What is an obscure piece of media or videogame that you think nobody else here has heard of?
It could even be a youtube video or movie that you don't think anyone reading this has heard of besides you.
The Illusion of Gaia for SNES. I don't know anyone who has heard of it.
I still have the T-shirt that came with the box set!
It was a weird game, honestly.
I think the other two games in that series (Terranigma) didn't get official English versions, but there are fanslations if you want to play them.
Terranigma is one of my favorite SNES games! It is a truly awesome adventure and so underrated!
I played through a lot of fan translations and obscure games when I first discovered emulation. E.V.O Search for Eden is another weird, unique RPG from that era, which I highly recommend!
All 3 games got official English translations. Soul Blazer and Gaia were released in the US and Europe, but Terranigma for whatever reason was only released in Europe. I'm so glad emulation came around and opened up access to so many region-locked games.
Rented Illusion of Gaia so many times!
I don't believe I played it, but I remember that box art. They probably had it on the shelves of my local blockbuster video. I think it might have also been a cover feature in Nintendo power.
That's how I played originally was renting it. The box art was awesome.
Yep, know about it. But I was more of a 'Secret of Mana' and 'Secret of Evermore' person myself.
One of my cool older cousins was playing this one christmas when we went to his house! I was vaguely disappointed when we went back the next year and he was like "oh yeah that was fun but i beat it and don't play it anymore." Little kid brain assumed the game just went on for much longer than it does. Playing it together (ie: taking turns) is a fond childhood memory for me, though.
My mind went straight to the SNES too, but with Chaos Seed, the feng shui dungeon building oddity. I have a feeling people might be familiar with SNESdrunk around here, though.
Interesting in Pal regions it is called Illusion of Time.
I also found a fan remake on itch.io
I replay that game every couple of years, one of my all time favorites. My brother still had the cartridge.
Now I’m gonna need to play when I get back home, thanks stranger!
I think I might've seen a copy of that at a retro used game store near me here recently.
Wow. I watch YouTubers who talk about the SNES, and it gets brought up all the time in those circles!
I had it as a kid. I remember really liking it.
The original Death Race 2000 starring Sylvester Stallone and David Carradine. It may have had a small comeback when the Death Race remake came out but this isn't the kind of movie you'd see randomly on tv.
Fun story, my dad met a guy who talked about a movie he had seen once, where racers ran over people to score points, my dad thought this guy was taking the piss and never considered the movie might be real. Until one day he was watching TV randomly and stumbled on the movie. But as people from the era of cable TV might remember, it was hard to know the name of the movie you just caught midway through, unless the channel showed the name of the movie you were out of luck, so I grew up knowing that this movie existed, but never knew the name. When the remake came out the plot seemed familiar enough for me that I immediately went to check what it was based on and finally put the final nail in the coffin of a long family mistery.
I edited the nudity out of that so we could screen it at work. There's a LOT of titties in that movie.
The 1976 arcade game called Death Race (seemingly no relation) is one of the first to ever spark controversy over violence in video games. It's not too well known today, being almost 50 years old and fairly primitive.
And fun movie fact, Death Race 2000 is Sylvester "Sly, The Italian Stallion" Stallone's first non-pornographic film role.
My parents love this movie, I saw it many times growing up. Every time they drive past someone in a wheelchair that movie gets mentioned.
Just saw the trailer. I thought 2000 was the year it came out but it came out in 1975.
Yes! This is a movie my parents let me watch when I was like ten or eleven and it definitely stuck with me.
"What's that?" "A hand grenade" best pun in cinematic history, un-toppable. I'm a huge Death Race fan, and CarWars, and the Twisted Metal game. Gun cars are just cool
In 1990, a series of CGI animation collections began release on VHS tape. The Mind's Eye was the first experience many people (myself included) had with pure computer animation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%27s_Eye_(film_series)
The best known segment from the first tape is Stanley & Stella in Breaking the Ice, which was first released in 1987. You can just watch it online now of course!
https://youtu.be/3bTqWsVqyzE?si=28YJchoAQSqfZY0P
The animation style reminds me a lot of Reboot, a childhood favorite. It still amazes me how interesting this style is even today, really shows how much more artistry and vision matter than technology. I believe this is also the first public demonstration of a flocking algorithm.
That's why my mom bought me an Amega 4000. It was a birthday present. Never got that Video Toaster and never did get into animation back then but I had Brilliance and used it allot. I cant remember for sure but I think I remember the os being more Unix like. God I loved that machine!
Ever since I saw Beyond the Minds Eye I've wanted to do computer animation.
My brother brought this home along with the follow-up, Beyond the Minds Eye. I recall the first one having some scenes from The Lawnmower Man. I believe the soundtrack also featured Jan Hammer.
Too far, take it easy! (It's alright) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yuyXloX_uNw
Holy shit, I saw this as a kid around 95-98 when I was visiting a friend of my mom I think, this as playing as music in the tv, the guy had like a home theater like setup and this burned into my mind, especially the segment on beyond the minds eye where there’s a guy/robot playing a fps. This was a wild trip to recall, thank you!
Alright let's go, I love niche things:
Movies:
Tabletop:
Games:
My music taste is so underground you guys I'm very cool like that. There's a surprising number of trans folk punk musicians from the Pacific Northwest. I'm getting sleepy but if anyone wants me to bombard them with folk punk artists (trans or otherwise) lmk I'll totally hook you up
I wouldn't say Joe's Apartment is niche.
It's just not good and easily forgotten.
I've been collecting rulebooks for that game for the last ten or so years. Maybe my favorite tabletop. It flows pretty smoothly if everyone is familiar with the rules but for sure even if you've been playing it for a decade you'll always hit something that's like "I have no clue how to resolve this". And the learning cliff is for real so actually getting people interested in it enough to become that familiar with the rules is as hard as the game lol
The MtG BearShare secret lair is the funniest fucking card they've ever made
It's an absolute gem lol. The only secret lair I've actually gotten
I don't need a bombardment but I'll certainly take a top 5 folk punk bands! (Trans or otherwise).
Folk punk in the PNW where at least someone in the band is trans: Pigeon Pit, Left at London, Sister Wife Sex Strike, and Porch Cat. I know I'm missing some, maybe Kimya Dawson counts (non binary, lives in PNW, but from New York and Moldy Peaches was a New York band).
If I'm just going to do top 5 folk punk in general though, hard to pick and it changes often but let's go with: Apes of the State, Days n Daze, She/Her/Hers, Jeffrey Lewis, and Pigeon Pit (I fucking love Pigeon Pit okay)
Sames!
I forgot about Redneck Rampage. For some reason I associate the feeling of that with Blood, and it looks like they're both from 1997. I'll have to go fire it up and see if there are any similarities
Same engine (Build)
Bubba Ho-Tep is an awesome little Bruce Campbell movie if people are looking for something to watch. I remember Fido was pretty big among B Grade / Comedy horror fans about 10-15 years ago.
Sim Tower was really fun growing up. I was expecting that when came out fallout shelter and was mad and disappointed. I feel like most people have seen screenshots or characters from The Neverhood but probably couldn't name what it was from. I never played it but remembered it growing up and only found the name out a year ago.
I've seen Bubba Ho-Tep and Cemetery Man! Watched them during a movie marathon once that also included From Dusk Till Dawn and Jacob's Ladder. That was a night well spent.
Out of the games, I've played Sim Tower. I never made it to 5 stars but got as far as building the subway in at least one of my towers. I played way too many sim games as a kid. SimSafari is probably the most obscure I tried -- never really made much sense out of that one though.
