Users selling services online want to use a payment processor called CapaCash, but MerchantSoft is banhammering anyone using it. There are rumblings that a bunch of folks angry about the deletion of their communities who went and made their own unique Hypnospace area. There’s the notable online “celebrity” Chowder Man, a washed-up rocker trying to make a comeback via this up-and-coming Hypnospace thing, a bunch of kids arguing with each other over the bizarre musical movement Coolpunk, and a few notable corporate entities trying to endear themselves to users by piggybacking on these online trends.īut even in the early part of the game, the cracks in Hypnospace’s community are beginning to show. Early in the game, you see a campaign to get a new leader of the Goodtime Valley community elected across various member pages - the sort of popularity contest anyone who was jockeying for some status in an online remembers. Hypnospace reminds me of Prodigy’s walled garden in a lot of ways: its assorted “zones,” its colors and abstract visuals, its weird advertising tie-ins, but mainly in the way we see its users interact with each other. The communities I knew that had formed around games and animation splintered and vanished, and bonds that had formed between people simply vanished into the ether. (I was one of them.) Some stuck on Prodigy. Some folks I knew went to an up-and-coming thing called America Online, which let you read forums and mail offline. Given that you had to be online to compose and read forum posts, this was a killer. That is, until Prodigy decided it wasn’t making enough money from monthly subscriptions and email charges, at which point they shifted over to per-hour billing. The assorted forums were a primary reason most folks used Prodigy. (Also, according to Sega fans on the service, EGM was biased against the Genesis.
#HYPNOSPACE OUTLAWS CREATOR CODE#
I even got the Sonic 2 level select code from there way before any of the magazines of the time published it. I joined online clubs, posted about games I liked, wrote dumb fanfiction, all the stuff you expect a youngster to do online. As a youngster with an interest in games and cartoons, I came to learn about all kinds of new and interesting things there (including some Japanese thing called “anime” that supposedly had some of the craziest animation you’d ever seen). Prodigy was my first online community, and my first experience with online community loss. WARNING: HEAVY SPOILERS FOR HYPNOSPACE OUTLAW PAST THIS POINT! In fact, Hypnospace is doomed from the outset of the game, and you watch it collapse before your very eyes.īut while Hypnospace might have been fictional, the story it tells of a fractured, angry community and the corporate interests it’s at odds with are very real indeed. No, I’m not talking about the event that launches players into the game’s final leg: it’s very clear that the writing was on the wall for Hypnospace long before that happened. When I played Hypnospace Outlaw, I saw all of the hallmarks of another online community destined for death. I’ve seen many online communities spring up, thrive, and then fade away, a cycle that always seems eerily similar every time it happens. I’ve been using various online services for a very long time, starting with the likes of Prodigy back in 1992 when I was but a preteen. Yuck.But one thing in particular about Hypnospace Outlaw really stirred a lot of emotions in me. My game’s name being INSIDE their game, adorning a cosmetic set. “I really just don’t want to be associated with that world at all. Our game’s name being used to push what is effectively gambling isn’t something we’d like to be known for. “As an indie developer I find the association potentially harmful to my studio’s reputation – there have been multiple people who saw it previously and assumed we did some kind of deal with Tencent for them to use our name/visual style. This sort of association, alleges Tholen, can be harmful for a small indie studio. “I’ve watched a few YouTube videos of it and it’s frankly a bit confounding.” “The Hypnospace Diva bundle seems to be a set of cosmetic items that you can do some sort of lootbox-y randomized gambling shenanigans to unlock?” says Tholen. “Hypnospace itself is a kind of Geocities that you access while sleeping, so it made sense,” added Tholen. Tholen explains that Hypnospace was a mash-up of Hypnos, the Greek personification of sleep, and space – meaning place. It was only then that Tholen realised it was a commercial project.
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