Welcome back! It’s looking like a short dive this week because Chris has to sort out some drains. Have a lovely week!

The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart

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Essay: ATOMEGA

I’ve just finished reading Solace House by Will Maclean. It’s a spooky story about a strange mansion that may be a sort of portal to another realm. It would make a really wonderful walking simulator - I can imagine moving through all those rooms and watching as things gradually get more and more odd.

But for some reason, the book really left me thinking about Atomega. And this is fortunate because I think Atomega is one of my favourite games of all time. But I also feel kind of wistful about it. As they say on TikTok, let me explain.

Atomega is a multiplayer game made by the team that made Grow Home, another of my favourite games of all time. It’s a gloriously brisk thing. Each match pits you against a bunch of other players in a complex space. Your job is to evolve, by eating all of these cubes scattered around, and as you grow, you become more dangerous, and you also find that you can open up new routes through the shared map. Eventually, someone gets really, really big and then you’re into the end game.

There is so much to love here. The focus on a personal objective in a shared space, the magical way that a building can reveal different options that you can only access when you’re bigger or smaller than you were before, the sharp edges of the maps and the purples and golds in which everything is drawn.

But what I really love is that each game, if I remember correctly, takes place at the end of the universe. As you grow and evolve and fight each other, a countdown is happening until the entire cosmos explodes. This gives each match an enviable sense of progression, but it also gives the whole game a kind of 70s sci-fi paperback and vinyl vibe that I can’t get out of my head. It’s basically a prog multiplayer arena game. All it’s missing is flutes on the soundtrack.

And this in turn is how I ultimately remember Atomega: it’s a place, far out at the very edge of things, where I once had a very good time. And is that place now gone? I tried to boot the game up last night and it wouldn’t load. Apparently there’s a problem with certain Intel PCs and I could fix it by typing a bunch of code into something on my computer. But as that last sentence suggests, I probably shouldn’t do anything that technical. I can’t be trusted. So now I’m out here, forever barred from the end of the universe. It feels kind of perfect. What a wonderful game. CD