Patrick Dolan and Andrew Bailey (York University)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.33008/IJCMR.2023.10 | Issue 10 | July 2023
Throughout the late 2010s, a community of independent game developers has come together under the moniker “Haunted PS1” to produce an annual anthology of game demos and an accompanying livestreamed event showcasing these works celebrating a mode of game-making often referred to as “low-poly horror.” This emerging genre nostalgically celebrates the aesthetics of older generations of computer and console games, especially those made for the original PlayStation (PS1) during the mid-to-late 1990s. Over time, this has resulted in an increasingly large group of new indie games that have all been deliberately made to recreate the awkward control schemes, disorienting texturing warping, and jittery polygons inherent to PS1-era game development. To achieve these outdated effects using contemporary game engines, the Haunted PS1 community has produced and openly shared its own custom tools and plugins. This article uses one such tool called “The Haunted PSX Render Pipeline” as a prompt to investigate the relationship between independent game development and other nostalgic and DIY modes of creative practice, namely zine-making and underground horror film. Furthermore, we work to reveal why games and tools released within the Haunted PS1 community are so often distributed for free and how this is partially related to the distinctly obsolete, ugly, and non-commercial aspects of the PS1 aesthetic within contemporary videogame capitalism and fandoms for so-called “bad” media.
Keywords: nostalgia, PlayStation, the Haunted PS1, The Haunted PSX Render Pipeline, low-poly horror, independent game development, tool fandoms, shot-on-video, underground horror, zines, paracinema, non-cinema, bad cinema, VHS
Introduction
“We’re in something of a golden age for horror games,” declares NME writer Oisin Kuhnke.[1] While the Japanese videogame developer Capcom has seen great success recently with their long-running Resident Evil series (1996-ongoing), Kuhnke is not referring to the output of mainstream companies such as this. Instead, they praise the output of a rapidly expanding and nebulous group of independent and DIY game developers commonly referred to as The Haunted PS1 (HPS1) who produce short, experimental horror games that nostalgically eschew the detailed graphics of AAA games for the outdated aesthetics of the PlayStation 1.
Cultural perspectives on digital games and nostalgia have dramatically shifted over the last two decades. In many ways, this was spurred by the proliferation of independent games that began in the mid-2000s with the release of popular pixel-art platformers such as Braid (Number None, Inc., 2008), FEZ (Trapdoor, 2012), and Cave Story (Studio Pixel, 2004). The critical and commercial success of these indie games helped to establish a growing market for game mechanics and visuals that pay homage to previous eras of game development practice. More often than not, they borrow the aesthetics associated with older 8- or 16-bit consoles such as the Nintendo Game Boy (released in 1989) or Super Nintendo Entertainment System (released in 1990). Within the field of game studies, much of the existing scholarship on these kinds of indie games tends to focus on their commercial relationship with the mainstream industry and how their independence from it is perceived and defined.[2] Although less common, there have also been recent attempts to explore the aesthetics and style of the genre[3] and the cultural significance of the innumerable smaller grassroots, hobbyist, and informal communities of practitioners that compose it.[4]
This article builds on this growing body of research, examining HPS1 as a novel configuration of indie game-making practice that, unlike the consistently marketable retro pixel art styles referenced above, deliberately engages with videogame aesthetics that many perceive as ugly, obsolete, and unpleasant. Since approximately 2018, games associated with these outdated visuals and mechanics have commonly been grouped under the HSP1 communal moniker. This name comes from the community’s nostalgic predilection for the low polygon counts, pixelated textures, and jagged edges of the 3D graphics seen on the original PlayStation, (released in 1994 in Japan and 1995 in the US and EU) and the pioneering survival horror games that were released on it during the mid and late 90s. Beyond this invocation of outmoded visuals and genre conventions, HPS1 developers often advertise their games using branding flourishes that harken back to this era. Examples include retrofuturist studio names and logos and promotional imagery reminiscent of the jewel case packaging that PlayStation games were sold in. Much of this nostalgic signposting tends to be found on the developers’ social media accounts and store pages that are most often hosted on itch.io. For those unfamiliar, itch.io is a digital storefront that is widely renowned within the indie game development scene for how small a percentage of sales it takes and the ease with which developers can upload and sell their games—especially in comparison to much larger platforms such as Steam and the Epic Games Store. It is also a hub for community engagement, hosting online game jams and its customizable store pages and customer profiles. Furthermore, and crucial to our arguments concerning the HPS1 community’s complicated relationship with capitalism and art, most games released on itch.io by HPS1 developers are freely available with only a prompt for a suggested donation that pops up on the download pages. We contend that the HPS1 community—with its preference for older, less inherently marketable forms of game development and the tendency for its members to share and cross-promote each other’s work through unified branding and platform choices—is a nexus of creative practice that is becoming increasingly necessary to study and theorize in relation to other, more firmly established communities that similarly blend media fandom with artistic production. HPS1 games’ use of outdated, ugly graphics along with remediated CRT and VHS visual artifacts reflects not only a bad cinema fandom that formed in the wake of 80s Shot-on-Video horror movies, but also DIY creation communities that rose through zine making, horror conventions, and online forums.