I don't know if it's that obscure... but for anyone else who played a bunch of sim games -- do you remember the song with the lyrics "I'm just a splatter, splatter, splatter on the windshield of life"?
Joe’s Apartment
being niche makes me feel old..
I'll occasionally catch myself singing "welcome to Joe's toilet, plop plop plop, ahh ahh ahhh.."😂
looks like the full movie is on YT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49Z7fSRrn2Q
Fido the zombie movie?
Make sure you get me a head coffin.
Fido the fuckin zombie movie! I love zombie movies the cheesier the better
There was an old PC game called "Dominus". I don't really know much about it. My dad just randomly picked it up as an xmas gift one year for me. It was pretty sweet.
You're the lord of a kingdom that gets invaded by like eight armies. You have your own monster units you can deploy. You can deploy traps. You can cast spells. You can go down and fight hand to hand. If they make it to the throne room and kill you, it's game over.
If you capture enemy troops, you can interrogate them. There's a little animation where they get poked with a red hot iron poker. If you capture a leader, you can sometimes negotiate peace. If you capture an enemy mage, you can learn part of a secret spell. I never got a secret spell working, though.
It was super cool. Never met anyone who's played it.
Several years back I watched a Japanese film called Fish Story. It's a pretty weird movie, and the first time I watched it, I hated it, and almost turned it off. It was just kind of boring, and it was really confusing because it kept jumping between different stories, and it was not in chronological order. Then, right at the very end, a short segment tied everything together so incredibly. It blew my mind and I immediately wanted to watch the movie again. I have never experienced anything like that before or since. I don't know anyone else who's ever heard of this movie.
That seems interesting, you've probably already watched it, but in case you haven't Memento is another movie that's told in not-chronological order and ties together at the end.
Is it bad I thought this was a Japanese version of finding Nemo before I searched it?
Just looked it up. I like quirky movies and I like the sound of this - it's going on my list to watch later. Thanks! :)
I really enjoyed Fish Story too! I sought out other films by the same director/writer, Yoshihiro Nakamura, and found a few others i really enjoyed. I can't claim they'll have the same wow factor or impact as Fish Story but i love these films for similar reasons i love Fish Story.
Golden Slumbers was crazy, weird, beautiful, and fun. Awesome ending! Highly recommend. Much different from Fish Story but with a similar sort of quirkiness. Another one i found around the same time was The Foreign Duck, the Native Duck and God in a Coin Locker. That's a really weird one, but again with beautiful scenery and a sort of mysterious air. Another one i caught more recently and really enjoyed was called A Boy and his Samurai. I wasn't initially that interested in watching it but gave it a chance and I'm really glad i did. Such a sweet and charming film.
Mad Dog McCree. A literal "video" game. Live action first person pointy shooty thing.
I've never seen a video on this, but surely someone else has heard of it.
Back in the late 2000s, early 2010s, I got a CD in a cereal box with a PC game on it. the game was I think some kind of gamified flight sim, and the interesting part is that there was a decal of a plane on top of the CD surface. On the other side of the CD, there was another game (maybe a racing game?) And it had a corresponding decal, so the CD had decals on both sides and could be inserted both ways in your player to play each game. I've never seen that anywhere else (2 -sided CD or CD readable surface with decals) and I remember the game actually being somewhat fun, but promotional games of the era are very often lost media.
I did a little digging and found that Nestle added CDs to their cereals! There were quite a few different titles with different labels. Maybe these links well help you find your games?
There's a bunch more content here:
It was this one https://archive.org/details/nestle_game
But in french instead of Portuguese. Thanks for the throwback!
Movies:
Games:
Okami won game of the year, it's certainly not obscure. It even got a Steam release after all these years.
I just recently played through Terranigma! It's the third of a unofficial trilogy of similar Enix titles that I played as a child: SoulBlazer and Illusion of Gaia. Terranigma didn't make it to the USA for some reason.
Triplets of Belleville wa Oscar nominated if I recall correctly, so might not be that obscure.
Oooh, Kubo was really fun I forgot about that one. I liked it a lot
Triplets of Belleville is something I haven't thought of in a long time. Thanks for the reminder, time for a re-watch!
Lots of good music in the triplets movie
I watched Kirikou in my high school French class! I liked it, but being teenagers, there were many immature jokes about the nudity.
Okami was really fun. I will say that going back to play it now the NPC talking sound the murmuring gets really old fast. I still enjoyed everything else.
NPC talking sound the murmuring gets really old fast.
You can turn that off in the settings, at least in the Switch version. First thing I always do when starting a new run ;)
The game Chex Quest, which was a total conversion of Doom for kids, used as an advertising campaign and included in cereal boxes. Incredibly well done game.
It was recently released on steam for free
I played that. Free game that came in the cereal box, and way better than I expected for an advertisement
I also had the NES Yo' Noid game that Domino's put out
Everyone knows Oregon trail and Amazon trail, but I don't see Yukon trail mentioned as much. Similar game but up the coast of Canada.
Also we had a game called Power Pete that came with this old powermac we had.
And a game called Stay Tooned! Where you get sucked into a cartoon hotel. Each room had cool puzzles and you had to escape
There was a local band where I am 20+ years ago called Naucet. With songs such as "This is Not a Convenient Time to be Stabbed". I have absolutely no idea what happened to the band, where they went, what they did. I can find no reference to them anywhere online whatsoever. I have a musician friend who was friends with them(maybe just one of them, I forget at this point) and has copies of their music on an old hard drive somewhere in a closet. Been a number of years since I've seen/heard from said friend, so I can only assume whether or not he still has that old hard drive. If he does, then for all I know, that might be the only place in existence that you can find that music.
My favorite video game as a kid was called Red Storm Rising, based on the Tom Clancy novel of the same name, and played on a Commodore 64. It put you in command of a submarine facing off against the Soviet navy. Graphics were very basic, but it had a very intelligent engine that lead to needing to use real strategy to win.
Almost no one else has ever heard of it.
I'd never met anyone but my mom who'd played Solomon's Key prior to Nintendo straight up adding it to the NSO.
The other game I never hear about was the ID4: Independence Day floppies that came in cereal boxes or something. Don't really remember the games that well but I do remember trying to collect them all.
Also, I once basically got gaslighted into thinking that Falling Down was just a fever dream of mine until one day I'd heard the name in a Tech N9ne song and it all clicked again.
Back in the late 70s and early 80s, when I got to stay home from school, I remember that around 11am the local PBS channel would air short videos from regional public service stations around the country, or low-budget cartoon shorts with an experimental vibe to them, who knows where they were made or by whom.
One example was of a short fella who sang the same "Ey yey-yey-yey" refrain over and over again, those around him got increasingly annoyed but he wouldn't stop. At the end, a mob slowly converges around the character, encircling him... and he just keeps on cluelessly singing the "Ey yey-yey-yey" refrain.
The mob covers the guy, there's a quick collective roar, then it recedes to show a tombstone. The last shot is of the "Ey yey-yey-yey" echoing as we see the image of the grave, frozen on the screen.
Another one, which I vaguely remember was filmed by a North Carolina public television station, a live action short of a kid that gets bullied at school, at the end the bully or bullies have some sort of accident in the woods, the kid is witness to this, and the shot freezes on the kid looking straight at the camera, with a voiceover along the lines of "What would YOU do in this situation?"... and it ends, right there, not with a resolution but with a cliffhanger and a moral question.
EDIT: grammar for clarity
GTA IV Pakistan edition
Basically, just a GTA4 pirate rip and modded and sold on actual disks.
