Game News These games drive people crazy and yet they don’t exist!

Game news These games drive people crazy and yet they don’t exist!

Petscop, Vermis, Valle Verde… perhaps you have already come across the names of these games which have animated forum discussions for years, even though they do not exist. This Internet phenomenon is notably the driving force from Twitter account thegamesarefake which attracts several hundred thousand subscribers every day. A rule to appear in your content feed: create “ a game that no one can play “. The owner of the page thus publishes daily screenshots and very short video clips of realistic video games that do not really exist. An initiative launched in 2022 which even led to the opening of an eponymous YouTube channel, which simply republishes the drafts of sometimes strange universes and the first attempts at canceled projects from some major studios. But it is above all the creations of amateur artists who weave the singularity of the phenomenon, who choose to illustrate lines of dialogue devoid of context, and landscapes which allow us to imagine teeming worlds.

From creepy pasta to fake artbooks

Thegamesarefake is in reality only the small part of a particularly dense trend, popularized among other things by the online sharing of animated portfolios of popular artists and the advent of stories like Petscop, this YouTube horror web series which takes the form of a let’s play. The channel belongs to a certain Paul, who claims to have got his hands on a forgotten PlayStation game from the 90s. The player comments on less than frenzied games during which he travels through dark environments in the shoes of an unsightly biped who simply collect a whole bunch of trinkets and come across collectible creatures. A somewhat extraordinary experience until Paul encounters, in the depths of the game, the grave of a little boy, then a child in tears, and other very cryptic discoveries, also including the existence of a person who shares uncanny similarities with the player, and which has led to the birth of a slew of topics filled with hypotheses and amateur investigations. Petscope is actually a kind of illustrated creepypasta, the internet version of the horror stories that we tell ourselves in the dark by the light of a flashlight, but which we now find on Reddit forums, then in Squeezie videos. He is also the subject of a long series of videos by feldup, a YouTuber specializing in horror and internet mysteries.

Before Petscope, there was Ben Drowned, a story well known to fans of the genre, taking as its narrative starting point a cartridge from the game Majora’s Mask haunted by a young ghost named Ben. This will encourage the birth of a long line of internet legends, among which we could also cite Valle Verde, another horror series on YouTube created by the artist Alluvium who also illustrates images of a certain lost PlayStation game that he says he found in a cache in the La Plate ecological park. The exploration of a bucolic Animal Crossing-style world is severely disrupted by the intervention of nightmarish landscapes and corrupt discussions. The style, the textures and the characters faithfully pay homage to the PlayStation 1 era, and the content is full of religious and political references and subtexts which again are fertile ground for forum discussions.

Games developed with the aim of being told, rather than played, there are now in spades: Let’s cite Catastrophe Cow, Diminish and then of course Vermis, a more unique project this time which consists of an artbook by the artist Plastiboo, who describes his work as a “pure act of world building inspired by old dungeon crawler games“”. This is nothing more and nothing less than the official guide to a game that doesn’t exist and it turns out to be absolutely superb.

A talent showcase

Often cited in discussions on the subject, Paul Robertson is freakishly gifted when it comes to creating sequences of fake plays that would make us want to empty our wallets. This Australian animator with slick pixels and somewhat trashy imagery first made headlines by publishing in 2006 a 12-minute short film all in black and white called Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006, which was akin to an extremely satisfying, but completely fictional, side-scrolling action game gameplay video. He has since brought images from Scott Pilgrim vs: The Game and Wizorb to life and regularly posts exceptional new creations on his personal channel.

Other accounts on the fly, who like to shape fake games as showcases of their talents: Jaya Ply, whose screenshots of a turn-based action game with anthropomorphic rabbits garnered more than 30,000 likes. Once again, a quick look at the Thegamesarefake page will offer you a rather nice overview of the work of dozens of amateur and professional artists, and above all a nice moment of contemplation.

And then let’s finish by citing some tributes to the major licenses too, with “Mother 3 Tribute”, a “love letter” to the third game in the trilogy which officially never crossed the barriers of the West. A team of 22 creatives developed a fictional trailer illustrating their vision of a MOTHER 3 developed by modern technology. Images just as popular as this video called FINAL FANTASY VII-2 by ToNg who imagined, in 2007, what the seventh episode of Final Fantasy could look like at that time.