In the next section of this article, we introduce a freely available tool named the “Haunted PSX Render Pipeline.” Made by and shared within the HSP1 community, it is intended to help users reproduce the nostalgic aesthetics of the PlayStation console within the Unity game engine (a piece of software that is commonly used by independent game designers and media artists).[5] Not only is this tool evidence of the non-commercial and communal qualities of the community, but displays their painstaking dedication to reproducing the material qualities of old, ugly, and distorted PS1 graphics. These kinds of non-commercialized, freely available, communal tools partially reflect what Emilie Reed, museum studies and art history researcher and game developer, defines as “mass art engines” and “mass art tools” that resist industry pressures toward “professionalization, polish and scale.”[6] Using the game making tool as a culmination of energies, we trace the HPS1 community’s roots through independent horror movie distribution before moving on to analyze its preference of ugly aesthetics through theories of bad cinema.
HPS1’s Tool Fandoms and Communities of Practice
Beyond HPS1’s tendency to release their games for free, there have also been several custom-made tools that have been freely distributed throughout the community that allows members to more easily reproduce the desired aesthetics of the original PlayStation. One of the most prominent examples of this is an add-on for the Unity game engine called the “Haunted PSX Render Pipeline” (more commonly referred to as HPSXRP) that was created by indie developer Nicholas Brancaccio and released in January 2021 via GitHub. According to another developer in the HSP1 community with the itch.io and Twitter handle “leafthief” who wrote and published an installation guide for HPSXRP, the add-on is meant to emulate “the hardware limitations of the PS1” such as “vertex jitter and the pixelation post processing.”[7] The add-on was initially previewed as part of the 2020 iteration of the HPS1 community’s annual EEK3 Indie Horror Showcase in the “Game Dev Tech Showcase” section and has since been used to make a vast collection of games, animations, and art assets—many of which are easily found by searching the hashtag HPSXRP on Twitter. For example, Bryce Bucher, who has been a frequent contributor to the HPS1 community, has made several posts highlighting their use of the HPSXRP to help create their games. Similarly, Brancaccio has also made posts to this effect, in one instance pointing out how Bucher’s 2022 game Mysteries Under Lake Ophelia represents one of the first games made using the HPSXRP to be released for the Nintendo Switch.[8]
Collectively, the communal cross-promotion of the HPSXRP referenced above functions as a strong example of what Stefan Werning, Associate Professor for Digital Media and Game Studies at Utrecht University, refers to as “tool fandom,” where a group of practitioners organizes itself around a particular platform or piece of software in a way that is comparable to the more commonly understood fandoms of specific narrative media franchises.[9] When initially defining tool fandoms, Werning points to large media companies such as Adobe, Disney, and Sony, arguing that they increasingly “perceive their tools more as a service, which becomes more valuable through sharing, than as a product, which has to be kept scarce to maintain its value.”[10] Werning then complicates this by explaining how tool fandoms also exist in relation to much less known, though more easily accessible game development tools such as Bryce, Scratch, and GameMaker.[11] Werning states that participation within tool fandoms is inherently a social experience and that the communal learning, engagement, and participatory culture they offer allows for members to accrue a complex blend of gaming and social capital. These intertwined forms of social recognition allow members of tool fandoms to express and display a wide array of qualities about themselves and their creations, such as “status, prestige, authority, value, skills, tastes and knowledge.”[12]
Using the HPSXRP hashtag to promote one’s work on Twitter is not the only way in which Brancaccio’s Unity add-on has worked to foster a community of practice around itself. In addition to the interlinked network of art that the Twitter hashtag has produced over time, there are links to and descriptions of the broader HPS1 community’s Discord server included within the GitHub page for the tool. Within this server, there is a specific subchannel dedicated to discussion related to HPSXRP where game developers can ask or answer technical questions, and share images, videos, or links to the games they have been working on.
The intimacy and enthusiasm that the HPS1 community and the HPSXRP tool fandom collectively foster have many novel qualities worthy of further research but are not without precedent. Unsurprisingly, there are many cultural and socio-economic resonances with the broader independent game development community, but through HPS1’s deliberate alignment with grungy aesthetics, there are also productive insights to be gleaned from the history of zines and other similar forms of DIY print publication.
The term “zine” comes from the word magazine but is used primarily for a DIY-style print publication that is independently produced (normally by one person). Elke Zobl, creator of the Grrrl Zine Network and associate professor at the Paris-Lodron University and the University Mozarteum Salzburg, traces the history of zines from 1930s sci-fi fiction, through the DIY punk scene when photocopiers were becoming more accessible, to the 1990s the riot grrrl movement and third-wave feminism.[13] Game developer and author Anna Anthropy explores the relationship between this mode of low-tech book-making and the kind of independent videogame development that the HPS1 community represents. She argues that due to the rapid proliferation of easily approachable game-making tools that are designed for non-coders, it is “now possible for people with little to no programming experience—hobbyists, independent game designers, zinesters—to make their own games and to distribute them online.”[14] What this allows for is game production to go beyond the homogenous cycle where publishers “permit only games that follow a previously established model,” one which historically, has catered primarily to white cishet males.[15] In effect, the development of these DIY tools has resulted in many feminist, queer, experimental, and artistic game scenes to arise that collectively reveal a much wider possibility space than what is offered by the mainstream industry. In many ways, this echoes the relationship between the history of zines and largescale commercial book publishers. As Susan E. Thomas, librarian at Pace University and scholar on independent publication, points out in her art historical analysis of zines, they are “deliberately messy, inefficient, and labor-intensive”[16] and often made by creators who have a “fondness or preference for obsolete technologies.”[17] Just like the HPS1 community’s desire to invoke the outdated controls and visuals of bygone game consoles, these anachronistic qualities place zines on the outer fringes of the commercial industry. Additionally, using phrasing that feels in sync with HPS1’s monstrously creative output, Thomas also identifies much of contemporary “art zine subject matter has tended towards the fantastic and gothic as well as the queer, cryptozoological, ‘emo,’ and creepy.”[18] Finally, although zines have historically often been distributed in person at annual fairs and festivals, over the last couple of decades, artists have increasingly made their work available to view and purchase through e-commerce platforms such as Gumroad. Like itch.io, Gumroad allows creators to set up a store page to sell their work with the option of including a Pay-What-You-Can (PWYC) or donation-based payment option instead of charging a specific product price.
