Mackerelmedia Fish
Mackerelmedia Fish is a 2020 experimental ARG-like browser-based video game developed by Nathalie Lawhead. The game explores themes and settings related to 1990s and early 2000s Internet culture (its name being a parody of Macromedia Flash), especially the loss of digital history through deprecations and data decay. Some of the game is directly implemented on a website's open.htaccess directories, while other portions of it take the user through other previous art projects by Lawhead, such as an application titled Electric Zine Maker.
Also recorded as Mackerel Media Fish
Mackerelmedia Fish
- Date
- 2020
- Language
- English
- Genre
- adventure video game · alternate reality game
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Documentary summary
Mackerelmedia Fish is a 2020 experimental ARG-like browser-based video game developed by Nathalie Lawhead. The game explores themes and settings related to 1990s and early 2000s Internet culture (its name being a parody of Macromedia Flash), especially the loss of digital history through deprecations and data decay. Some of the game is directly implemented on a website's open.htaccess directories, while other portions of it take the user through other previous art projects by Lawhead, such as an application titled Electric Zine Maker.
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wikidata · Q98549534 · wikipedia · Mackerelmedia Fish
In this article
Development
Development
According to the developer's blog, much of the game was built with Tumult Hype, an HTML5 development application. Lawhead mentioned wanting to have some sort of fictional context for Electric Zine Maker, and created Mackerelmedia Fish as a tie-in to that project as well as future ones. They also mentioned wanting to create an interactive project that made use of open directories for a long time. The project's code has been released on GitHub.
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Mackerelmedia Fish is associated with United States.
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Reception
The game was named one of the Games of the Month of April 2020 by itch.io staff writers, who called it the "perfect entry point for alternate reality games". Writing for Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Lauren Morton praised the game for its 'clever oddity', calling it a "portal back to my childhood when the internet was, if not weirder than now, differently weird". Writing for The Verge, Adi Robertson referred to it as "a strangely adorable ode to dying websites". PC Gamer and The Verge both compared the game favourably to Hypnospace Outlaw.
Notes from the source article
Cited by Wikipedia
Notes from the source article
These works are cited by the source article, in its own numbering. They are recorded as its citations, not as sources VALÉORINE has verified.
- 1.Lawhead, Nathalie. Mackerelmedia Fish: an ARG-like text adventure game (with sourcefiles). nathalielawhead.com.
- 2.alienmelon/mackerelmediafish. GitHub.
- 3.Games of the Month: Treachery in Beatdown City, Mackerelfish Media and More!. itch.io.
- 4.Morton, Lauren. Look at this wacky fish ARG about exploring abandoned websites. Rock, Paper, Shotgun. 2020-03-30.
- 5.Robertson, Adi. Play Mackerelmedia Fish, a strangely adorable ode to dying websites. The Verge. 2020-04-25.
- 6.Macgregor, Jody. Mackerelmedia Fish is an odd, fun, retroweb adventure. PC Gamer. 2020-04-05.
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