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Deep Space is a soundtrack to a videogame that doesn’t exist

Bad news: Deep Space is a game you will never play. It doesn’t exist except as an implication. It’s the invented backstory for a new record by Joel Williams (also of Wavves-affiliated acts Sweet Valley and Spirit Club). Under the name Kynan, Williams wrote the soundtrack to an imaginary game, which he describes as a “surreal shoot-em-up” in the vein of 1986’s Fantasy Zone. In the end—presumably around track 17, “Self Inflicted Wound Game Over”—you end up destroying the planet in your efforts to eradicate “mutated demon aliens.” The lead track, “Deep Impact,” throbs with huge clanging beats and plaintive synth arpeggios. “Contamination” has grainy washes of sound that…

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Lo-fi survival horror returns next week as Back in 1995 comes out

The year 1995 was a turning point for the videogame industry. It was the first year of E3—now the biggest videogame awards and announcement show, which still runs annually. It was the year of the release of Sony’s PlayStation in Europe and North America (it had been released the year prior in Japan), as well as the release of the now cult-regarded system Sega Saturn (also released in 1994 in Japan). While the systems’ most notable games didn’t see release until a year or so after, 1995 was the start of something new. The dawn of a new generation—and a delightfully…

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This PS1-style videogame is basically Speed with hysterical vehicle physics

Speed, the 1994 film in which Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock, and assorted extras hurtled around Los Angeles in a public transit bus, was a fun movie about absolutely nothing. With that in mind, here is OmniBus, an arcade-style game currently being developed by Chicago’s The Buddy Cops that takes Speed’s premise and suggests that it is really a story about physics. Why is this happening? Well, because OmniBus’ creators decided that the low-poly bus in their PS1-style game has no brakes, and really the only difference between a movie villain and a game developer is some moustache twirling. For what…