Looking beyond historical and contemporary zine-making practices, the DIY sensibilities of the HPS1 community can be productively linked to the in-person gatherings[19] and online forums[20] of horror fans and VHS collectors as well,[21] particularly the fetishization of VHS aesthetics that became increasingly popular with Facebook-centric underground horror filmmakers of the late 2000s and 2010s. This particular era of underground horror featured very low budgets, high violence, and gore and was marketed and distributed across several Facebook groups and online forums.[22]
The growing use of PayPal for money transfers along with e-commerce platforms like Storenvy for online stores and affordable consumer DVD production technology or a-la-carte DVD manufacturers like MVD in the late 2000s to early 2010s made distributing videos outside of the mainstream increasingly frictionless. While these filmmakers still frequented conventions and festivals, discourse between creators and fans increasingly occurred online, primarily through Facebook groups, providing an inexpensive venue for marketing their products, but also a vibrant exchange of discourse about horror films, new and old, and a venue for community building centred around these distinct products.[23]
The Facebook horror scene is part of a history of independent horror that can be traced from midnight screenings of cult and exploitation films in privately owned theatres beginning in the late 60s (often called the “Golden Age of Horror”) to the home video market and the influx of horror released on and made for VHS.[24] The scene’s immediate progenitor is the horror DVD market of the mid-2000s which saw a slew of older slasher films and Italian horror and Giallo from the 1970s and 1980s, alongside contemporary films by auteur directors like James Wan (Saw, 2004), Eli Roth (Hostel, 2005), and Rob Zombie (House of 1000 Corpses, 2003) (referred to as the “Splat Pack”) released to stores.[25] Producers at the time took advantage of the lax ratings of the home market to release uncut and unrated versions of the film as well as make use of the added storage of DVDs for commentary tracks and video extras.[26] As a result, owning a movie became less about the content and more focused on physical media as a collector’s item.[27] The Splat Pack also saw a more extreme and low-budget contemporary in the 2000s in a growing underground horror scene, including, but not limited to filmmakers like Lucifer Valentine (Slaughtered Vomit Dolls, 2006), Fred Vogel (The August Underground Trilogy, 2001/2003/2007), and Bill Zebub (Jesus Christ: Serial Rapist, 2004). Infamous for their crude production and transgressive content, these films were not as readily available as the horror re-releases and the Splat Pack, instead, they were acquired through horror conventions and the filmmakers' own websites. The horror DVD market and underground horror of the early-to-mid 2000s paved the way for Facebook filmmakers.
What made this Facebook-focused iteration of underground horror stand out, apart from their online marketing and distribution, was how much these titles paid homage to outmoded VHS aesthetics through visual effects and iconography. For example, Slaughter Tales (2012) and All Hallows Eve (2013) are anthology horror films that revolve around the main character finding an old VHS tape that features the segments of the films. The director of Slaughter Tales even used an old camcorder bought at a garage sale to authentically recreate the look of older digital video. Part of the appeal of these movies was their postmodern nod to the materiality and the narrative tropes of the Shot-on-video horror of the 1980s and 1990s. Furthermore, a number of underground horror films have been anachronistically released on VHS through distributors such as Lazer Paladin Video, Videonomicon, and SRS cinema. This focus on materiality in the Facebook scene was part of a growing cultural appreciation of VHS in the 2010s that had a notable influence on the HPS1 scene. Following in the footsteps of zine cultures, ad-hoc online distribution, and underground horror production, the HSP1 community has formed itself using a messy mould of deliberately ugly aesthetics, DIY collaboration, and fan-like interaction. In doing so, we argue that they have created an appealingly distasteful new genre of videogame that manages to exceed uncritical, enthusiast videogame nostalgia. Furthermore, in line with the DIY communities before them, the creation of the HPSXRP has given HPS1 developers a free tool to more easily—and as we will see in the following section more pleasurably—produce their deliberately ugly games easier. The influences of HPS1, of course, did not solely derive from Facebook horror filmmakers. Its lineage can be traced through the independent horror games in the 2010s (such as Slender: The Eight Pages, Parsec Productions, 2012), internet urban legends/fiction (also called Creepypasta), especially those about haunted games (see Ben Drowned, Sonic.exe, or Sad Satan), and found footage horror films (The Blair Witch Project, 1999, and the V/H/S series, 2012-2022). Yet, the Facebook-based underground horror stands out as a key progenitor for its communal production and its focus on aesthetic ugliness.