There are several, and they are hard to find online because any uploads of it probably don't exist anywhere anymore, and were already rare due to aforementioned disks.
Some of them are so regional and probably made by one person, the only way to find one is to get a computer HDD with it installed.
It was a game for PC around the year 2000, I don't even know the name of it. I've been searching for it for years. It's a point and click adventure game.
The premise is your spaceship breaks down on an alien planet. If you try to repair the ship immediately a giant alien spider will come and kill you.
After searching for a while you end up making friends with one of the aliens and sneak around one of the villages looking for parts.
I never made it past that point.
I highly doubt anyone will know what this is, I've tried multiple times on that reddit sub for games people can't remember.
Anna and the appolypse, it's a fantastic zombie musical with insanely good songs. I have never met anyone in the real world or online who have heard of it (except a few who I forced to watch with me).
Strings (2004) movie. It's a trope-ish fantasy movie, but all of the characters are marionettes. The strings go up to the heavens and are taken into consideration with things like architecture having no roofs, and gates are arches that rise up out of the ground to prevent travel beneath them. Someone gets injured by the string on their arm getting cut, and their arm flops around lifelessly afterwards.
Eternal Champions. An old fighting game for Sega. I've never met anybody in real life who has heard of it. It was so awesome. Xavier was the shit.
I had this! For some reason I liked the noir detective guy.
Larcen! He was awesome too. Such a great cast of characters, and each stage had a stage death you could unlock similar to a fatality. My brother's and I sank so many hours into this game.
One of the proudest days of my youth gaming career was beating Eternal Champions. The environment-based fatalities were incredible.
Cyborg kickboxer dude and the weird cane-staff guy were both OP as fuck, but the future cop guy's ranged stun was amazing for longevity.
I remember reading about that one in a video games magazine when I was a kid! I never played it. I kind of assumed it was a bigger deal because it had a lot of coverage in whatever magazine I was reading.
Arx Fatalis for og Xbox. I have it and haven't played it, but nobody I know has ever heard about it.
I just searched that game and found it is also on steam.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1700/ArxFatalis/
Reminds me of the old TES games before Oblivion.
I actually have both that and Arx Libertatis installed on my PC! I haven't gotten around to playing it though.
It was a very cool spiritual successor to the older Ultima Underworld games, which are surprisingly interactive for their time. In many (many) ways they are the precursors to the immersive sim genre, and Arx is an interesting if isolated branch on that family tree.
I had it on pc at one point. I think I read about the spell casting system and really wanted to try it. I didn’t end up playing that much though.
there is this film from the late 80s called miracle mile about a guy who answers an incoming call at a payphone outside a diner in los angeles, and its a panicked military officer who dialed the wrong phone number who says he just launched americas nukes and that a nuclear retaliation will hit american soil in about an hour. a lot of the film is spent without being fully convinced of the authenticity of the phone call and the film has a slightly dreamlike pacing which makes it feel pretty tense, and theres a scene that stuck with me where the main character has a nosebleed in the diner after the phone call. i feel like even as far as cult films go this one is a little under the radar and, even though its not a life altering film, probably deserves a little more credit than it gets.
When I was a kid I was only allowed to play educational computer/video games. The only exceptions to that were 2 games that came with our Win95 computer (when we got the computer it came with a little case full of software/game cds). One of the games was redline racer, a game where you could race motorcycles on pretty cool (for an 8 year old) tracks. The other was G-Police, a game that took place in an outer space colony built inside domes on the moon Callisto. You played as a guy who joined the government police to find out what really happened to his dead sister. The entire game play was executing missions piloting a flying fighter craft and the story was told/discovered via radio transmissions and cut scenes every few missions. I probably put hundreds if not thousands of hours into playing that game over and over between 8 and 10 years old. I actually found redline racer a few months ago on an abandonware site and got it to run on my computer, but the only install options were French, German, and Spanish, none of which I speak. I installed the Spanish version and was surprised at the fact that I could still remember/navigate all the menus. I haven't found G-Police anywhere or ever heard of anyone else who knows it. Part of me wishes I could find it and get it to work for nostalgia, but the other part of me knows that it's going to look like a bunch of boxy awful graphics and I should not taint my happy memories.
Check this out: https://www.myabandonware.com/game/g-police-a4m
Omg that's it! Thank you! I've been searching all over for this
G-Police was the poster child for new texture streaming effects over the AGP bus. It was one of the first games (if not the absolute first) to feature animated billboards.
There was also a Playstation version which may be easier to find.
I think you might have solved my weird unknown warez.
That sounds a lot like it!
Is this it?? https://youtu.be/uCPVqk0BxxI?si=7DLh_ZG_vY-4oFra
Thank you! I had vague images of this game in my head but never found it again.
Nanosoft... There's a line from one of the early missions where you have to scan cargo to find something being smuggled, which I've always remembered for being so state the obvious enthusiastic. There are four to scan, and after unsuccessfully doing three they say "three down, one to go, it's got to be the next one!"
Moraff's Escapade for early Windows, or more specifically, the glitch levels in it.
If you spam the "next level" cheat button (which if I remember correctly is F8) enough times you'll go past the levels that were intentionally designed and start exploring the game's RAM.
All I remember from that game is some character named Xai or something like that. Xain? That and the world map was cool.
The Belgian 80's metal band Ostrogoth.
Their website doesn't exist anymore and the only band-run social media page is on Facebook.
If you're a fan of retro heavy metal, give them a listen! They still tour, though you won't be finding much about it online.
The Wii U failed with few units sold. Star Fox Zero released for the Wii U sold much worse than any other Wii U game. But it's really good - Motion controls are amazing plus the two player co-op where one flys and the other guns is very fun
My grandparents knew the guy that produced this music video for a local band. I'm pretty sure the VHS copy they had was one of few in existence. It's been on YouTube for over a decade and only has 122 views, but it's a gem.
The movie Tampopo, about ramen. Great film.
Chakan the Forever Man on my Sega GameGear. I played it SO many times.
Straight up one of the most legitimately difficult games ever on that system too. Dark souls from a bygone era.
I have never met anybody else who played the Wall-E game for Wii.
Nerve Damage, a game that was I think made on a random gamejam, and the whole premise is to make a game that's actively trying to be as uncomfortable as possible to play, while also getting you into the flow and actually makes you enjoy it.
Unfortunately, I didn't find how to play it, and it didn't release as far as I know. I've heard about it on some kind of GDC presentation about Innovative/Obscure game design.
While that actually means that someone has indeed heard of, I've never met anyone else who got to play it. Or heard about it.
25+ years ago there was a release on some Warez sites called “beer police”.
From what I remember, It was a game set in some future sci-fi world with flying cars with a 5th element vibe.
Only ever saw it for a few hours at a mates house, so my memory is sketchy, but I’ve never found any other mention of it.
An old MS-DOS game from the 90s called Solar Winds, by Epic Megagames. It was top down and you flew around battling spaceships and doing missions in space. I absolutely loved it as a kid. Pretty sure you can get it for free now.
Actually yes hereit is https://www.playdosgames.com/online/solar-winds/
I WAS THINKING ABOUT THIS GAME LIKE TWO DAYS AGO
Nobody I know has ever heard of it. It was SO GOOD.
Hand of Manos. Most likely thee worst movie ever made. I found it for a screen writing class. The assignment was watch a bad movie then present it to the class. Easiest A+ of my fucking life.
