Interviews
[Interview] 98DEMAKE Discusses His Found Footage Horror Game ‘SEPTEMBER 1999’
For five minutes and thirty seconds, SEPTEMBER 1999 invites you to give up agency and surrender to the swiftly escalating horror.
In the found footage-style game from OK/NORMAL developer 98DEMAKE, players watch as the scene in the two hyperrealistic rooms around them become increasingly macabre. The whole game is presented in the aesthetic of a fuzzy VHS tape.
While exploring 98DEMAKE’s work, it quickly becomes clear that the developer has an affinity for the 1990s. In addition to the retro-inspired games, 98DEMAKE regularly uploads videos of modern games redone with PS1 aesthetics to his eponymous YouTube channel.
We spoke briefly with Toni Kortelahti, the man behind the moniker, about the process of creating those videos, the development of his games, and why the 1990s is a particularly haunting decade.
BD: On your YouTube channel, you upload ’90s-inspired re-imaginings of modern games like Minecraft, GTA V and The Last of Us. Your work as a developer, on SEPTEMBER 1999 and OK/NORMAL, similarly, has the feeling of watching a VHS or playing a PS1 game on an old CRT. What is it about the 1990s that inspires you? Is it nostalgia or something more?
Toni Kortelahti: I guess a lot of it is just pure nostalgia, but I also feel like the fuzzy low res look of a VHS tape, or the pixelated PlayStation look of OK/NORMAL, does wonders to adding a certain atmosphere.
Both styles obviously reduce the clarity of the image, which leaves more to the player’s imagination, since before you get close to objects, you’re not quite sure what you’re looking at.
In September 1999, the VHS look also brings an extra layer of realism to the already realistic graphics. It looks familiar (if you’ve ever watched a VHS tape that is), which makes it feel more real.
OK/NORMAL is 98DEMAKE’s previous retro-styled horror adventure.
BD: Building on that, OK/NORMAL and SEPTEMBER 1999 are both horror games. This year’s Paratopic also drew on the aesthetic of the 1990s to create an unsettling experience. What is it about that era that works so well with horror? Does it work especially well with indie horror, where players are less likely to expect realistic graphics?
TK: As far as the PS1 look goes, it’s obviously far less demanding for the developer. If you build say, a house, in the PS1 graphics style, it’s going to be a few days of work to have a nice base up and running. If you build said house in a photorealistic fashion, it’s going to be at least a few weeks of work before you have anything resembling a realistic house.
It’s also just what I said above, nostalgia and that feeling of “what am I looking at here”. Gamers who played on the original PlayStation or N64, are a big crowd these days, and can appreciate the lo-fi graphics, in addition to feeling a special sense of dread — the kind of dread you felt playing horror games as a kid/youngster.
BD: Speaking of photorealism, as AAA games get closer and closer to bridging the uncanny valley, do you think something is lost? What do the fuzzy, polygonal character models of 1998 have to offer players today?
TK: Again, I’m gonna go with the feeling of “what am I looking at here?” The amazing visuals we have today leave a lot less work for the players imagination. You see a monster in high-definition, you see every nook and cranny, every little detail of the monsters horrifying deformations, and that’s it.
For example, when you saw the Licker in Resident Evil 2 for the first time, you went “What the hell was that thing?” You only saw that it’s this red, fleshly thing, and your imagination would start racing.
That’s some powerful stuff.
BD: Your first 98DEMAKE video—an evocative panoramic version of a scene from The Last of Us— went up about a year ago. Had you begun development on OK/NORMAL or SEPTEMBER 1999 yet at that point? Which came first, the 98REMAKE chicken or the OK/NORMAL egg?
TK: The videos came first. I never really intended to do as many videos as I did, and actual game development is more of what I really love doing.
The amount of attention the videos received was staggering, and really telling that there’s still a lot of love out there for graphics like that. Then at some point, when doing just the videos was starting to get a bit stale, I started development on OK/NORMAL.
BD: What’s the process of video creation like? Your videos often look like Lets Plays of old games. Are you building small playable demos each time you make a video or is it purely animation work?
TK: Most of the videos are just pure animation, either done in Blender or Adobe Animate. A few of the later videos — Mirror’s Edge, P.T. and Big Rigs — are all running in Unity, so they’re small playable demos that I’m playing while recording.
BD: The process of playing through SEPTEMBER 1999 is mostly wandering around a couple of rooms until the game moves you on to the next scene. What’s the desired effect from removing the ability to drive forward progress from the player?
TK: The initial idea I wanted to do with September 1999, was to create a found footage styled game. I looked at other games done in the same aesthetic for inspiration, but felt like they were far too “gamey” and that the VHS look was more of a gimmick, rather than an actual part of the gameplay.
Now if you’re watching a tape, do you have control over what’s happening on that tape? Obviously not.
However, given that this is still a game, the player had to have some role in the process, hence the ability to move around. If you choose to stand still for the 5 minutes and 30 seconds, it’s just a tape of someone filming at walls. If you move around, it’s something entirely different. This idea is something I want to expand on — giving the player a larger role, yet taking away the ability to consciously move the events in a certain direction.
BD: Building on that, you’ve tweeted about Steam reviewers complaining that your game is not, in fact, a game. Where do you think this impulse—to call something “not a game” if it deviates from certain norms—comes from?
TK: I, of course, knew this conversation would come up, just like it does with every “walking simulator” out there, but it’s still a stupid conversation we probably shouldn’t need to be having any more.
People are accustomed to games working in a certain way, being interactive and, most importantly, fun. To classify as a game, there, of course, needs to be a certain degree of interactivity, but that doesn’t mean having a gun, objectives, or collecting whatever it is you’re collecting. Games also don’t need to be fun at all.
If a movie isn’t fun, nobody’s screaming “This isn’t a movie!”, yet it’s a conversation that pops up all the time in video games.
If experimental games aren’t your cup of tea, that’s completely fine, but you shouldn’t try to cast them out for that. My game is just as much a game as the next AAA title — it’s just a different kind of a game.
BD: You released OK/NORMAL and SEPTEMBER 1999 in fairly quick succession, with the first coming in April and the second releasing in September. Were you working on them concurrently or are you just a quick worker?
TK: Both are fairly short games, and simple as far as the game mechanics go, so I guess I’m just a fast worker!
BD: Do you have any plans for your next project? Should players expect more 1990s-style horror or do you plan to go in a different direction?
TK: Players should expect something very similar to September 1999, but bigger, better and more fleshed out!
So stay tuned and stuff!
SEPTEMBER 1999 and OK/NORMAL are available now on PC via itch.io and Steam
Interviews
Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’
Paul Tremblay didn’t start his writing career believing he’d be battling machines over the sanctity of his job, but like so many writers of his generation, the battle found him. In the years since Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural networks started gaining traction as an advertised shortcut to creativity, Tremblay has been active in lawsuits to prevent the use of his works in training AI models, and he’s found that, with each new project, he has to consider the possibility that some LLM, somewhere, is going to latch on to what he’s creating.
“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”
While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists.
“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“
Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.
Paul Tremblay in documentary series “First Word on Horror”
The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling.
Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story.
“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”
The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential.
“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“
Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay.
“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”
Mary Roach’s Stiff
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness.
“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”
So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation.
“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere.
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