Para- and Non-cinema
Pleasure in horror,[28] certainly plays a role in the appeal of HSP1 games. However, as the HPSXRP works to demonstrate, there is also a distinct allure in the aesthetics of the original PlayStation that heavily works to structure this community’s tastes and creative output. This preference for what is now perceived to be unpolished, outdated, ugly, and unappealing is also not without precedent and has tangible roots in recent media history through what Jeffrey Sconce, professor in the Screen Cultures program at Northwestern School of Communication, defines as “paracinema.”[29] According to Sconce, paracinema describes an oppositional pleasure that purposely seeks out media deemed low culture, offensive, crass, and even mundane. The objects of paracinema include, but are not limited to, low-budget 80s action films, lude and gory Hong Kong Cat-III films (an equivalent rating to X rating in North America), DIY prank videos like the CKY series (1999-2002), or corporate training tapes. The notion of paracinema also has close ties with what William Brown, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Roehampton, London, refers to as “non-cinema,” a conceptualization of a particular mode of low-budget digitally-produced art film that he refers to as “the low end of filmmaking” that aims to “divert attention beyond that which already has the means to demand our attention in terms of films, and to focus us on the small, the peripheral, the barbaric, the wretched.”[30] Furthermore, several aesthetic tropes unite para- and non-cinema, such as “lo-fi images, location shooting, regularly amateur or amateur-ish acting, [and] an emphasis on darkness.” As Senior Lecturer in Film and Screen Studies at Monash University Julia Vassilieva expresses, pleasure for this kind of “bad” cinema “marvels at the sight of blood, excrement and slime; and it celebrates abject emotions stretching from shock, horror and disgust to boredom.”[31] It renders “bad into sublime”[32] through a distanced, ironic reading of texts, resembling a postmodern spectatorship. In short, these theories claim that enjoyment of bad media is derived from its badness.
There are significant medium-related differences that can easily be noted between the kinds of micro- or zero-budget films that Brown and Sconce are focusing on in their respective cinematic speculations and the indie horror games that are produced within the HSP1 community. Yet, their shared aesthetic focus on the low, the dark, and the messy allows for this concepts to be applied nonetheless. Early 3D graphics with low polygon counts from the mid 90s have long been considered ugly when compared to the pixel graphics that were dominant previously and the refined 3D visuals that developed after. For example, Meg Pellicio, editor at TheGamer, praises games of the console, but highlights that “plenty of PS1 games feature hideous visuals.”[33] Even among PS1 fans, game graphics are deemed “ugly-ass polygons”[34] as is communicated in the title of a forum thread on Retro Game Boards otherwise espousing love for the games. In another example, user Balgore on the Steam community forums for the throwback action game ULTRAKILL (Arsi "Hakita" Patala, 2020), says he found the game fun but cannot get past the “brutal brutal polygons”[35] Using Brown’s non-cinematic framework, this places these kinds of ugly aesthetics on the peripheral of industrial modes of production and thus allows them to fill the role of the “barbaric” and “the wretched” when compared to those of mainstream videogame capitalism.[36] Additionally, just as Brown argues in relation to non-cinematic filmmaking, these barbaric aesthetics are not only restricted to those without budgets, but are also something that “haunts” mainstream, big budget production as well. Briefly invoking Mark Fisher’s hauntological approach to media,[37] this means that the ghost of game-making’s graphical past is always lurking around, ready to be deployed as a criticism over lack of visual polish while simultaneously acting as a creative well for nostalgically-minded artists such as those within the HPS1 community. Additionally, like para- and non-cinema, this willful embrace of the impoverished is not something that is restricted to the visual or technical choices being made, but also includes a distinct enthusiasm for similarly peripheral content, for storylines and themes that most would consider to be ugly.
Many HPS1 games feature shocking, brutish, and trippy narratives of the kind referred to above. For example, RIIP (Pastafuture and Neurobew, 2021), included on the Holiday-themed HPS1 collection Madvent Calendar 2021, drops the player in a series of environments, both residential homes and commercial spaces, where they must rip through part of the environment to escape a glitching entity. The game is in first person perspective and features low poly graphics distorted with thick pixels, dark and dirty environments, with TV static blocking entry into many doors. It gives you no instructions or even a title screen and the player must frantically find a way out of their current space to the next before a white, jagged, fuzzy entity reaches them and sends them back to a previous section. Its distorted graphics, glitchy enemy, and rippable environments collaborated thematically to make a unique, disorienting, surreal, and very frightening game. RIIP without the implementation of “ugly-ass polygons” would not be as effective an experience.
SOV horror
Beyond the garish polygons and dreadful narratives of the games, what is often most striking are the video effects used in HPS1 games. While emulating PS1 graphics, many games implement VHS tape static and the visual distortion of a Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) television. Their content, coupled with their emulation of these anachronistic aesthetics, suggests the influence of shot-on-video (SOV) and VHS horror, like the Facebook horror filmmakers of the late 2000s and early 2010s.
SOV horror refers to a subgenre of low-budget horror movies shot on consumer or semi-professional video equipment and distributed through video rental stores. The home video rental market saw a boom in the 1980s and into the 1990s. As horror filmmaker and author Richard Mogg states, at this time, VCR and consumer video production technology became more affordable and as a result, was adopted by many homes in North America and Europe. Movies on VHS were expensive in the 80s, therefore the primary distribution of movies was through rental stores. There was high demand for home video and, starved for content, many stores stocked low-budget horror movies made by independent and hobbyist filmmakers shot on newly accessible video production equipment.[38] This wave of scary DIY tapes was deemed SOV horror, and hold a cult following today among VHS and B-movie horror enthusiasts.
