I’m a huge fan of the Commodore Amiga (the world’s first psychedelic computer), but what sucked me in as a youngster were games for it made by the Liverpool game developer Psygnosis. In the late 1980s, they realized what this weird, powerful machine could do and created a distinctive aesthetic for their titles. They hired Roger Dean and other prog-rock geniuses to create game art, and adhered to a unique storytelling vibe: not quite gothic, not quite fantasy, not quite 1970s UK pastoral postapocalypse. Then they soaked it in moody tribal electronic music by the likes of David Whittaker and Tim Wright, years before Sadeness hit the charts.
The games were also brutally difficult, sadistic even, to the point that it made everything all the more mysterious. There were, simply put, not enough wonderful games with names like “Agony”, “Leander” and “Shadow of the Beast.”
Psygnosis is long defunct, absorbed into Sony and its legacy ascended to Brandhalla. So I hope no-one minds my Psygnosis Game Generator, which combines a random Psygnosisy game name (equal parts concise, literary and antideluvian) with a randomly-picked work of art by Roger Dean and the classic Psygnosis box art wrap. Click “generate” for another—and be sure to share your artifact from a parallel universe. (You can also fiddle with URL parameters if you want to manually pick a title, typeface,painting, etc.)
A Psygnosis Game Generator [boingboing.net]