So there’s two possibilities. Either you’ve played “Hypnospace Outlaw” and that’s part of the reason why you’re here on this particular website
Or you haven’t played it yet. In which case here’s a game that caters to exactly the kind of person that signs up to a forum in 2025!
Hypnospace Outlaw is a game about surfin’ the web in the year 1999, in that weird moment where everybody was so excited about this new technology but not completely sure what we were all going to do with it yet.
Here’s a screenshot, but I’m not going to elaborate further because it’s more fun to find out for yourself.
For those of us who have played it though, here’s the thread to talk about the game! Share your favourite characters, songs, jokes, secrets, whatever.
For me, what really stood out was how much was designed for this specific project. The Geocities-like look of the websites? That’s not fake! The developer really invented a kind of website builder for this! And you can make your own Hypnospace pages and play them ingame! You can download other people’s sites!
And the game could have gotten away with a few nods to music genres of the time, but that wasn’t faked either! Real musicians made real music videos and tracks and did real photoshoots in costume!
Even the kind of thing you expect to scroll past exactly once (like a videogame review for a fictional game) contains real footage of an actual 3D rendering made just to make you think it might be real.
This attention to detail is everywhere you look in the game, it elevates it from being kind of a silly pastiche to a serious love letter to a different era. If you’re old enough to remember the 90’s, you’ll recognise it. And if you’re not, well…this is what it felt like.
There was a planned sequel called Dreamsettler, set in the early 2000’s, but this was cancelled. Absolutely tragic, but these things happen.