Another weird one is, there used to be a sex Tetris type game for Windows 98 or earlier. Little naked people would drop down and when you got a full line they would jump off the screen. I don't know how that got on the family PC, but it was on it. I played it. So there's that.
All from the early 90's...
Life and Death II: The Brain - An old DOS medical game
Deadlock: Planetary Conquest- a competitive SimCity-like game
The Dagger of Amon Ra - A point and click mystery adventure game
Edit: added subtitle to Deadlock and video links
I am looking for a sci-fi story that I read in the 80's. It was a story about the future and I am sorry but the only vivid detail I remember was that parents had actually gone to a store to purchase a gift (a bicycle I believe), and the person at the store thought it was strange to have people actually come to the store, but let them in to shop.
I saw Repo! The Genetic Opera when it came out in 2008. It's an opera, very little dialouge, if any, I haven't watched it in a while. Paris Hilton has a main role.
https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/14353-repo-the-genetic-opera
I watched this for the first time last night. Absolutely loved it!
Zydrate comes in a little glass vial.
(Love this movie)
A little glass vial?
One of the few movies I actually have a DVD of, great movie
I love this movie so much. I'm not normally super into musicals in general, but this one is a major exception.
I saw that. My wife (who is an opera singer and has a music degree) was pissed that Paris Hilton had a singing part in an "opera" when she didn't.
I only watched this because i watched Repomen the week earlier, and learned I started Skinny Puppy frontman Nivek Ogre.
Did you know there’s so sequels too?
When I was a kid I went to a Primus show and they were playing music before the acts came on. One was “Smoke On The Water” covered by Tom Jones and I’ve never been able to find it or even any information about it. I know it was this song and artist as I asked the engineer, it was a great rendition and I wish I could find a copy
Decades ago, my dad bought a PC that came with a free CD for a game called Retribution. The box art looked unlike anything I'd ever seen before (basically 3D graphics at a time when the Mega Drive reigned supreme). Sadly, the disc didn't work, but I've tried to get my hands on a copy, to no avail.
Looking at the graphics now, they weren't even that good...but for the mid-nineties for a small child, absolutely amazing.
Ok so I don't know the name of it. But it was a sidescroller shooter game for the Sega Genesis. You played as like a kid and blasted enemies and there were upgrades. I think it had gun in the name.
Edit: I was right it did have gun in the name
I always get this game if im installing an emulator. It was great. I liked the combinations of guns you could choose. Either power up one of the 4 types or combine with another type. Homing lazers were always my go to.
That was the first game I rented from blockbuster. I spent all night playing it with a friend. Still one of my favorites for Genesis
I played this game so much
I recently worked my way through the old games library on archive.org and found some gems I used to play.
The game that got me looking there in the first place was Lost Dutchman Mine (still holds up!), but then I just kept scrolling and have bookmarked dozens of games. I won't list them all, but some favourites I grew up playing (and still occasionally revisit) that I don't think were massively (or at least still would be) well known:
Xonix - the first pc game I ever played, back when monitors only had 2 colours lol
Jones in the Fast Lane The Sims if it was a board game
Mario is Missing Yes, the Mario. I was the only person I know to own and play this game
Home alone and Home Alone 2 both on 5¼-inch floppy
Goblins I never got far in this game as a kid, and I have resorted to digging up the walkthrough even today to progress lol
Not a game, there is also Jerry Springer the Opera, a satire which I feel went far too low under the radar, and more people should watch (I think most people assume that the first act - a mock up JS episode, is all it is, but it really isn't). I've listened to it so many times I can literally sing you the whole thing from beginning to end (OST is much better quality than the live recording, and is on YT too). 😂(CW: contains some outdated and offensive terms and slurs)
E: here's a no-spoiler taste, the ad break
Edit again (I'm now re-watching it and this part just came up and reminded me lol): some folks here might be familiar with I Just Wanna Fuckin' Dance, which is from the opera!
There are probably many more, but I've just woken up, so that's all that comes to mind rn..
I spent way too much of my childhood playing Jones in the Fast Lane. It plays on ScummVM these days.
Same, though not only in childhood! For a while it was my "get to sleep" game I would play every night until I dozed off, this was only a couple of years ago.. 😂
Despite that last remark, it's a great game (if a little repetitive, which is what puts me to sleep lol E: Sims 3 often does the same..😆)!
Nice, Gobliiins!!! I played that a whole lot back in the day. I think there was even a couple sequels too. Fun game!
I had Jones as well! Honestly, I barely knew what the hell I was doing back then.
My girlfriend in high school introduced me to Fishing with John and it's comedy gold. Way before Tim and Eric and all the other absurdist comedy shows. I highly recommend it!
Starsiege. No, not tribes. Starsiege, third game in the earthsiege series. Tribes was actually a spin off in the same universe that got much more popular (with good reason, tribes was awesome).
Starsiege was a pc game that came in a bigass box, complete with multiple books filled with lore from the game's universe. It wasn't as well received as mech warrior (another mech sim), so it didn't have a big community. But those of us that played it loved it to death. I think you can still get the game running if you don't mind fucking with a bunch of sketchy third party patches.
These religious NES games. The one I remember was called Exodus. It was basically a ripoff of an existing game, but Moses themed.
I used to have this game for the NES called Xexyz. It was this really strange game that tried to be several different genres in one, and I actually had a ton of fun with as a kid. I don't think I've ever met anybody else who has ever heard of this game, let alone played or enjoyed it. I'm not even super sure how I came to owning it in the first place; I think it was in a box of random games my aunt got from a flea market at one point, maybe.
If any of you are sitting on an NES emulator with an archive of every official ROM and haven't tried this game, it's definitely worth checking out. Weird little gem that nobody seems to know about, it seems.
The band "scruffy the cat"
I've never met anyone else that knows they existed
Oh man, every time someone asks a question along these lines I always think of the movie Hank and Mike. I found it in a discount bin at a grocery store probably a decade ago so I took a little time to actually look into it more this time. I knew it was Canadian and unlikely a big hit, but apparently it was just so poorly received. It made less than $17,000 of the $2M it cost, and it's real tough to find anyone even reviewing it. I even struggled to find the music from it. (The one song is badass). And it's got a couple B-tier actors that I remember doing a great job, and I think Joe Mantegna really went for it in his role as the god Pan. Chris Klein kills it in this song.
The crude humor kinda puts people off I think but the satirical aspects cut a little deeper than the movie needed to. And probably when I discovered it I was depressed and had a drinking problem and the overall mood of it really felt at home to me at the time so I was able to just live in those aspects of the film and really absorb the more subtle message. It's definitely absurd in many points but there's a lot of heart in it.
I don't think it's totally forgotten, but an old nes game no one talks about called Bump n jump. You play a buggy in a top down style racer; think spy hunter. You're meant to race to the end of levels, crashing into (or avoiding) other vehicles for points. You can jump over bridges and gaps as well, and each level ends with a huge leap of faith ocean jump.
I feel like it was largely forgotten in gaming history, but I loved it when I was a child I put many hours into it.
My dad brought home "Xexyz" for NES one year. I have never heard anyone ever reference this game in any nostalgia reviews and had to actually go look up the name myself after vaguely remembering it as that side-scroling NES game that started with an x.
Reading through these answers and two people posted Xexyz lol
Edit: not seeing the other one anymore, maybe they deleted it
Two movies from the 90s... "Ruben and Ed," and "... And God Spoke."
And God Spoke was a revelation the first dozen times i watched it, it was full of tiny little blink-and-you'll-miss-them moments. Haven't seen it in years.
