didn’t compare Abzû to Flower or Journey any longer. I just wanted a short game to fill a lazy sunday afternoon with. And it turns out Abzû is actually pretty good! Not novel like Flower or absolutely paradigmatic like Journey. But pretty good!

It’s mostly just about diving around in different colourful sea environments. Very chill, and just when you think the game has nothing more to offer… well, turns out it does.

In the current game development landscape where many games take closer to a decade to make, Abzû is a refreshing snack. A polished, beatiful game made in three years and played through in around 2 hours. Even if it did take me a decade to actually finish it.

From indie darlings to hang out games

What made me bounce off Abzû in 2016 was it’s lack of aesthetic and affective profoundness which were key components of Flower and Journey, respectively. Now, however, I realize Abzû isn’t – or shouldn’t be read as being – in the same genre as thatgamecompany’s games. Abzû is actually more akin to hang out games like A Short Hike and Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor. Pretty, quirky, short, and focused on just hanging around in little digital spaces. Abzû was made and marketed in the image of thatgamecompany’s more profound predecessors but I don’t feel less for the game for eventually being something else.

In 2016, I hadn’t really identified hang out games as a genre. And it’s not like I still have, exactly. It’s more of a vibe than anything else, based on ongoing discussions and a vague sense of slow genre shifts in videogames and their production.

Hang out games are a loose group of (often indie) games I’ve learned to recognize via their broad mechanics such as sandboxiness (but, like, small sandboxiness so maybe litterboxiness?), bite-sizedness, atmosphere, simplicity and various visual cues arising from all of the aforementioned. It’s like a cognitive schema for what some games look and feel like; a tool to use when thinking about games, basically, rather than a clear category of games and experiences. And I’m happy Abzû contributed another entry into that personal mental catalogue!

Sometimes all you need is a place to play in

There is a more cynical reading here, too, of course. Of a game that takes the beauty of earlier novel experiences and packages it into a lesser thing, in accordance with the the dominant commercial aesthetic of the 2010s. But that would feel unfair: at its heart Abzû is a nice little mood piece, perfect to play with your kids, if only to show them that you can hang out with, and in, videogames. That videogames are pretty and weird and gentle, and that oceans hold a whole world’s worth of beauty worth fighting for.

It’s not what Abzû was made for, I think, but it’s what it has become, almost a decade after its release. A fantasy of a place where you can spend a while playing in peace amidst a burning world.

Office Blade Runner

Video meetings and the proliferation of LLM chat interfaces have introduced a new point of tension for organizations. I call it "guess the robot", and it works like this.

In a meeting where everyone is pitching ideas or ways of proceeding with something, you notice someone is being extra prolific. Like, sudden bursts of highly thought out responses. Not just reacting to proposed ideas but proposing like 5 new ideas and a few new angles that tangentially touches upon what you're discussing.

It's not just someone being enthusiastic or someone working under a fresh dose of caffeine. It's like someone were processing and outputting information at a higher capacity, but working on a set of facts oddly removed from the realities of your organization and the meeting at hand.

That person is, of course, feeding prompts into ChatGPT (or equivalent) and passing off the results as their own takes. And, look, generative AI is good enough to make sort of passable suggestions. But when you pull from ChatGPT which has NO DATA on your organization's ability to follow up on ideas, and bring with you a torrent of new actionable (but pretty mid) ideas, it only floods the discussion and bogs down everything.

If everyone is already working at close to full capacity, it doesn't help to rush in with overachieving mediocrity. I'd take one brilliant (and realistically doable) idea over a buffet of kind-of-ehhs any day! This method of "increasing productivity" quantitatively but not qualitatively is bonkers!

It's weird sitting in a meeting trying to intuit who's augmenting their takes with AI suggestions. I never imagined being an office blade runner doing realtime Voight-Kampff heuristics to identify the robot in the room but here we are.