As amateurish productions, many titles lack the technical aptitude and narrative pacing of filmmakers well versed in the language of cinema. As a result, many require a refined palette for this quality of the product and patience for plodding and often nonsensical unfolding of the plot.[39] These movies often feature poorly paced plots that, despite their simplicity, are hard to follow due to the filmmakers’ lack of technical know-how in creating spatial and narrative logic. Sound is typically mixed poorly, scores are rudimentary synth compositions, and the shocking moments in the films are accompanied by shrill musical stabs or sound effects that clip, distort, and warble. Furthermore, as films were shot on consumer video equipment and transferred onto VHS, the visual quality of these movies is poor, full of static, noise, and degeneration, often accentuated by the decay of the tape it is watched on. Beyond their unique pace and balance, pleasure for SOV horror is also tied to its materiality. The tape as an artifact, complete with its deterioration, becomes part of the pleasure. VHS visuals have also become aesthetic shorthand for gritty and authentic depictions of real-life violence. Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Lincoln, UK Neil Jackson et. al. name it the snuff aesthetic[40] with features that include “location shooting, handheld cameras, imperfect or improvised compositions, [...], degraded video imagery, lens phenomena, [..] print scratches, [...] and sound irregularities.”[41] The snuff aesthetic appears in many found footage horror films such as Cannibal Holocaust (1980), The Blair Witch Project, and Paranormal Activity (2007), and has also been used in more recent mainstream horror games such as Outlast (Red Barrels, 2013) and Resident Evil 7 (Capcom, 2017) to heighten the terror of their first-person perspective gameplay and cinematics.
Along with an aesthetic signifier for gritty real-world horror, the decayed visuals of SOV horror are tied to their physical medium, the VHS. This materiality is well known to VHS horror collectors today. Daniel Herbert, Associate Professor in the department of Film, Television, and Media at the University of Michigan, points out that while the concept of movies as a physical object is in decline, there are many companies that are distributing new VHS movies, primarily horror, cult, and exploitation.[42] Examples include SRS Cinema and Videonomicon (mentioned above) that distribute SOV horror and new films with a similar aesthetic on VHS, as well as DVD and Blu-Ray.
HPS1 games’ DIY production, their creepy, gory, brutal, and/or trippy content, their mix of tedium and mundanity with shock and novelty, matches the low budgets, lack of technical polish, and the subject matter of SOV horror and VHS tapes. Many HPS1 games use visual effects that resemble the static and degradation of VHS tapes and some even use the medium’s iconography in their games. Scary Tales Vol. 1 (Puppet Combo, 2019) has a title screen that looks like the cover of a VHS. In order to play the games in the collection, in this simple meta-game, you need to insert a tape into the VCR. CRT TVs and tapes also feature in numerous other titles such as Paratopic (Arbitrary Metric, 2018), TV Night (David Rodmad, 2019), and There’s Nobody (Gabrielndjldc). Some games, such as Bloodmoon Church (AzaGameStudio, 2021) and Ode to a Moon -The Lost Disc (colorfiction, 2019) ask the user to “play VHS tape” or “insert” to start the game. Publisher Torture Star Video even satirically brands themselves as a VHS distributor.
What’s curious about the melding of PS1 graphics with VHS aesthetic is the technological mismatch. While the CRT effects are fitting for the low-polygons of the 90s, the VHS decay is not. As the gaming console was connected directly to the TV and running off a CD, images featuring static lines and faded, blurred colours do not match up to PS1 technology. That being said, the PlayStation entered the market in Japan in 1994, and North America and Europe a year later. While DVDs launched sometime between 1995 and 1996, what has been called “the DVD Revolution” (the mass market adoption of the format) did not occur until 1997.[43] Of course, while the DVDs entered the mass market, their use did not fully catch on in every household. Therefore, it can be assumed that VHS was the dominant mode of home video exhibition when many people were playing PS1. Therefore, memories of home entertainment that combine limited polygons and VHS degradation is a natural nostalgic amalgamation.
PlayStation also marked an explosion in survival horror games. While many horror games were produced before Sony’s first home console, the golden age of survival horror is commonly attributed to the 90s.[44] Alone in the Dark (Infograms, 1992) is considered the first survival horror, but the term was coined by Capcom for Resident Evil (1996),[45] the game that popularized the genre, spawned a long-running series and inspired the creation of another giant franchise in the genre, the Silent Hill series (Konami, 1999-ongoing). The 90s also saw a slew of less successful survival horrors released, all featuring 3D graphics, environmental puzzles, menacing enemies and limited resources to defend yourself. 3D environments of many early survival horror games were represented with pre-rendered backgrounds and fixed camera angles. While this allowed developers to create more detailed surroundings it also mimicked horror cinematography and surveillance video, which reflected snuff aesthetics even in these earlier titles. Apart from the formation of a specific genre in the 90s, the low powered polygonal visuals of the PS1 saw games take on an eerie verisimilitude with their three-dimensional world created with distorted graphics. As Aaaron Tacker-Weiss, co-developer of The Devil (cathroon, et al., 2020) explains, the “240p screen resolution, severe aliasing, and unfiltered textures” lent an uncanny quality to the games of the PS1 through their visual distortion.[46] When we consider games like The Devil, and the many other HPS1, we see a conflation of content and aesthetics similar to SOV horror.
Occurring at a time when the particular sub-genre and mode of exhibition were at their zenith, the formal elements of SOV horror and the visual elements of VHS are linked. The PlayStation, similarly saw an explosion of a certain kind of content (survival horror) married to specific aesthetics (low poly graphics). In turn, plodding, mysterious, and surreal horror games have been married with nostalgic graphics of the “embryonic 3D” age.[47] Many HPS1 also mix in elements of VHS horror through their shocking, gory, and surreal content, and in their evocation of the “badness” of SOV horror in video game form, HPS1 welcomes “ugly ass,” low-poly graphics into the bad cinema fold.