Ruben and Ed is just surreal, with at least two scenes that have stuck in my head lo these thirty years.
There was a game I played on my grandma's TurboGrafx 16 many years ago. I cannot remember the name, and searching over the years still has me befuddled.
It was a racing game, but with an RPG element where you had to continually upgrade your car and take on local race champs. I loved it and cannot for the life of me find the damn thing.
Edit: holy shit I think I found it. Final Lap Twin
I'm more shocked that someone actually had a turbografx back then, here I never saw a live one in my life, but it's a fun little console with some underrated gems, I'm having so much fun going through it's anime inspired library.
I don't know where she got it, probably ToysRUs back then. I would play it for hours. We only had an NES at home so we were always blown away at the graphics. Now you can find them in used game shops every once in awhile for 200 bucks, at least around here.
We had a TurboGrafx when I was a kid! We had Shinobi 3 and some game that was supposed to be like Punch Out! But I don't think it actually was called that.
That machine was a beast and I loved it.
Bonk was great!
Secret Dungeon
It was my second attempt at making a game(the first time i wrote "horizontal" instead of "Horizontal", making movement not work. I gave up for 2 years from making games because of that). It was made by me and a friend.
It was supposed to be a platformer in which you could kill enemies and bosses and have a lot of secrets. It was never published because we gave up
There was a door (plugin) for The text-based *BBS game Legend of the Red Dragon called Violet's Tavern.
You could sit at the bar and buy a drink that enhanced your stats, You could go upstairs and pay for a hooker to replenish your energy or you could try to seduce the barmaid / owner and actually have kind of a sweet encounter with her.
It had a betting mechanic I don't remember if it was blackjack, dice or what but you could game it a little bit by throwing a shit ton of money at it a few times. The initial odds to win or somewhat higher than the extended odds to win so if you hit it and hit big you just walk away. Sometimes you ended up empty but more often than not it worked.
I hosted this on my BBS
That’s a fuckin deeeeeeeeeep cut
Temple of Apshai
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Apshai
You've never heard of it, and modern RPGs wouldn't exist without it.
When I was little my parents had an Amiga 500 computer. My mother was never into gaming except for one. It was a boulder-dash clone called "Emerald Mine" (in which you collected emeralds, not diamonds) made my an obscure German studio. I think it was never widely spread and mostly stayed within Western Eu, but who knows, I might be wrong.
There was a text based game sample pack on Apple II C that I can't remember the name of.
If you typed in a command too simple, it would give a preprogrammed response, apparently offended that you took the game for an idiot. You could look around, pick up items that it described, open and close drawers, go up and down stairs, unlock doors if you find the key, dig in the ground if you find a shovel, all through typing in actions and reading the text that came up in response.
There were at least 3 samples on the floppy disk, one an adventure on a crashed spaceship, one finding a buried treasure in a desert, and one centered around a white house (not the White House, but a house that was white.) All the samples ended just when it got interesting and advertised where to get the full games.
Edit: the whole idea of gaming on an Apple 2c seems foreign to every single person I have ever mentioned it to. Someone must have done it, because my family found 2 different computers at garage sales in the 90s that each came with stacks of games on 3 inch floppy disks. Some where educational games, I learned to type properly with one of those. Some were bootleg versions of popular games with handwritten labels. The original Maria Bros comes to mind as one of those, it was on a disk with Joust. Some were the original floppy disk from the publisher. Oregon Trail was one we spent countless hours on, and I especially liked Wings of Fury.
Are you thinking of the Infocom library of games? Most famous of which would be Zork or Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infocom
Which you can download the complete collection freely here:
You'd need to work how to actually run them.
Infidel is definitely the one about finding treasure in the sand, so it must have been a sampler from Infocom
I recorded a film off the tv channel Sy-Fy a few years backcalled AfterDeath (not the 2023 film that comes up in a search). It's possibly not that obscure, but I believe it was a low budget film so maybe not at all well known. Anyhow, it didn't record all the film for some reason so I have never seen the end (last 15min or so), but despite the clear lack of quality it had an interesting premise (a group of young people who wake up in a beach cabin but apparently in the middle of some quasi-nowhere). I was intrigued as to how the approach to playing out the scenario would end but maybe I enjoyed it more for not having been able to see the ending if it was z bad one!
On the Internet, everything is fundamentally both obscure yet ubiquitous, or so it seems. But in real life, there are at least 2 things that seem to be obscure to the point that people don't believe me when I mention it:
The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One - A D&D podcast. It's cast should be pretty familiar if you're into other D&D podcasts - Brennan Lee Mulligan is the DM, Aabria Iyengar, Erika Ishii and Lou Wilson are players - but it doesn't seem to have many listeners.
It strikes a nice balance between scripted narrative performances and actual play. It's edited and scored with a light touch that stops it dragging like the raw sessions of something like Critical Role, but preserving the authentic character breaking reactions as the dice takes it somewhere interesting. The players don't seem to be in on a "script", anymore so than the normal sort of out of session discussions you might have in a narrative heavy game at home, but the DM does a very good job of keeping it focused. It's also thankfully not another billion player table, three is much more comfortable.
The vibe is excellent. From cozy slices of life to drama that plays on your heartstrings as three childhood friends reconnect and go on an adventure. Its trailer conveys the tone pretty well honestly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q9et3Othu4
There was this PC FMV game back in the early 90's where there's this woman doing all kinds of things that gets herself killed and all you do is flip the right switches at the right time and enter 3 digit codes.
One of the earlier games I had on a CD-ROM. Back then it wasn't a disc tray. You eject an entire disc jewelcase-like thing and put your cd inside the case and shove it back in like a floppy disk.
Core memory unlocked: My elementary school only had one caddy, so you had to take the disk out of the jewel case, pop it in the caddy, then pop that whole contraption into the disk drive.
There was this PC FMV game back in the early 90’s where there’s this woman doing all kinds of things that gets herself killed and all you do is flip the right switches at the right time and enter 3 digit codes.
This sounds similar to Night Trap.
Good guess! I looked up some screenshots but they didn't look quite like how I remember though.
The video game Star Goose that came on a floppy disk.
Alter Aeon is a fun MUD with multiclassing. I love my wizard / cleric / thief
They also have a nice wiki
Most obscure videogames I ever played:
Captain goodnight. Still one of the best games I've ever played. First game I saw that allowed piloting planes, helicopter, jeeps, tanks and run around killing enemies all with a solid story.
Right offhand, Rita Pfeiffer. There have been times where I was her only Spotify listener. Probably also nobody has heard of Knife the Puppets but me and my wife. My favorite musician at the moment is probably Ashley Virginia, a little known folk singer out of North Carolina. I've been obsessed with the Hushabyes since Lindsey Verril of Little Mazarn introduced them to the world. I'm getting a cassette player mostly for New New Sincerity, Lindsey's label, but there are some cassettes I want from the Spinster Sounds collection.
I'm sure I've seen some ultra rare movies, but I watch so much weird old trash that I have no idea how well known any of it is. I've seen Tales from the QuadeaD Zone twice. I follow Blood Tea and Red String on Instagram. I excited for the sequel. One of my all time favorite movies is a 1977 X-rated version of Cinderella with full song and dance numbers (a few of them genuinely fantastic!) and Sy Richardson as the fairy godmother.
EDIT: I forgot the real crown gem! We own a copy of the original cut of a movie called Freedom Deep! It's basically a feature length music video for a band called Goya's Child. The version of Freedom Deep you can find online is the new cut. It has lots of obnoxious narration over the music and nonsense 9/11 content thrown in. The rare DVD version is still not a great movie, but it's a painfully fun ultra long grunge music video! Oh I need to make some people I work with watch Freedom Deep.
