We’re two years into the pandemic and in a desperate attempt to reclaim some sense of normality and address my constant brain fog – I’ve been writing a memoir since January. I’m only about 23,000 words in so far – but if I maintain my current pace, I could be finished by the end of the year. 

I understand that writing a memoir sounds incredibly self-serving, and I don’t even know if I want to try and publish it. Initially I started writing because I was having my usual ‘January Scaries’ where I become temporarily suicidal because I don’t know what I’m doing with my life. This year marks the 7th year that I’ve been on antidepressants since my first case of the scaries on New Year’s Eve in 2014 and decided I didn’t want to live anymore. This blog came out of that, when I was first experiencing manic symptoms as I adjusted to the medication.

As a result of digging into a lot of childhood (but mostly young adult) trauma, I’ve been deep diving my nostalgia and trying to excavate early teen memories of when I was finally let loose on the internet.

In year 5, I was selected to go to a week long art camp in the Blue Mountains with a bunch of other primary schools. I’d never been away on camp before, and I was one of the youngest there. We spent the week doing a lot of painting, making sculptures and outdoor ‘found art’ in groups. It was the middle of winter, and the weather was wet and miserable.

A girl I was bunking with from Toongabbie was a year older. I remember thinking she was really cool, wearing her long brunette hair in loose pigtail braids with yellow overalls and a striped top. At the end of the week, she gave me her email address and we became email penpals for a while. I didn’t have my own email address yet, so I think I was using my mom’s, but we would talk about cartoons and boy bands we were into. Then one day I got an email that she had gotten a Game Boy and was playing this new game called Pokémon with a bunch of cool creatures. I knew there was a cartoon, but I didn’t have any handheld consoles and didn’t know there was a game at all. From that point on, I was obsessed with getting a Game Boy, but didn’t manage to get one until the following year (in one of the most depressingly self aware moments of my childhood, nonetheless).

When I think of when I started dipping my toe into the vast web of 1999/2000, I was mainly spending time on the official Pokémon website…and then fansites that I definitely mistakenly thought were official. I’d read about all sorts of supposed cheats to get Mew or Celebi, with blurry screenshots. One of the first ROMs I ever downloaded was a bootleg Pokémon game that I’m almost certain was that Game Boy Color Pokémon Diamond bootleg of Keitai Denjū Telefang that was floating around a lot in the early 2000s. I just thought it was a crappy Pokémon game and didn’t realise it was fake until about an hour in. Oh, to be that gullible again.

So why am I bringing all of this up? Well it’s the 20th anniversary of me getting my first hotmail address and being allowed to use MSN, and also Jay Tholen announced Dreamsettler earlier this month, and I have been in a deep Hypnospace Outlaw rabbit hole ever since.

You know those games that you hear about and get excited for, but then lose track and dig up several years later? Rediscovering Hypnospace Outlaw was like being activated as a Vaporwave sleeper agent. I love the idea of failed 90s peripherals, web 1.0 and basking in nostalgia – it was like this game was made for me.

As life was ‘returning to the new normal’ in August of 2020 (yeah, we sure were optimistic huh), and I was heading back into the office more frequently, Hypnospace Outlaw finally got a Switch release. When I saw it appear on the pre-order list in the eShop, I had a visceral flashback to an announcement trailer and kicked myself for forgetting about it for so long. So I added it to my pre-order list and waited impatiently for the preload.

Upon booting the game up for the first time, I was immediately brought back to the family computer room. Given that both of my parents were huge nerds, we had no shortage of CD-ROMs and old floppies sitting around. My dad kept all of the big boxes from the games we bought, and they sat in a floor to ceiling bookcase that spanned the entire wall. I’d begin my ritual of switching everything on and then sit and spin on the desk chair as I waited for the start-up sequence to finish so I could play Mindmaze in Encarta ‘98 or mess around with the Soundblaster Live! Experience. Maybe I’d just watch screensavers or try customising my Garfield Windows 98 theme – the world was my oyster and I was barely online.

By the time I was free-wheelin’ around the internet with my own email address, many of the Geocities pages my friends and I designed had been abandoned. I was terrible at maintaining a single website, and instead set up all sorts of one-page wonders full of spelling mistakes, ‘borrowed’ anime wallpapers and sporadically updated blogs about how hard it was to be in the 9th grade and loving Invader Zim. It wasn’t until I asked for a domain for my 14th birthday that I bothered to really do anything more substantial, and although nothing really came of it – I’m impressed that I learned how to use FTP and set up a phpBB forum by myself. By the time I finally got my site up and running, I was far more into using LiveJournal and customising the CSS of my layout rather than building things from scratch.

