Mackerelmedia Fish

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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.

Development[]

According to the developer's blog,[1] much of the game was built with , 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.[1] She also mentioned wanting to create an interactive project that made use of open directories for a long time. The project has been released as an open-source software, currently hosted on GitHub.[1][2]

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".[3] 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".[4] Writing for The Verge, Adi Robertson referred to it as "a strangely adorable ode to dying websites".[5] PC Gamer and The Verge both compared the game favourably to Hypnospace Outlaw.[6]

References[]

  1. ^ a b c Lawhead, Nathalie. "Mackerelmedia Fish: an ARG-like text adventure game (with sourcefiles)". nathalielawhead.com. Retrieved 20 August 2020.
  2. ^ "alienmelon/mackerelmediafish". GitHub. Retrieved 20 August 2020.
  3. ^ "Games of the Month: Treachery in Beatdown City, Mackerelfish Media and More!". itch.io. Retrieved 2020-08-20.
  4. ^ Morton, Lauren (2020-03-30). "Look at this wacky fish ARG about exploring abandoned websites". Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Retrieved 2020-08-20.
  5. ^ Robertson, Adi (2020-04-25). "Play Mackerelmedia Fish, a strangely adorable ode to dying websites". The Verge. Retrieved 2020-08-20.
  6. ^ Macgregor, Jody (2020-04-05). "Mackerelmedia Fish is an odd, fun, retroweb adventure". PC Gamer. Retrieved 2020-08-20.

External links[]


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