There was this old game called Twistingo that my grandma had on her computer. Made by a long defunct company called eGames, it was basically like if Zuma and Bingo had a child. There were balls with numbers that'd slowly advance down a track, and you had one or more bingo cards. If the ball had a matching number on your card, you'd click on the number and the ball would vanish. If the balls reached the end, you lost. Really fun game, I still have the old disc for it.
I had this game I swear was Atlantis related, but involved you flying a tri-plane, shooting down other planes. It was very cool.
Symbian, mobile Java games
There were some legit games for symbian
As someone who back then experienced symbian java/java games on my father' and brother' phone, I partially agree. For some reason back in 2010-2012, here on Indonesia, cheap Symbian based phone are booming. You can buy a cheap symbian phone with preloaded mp3s and some java .jar games from local phone booth. For me personally I played those java games on my brother Nokia E63 (which is fun) or my father' Sony Ericson phone (forgot which model). Java games solely responsible for me to discover Gameloft that made those knockoff mobile games (but fun given how simple it was back then).
EDIT: Perhaps due to difference how regional tecnoloical advancement back then but here earliest I got more modern phone was in 2013 when I got my own Lenovo A369i which running Android Jelly Bean. Learn myself how to root my phone to gain more of my system (back then I was first year of Middle School). Symbian phones was one of mobile era that I fond of because it was very close to my memory of being a kid.
On similar topic, Blackberry based phone was big here in Indonesia when most of higher class use Blackberry Messenger as form of chatting, never had myself a Blackberry due to how expensive they were on Indonesia
Crusader: No Remorse and No Regret.
Given the amount of videos on these games you'd think they were super popular and well known, but when they were brand new nobody knew about 'em. To this day, I rarely find anyone who actually played them when they were first launched on an actual DOS computer and not through GOG and DOSBox.
Even today, it's rare that I run into people who know how awesome they are. They had it all; bitchin' graphics, insane action, amazing FMV with actual acting and costumes... Other than the controls, they still hold up today.
Toomba 2: The evil swine return is a piece of nostalgia I can never share
This song I downloaded from a file sharing application in the early 2000s. I've been searching for the artist for about two decades, nothing (the forum posts that come up when you search for it are also me).
When I was a kid I saw this stop motion animation on tv about a little kid afraid to go to bed. This crescent-moon headed bird man comes and steals his eyes. It ends with the boy, blind, stumbling around in the dark.
It was awesome.
Was it The Sandman?
It was! Amazing!
Has anyone seen the 80's animated series The Mysterious Cities of Gold? It took me forever to find it and before I did I started doubting if it even existed or if I made it all up in my head. It takes place in the 1500's and it follows this group that is looking for the lost cities of gold. At some point early on they find an ancient aircraft that is made of solid gold, solar powered and in the shape of a giant condor.
Operation Sandman, amazing movie with Ron perlman and also the adventures of Pete and Pete
"Mail Order Monsters," which came out in the 8-bit era (mine was C64). Basically, you started out with a "base monster," like plant, insect, reptile, etc. Then you battled someone else's. The winner got some money, which could be used to upgrade your monster with abilities, extra limbs, and so on. You could save your monster on a floppy disk and battle on someone else's system.
My love affair ended when a friend figured out how to hack that data file on the floppy and make an invincible monster
Back in the heyday of flash videos and before youtube, there was a clerks spoof featuring marvel comics heroes that I remember as being enjoyable, clever, and ultimately just a good tribute/ripoff of the source material. I have no idea how to find that again.
clerks spoof featuring marvel comics
Heroes!
You wrock, sir or madam
Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio. Try and grow a city-state by strategically distributing resources. Poor distribution results in death by famine, disease or invasion. Good distribution keep state growing and eventually become king to win the game. I played it on a Commodore PET.
The games I've made.
Cherry Coke had a promotional game called something like The Lost Island Of Alanna they gave out in the mid 90s. There was a little attack of them in the waiting room of the principles office at my school.
It was a pretty well done short Myst-like.
When you beat it the reward was a guide to read secret messages that were hidden in the squiggles that covered the cherry coke label at the time.
Elroy Goes Bugzerk and Elroy Hits the Pavement.
Man I want another Elroy game!
Major Havoc.
Super cool arcade game c. 1988 featuring a simple line drawing type environment where the Major runs through hallways, a little like the original Prince of Persia. The controls were a cylindrical scroll wheel and a jump button. The really cool thing though was that there were pads on the floor that would trigger various effects, like a gun that shoots a star shaped bullet down the hall that you had to avoid. Many new and exciting challenges to face with every quarter. Ah, good times.
I'm still bummed that the band Splashdown was screwed over by the music industry. They were too jazz for pop fans and too pop for jazz fans but had an amazing sound and a brilliant vocalist in Melissa Kaplan. They released a couple EPs and a brief album (Stars & Garters) before their major label debut Blueshift was permanently shelved.
They posted a goodbye collection of demos & b-sides before dissolving into Universal Hall Pass, Freezepop, and Anarchy Club.
Edit: Got nostalgic and searched for news - happy Sol Invictus to me I guess! https://splashdown1.bandcamp.com/track/metamorphosis
There's also the Pine Salad Productions fan-dub of a few Dirty Pair and Macross episodes from the late-80s, I think? I had a 5th gen VHS of a few ("The Dirty Pair Does Dishes" was one). Insane dubs that were absurd and utterly unrelated to the actual plots or even characters. I thought they were hysterical when I was a young edgy person.
A friend found "remastered" versions a few years ago and...the humour has not aged well, to put it mildly. Watch at your own risk. Glad I'm no longer edgy I suppose.
My brothers and I had a handheld game in the 80s that was basically a star wars knock off. It even started each attack sequence with a fast version of a star wars theme. The enemies were all Tie Fighters (all digital pieces that lit up when active been off when not), and you shot them with lasers Galaga-style. If you died, it played part of Jupiter from The Planets by Gustav Holst.
It was called ASTRO Thunder.
How about Wally Gubbins? A series of silly skydiving videos. My father has a ton of them on VHS. I loved it as a kid. I just looked, you can even find them on YouTube. So maybe not that obscure.
In terms of software I remember having several ad games. So, games that are basically just an ad. I had a Bifi game. Some weird game about colours where I don't remember what it was for. And a "game" about Chesterfield Cigarettes. I remember that I had to install QuickTime Player to run it. It was basically like Google Streetview when you walked into buildings with a few interactive elements put in. No idea where I got it. Might even still have the CD somewhere.
Edit: I found the Chesterfield thing: https://archive.org/details/see_you
Pigskin footbrawl
This is an odd one. Deep Africa is an episode from an obscure series called Inflated, which came out some 20 years ago. I remember someone at a party having a VHS of it.
It features blowup dolls as the main characters. It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen it, probably hasn’t aged well, but I remember aspects of it being funny, if not absurd.
Getbackers. It was an anime that I liked as a kid. I tried to rewatch it recently and realized how bad it is.
In the 70s we had a cassette tape kids story about a wizard who lived in a mountain and kept all the winds in a box.
The story was about someone who went in and retrieved the winds.
It involved blowing up sections of passageways (the narrator talked of lighting the blue touchpaper), and the wizard woke up and chased the hero.
He had a walking stick so his steps were reproduced including that, and he was calling, "My wind! Somebody's stolen my wind!".