When I began to explore the zones in Hypnospace Outlaw, I was brought back to a simpler time where your personal brand didn’t matter half as much as how many animated gifs and text marquees you could fit on your page at once. Where everything was customisable and UX was just a pipedream, it felt that when you made your own website it truly was a special place carved out just for you.

In Hypnospace Outlaw, you’re an Enforcer with the Hypnospace Patrol Department, helping MerchantSoft moderate the many pages and citizens of the prime sleeptime service. The premise is simple enough, Dispatch sends you cases and you get to play internet detective – flagging copyright infringing comic images, taking down targeted harassment and restoring hacked pages. If citizens accrue enough violation points, you can flag them to be reviewed for suspension or banning. 

The citizens of Hypnospace will sometimes prey on your own biases to make you second guess if you would flag them, and I particularly appreciate the instance where Tiff has posted chat logs from two other Teentopia users who have been harassing her on Chitchat. Reporting them ends up giving her violation points since there is no way to report user harassment without punishing the person presenting the evidence. It’s a nice way to show the limitations of automatic moderation in web services, even when a human is doing the bulk of the flagging.

While Hypnospace Outlaw provides an engaging main story around being an Enforcer, the biggest draw for me was how genuine the pages felt. Personalities of the Hypnospace citizens feel realistic of the kinds of people you’d see online before you had to meticulously brand every facet of your personality, you’ve got irrationally belligerent boomers, lonely retirement home residents, peddlers of adoptable pixel art dragons, teen hackers, bedroom musicians that are constantly trying to one up each other by inventing new sub-genres – and the varied experiences they share throughout the Hypnospace journey culminates in a bittersweet ending that had me digging through the HAP to archive every page and make sure I didn’t miss a single detail through the numerous time skips.

Maintaining authenticity to a time period is one thing, but managing to make sure the content was humorous and heartfelt when it needed to be was next level. The humour in Hypnospace Outlaw has an Adult Swim-like quality to it, but very rarely crosses the line into maliciousness and holds back just enough to remain charming.

How much of the world that you learn about and connect is really up to how thorough you are in exploring, and though Hypnospace Outlaw doesn’t make a lot of direct pop culture references – outside of the obvious Squishers = Pokémon connection, the ones that are included as part of the world building are excellent. Somehow it feels more authentic when there aren’t many one-for-one real world references. One of my favourites is Chowder Man’s (real-life musician Hot Dad, who I’ve been following since A Taco Bell Christmas) attempt to rebrand as Kruncher. His comeback song contains a generic ‘radio edit’ voice censor over the three ‘ways of Kruncher’ before leading into the AOL keyword style search terms. Something awoke in me, and I realised the ‘radio edit’ censoring is a reference to Kid Rock’s ‘American Badass’. It’s thanks to this episode of Laser Time that I even knew about it, since I was thankfully spared the scourge of Kid Rock as a preteen.

If Hypnospace Outlaw served as a flashback into my coming of age on the internet, I can only imagine the kind of memories that Dreamsettler is going to dredge up given that it’s set in 2003. The year that I became Terminally Online. When some guy I met through Gaia added me on MSN and tried to roleplay with me for the first time, asking me if ‘m’lady would be my girlfriend’, leaving me confused and significantly uncomfortable. Maybe I’ll get the chance to relive the glory of mp3 shrines, Visual-Kei or lurking Fanfiction.net for more Gundam Wing fics with Duo and a Mary Sue OC. To be honest, I’d be satisfied with thinly veiled flash cartoon references, or perhaps someone in Teentopia dubbing over a Gumshoe Gooper cartoon a la the Fenslerfilm GI Joe PSAs from the same period.

Either way, I’m thoroughly excited at the thought of experiencing something set in this universe for the first time again. Hypnospace Outlaw proved to be one of the most emotionally rewarding gaming experiences I’d had in a number of years, and revisiting it with the Dreamsettler announcement only cemented my love for its cast of Cybercog devotees, Coolpunk wannabes and disgruntled ‘I stand with Gooper’ boomers.