The best story I ever heard was delivered in a conference talk called “Unrecorded” in Nordic Games Conference in 2017. Here are the key parts that I remember.

  • The talk was of course unrecorded
  • The presenter spent the first 5 minutes making sure noone was going to be recording
  • The Netflix show “Bandersnatch” actually struck a very similar vibe, 4 years later
  • The speaker was also the protagonist in his story, which took place in the late 90s to early 200s
  • The speaker had an incredible way to narrate. The point of the talk was to talk about storytelling and he clearly chose to show, not tell, lol
  • In the story, the protagonist spent a lot of time chasing down a game he remembered playing in the 80s that seemed to have been Polybius
  • In the main storyline, the protagonist has a heart attack about halfway through. After the heart attack and an ambulance ride, things start getting increasingly surrealistic and he ends up following a secretive games collector in his basement. The collector shows the speaker a vast collection of lost games
  • The collector introduced a variety of side-stories about games that were cancelled
  • There were a few different games that I remember, which the collector introduced as:
    • The game that toppled a king (a Saudi Arabian GTA knock-off that went massively overbudget and was the trigger for starting a revolution against the royal family)
    • The game where you meet god (a Japanese game that had a cat answer questions with some short of AI, even though it was nowhere in the code)
    • The game that kills you (this is the final game the protagonist plays)