The kinds of games you can find on the deeper parts of the clear net are some of the most interesting and compelling experiences you can have with a piece of media today. It's a well-established hobby at this point, with tons of insufferable Youtube top tens and iceberg narrations having touched on most of the classics, so we don't need to get into the decade-long history of Le Weird/Obscure Gaming. This thread is just meant to be a new place for general discussion of arcane, strange and wind-swept interactive software from the earliest days of the internet to now. The days of LSD Dream Emulator being a niche cult classic are far in the past; we're talking about the realer stuff: your Eastern Minds, your Garage: Bad Dream Adventures, and your Blue Sangoes.
This image Reddit stole from /vr/ is pretty dated, but it still stands as one of the earliest instances of the iceberg macro trend that's untarnished by the Web 3 crowd and can still function as a catalogue for deep internet games worth looking into, although the really good stuff only starts at Tier 6 and a lot of it has become Lost Media Wiki canon since 4chan covered it. Saint has mostly gone offline in the past few weeks and the recent history of his Youtube channel consists of a lot of unedited streams, but you can use his uploads from the past ten years to a similar effect. His friend F3l0n used to curate an IA list containing redumps of all kinds of cool weird physical software and old discs, but it seems to have been lost to time. Ultimately, the only real way to find this stuff is to go out and look for it yourself. Once Vinny Vinesauce started covering the weird indie circuit (magicdweedoo, Catamites, Arcane Kids, etc), it was only a matter of time before their development cycles ended up catering more towards that audience, which you can see with Anthology Of The Killer, so I'm not going to link them here.
The ultimate catch-22 with this kind of thing is that e-celebs covering a niche game will always cause it to reach an audience that doesn't appreciate it, which will degrade the community, demotivate the devs and stagnate interesting discussion, which is why unearthing all the weird stuff lost to the annals of the Internet Archive is so important.
Two rules:
1. No hoax games. No Petscop, no Sexdick, etc. Nothing that didn't have a development cycle before it started receiving attention.
2: No games developed in a modern engine like Unity that are meant to look old and weird but aren't, so no Haunted PS1, Ultrakill, Buckshot Roulette, etc.
This image Reddit stole from /vr/ is pretty dated, but it still stands as one of the earliest instances of the iceberg macro trend that's untarnished by the Web 3 crowd and can still function as a catalogue for deep internet games worth looking into, although the really good stuff only starts at Tier 6 and a lot of it has become Lost Media Wiki canon since 4chan covered it. Saint has mostly gone offline in the past few weeks and the recent history of his Youtube channel consists of a lot of unedited streams, but you can use his uploads from the past ten years to a similar effect. His friend F3l0n used to curate an IA list containing redumps of all kinds of cool weird physical software and old discs, but it seems to have been lost to time. Ultimately, the only real way to find this stuff is to go out and look for it yourself. Once Vinny Vinesauce started covering the weird indie circuit (magicdweedoo, Catamites, Arcane Kids, etc), it was only a matter of time before their development cycles ended up catering more towards that audience, which you can see with Anthology Of The Killer, so I'm not going to link them here.
The ultimate catch-22 with this kind of thing is that e-celebs covering a niche game will always cause it to reach an audience that doesn't appreciate it, which will degrade the community, demotivate the devs and stagnate interesting discussion, which is why unearthing all the weird stuff lost to the annals of the Internet Archive is so important.
Two rules:
1. No hoax games. No Petscop, no Sexdick, etc. Nothing that didn't have a development cycle before it started receiving attention.
2: No games developed in a modern engine like Unity that are meant to look old and weird but aren't, so no Haunted PS1, Ultrakill, Buckshot Roulette, etc.