Conclusion
As we have argued throughout this article, the HPS1 community represents a unique synthesis of nostalgia and novelty that is differentiated from other retro-oriented indie game development practices through its love of outdated and unpolished aesthetics. These “bad” graphics are often constructed in reference to the specifically ludic conventions of 90s-era survival horror games. However, as we have shown, there are not infrequent instances of the community opting to blend these references to older games with the static, scan lines, and visual decay of VHS-based horror cinema. Furthermore, the need for custom add-ons and plugins such as the HPSXRP that force modern game engines to produce these deliberately less marketable visuals works to reflect the kind of platform-based tool fandoms that are increasingly common within many forms of digital creative practice. This practice-led fandom also allows for the HSP1 community to be speculatively theorized through the similarly DIY histories of zine-making and underground horror.
Collectively, all of this positions HPS1 as a community of practice that warrants further study. As low-poly horror continues to grow in prominence, how will its relationship with videogame capitalism correspondingly shift? Although, as we have referenced above, most HPS1 games hosted through itch.io are freely distributed, many of the most popular titles on this platform have been ported onto consoles with accompanying non-donation-based price tags. Looking toward the small press and indie horror contexts we have used to build historical context for the HPS1 community, therein lies some potential answers in terms of how this nebulous and informal network of creators may loosely formalize itself over time. There have already been some examples of small groups of low-poly horror game developers successfully assembling themselves into commercial studios and/or publishers (for example, DreadXP and New Blood Interactive) that mirror independent book publishers and film distributors. Looking to the future, it will be interesting—especially to those within the fields of platform studies, and game production studies—to see how this trend develops and at what point this nostalgic and bad cinema-infused mode of game-making reaches a threshold of popularity and financial success where their ugly aesthetics become normalized. Although the technical limitations of the PlayStation 1 work especially well alongside the grungier aspects of the horror genre, as tool fandoms like HPS1 expand, there will be more opportunities for artists to recreate other bygone aesthetics and genres. Many of the HPS1 developers currently engaging in this practice are of the age where they experienced the survival horror games of the PlayStation 1 first-hand throughout their childhood or teenage years. But what remains to be seen is how future points of reference will distort and adapt these "ugly-ass" aesthetics into new forms of artistic expression.
Footnotes
1 Oisin Kuhnke, “The Resurgence of the PS1 Horror Game,” NME (blog), October 27, 2021, https://www.nme.com/features/gaming-features/the-resurgence-of-the-ps1-horror-game-3076237.
2 Felan Parker, “Boutique Indie: Annapurna Interactive and Contemporary Independent Game Development” in Independent Videogames: Cultures, Networks, Techniques and Politics, ed. Paolo Ruffino, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2020.
3 Lana Polansky, “Towards an Art History for Videogames,” Rhizome, Aug 03, 2016, https://rhizome.org/editorial/2016/aug/03/an-art-history-for-videogames/
4 Brendan Keogh, “From aggressively formalised to intensely in/formalised: accounting for a wider range of videogame development practices,” Creative Industries Journal, 12, no 1, (2019):14-33.
5 Benjamin Nicoll and Brendan Keogh, The Unity Game Engine and the Circuits of Cultural Software, 1st ed. 2019 edition (Palgrave Pivot, 2019).
6 Emilie Reed, “Game Art Engines Talk,” emreed.net, September 5th, 2019, https://emreed.net/GameArtEngines_Transcript.html.
7 leafthief, “Setting up the HPSXRP,” itch.io, 2021, https://leafthief.itch.io/turnpike-north/devlog/212145/setting-up-the-hpsxrp.
8 Nicholas Brancaccio (@pastasfuture), “#HPSXRP on Switch! 👀,” Twitter June 4 2022. https://twitter.com/pastasfuture/status/1533115100256784384
9 Stefan Werning. Making Games: The Politics and Poetics of Game Creation Tools (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2021) 51.
10 Ibid.
11 Werning, Making Games, 52.
12 Sturm, Damion, and Andrew McKinney. 2013. “Affective Hyper-consumption and Immaterial Labors of Love: Theorizing Sport Fandom in the Age of New Media.” Participations 10 (1): 357– 362.
13 Elke Zobl, “From DIY to Collaborative Fields of Experimentation: Feminist Media and Cultural Production Towards Social Change – A Visual Contribution,” in Feminist Media (transcript Verlag, 2012).
14 Anthropy, Anna. Rise of the Videogame Zinesters : How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Dropouts, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form, (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012), 9.
15 Anthropy, 6.
16 Thomas, Susan E. “Value and Validity of Art Zines as an Art Form,” Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, Fall 2009, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Fall 2009), 28.
17 Thomas, 27
18 Thomas, 28.
19 Alison Harvey and Stephanie Fisher, “‘Everyone Can Make Games!’: The Post-Feminist Context of Women in Digital Game Production,” Feminist Media Studies 15, no. 4 (July 4, 2015): 576–92; Stephanie J. Fisher and Alison Harvey, “Intervention for Inclusivity: Gender Politics and Indie Game Development,” Loading... 7, no. 11 (December 31, 2012); Daniel Joseph, “The Toronto Indies: Some Assemblage Required,” Loading... 7, no. 11 (December 31, 2012).
20 Chris J. Young, “Game Changers: Everyday Gamemakers and the Development of the Video Game Industry” (Thesis, 2018), https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/handle/1807/89734.
21 Matt Hills, “Attending Horror Film Festivals and Conventions: Liveness, Subcultural Capital and ‘Flesh-and-Blood Genre Communities,’” in Horror Zone : The Cultural Experience of Contemporary Horror Cinema (London ; New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010), 87–102; Brigid Cherry, “Stalking the Web: Celebration, Chat and Horror Film Marketing on the Internet,” in Horror Zone : The Cultural Experience of Contemporary Horror Cinema (London ; New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010), 67–86.
