compressed. And for the first time in over ten hours, the streamer muted the recording, and said ‘I can’t deal with this shit.’ He completed the rest of the game on mute. And that’s how I learned I was a rapper in the game.” Nelson is keen to stress how poorly these raps were recorded. They were already heavily-compressed recordings through a broken laptop mic, and when it came time to add them to the game, the team compressed the recordings even further – an act of self-vandalism that was true to the development’s entire philosophy. In a bid to capture the spirit of 90s technology, alongside the passionate early-internet communities, a lot of the development time was spent on intentionally breaking aspects of the game – from the intentionally buggy arcade racer within the Hypnospace, to the rampant typos found in the game’s blogs and emails. THIS IS HOW WE DO IT “The creative process for that was really fascinating,” says Nelson. “Because everything that Jay and the team does is really good work. So a lot of our development process for the game was taking good things we had made, and breaking them. “So for the arcade game, they had to break it to make it work within the universe. And for myself, when I was writing certain pieces of content, I would make a typo. And I’d face a crossing in the woods. I’d have to say: ‘No, I’m committing to this typo, this typo is how this character writes forever now.’” For the record, any typos found in this or any future issue of MCV/DEVELOP is an intentional homage to
Hypnospace Outlaw, and we’ll fight anyone who says otherwise. “People intentionally putting in typos, intentionally putting in obtrusive ways of working through an environment... Extremely skilled people intentionally breaking their work to make it better is an absurd design dynamic. But when you bring that to bear for a common creative goal, instead of a self destructive act of just tearing apart your own work in a fury, what results is something that’s genuinely kind of miraculous. “Hypnospace Outlaw isn’t a game that should be able to ship. It is the game you tell people not to make because there’s no way in hell that it’s ever going to release. And this group of people managed to build it. And I had the opportunity to be a part of that group of people and I’m deeply thankful for that.” The resulting combination – a remarkable attention to detail in capturing the history and the feeling of those early internet days, while still writing a fictional, alternate universe, underlines the game’s development, and the lesson Nelson has taken from the experience. “What I learned is that the content can be inaccurate, if the feeling behind it is true. [The result] is an internet that feels like the one you were on when you were 13, but also like one you’ve never experienced before. “The largest thing to take away from this is the creative instincts of everyone on the project – taking the absurd, taking the weird, taking the objectively bad ideas and making them meaningful. Hypnospace Outlaw is the impossible made possible, and gosh, it’s cool to be a part of something like that.”
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