The influences and surprising origins of Hypnospace Outlaw

Hypnospace Outlaw used to be a very different type of game than the one we know today. The authentic replica of the world wide web circa 1999 was originally designed to be little more than ornate level select screens in a stylish endless runner-style game, for example, providing extra context for your adventures pursuing "outlaws on the Hypnospace Highway".

Games change during development, of course, and it’s not unusual for once substantial ideas to be left on the cutting room floor. But seeing as Hypnospace Outlaw is our pick for the RPS Game Club this month, I wanted to reach out to the game’s creator Jay Tholen to ask some questions about these unlikely origins, its influences and its lasting legacy. What happened to the Hypnospace Highway? And what comes next for the world of Hypnospace?

The resulting chat (which was conducted via email) was packed so full of interesting titbits about both Hypnospace and its subsequent spin-offs that I've decided to present it here as is. Enjoy.

RPS: What are your earliest memories of the Hypnospace project, and what were your inspirations?

Jay Tholen: The initial idea came back when I was working on the microgame Hypnospace Enforcer in 2014 during the development of Dropsy. It was a side project I was developing in periods of low motivation. In that game you're cruising down an "information superhighway" chasing down internet users who had been reported for breaking rules. Between levels you see information about the accused, including their avatars and a summary of their misdeeds. Around the end of the same year I'd already started working on the sequel, which included a small faux-OS that'd allow you to browse an assailant's personal pages for more context. Back then it was more of a glorified level select system, with the main gameplay occurring on the highway.

RPS: The Kickstarter for Hypnospace notes “Pursue outlaws on the Hypnospace Highway” as a key feature of the game. A few years ago, you said this “endless runner” style mode ended up being removed in favour of the detective game we have today. Could you talk more about this initial version of the project, and the decisions that eventually led you to cutting it?

JT: We ran out of time to complete it as we had originally envisioned it by our release window but it wasn't removed, just repurposed and scoped down. There was no way to make it the amazing thing we were hoping, so with some influence from one of Brian Eno's oblique strategies (Emphasise the flaws), I decided to place it front-and-centre as a plot element. We ran out of time to develop it in real life, so why not make an in-game character also run out of time and release a half-finished version? It being a 'bad car game' became a joke among in-the-know Hypnospace characters. To me, this was a much better option than trying to pass it off as a fleshed out attractive feature.

The appeal of the original design would've been the idea of a quasi-MMO game pushed on a bunch of users who mostly weren't really interested in games. Some cars would've just been sitting on the side of the road in confusion, some would be zipping around pro-gaming it, etc. There would've been ads and unique decor for each zone. If a user had a virtual pet, it would've followed behind their vehicle. There would've also been a way to access other users' file storage through the highway via a hack. We could've spent another year making it live up to that, but frankly as development continued I realised that the appeal was in the web and the unfolding abilities of HypnOS.

RPS: Were there any other features that had to be cut?

JT: Not really! Just dynamic resolution support (we made fundamental decisions early on that we can't reverse without rewriting much of the game) and small quality-of-life features like a grid view for the download manager.

RPS: Is there anything in Hypnospace that's inspired by a specific experience you had using the internet at the time?

JT: Two of Corey's journal entries in which he whines about being single and lonely were copied and pasted from the livejournal I maintained as a kid. Zane's comics were inspired by bloody anime-inspired comics I used to make with a friend in middle school called Scion X. The Dumpster was half Suck dot com and half Something Awful dot com. M1NX was inspired by very early 1999s-2000s Something Awful. Suck was a relatively good natured snarky comedy 'blog' (before the term blog) while Something Awful was a not-as-good-natured comedy website with a massive forum. It was my second large internet subculture (the first being the Klik game making community) and I was deeply invested in it for a while. The two main 'villains' were also inspired in multiple ways by bosses I'd had.

