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Hypnospace outlaws creator3/17/2023 ![]() There are clear jokes, like the page that features an epic rock ballad about a man shaving his five o’clock shadow, or the virtual pets you can buy for your desktop that fill the screen with pixelated turds, but much of the humor is derived from precisely-crafted mundane details: the nu-metal blaring from an early teenager’s typo-filled homepage, or the deeply bland jokes on a Goodtime Valley Baby Boomer’s “goofs” page.Īnd yet there’s an underlying humanity that elevates this adventure from parody to loving tribute. From the opening training videos (compressed into 256-color oblivion) and their tech-utopian, Internet-as-zen-enlightenment posturing to the all-out flame war between zealous fans of the various music scenes inhabiting Hypnospace, the script is a triumph of comedy writing, effectively mixing keen observation with a healthy dose of the absurd. Goofy animated gifs and tacky fonts are one thing, but what sets Hypnospace Outlaw apart is the density and honesty of its portrayal.įirst of all, this game is funny as hell. Users with more experience and companies with marketing budgets have pages with more of a unified aesthetic, chock full of the heavily-dithered gradients and earth tones that were so prominent at the time. The dedication to recreating the look and feel of the early Internet pays continual dividends.Īs the children of the ‘90s reach unambiguous adulthood and start yearning for the good old days, there’s been no shortage of nostalgia for this particular time period, resulting in fun but often superficial throwbacks to the era. The designs of the various sites are spot-on, with lots of the maximalist vomit “more fonts are better” school of design that was so common across AOL and GeoCities sites. There’s TeenTopia, a youth-focused zone, the conservative and rootsy Goodtime Valley, the hip musical underground Coolpunk Paradise, and plenty more.Įach zone contains a dozen or more pages from individual users or companies. The unauthorized offenses are scattered across an incredibly robust network of Hypnospace sites that you navigate through the game’s browser, with hundreds of individual web sites grouped into communities based around the general vibe of the users. Too many unsuccessful flags and you might be punished by way of HypnoCoin fines, though in my experience I was never actually fined despite being quite liberal with my ban hammer.īut playing Hypnospace Outlaw is much more than simply checking off a list of tasks. Successfully flagged violations result in a HypnoCoin payment that you can put towards everything from antivirus software to new desktop wallpapers. When you find the illicit text, images, or links, you can click a hammer icon to submit it for review. MerchantSoft will task you with tracking down specific instances of harassment or finding the source of a glut of copyrighted materials, or investigating a new virus that’s been making its way across Hypnospace. You take on the role of a Hypnospace Enforcer, a volunteer moderator who gets assignments from the Support team at MerchantSoft (creators of HypnOS) to flag various policy violations. Heck, you can even change the screensaver settings. The game literally begins with the HypnOS bootup sequence, and the interface is a surprisingly functional fake Windows 95-like OS, featuring a web browser, email client, music player, and a number of other small programs. Hypnospace Outlaw is set in 1999 during the months leading up to Y2K, taking place entirely within the framework of a fictional operating system, HypnOS, which connects to Hypnospace, a version of the early Internet that people browse in a hypnotized state while they sleep. ![]() While this is an involving and clever adventure game, it functions even better as a time capsule of an alternate reality, one that is wildly funny and absolutely convincing in its replication of the look, feel, and sound of a bygone era. And yes, I had an animated “under construction” gif.Īll of which is to say that I might be the most demographically perfect person to play a game like Hypnospace Outlaw, a unique title that seeks to recreate, in minute and loving detail, a very particular era of the early World Wide Web – indeed, a time when people actually called it the World Wide Web. The backdrop was a tiled 64圆4 pixel marble image and the text was nearly impossible to read on top of it. It was called “Nathaniel Berens Home Page” and it contained riveting content such as my age (nine or ten years old, I can’t remember), my interests (reading, writing, video games), and my favorite movie ( Back to the Future). In the mid-nineties I created my first website as part of a webring known as “KidZone,” which featured kid-friendly and kid-created content.
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