22 Patrick R. Dolan, “Illicit Objects: Subversive Forms of Value Production in Horror Cinema” (Master’s Research Project, Toronto, York University, 2016).
23 Dolan, “Illicit Objects: Subversive Forms of Value Production in Horror Cinema.”
24 See Mark Bernard, Selling the Splat Pack: The DVD Revolution and the American Horror Film (Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, 2014); Richard Mogg, Analog Nightmares: The Shot On Video Horror Films of 1982-1995, 1st edition (RickMoe Publishing, 2018).
25 Mark Bernard, Selling the Splat Pack; Raiford Guins, “Blood and Black Gloves on Shiny Discs: New Media, Old Tastes, and the Remediation of Italian Horror Films in the U.S.,” in Horror International, ed. Steven Jay Schneider and Tony Williams (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 15–32;
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid.
28 See Mathias Clasen, Why Horror Seduces (Oxford University Press, 2017); Bartłomiej Paszylk, The Pleasure and Pain of Cult Horror Films: An Historical Survey (McFarland, 2009); Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1991): 2–13; Robin Wood, “The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70s,” in Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan... and Beyond: A Revised and Expanded Edition of the Classic Text (Columbia University Press, 2003), 63–84.
29 Jeffrey Sconce, “‘Trashing’ the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style,” Screen 36, no. 4 (December 21, 1995): 371–93.
30 William Brown, “Non-Cinema:Digital,Ethics,Multitude,” Film-Philosophy 20 (2016): 104-130.
31 Claire Perkins and Julia Vassilieva, “B for Bad Cinema,” Colloquy, no. 18 (December 2009): 7.
32 ibid.
33 Meg Pelliccio, “10 Terrible-Looking PS1 Games With Amazing Gameplay,” TheGamer, December 2, 2020, https://www.thegamer.com/playstation-ps1-games-graphics-best-gameplay/.
34 Chacranajxy, “PS1 Appreciation/Collectors Thread of Ugly-Ass Polygons,” Retro Game Boards: Video Games, October 25, 2017, https://www.retrogameboards.com/t/ps1-appreciation-collectors-thread-of-ugly-ass-polygons/87?page=9.
35 Balgore, “Graphics?,” ULTRAKILL: ULTRA General, December 22, 2020, https://steamcommunity.com/app/1229490/discussions/0/3002177675804624601/.
36 Brown, “Non-Cinema,” 108-109
37 Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, (Portland, Oregon: Zero Books, 2014).
38 Mogg, Analog Nightmares.
39 Caetlin Benson-Allott, “Affect & Apparatus: Horror After Cinema,” in Terror on Tape: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the History of Horror on Video (Yale University, 2016).
40 Neil Jackson et al., Snuff: Real Death and Screen Media, 1st ed. (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2016), https://doi.org/10.5040/9781501304590.
41 Neil Jackson, “ Cannibal Holocaust : Realist Horror and Reflexivity,” Postscript 21, no. 3 (2002): 36 as quoted in Neil Jackson et al., Snuff: Real Death and Screen Media.
42 Daniel Herbert, “Nostalgia Merchants: VHS Distribution in the Era of Digital Delivery,” Journal of Film and Video 69, no. 2 (June 1, 2017): 3–19.
43Janet Wasko, How Hollywood Works (London, 2003).
44 “Survival-Horror,” Wiki, Middlebury College MediaWiki Server, May 14, 2014, https://mediawiki.middlebury.edu/FMMC0282/Survival-Horror; James Troughton, “From Resident Evil To Dead Space: The History Of Survival Horror,” TheGamer, August 13, 2021, https://www.thegamer.com/survival-horror-history/.
45 Troughton, “From Resident Evil To Dead Space.”
46 Kuhnke, “The Resurgence of the PS1 Horror Game.”
47 Ibid.
Works Cited
Anthropy, Anna. Rise of the Videogame Zinesters : How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Dropouts, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form, (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012).
Balgore. “Graphics?” ULTRAKILL: ULTRA General, December 22, 2020. https://steamcommunity.com/app/1229490/discussions/0/3002177675804624601/.
Benson-Allott, Caetlin. “Affect & Apparatus: Horror After Cinema.” In Terror on Tape: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the History of Horror on Video. Yale University, 2016.
Bernard, Mark. Selling the Splat Pack: The DVD Revolution and the American Horror Film. Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, 2014.
Brown, William. “ William Brown, “Non-Cinema: Digital,Ethics,Multitude,” Film-Philosophy 20 (2016): 104-130.
Cane, Shannon Michael. “Xerox, Paper, Scissors.” Aperture (San Francisco, Calif.), no. 218 (2015): 46–51.
Chacranajxy. “PS1 Appreciation/Collectors Thread of Ugly-Ass Polygons.” Retro Game Boards: Video Games, October 25, 2017. https://www.retrogameboards.com/t/ps1-appreciation-collectors-thread-of-ugly-ass-polygons/87?page=9.
Cherry, Brigid. “Stalking the Web: Celebration, Chat and Horror Film Marketing on the Internet.” In Horror Zone : The Cultural Experience of Contemporary Horror Cinema, 67–86. London ; New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010.
Clasen, Mathias. Why Horror Seduces. Oxford University Press, 2017.
Dolan, Patrick R. “Illicit Objects: Subversive Forms of Value Production in Horror Cinema.” Master’s Research Project, York University, 2016.
Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, Portland, Oregon: Zero Books, 2014.
