Expedition 8
The Bathysphere
Welcome to our eighth expedition! This week’s essay concerns the concept of ‘endlings’ in both video games and the games industry itself – if you’re not sure what an endling is, you will have to read on. Also, we have game and book recommendations and we glance back at a very critical Edge magazine review from the era of FMV games… As ever, a section of our journey is available for free, the rest is for paid expedition subscribers only. Thank you for joining us!
The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart
Contact us on bathyspherecrew@gmail.com
Delightful games
Lost for Swords is a Godot-made game I’m playing on iOS quite a bit at the moment. It’s a card-based dungeon battler with lovely brisk levels and depths which are steadily becoming more apparent as I play. At the heart of it, I think, is a design that wants you to uncover the right order in which to do things - the right order for turning over a weapon, say, and then using it on a foe, or picking the right foe to attack while you still have a bit of shield left. I’ll leave it at that, because it’s a game that’s filled with the joys of discovery. I hope you enjoy it! CD
There’s a slim chance you haven’t yet been cajoled into playing Despelote, a short game about childhood set during Ecuador’s 2002 World Cup qualifying campaign – so I’m doing that cajoling now. It’s such a fascinating experiment in form, meta-narrative and the potential of games as a medium of documentary and autobiography. Also, you can pet the animals. KS
Interesting things
Eight Billion Genies is a comic series by Charles Soule and Ryan Browne. It’s been out for a while but I’ve been reading it over the last few weeks. The idea is that, once the population of earth hits eight billion, everybody suddenly gets a genie who will grant them a single wish. The series then telescopes outwards in greater and greater increments of time as chaos ensues.
It’s truly lovely stuff, filled with wild panels and precise moments of tenderness and pain. What’s interesting to me, though, is that I started reading it last year before I was thinking too much about generative AI slop, and now I’m finishing it while generative AI slop is everywhere and unavoidable. It feels like the comic’s central concerns dovetail with that quite nicely.
There’s this huge, deadly period of faux-creativity that kicks off when eight billion people suddenly get a genie, for example, and for a while it feels like the world is filled with knock-off superheroes and giant kaiju sweetcorn. One of the book’s main nagging points is the danger of suddenly wielding a load of power that you haven’t earned and don’t really understand. That sounds kind of familiar. CD
There is a lot of excitement brewing around the 40th anniversary of the Commodore Amiga, the home computer that brought us Sensible Soccer, Lemmings and of course, James Pond 2: Robocod. The Centre for Computing History in Cambridge is running an Amiga weekend on July 19-20, while this year’s Pixel Heaven retro gaming festival in Warsaw (6-8 June) will feature dedicated Amiga and Atari ST events. Oh and if you haven’t discovered it yet, Amiga Addict is a modern print magazine with lots of extremely nostalgic interviews and features. KS
I have just received the latest tome from Bitmap Books. Hurt Me Plenty is a guide to first-person shooters released between 2003 and 2010 an incredibly transformative period which saw the rise of Call of Duty, but also a wealth of experimental sci-fi and horror blasters. It’s a lovely book to dip into, both for contextualising the stand-out releases and discovering forgotten titles. KS
I’ve chosen a couple of ecologically-themed Interesting Things to pair with the main essay this week. The first is Playing Nature Ecology in Video Games by Alenda Y. Chang, which examines games as a response to the climate crisis. Hauntingly, the book opens with a discussion of how the game Walden was funded through a National Endowment for the Humanities grant. The book was published in 2019, now the Trump administration is cutting any NEH grants that relate to “diversity, equity, and inclusion (or DEI) and environmental justice.” FSN
Alice Bucknell’s Nightcrawlers is a two-player “pollination simulator” in which one person is a bat, and another a flower. The plant in question is a “datura,” a species that is known to be particularly resilient in the face of extreme weather conditions, such as wildfires. As the flower, you navigate root networks, and as the bat, you use echolocation. Nightcrawlers is on show at IMPORT EXPORT’s Salon in London, but only till May 17th, so you’ll have to be quick to catch it there. After that, it’ll be at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. FSN
Essay: Video Game Endlings
I first came across the term “endling” in, of all places, an Instagram reel. While mindlessly scrolling one evening, I was suddenly struck by a sentimental scene of a man carefully tending to a single goldfish in a beautifully decorated room. This footage comes from Endling, a short film directed by Kelly Yu about the last goldfish on earth and its caretaker. The premise of the film is fictional, but there have been countless “endlings” in recorded history, such as the last known Tasmanian tiger that died in 1936.
Endlings turn up a lot in science fiction and fantasy stories. There’s the eponymous Doctor in Doctor Who. Aang in Avatar: The Last Airbender. Endlings are the ultimate orphans, narratively compelling because they indicate a dark past and an uncertain future, with the ever present question of the possibility of Another existing. There’s even a TV tropes page about this archetype, called “Last Of His Kind.”
Video games are no stranger to the Endling. Characters that have often been described as some of the most iconic in the medium are arguably endlings. Aerith in Final Fantasy is the last surviving member of a group known as the Cetra, which is why she has special powers. In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Impa is thought to be one of a few remaining Sheikah. Knuckles is the last echidna in Sonic the Hedgehog. The list goes on.
Some games examine the topic beyond a dramatic backstory, such as the suitably named Endling - Extinction is Forever, which follows the last mother fox on earth and her cubs. The 3D side scroller depicts a world in which humans have completely ravaged the environment and you’re doing your best to survive. As the title would suggest, the game’s message is one of finality, but recent headlines have challenged this narrative.
You may have heard of Romulus and Remus, the two “dire wolves” publicised as a miracle of science and an example of de-extinction. The biotech company Colossal Biosciences claims to have brought back a species that has been extinct for over 10,000 years, though experts have challenged these claims. The lure of the endling narrative is also its reversal - the resurrection of a lost species.
Though it wouldn’t be appropriate to compare the loss of an entire living species to the loss of a video game, there are parallels between the endling/de-extinction narrative and the tragedy and tension that surrounds stories of lost video game media. There are several cases in which the original source code of beloved games were thought lost forever and then rediscovered. One such case was a fan inadvertently unearthing StarCraft source code on a disc they ordered from eBay. In the case of the 1997 Final Fantasy VII PC port, they didn’t have the original PS1 source and so had to use an older build of the game to splice together an approximation(not unlike the miracle dire wolves).
Endlings are compelling because they tap into a scarcity mindset - something can only be rare if it's not abundant, after all. It’s why there was a media furore over the auctioning of a Nintendo PlayStation prototype in 2020, as it was thought to potentially be the ‘last of its kind.’ The result of a brief collaboration between Nintendo and Sony in the early 90s, the Nintendo PlayStation is a relic not only of a different time but also a turning point in video game history.
The exceptionalism of the endling, though, is always a testament to past failures. Beyond the wider existential threat of the climate crisis, in the case of video game preservation, the best time to preserve a piece of media you love was yesterday. Endlings might make for great fantasy stories, or even profits for some people ,but the reality is that they represent a sad and preventable ending. Nothing should have to become exceptional to be worth saving. FSN
Retrospective adventures
If you want to know what the writers at Edge Magazine were doing this time 30 years ago, I can tell you: they were critically attacking the emerging era of FMV games with furious vigour. This unforgiving review of Johnny Mnemonic appeared in the August 1995 issue and it’s an interesting glimpse into what were considered acceptable technical specifications at the time, as well as contemporary concerns and debates over what constituted a “game” and “gameplay” in the multimedia era. By the time I arrived at Edge in 1995, fewer FMV-led titles were coming in for review – possibly because publishers were too scared to send them.