I think it was probably on the front of a magazine or something. I don't know if it's a traditional story or something written for that production but I thought it was brilliant at the time.
OK, I'll go all-in on this:
2000 AD Comics' Nexus, The computer game.
Made for the Commodore C128 computer (which oddly ran Microsoft Basic), it was a simple single-screen platform shooter with the twist that you could pile up the bodies of your enemies and use them as platforms.
There was this one game called calling for the wii. Since the Wii controller had a speaker, it would ring like a phone and you would answer it, then followed by game's sound out of it as if you are talking on the phone. Plus it had a story I found interesting.
Clonk rage was a game that I wished got a new one, it was basically lemmings x worms x teraria where you would gather resources and avoid danger while trying to kill all your opponents clonks... so many memories of playing it multiplayer... it got open sourced a while ago, (open clonk) if your interested
A solar powdered handheld called something like Keep the devil rising.
Either windows 95 or 98 I used to play this game my mom set up for me but doesn't remember. Now she needs my help to plug in a USB cable but somehow has a job that uses software and procedures too complicated for me... Anyway I can remember if it was entirely this or just part of it, but the memorable part was the sliding puzzles, like the ice caves in Pokemon. The character might have had skates or something but it's a vague memory that could be wrong.
One Way Heroics (Plus)
Made by a guy in Japan. Uses a custom engine and has really intricate rpg elements, super cool and I'm a huge fan. Basically you're constantly moving right because a black fog is consuming the world and if you aren't fast enough then it'll consume you too. Kind of plays like a Roguelike, but runs can have the shorter objectives, or the really long ones.
Granted it's not perfect:
But I still love the game, and one of my first projects I plan on is making a hexagonal-grid version of the engine that would enable the above (gameplay) issues to be fixed, something might come out of it tbh.
In honor of Xmas, I found this video a decade ago, and it is the version I hear in my head every year.
My "Learn to Play Didgeridoo With Gram Doe" CD.
Flying Saucer by Postlinear Entertainment, its a flight simulator(of a flying saucer) within a alien conspiracy world.
Sundog: Frozen Legacy (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunDog:_Frozen_Legacy) originally for Apple II but brought to PC. My friend and I spent countless hours roleplaying as Han Solo, trading contraband and pulling bounties. If you want an incredible space trading/combat sim experience, forget Star Citizen, this game is for you!
A former roommate of mine had a DVD he had gotten from a friend who got it from a film festival. I believe it was Dreamscape but I haven't been able to find a copy to confirm this actually it.
Denver the Last Dinosaur!
I've never met anyone who knows what this is, even if I sing what I remember from the theme song.
My husband is slightly older than me and he had no idea wtf I was describing. It was a late 80s/early 90s cartoon with a green long necked Dinosaur with sunglasses that performed in a band.
I had to YouTube the theme song to make him believe it was real.
Maybe not super obscure, but I loved BMX XXX on the original Xbox. It was overshadowed my the plethora of other games like Tony Hawk, Aggressive Inline and SSX but I still love it.
Loved it for the topless riders? Or did you 'buy it for the gameplay'
If I wanted to see toplees girls on my modded Xbox I would just load up Dead or Alive Beach Volleyball with a nude texture pack. I genuinely enjoyed the riding aspect of the BMX game.
There were four promotional songs put together to promote the 1960's Adam West Batman. One of them is Miranda sung by Adam West. It's, uh, something, yeah.
I remember a 3D version of Tetris on an early IBM PC clone. Very early like 8088 or 286 PC. Don't remember the name and it was only wireframe and 1color (amber or greenscreen?) but I was very impressed with it. Seemed ahead of its time.
I recognize something like that, but I think the blocks were blue. Maybe the wireframe was amber? And the blocks were falling into the screen.
Might be Blockout? Although i remember even worse graphics and lots of brown.
Check out PolyCube for a modern 3D Tetris.
New addiction unlocked. Thank you.
When I was a kid, I remember seeing a trailer on TV for a Captain America movie. The tone of the trailer was dark and gritty, it looked like it was a drama and you don't find out it's even a Captain America movie until they reveal him at the very end.
The GI Joe movie where the hands come out of the ground still sticks with me.
beyond ynth
Back in the 90s maybe into early 2000s, my family managed to acquire a lot of VHS tapes, and some of them were fairly obscure
Two that I remember particularly fondly were 2 animated movies
Epic: Days of the Dinosaur, which was about 2 kids raised by dingos, kind of a weird fantasy movie
And Return to Treasure Island, which was pretty much just a straight-up if somewhat comedic adaptation of Treasure island, which was apparently made the USSR, and the Russian version had live action sequences that didn't appear in the English version I had.
Ninja Bachelor Party. A goofy and mostly nonsensical home movie made by a few teenagers, including legendary comedian Bill Hicks way before he was famous.
The Parking Lot Is Full webcomic.
Chromadrome 2. A PC game about simply controlling a small blob-thing speeding down a straight path with holes and other obstacles and keeping it away from them. Sorry of a precursor to mobile games such as subway surfer or whatever they are called. Never met someone who heard about it even though it made it's way onto Steam many years later.
Movie: Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man
Music: Buggie Techinica by Polysics
Legacy of the wizard, rygar, cypher (strider)
There was a cover of Radioactive by Marina on guitar I'd listen to in the bathroom at high school but I can't find it again on Youtube
There was a dnd game for the intellivision
There was more than 1! My dad had at least 2 and I am pretty sure there was a 3rd. I remember playing the Minotaur labyrinth one a lot.
https://youtu.be/O59I5rjzEmc?si=VJQmIlWnoYgJuEie
They'll be in there somewhere. I was surprised by how many I hadn't heard of.
I've never met anyone who knows this game https://classicreload.com/braminar.html
sometimes I feel like Nintendo's Custom Robo series counts as only 2 games ever existed outside of Japan: Custom Robo [Battle Revolution] for Gamecube, and Custom Robo Arena for DS. Luckily there's been 3 spiritual successors since then: Cyberspace Colosseum, WizardPunk, and Battlecore Robots.
There's also this B-movie from the 60s called The Creation of the Humanoids. It's not that spectacular per se, but it is the source of the "You are a robot" sample used in Powerman 5000's When Worlds Collide and the Metal Arms: Glitch in the System theme music.
A-Train DS, or A列車で行こう DS, a Japanese game about managing trains. Basically like Transport Tycoon/OpenTTD, but focuses on Japanese train. It was actually really good, it actually made me obsessed with Japanese trains. Coolest thing about this game is, you can actually "ride" the train you built. It was like a dream come true for childhood me.
Yet, I rarely heard anyone online talks about this game. I really recommend others to play this game... If you can read Japanese as I am not sure that there is English translation for this game...
I played the heck out of TankPot back in the day. One of the best early games to have a high number of simultaneous multi-player, I think 64, split poverty 4 teams of tanks. Played through the browser, it moved around to different sites a few times over the years and now has its own dedicated site: https://tankpit.com/
No idea what the movie’s actual title was but there is a wonderfully poorly dubbed kung fu movie by the American title “Shaolin V Ninja”
The voices are terrible, sometimes the characters answer their own questions, music is stolen from Star Trek II at points and it features probably the best “I’ve been stabbed” sound in cinematic history at about 1 hour, 13 minutes. Highly recommend. https://youtu.be/h6iYROUoHUE?si=6h7DzxRMD6x4YSLl
Also it’s that specific dub, there seems to be a more shared version on youtube that is better translated (and not as stupid).
I remember playing Big Sky Trooper for the SNES which was about killing the alien slugs and you had to navigate the solar system.