Fisher, Stephanie J., and Alison Harvey. “Intervention for Inclusivity: Gender Politics and Indie Game Development.” Loading... 7, no. 11 (December 31, 2012). http://journals.sfu.ca/loading/index.php/loading/article/view/118.
Guins, Raiford. “Blood and Black Gloves on Shiny Discs: New Media, Old Tastes, and the Remediation of Italian Horror Films in the U.S.” In Horror International, edited by Steven Jay Schneider and Tony Williams, 15–32. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005.
Harvey, Alison, and Stephanie Fisher. “‘Everyone Can Make Games!’: The Post-Feminist Context of Women in Digital Game Production.” Feminist Media Studies 15, no. 4 (July 4, 2015): 576–92.
Herbert, Daniel. “Nostalgia Merchants: VHS Distribution in the Era of Digital Delivery.” Journal of Film and Video 69, no. 2 (June 1, 2017): 3–19.
Hills, Matt. “Attending Horror Film Festivals and Conventions: Liveness, Subcultural Capital and ‘Flesh-and-Blood Genre Communities.’” In Horror Zone : The Cultural Experience of Contemporary Horror Cinema, 87–102. London ; New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010.
Jackson, Neil, Shaun Kimber, Johnny Walker, and Thomas Joseph Watson. Snuff: Real Death and Screen Media. 1st ed. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2016.
Joseph, Daniel. “The Toronto Indies: Some Assemblage Required.” Loading... 7, no. 11 (December 31, 2012). http://journals.sfu.ca/loading/index.php/loading/article/view/123.
Keogh, Brendan. “From aggressively formalised to intensely in/formalised: accounting for a wider range of videogame development practices,” Creative Industries Journal, 12, no 1, (2019): 14-33.
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leafthief. “Setting up the HPSXRP.” itch.io, 2021. https://leafthief.itch.io/turnpike-north/devlog/212145/setting-up-the-hpsxrp.
Mogg, Richard. Analog Nightmares: The Shot On Video Horror Films of 1982-1995. 1st edition. RickMoe Publishing, 2018.
Nicoll, Benjamin, and Brendan Keogh. The Unity Game Engine and the Circuits of Cultural Software. 1st ed. 2019 edition. Palgrave Pivot, 2019.
Parker, Felan. “Boutique Indie: Annapurna Interactive and Contemporary Independent Game Development” in Independent Videogames: Cultures, Networks, Techniques and Politics, ed. Paolo Ruffino, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2020.
Paszylk, Bartłomiej. The Pleasure and Pain of Cult Horror Films: An Historical Survey. McFarland, 2009.
Pelliccio, Meg. “10 Terrible-Looking PS1 Games With Amazing Gameplay.” TheGamer, December 2, 2020. https://www.thegamer.com/playstation-ps1-games-graphics-best-gameplay/.
Perkins, Claire, and Julia Vassilieva. “B for Bad Cinema.” Colloquy, no. 18 (December 2009): 5–15.
Polansky, Lana. “Towards an Art History for Videogames,” Rhizome, Aug 03, 2016, https://rhizome.org/editorial/2016/aug/03/an-art-history-for-videogames/
Reed, Emilie M. “Game Art Engines Talk.” emreed.net, September 5, 2019. https://emreed.net/GameArtEngines_Transcript.
Sconce, Jeffrey. “‘Trashing’ the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style.” Screen 36, no. 4 (December 21, 1995): 371–93.
Sturm, Damion, and Andrew McKinney. 2013. “Affective Hyper- consumption and Immaterial Labors of Love: Theorizing Sport Fandom in the Age of New Media.” Participations 10 (1): 357– 362.
Middlebury College MediaWiki Server. “Survival-Horror.” Wiki, May 14, 2014. https://mediawiki.middlebury.edu/FMMC0282/Survival-Horror.
Thomas, Susan E. “Value and Validity of Art Zines as an Art Form,” Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, Fall 2009, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Fall 2009), 27-36.
Troughton, James. “From Resident Evil To Dead Space: The History Of Survival Horror.” TheGamer, August 13, 2021. https://www.thegamer.com/survival-horror-history/.
Werning, Stefan. Making Games: The Politics and Poetics of Game Creation Tools (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2021) 51.
Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1991): 2–13.
Wood, Robin. “The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70s.” In Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan... and Beyond: A Revised and Expanded Edition of the Classic Text, 63–84. Columbia University Press, 2003.
Young, Chris J. “Game Changers: Everyday Gamemakers and the Development of the Video Game Industry,” 2018. https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/handle/1807/89734.
Zobl, Elke. “From DIY to Collaborative Fields of Experimentation: Feminist Media and Cultural Production Towards Social Change – A Visual Contribution.” In Feminist Media. transcript Verlag, 2012.
Author Biographies
Patrick Dolan is a Ph.D. candidate in Communications and Culture at York University. His current research interests include affect, aesthetics, critical industry studies, video games with pixel graphics and low-polygon counts, and the politics therein. His research background focused on the industry, economics, and collector communities of horror VHS and DVD. He is a former Editor-in-Chief of First Person Scholar, a middle-state academic journal.
Andrew Bailey is a Mitacs Accelerate Postdoctoral Fellow with Archive/Counter-Archive and York University. Andrew’s current research is focused on exploring the way videogames and their paratexts can function as interactive archives. Andrew also teaches new media art history and game studies at OCAD University and previously been on the editorial boards of First Person Scholar and Press Start Journal. His writing has been recently published in the Videogame Art Reader, Critical Distance, Loading: The Journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association, and Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Literature.
