WEIRD DREAMS AUSTIN MATTHEWS guides us through a brief history of psychedelic video games
examine some truly strange virtual psycho-geographies. First up is Weird Dreams, a 1989 release from Rainbird Software. The game was controversial from the off as the action begins bloodily on the operating table. As a neurosurgeon begins an operation on our hero, he slips into various nightmarish worlds to battle a demon called Zelloripus. Surreal and Dali-esque, the game was a marked departure from the usual shoot-’em-up fare, dropping gamers into a frightening dream-trope where the only escape was to battle giant wasps in a candy-floss machine. Similar subject matter was visited on the Sega release, Nights Into Dreams from ’96, which takes place in a trippy neuro-world where characters would fly through 3D cities.
From ’88, and on the same surreal note, came Zak McKracken & The Alien Mindbenders, an adventure game from Lucas Arts. Featuring a totally out-there plot (involving aliens stupefying the earth’s population with a low hum transmitted down a phone line), the game contained many New Age themes, including levels set in mystical sites like Stonehenge and encounters with shaman and holy men. A guest appearance from an alien dressed as Elvis topped off the action in this decidedly brain-trepanning release. But such 2D puzzle solving wasn’t truly psychedelic, right? What we really want to play is a game about… dementia?
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ne may argue that almost all video games carry some sort of psychedelic influence – from the weird, psychotropic platform worlds of Sonic and Mario to the geometric coloured light-show-like
Tetris. However, in this article I mainly intend to focus on a few lost gems where the creators exhibited an overtly trippy influence in their pixellated play worlds or displayed a surreal take on life that perhaps evidences a sly toke was being taken somewhere between coding sessions.
Let’s start with the granddaddy of them
all. There’s certainly something odd going on in Super Mario’s world. This is a guy who spends his days consuming magic mushrooms, which make him grow Alice- like to twice the size in order to rescue a flower princess from a big reptile. Like, heavy man. Parents seem quite happy to let their children chase hallucinogenic toadstools for hours on end and jump on turtles’ heads or some shit. Sadly for Mario the mushrooms proved to be a gateway drug and his later adventures see him munching goofballs whilst in charge of a dangerously out-of-control go-kart.
But enough of such conjecture, let’s
Styled as a psychic adventure, Psychonauts from 2005 lets you explore characters’ minds by entering their psyche through a door in their skull. Once there you could battle personality and mental disorders to reach the end of the game. Getting weirder, why not try The White Chamber (’05), which opens with a women waking in a coffin…in space. Solving puzzles in this clever title warps reality into ever- eerier creepy scenarios. Even better is We Love Katamari from the same year – a game where you roll round a magical adhesive ball with the objective of picking up as much scenery as possible until your ball grows to the size of a city and subsumes bridges and skyscrapers.
The godfather of psychedelic gaming was Jeff Minter – a man whose every game appeared to feature a llama or camel of
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