I watched Star Blazers every week as a kid.
There's this youtube channel, on which someone does piano fugue improvisations, it is really good, and it has only a few thousand views
Here is an example, but there are more: https://youtu.be/YLW47a6Jk50?si=6coaJGDotT9B3JU1
There's also hours long live session during which he improvise many baroque pieces, I listen to it every now and then, and it's always a blast
The Legend of Alon D'ar. Never talked to anyone who's played it. I know some people have due to YouTube videos, but it's not a great game and I ended up beating it because I had nothing better to do.
A board game called Off the Rails. You play as goblins in a mine, and use mine carts to collect gems. It was on kickstarter maybe 5 years ago.
I'll throw mine in:
Video games: Weird Dreams and Spectre VR both for PC back in the early 90s iirc
Music: one artist i really enjoy that unfortunately died from covid in 2020 though he was only in his 20s... His name was Cesar Alexandre and i got to know and love much of his work as Lindsheaven Virtual Plaza. In fact, my first thought when i heard the opening track from their EP Daily Night Euphoria was that it would have been a great soundtrack for Spectre VR...
Captain Zoom in Outerspace
It was direct to TV Galaxy Quest before Galaxy Quest.
A friend and I used to play Liero Xtreme lots when we were kids. I have never seen any mention of that game anywhere on any forum in my years on the internet
Immercenary for 3DO. Such a strange game.
https://www.rpgfan.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Immercenary-Screenshot-004.jpg
the sega version of fist of the north star
When I was a child I saw a stop motion animation called 3 Little Pigs Sing a Gig. It was this rather surreal, felt puppet musical of the aforementioned nursery rhyme.
Zone of the Enders had a touching anime series about a widowed space truck driver whom stumbles upon a sentient orbital frame which he considers his surrogate daughter as he attempts to become a better father and reconnect with his grown kids, amidst an inter-system civil war.
And I'm kinda sure it's cannon.
No, I am not making this up.
The film Hey, Stop Stabbing Me! is reminiscent of early Parker & Stone or Troma, and the title basically says it all. In spite of its non-existent budget and inexperienced cast, I recall it being competently paced and downright hilarious (on purpose!), including multiple memorable quotes such as "don't be making fun of my hoe-saw," "dude, she's twelve," "comparative literature," and naturally, the titular "hey, stop stabbing me!"
I remember playing a game with my friend as a kid. I think it was around windows 95. You were a Mafioso and you could pick one of three businesses, one was a blow up doll factory. You had to plan heists by buying escape vehicles, such as tandem bikes, cars anong other things. I found it funny that only 2 people could escape in a transporter, because it had only 2 seats. The main goal i think was to steal from the comically large vault of the main mafia boss via submarine. My memory is very hazy, don't remember the name or anything else, but it was super fun.
Slashers (2001) is a fairly unknown horror / comedy from the heyday of video stores. I rented it on a marathon weekend with my old movie crew and it instantly became a favorite. The "Slashers, super-fun!!" theme song is likely problematic at this point but I still find myself and the few remaining folks from that crew saying it at random when we get together.
Outside of that group though, I've never met another human that's seen it. Albeit I'm not usually proselytizing about it like a weirdo... usually. Maybe at next year's horror-con I'll start.
ZZT, I think the game that completes "Ready Player One" is loosely referencing it.
Edit: Holy cow, I had no idea
https://www.howtogeek.com/713532/before-fortnite-there-was-zzt-meet-epics-first-game/
OK I'll have to go harder. Jet Set Willy or Reptilion
Brb
Not really a particular piece of media, but I saw an artist on twitter that made anime style art but with a Tex Avery twist, it's very strange seeing it but it intrigued me so much.
Warning though some of it is NSFW: https://twitter.com/acrylictoon
Woah, that embed opens their entire Twitter feed within kbin. Also pretty interesting art style.
Maybe someone here will help me find a song that I listened to with a friend (and danced a lot) during a summer in the late 90s.
It was an electronic dance song which featured a a very raspy male voice singing in Spanish and would ocasionally make the "pull snot from the throat and spit" sound.
My friend and I have been for years trying to find it to no avail... :(
A movie called Sir Henry at Rawlinson's End, extremely surreal British Arthouse. Like an opium dream from the brain of a fox hunting aristo, part comedy part stream of consciousness spoken word poetry. The gags, puns, and quips are truely monumental. It's a gem, though not PC, you've been warned: https://youtu.be/N6W5RB50fXk?si=eYUlKqkTyyMvHz-Z
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RawlinsonEnd
There was also a radio series and LP. I've heard the radio version but never seen the movie before.
This absolutely terrible in the most hilarious ways B movie that may or may not have ever actually been released called The Astrologer. It was filmed in 1975 and apparently lost until just recently. A local theater got a copy and did a showing of it. Fortunately, it’s now preserved on the internet archive! https://archive.org/details/the-astrologer-1975-previously-lost-film
There used to be a website with a rubber man floating on the screen. You could move him around with the mouse and make him stretch out in psychedelic colors. Hours spent doodling.
Not quite but close. Same effect but this was a really arty full body man that floated around the screen.
Tank Girl! It's a movie I have loved for so long. Makes me cry with laughter. Got my wife and son to watch it and was promptly banned from picking movies for family viewing for like 4 months. That did not take away my love for the film.
I don't remember how we had it but when I was growing up, we had a pc game called Adventures with Chickens. I might have to track down a copy and play it again because I'm confused as to why MobyGames says the game has "shoot 'em up elements" when I'm pretty sure it doesn't.
Stars! is a turn based galactic trade/strategy game my friends and I used to play via email in high school.
winnebago man. Not as obscure after they made the movie, but the found film of that era has a few other hits if you go down the rabbit hole
This is a kids song that's catchy. 90k views. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-uPsYA35qfQ
Eternal lands.
If you've ever played Incredibox, you most likely know him as the composer of that game's music.
Space Siege, it was basically Dungeon Siege but futuristic. I only ever played it from an old PC gamer demo disc.
Edit: Just to sell it a little harder, this album has phenomenal songwriting. It's got a laid-back LA-surf-rock sound with elements of punk and maybe a hint of wistful country in the lyrics.
The What! Help is On The Way
This album and band is endangered, no CD's, unavailable on any music streaming service.
The only online version I could find is this a random YouTube upload.
One of my favorite bands ever. They were introduced to me by a friend's sister in, like 1999. Their band ended quickly after the death of one of the members.
The only other link related to them now appears to be a remaining band member's channel, which hasn't been updated in 11 years.
There was a game from my childhood for the Dreamcast called E.G.G. (Elemental Gimmick Gear). I've never heard anyone else talk about it, but I remember it being super cool
I swear I'm the only person in the world who has heard of the game "Threads of Fate" for the PlayStation 1. It's the most underrated game I've ever played and deserves more love than it has ever gotten.
The Farmers Daughter. It was a text-based video game for the C=64 similar to Zork.
The premise was that you are a traveling lightening salesman whose car breaks down. You stop at a farmhouse to use their phone, and the beautiful daughter answers the door.
Your mission is to try to bang her. If the farmer catches you, he shoots you with his shotgun. If her brothers catch you, they'll analy rape you to death. You need condoms but they are stuck to the shelf.
Found it
https://classicreload.com/the-farmers-daughter.html
The appeal of games like this is so odd to me. They're moronic on one hand but viscerally addictive on the other. A very interesting psychological dynamic going on with this whole genre.
Any tips on how to avoid getting buttfucked until dawn?