Beware! Sail too far to the east, brave soul, and you will come upon that most dangerous of seas. The sky changes to a sickly fresh bruise color, all angry purple and yellow, and the waves will toss madness and froth against the bow. Even the sturdiest ship, the steadiest mind, will be shaken by the foul humors waiting for them beyond the horizon. Ye have been warned. Beware! Beware the internet!
I got lost in an internet vortex this afternoon. It all started innocently enough. Smooth sailing, reading Multiplayer’s interview with Steve Papoustis about Dead Space: Extraction. This led to Matt Hawkins’ Fort 90, and that’s when things started to veer off course. For anyone unfamiliar, Matt’s one of NYC’s great games journalists, but he’s also a madly prolific renaissance man. Fort 90 is a dangerous place, dense with images and text. It’s an easy place to lose your bearings, and that’s what happened to me. Matt linked to the Garry’s Mod work of one MrWhiteFolks. MrWhiteFolks made some spectacular high resolution images of No More Heroes character models stripped of their cel-shading. Very cool stuff. He also made this:
Oh there’s more. Much more.
The internet vortex is perilous, but when you’re hounding for anything and everything related to the videogame landscape, it reveals riches just like MrWhiteFolks’, erm, folk art. That’s what you call this right? That’s what you call it when Heather from Silent Hill 3 dance battles Pyramid Head from Silent Hill 2 in front of the assembled casts of Halo, Metroid, Rumble Roses, Dead or Alive, Gears of War, and Resident Evil 4?
I would like to close with pointing everyone to Edge’s recent feature on preserving videogames’ cultural history. It’s so easy to lose yourself bouncing between one article, one review, one preview, one speedrun, one ROM hack, one actual game to the next that it’s hard enough to process it all when you’re experiencing it in the moment. How do we even begin to preserve things like MrWhiteFolks’ creations? Do we preserve them? Are they important parts of gaming’s history?
Bet you’re all as lost as I am now.
Related links:
10 Years Ago This Week: Silent Hill
Resident Evil Arguments that Need to Die
Metroid Prime Trilogy Retrospective