Happy Thursday Bathyspherers! This week, Florence delves into their archive of screenshots, Chris returns to a SEGA classic and an unclassifiable literary treat, while Keith finds an early description of what would soon become known as cel-shading. Please sit down, read the safety instructions carefully and prepare for launch.

The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart

Contact us at bathyspherecrew@gmail.com

Delightful games

If you’re looking for a relaxed photography simulator with gorgeous technicolour skies, make Shutter Stroll your next video game destination. The game allows you to hop between different procedurally generated low-poly islands and snap what emergent beauty the algorithm has nurtured. FSN

It still doesn’t feel entirely plausible that there are GameCube games on the Switch 2’s virtual console thingy, but there are, and amongst them is F-Zero GX, which I have been thoroughly lost within. There’s a broader piece to be written about how singularly haunting and liminal older 3D racing games are, but for now I’ll just say that a game that always felt like it had come from the future still feels like it came from the future. To race on arcing tracks under staticky skies! CD

Interesting things

Petra Szemán’s website is a lot of fun to visit. I would recommend starting with their short video “How to enter a fictional realm/TUTORIAL” which is both a guide to entering The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim with a bespoke avatar, and a meditation on digital identity and place. FSN

I can’t remember where I first heard of Anna Kavan’s novel Ice, but I finally read it this week and I can tell it’s going to stick in my mind for a while. It’s an unclassifiable thing - a kind of dreamlike pseudo-thriller wrapped up in anxiety about the Cold War and male violence. It proceeds, through a series of morphing set-pieces that feel like fugue states, to tell the kind-of story of a world threatened by an encroaching ice shelf and three people trying to make sense of it all.

It’s gloriously chilly stuff, and a quick glance at Kavan’s biography suggests plenty of strange harmonies. But for me I was struck most by the narrative structure, which propels you forward constantly while subtly changing the basics of the story as you go, and how much it felt like the headlong pelt of a noughties first-person shooter. As much as Ice is any one thing, it often felt to me like I was playing a really good Half-Life 2 mod. CD

Essay: Screenshots as personal archive

I have played 213 hours of the Final Fantasy VII Remake, and what do I have to show for it? I didn’t even finish the game. I was honestly baffled as to how I’d spent that much time mooching around as Cloud Strife, until I glanced at the media folder on my Steam Deck. A total count of 614 screenshots are attributed to FFVII Remake. Ah. That’s where all the time went.

I’m fascinated by the ways in which people record their gameplay experiences. Whether it be through streaming, scribbling some notes on the back of a receipt, or indeed compulsively taking screenshots like I do. And it’s not just how people record, but what they record. I’ve long held a theory that, in the same way that archaeologists can learn a lot about past people from the stuff they leave behind, you could probably learn a lot about a contemporary person from the unedited video game screenshots in their media library.

What would you discover if you excavated my media library? The Final Fantasy VII Remake snaps are a good place to start. It’s worth stating that one of the reasons I became so captivated by taking photos in this game is that it has a dedicated photo mode. I’ve taken several versions of the same photo just to test out what it looked like with a sepia tinge as opposed to a monochrome filter. Beyond that, the proliferation of photos reflects my obsession with the game’s environmental design. There’s a series of screenshots in which I document some mice rootling through rubbish because I was so enchanted by the attention to detail. Probably my favourite in the entire folder, though, is a sequence in which I capture objects in Aerith’s mother’s kitchen. The relative freedom of the photo mode camera allowed me to get up close and personal with a 3D model of some red onions. I wanted a glimpse of the seams of how that world is stitched together.

Video game photography is increasingly being taken seriously as an artistic pursuit. Back in 2022 The Photographer’s Gallery in London hosted an exhibition called “How to Win at Photography: Image-Making as Play.” It included the abstract photography of Joan Pamboukes in titles such as Kill Zone and Metal Gear, as well as charcoal silk screens based on screenshots of petrol stations that Lorna Ruth Galloway took in Grand Theft Auto V. I have a particular affinity with the work of Alan Butler; he extracts the textures of plants in video games, then transposes them onto positive exposure film, before finally using these to create cyanotypes.

“Players now explore online environments like tourists, mapping them out and collecting souvenirs of their journeys with virtual cameras,” says the guide to the Photographer’s Gallery exhibition. Personally, I’m more interested in unedited screenshot albums than carefully curated displays. It’s the difference between getting to see the Instagram post versus the camera reel of off-kilter candids, the flotsam you saw on the beach as opposed to the singular, prettiest shell you could find. Every missed shot or bad angle is a statement of intention. It reveals not just something about the video game world you’re in, but how you move through it.

Looking through screenshots on my laptop, the oldest I can find date to 2022. There’s some from the procedurally generated RPG, Wildermyth. The text on one reads: “But as the old will tell you…precious things go overlooked in a ruin. What lodges amid the bones of failure is often the dream that drove it.” I don’t know precisely why I took this screenshot on the 1st of January 2022. Perhaps within the ruins of lost video game adventures in screenshot archives, we can capture the dreams that drove us. FSN

Retrospective adventures

My son is currently completely obsessed with Borderlands 4, which naturally got me thinking about cel-shading, the technique of rendering 3D objects so that they resemble 2D cartoon drawings. The Dreamcast game Jet Set Radio is widely credited as the originator, with its developer Smilebit pulling in influences from Tokyo graffiti and street fashion as much as traditional cinematic animation. What’s really interesting is that this is one of the only subjective, non-realistic art trends in the modern mainstream video game development. While the rest of the industry was slavishly aiming for photo-realism a few studios chose to become abstract artists – if only for a year or so. Anyway, this short report (part of a longer feature on incoming innovations) showed how industry observers initially struggled to describe the cel-shading aesthetic. KS