The psychic page was inspired by an extremely difficult client I had working the phones for a WYSIWYG page building website. She dictated the content of her website to me over the phone and kept me tied up for hours. After dropping her as a client at my boss's request she left me multiple abusive messages threatening supernatural consequences for 'leaving her to rot', as she put it.

Eventually her daughter contacted me and it turned out that she couldn't read and needed me to do everything for her so she could keep doing her psychic calls. She was apparently close to eviction. I knew she was a bit of a scammer but it really messed me up and was really hard for me to navigate morally and ethically. It's gotta be hard to find work if you can't even read and psychic phone counselling, while skeevy, certainly isn't the worst way to make money in such a situation. Either way I was forbidden from taking her on as a client again, but it stank.

I still have an .mp3 I recorded of one of the angry messages she left, which I was considering using in the game after the player flags the psychic but I figured it best not to since that could be legally funky.

RPS: It’s been four years since Hypnospace launched. How do you feel about the game's lasting legacy all these years later?

JT: I'm happy about it! People who take the time to buy into the universe a little seem to enjoy it. I was initially worried that people would see it as a "cop game" because that's what it is on the tin. People who don't play long enough (or people who are just really bad at subtext?) sometimes misread it but I think the vast majority of players appreciate where things end up.

I see it postulated that older people who want to relive the old days of the web are the game's target demographic, but I find that it appeals more to younger folk. I think some older people may approach it with more cynicism and don't buy in as easily and as a result don't care for the characters or pay attention to the minutiae on their pages. Progression is pretty heavily dependent on players recalling that information. Thankfully most players don't have that problem, but when I see it, it usually is from the older set.

RPS: What part of Hypnospace are you most proud of?

JT: Three things: the OS and how fun it is to tinker with (coded by Mike Lasch!), the characters and their dignity and how they mesh, and the music. I think our music is possibly our killer feature.

RPS: Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of the Slayer was a brilliant addition to the world of Hypnospace that I enjoyed a lot. Where did the idea for a retro-inspired FPS spin-off come from?

JT: I was a Duke Nukem fan as a youngster and after playing Sigil (as well as a bunch of user Doom wads) and Nightdive's Blood remaster I felt inspired to make my own. The game actually started as a faux 1990s Christian FPS (also hinted at in Hypnospace) called C.H.O.S:E.N. Anointed: No Fear, No Limitz. I decided to make it a Zane game because he was a pretty popular character and I initially wanted to make Slayers first as a 'practice run' for CHOSEN, which I feel is a more interesting concept.

Watching J.P. LeBreton's WAD Wednesday series also pushed me in the direction of Slayers X. I love when user maps are clearly made by young people and sometimes feel like a digital mishmash of a Lego diorama, a sketchbook, and a diary.

RPS: I’m personally very excited for upcoming Hypnospace successor Dreamsettler. How is the project progressing, and what's it been like creating something similar to Hypnospace but set within a different time period?

JT: It's coming along. The characters and the alternate-reality world events and content are all a blast to conjure up. Once the initial nostalgia factor wears out (and it always will) that's what keeps people around. I'm having quite a bit of fun with the music, presently. It has been more challenging to generate content because of the increased fidelity and resolution of everything. Folks in 1999 had way lower standards for internet content than folks in 2004. You could also hide a lot behind 32kbps audio.

Development for this one has worn on me more than with Hypnospace because it's much more complex. We have our own entire STML (Sleeptime Markup Language) and a feature-rich in-game page builder to go with it. It's an incredible achievement but it's not as immediate as the Hypnospace page builder, so it can sometimes feel like work and less like I'm method acting as a character while making their page. It's almost like the Geocities page builder versus FrontPage or Dreamweaver.

I'm also struggling to find aesthetic inspiration from the '03 to '05 time period. Aesthetic movements like Vectorheart, Metalheat, McBling, etc. are all cool, and I like playing with blogging and Flash culture, but most homepages in these years still looked Geocities-esque which may not strike folks as of-the-era, even though it was.