ranzware
The year is 1984. The game, also, is 1984. The book it’s based on? 1984. The year it came out? 1999, but it might actually be easier to run had it come out 15 years earlier.
I am playing—attempting to play—Big Brother, the recently unearthed demo of a doomed, never-released videogame sequel to George Orwell’s 1984 and a videogame technology pioneer in that it seems to actively resist being played.
It comes from that post-Myst heyday when devs were convinced that games were the future, man, and why shouldn’t we try to create a canonical sequel to a profoundly influential work of Trotsky-flavoured fiction as a videogame where you kill yourself by falling off a lift?
I salute the ambition. There is, I think, something magical to that awkward adolescent phase videogames went through in the ’90s to mid-’00s—like devs knew they had all sorts of powers but didn’t quite know where their limits were, and a feeling that what videogames were even going to be was still a little bit up for grabs. So, sure, make a sequel to 1984 where you’re rescuing your fiancee from the state via a series of water pressure puzzles. Maybe that’s what this medium is.
Ignorance is strength
Warping the plot of 1984—a doomed, suicidal, and maybe pointless individual struggle against a seemingly omnipotent state—to fit a videogame is a tall order. So instead, Big Brother just kind of turns the whole thing into a Die Hard adventure.
The plot is simple: a bald man, his every other word punctuated by a fresh bang from WarNoises.wav, needs you to break into the Ministry of Peace and cause a distraction. This will aid the rebellion—there’s a rebellion now, keep up—in their quest to do whatever it is they’re doing. Also, your fiancee is in there? Maybe?
Which is kind of odd, since Big Brother is not a Quake-like, it’s a Myst-like. Its levels, at least the ones I experienced, are wide and empty, all about solving puzzles rather than blasting the Thought Police. But it had defaulted to what was, in 1999, kind of a gaming go-to narrative.
It’s not a very Orwell plot. It is a very videogame plot, but it’s very videogame in such an era-specific way. Today, a generic game narrative is either a lavishly produced HBO knock-off or a low-budget extended metaphor for IBS. The days of videogames defaulting to gruff men ordering war crimes directly into the camera are behind us. Unless you’re COD.
For the better? Yes. But there’s a nostalgia here; a sense of becoming. Like when you look at teenage pictures of yourself. You look awful, yes, and almost assuredly worse than today, but you were at a phase of your life where it was still possible to become pretty much anything.
Lightning round
These are the things you might feel if you ever luck into getting Big Brother running, a process which required me to install two separate pieces of software for mounting .cue files, arbitrarily copy and paste dgVoodoo 2 files into most directories on my PC, and download a whole new set of DLLs for arcane purposes.
These are lost, ancient rituals now, in the days of digital downloads and over 80% of us having some species of Nvidia GPU. Again, it’s undeniably better, but there’s a kind of intimacy you build with a game when you have to root around filetrees and directly edit .ini files that I don’t think you quite get these days.
Back in 2008 I came to understand my less than legitimate copy of Deus Ex like it was my wayward child as I screwed with all manner of tweaks and edits and fan patches to translate it from an .iso on my spinning platter hard drive into a game I could actually play. I still remember where I need to install Shifter, which precise version of the Kentie renderer is best, and how to get to the advanced rendering options menu in the game’s console. But the last game I played, Avowed? I don’t have half that familiarity.
There’s a kind of intimacy you build with a game when you have to root around filetrees and directly edit .ini files that I don’t think you quite get these days.
Which, you know, maybe is for the best. Even once I’d performed the sacraments and consulted the auguries, Big Brother still ended up running at Doom-guy speeds. One section, in which I had to hit a button on one side of a room before walking over to the elevator it triggered on the other, became possibly the hardest thing I ever had to do in a game because everything was moving at light speed.
Reaching it before it rocketed back up to the top floor was borderline impossible when I kept smashing into walls and getting caught behind geometry. That’s to say nothing of the game’s random tendency to kill me stone-dead when I stumbled into obstacles I had no way of identifying.
And when I did finally make it, well, the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze. I was confronted by a row of showers and a completely inscrutable puzzle that meant I had to configure the water pressure in the base’s boiler to be just so. Meanwhile, the mise-en-scene of the whole thing had all the subtlety of a school play: enormous posters containing catchphrases from the book—”WAR IS PEACE” and “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY”—all over the walls alongside looping gifs of Big Brother himself rotating his head threateningly, like some kind of territorial owl.
Game over
I meandered among the tele-screens, all of which seemed to be live CCTV feeds of empty prison cells, and the desolate levels, picking up a seemingly endless series of medkits. Which was odd, because literally nothing in the levels seemed like it had any way of damaging me. Or so I would think until I tripped into yet another completely invisible thing that threw up the “You have been re-educated” game over screen.
Big Brother is not, you might have gathered, a good game, which is probably why its devs never actually released a full version of it. But if you’re in the exact right age window, someone whose formative years and awkward teens coincided precisely with the awkward teens of videogames as a thing, you might find yourself strangely charmed anyway.
They really don’t make them like this anymore, and for good reason, but there’s a magic all its own to an entire medium feeling itself out, taking wild swings at things like ‘a sequel to 1984’ because they’re still starry-eyed enough to think that could ever possibly go well. And there’s a magic to wrestling the beast that results from those misaimed ambitions into submission, even if I wouldn’t really wish it on anyone. Big Brother’s not a great game, but as a fossil-in-amber of what it was like to play videogames in a certain period of time? There might not be anything better.
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Kurt Indovina
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