Other Strangeness — merritt k

Explaining All of the Fake Games From Wayne’s World on the SNES

Say it’s the 1990s and you’ve been hired to make a video game based on the 1992 smash hit Wayne’s World for the SNES. Well, it’s going to be a platformer, because it’s the 90s. But what’s the structure for the game? Maybe you just have Wayne and Garth traveling through areas inspired by the film,…

February 15, 2023
The Influence of Hilma af Klint on Destiny 2

Visual design is important on two levels in video games. On one level, design conveys mood and atmosphere. On the other, it represents mechanics and interactions. Of course, these aren’t completely distinct — an ominous mood may encourage a player to advance through an area more carefully, for instance. Effective and memorable visual design in…

January 22, 2023
The Web Game I’ve Been Playing Daily for Almost Two Decades

This piece originally appeared at Fanbyte in April 2022. It was in my senior year of high school that NationStates swept my friend group. A simple browser game where you make decisions that contribute to the political and social contours of a fictional country, it was a fun diversion for a few weeks until something else online…

January 18, 2023
‘Crosscountry Canada’ Was My Oregon Trail

This piece originally appeared at Fanbyte in April 2022. When I first moved to the US in the late 2000s, I’d occasionally hear people talking about an old game they played in school called Oregon Trail. I had no idea what it was, because in Canada — or in Ontario, at least — nobody I knew…

January 15, 2023
Video & Arcade Top 10 Was Twitch Before Twitch

This piece originally appeared at Fanbyte in May 2022. Video games weren’t nearly as much of a part of the culture back in the 90s as they are now. Seeing someone playing a game on TV was a big deal — so an entire show about people playing games was huge. Americans had Nick Arcade, which I…

January 11, 2023
‘Creatures’ Was the Grown-Up Virtual Pet

I mostly wasn’t allowed pets when I was a kid. My sister and I wanted a puppy or cat, but our parents always said no. We thought this was our mother was allergic, but that turned out to simply be a front for the true reason she didn’t want an animal in the house —…

January 9, 2023
The Alone Sword is a Lost Ode to a Lost Game

This piece originally appeared at Fanbyte in March 2022. There’s something about the early Zelda games that captured the imagination of anyone who encountered them as a kid. More than many other games of the 80s and early 90s, they presented a wide world full of possibility and adventure — so it’s no surprise that many of…

January 8, 2023
The Nice-ification of the Hobby Shop

In the last few months of 2022, I started playing Magic: The Gathering again for the first time in about a decade. I got into it with Arena, the fully-digital version of the game, but then began going to weekly drafts at a local game store in Brooklyn. I haven’t spent much time in game or hobby stores…

December 31, 2022
Star Control III is a Beautiful Trainwreck

Star Control II, often called one of the greatest computer games of all time, recently celebrated its 30th anniversary. For those who aren’t familiar, the game sees you take on the role of a starship captain tasked with uniting a number of alien races against a genocidal species of giant centipedes called the Kohr-Ah. You…

December 29, 2022
LAN Party

For some time now, I’ve been working on a photo book called LAN Party. It began as an off-the-cuff joke tweet about wanting a coffee table book full of photos of awkward, Y2K-era teens staging elaborate in-person Counter-Strike and Starcraft battles and the response was enough for me to take the idea to a publisher. The book is now fully…

December 5, 2022