video games at the end of the world: a polygon dot com nostalgia tour

Hey… remember 2017?

good evening, and thank you all for coming to my Toad Talk.

If the answer is ‘barely,’ you’re not alone. My prevailing memories of that year are of hauling my awful carcass to the corner shop over the road for a superabundance of overpriced ice cream, hoping the guys who ran the place wouldn’t recognise me (they did, though at least they were nice about it). What I do remember, as usual, is the media that helped me claw through the mud to the end of the year — and in 2017, that was the Polygon dot com YouTube channel. Look on its works, ye mighty.

I mean, it still exists. It’s very different now. Back in the day, it was updating almost daily with genuinely surreal video game bullshit. The channel ran parallel to a fairly regular video game news and opinion site, under the banner of Vox Media, and I wondered more than once how they were getting away with any of it — what content strategist in the world had looked at the proposal for Please Retweet, thought this checks out, and signed off? We just don’t know. We could only be thankful that they did.

this used to look like a guy.

This stuff has had its hooks in me for a while. I’ve written (and then deleted what I wrote) about Car Boys, a video series which began with two internet men causing some physics-based car crashes in a driving simulator and evolved into a cosmically-horrifying narrative tribute to the annihilating power of the glitch. But Car Boys — while it was my point of entry to this weird corner of the internet — is only the tip of the iceberg. I mentioned Please Retweet, the premise of which is that video producer Patrick Gill will seek to persuade Nintendo of America to retweet a very good picture of Toad. It gets dark. Likewise SEO Play, in which a definitely-human, definitely-mortal Simone de Rochefort drinks objects from a large wine glass, wears a robe, and declaims the answers to commonly-Googled video game questions.

After all, this whole business was at least nominally about video games. There was a sense of getting away with something, of journeying to the outer limit of what video game coverage could be and nudging that line with the toe of a boot. Extended let’s play series about the beauty and the consequences of wanton destruction? A series of micro-documentaries following one man’s Toad-based emotional collapse? Universe-hopping saga about a demon named Doug and his battle for the soul of an extremely suggestible gamer? All of this is games journalism, actually, and a big fuck-you to Jim Bankoff into the bargain.

more coherent than black mirror, actually.

And it felt good! It was satisfying to see and to be part of. 2017 was not a great year: first year of the Trump administration, Brexit just beginning to mean Brexit. The news was breathless about the prospect of nuclear war. It makes sense, with the clarity of hindsight, that this bleakly funny, surreal little pocket of online space felt like the place to be. The world (we thought, with astonishingly limited imagination) was falling apart; we were at the mercy of unjust systems and political forces we did not know how to resist or subvert. Nothing made sense. Obviously we should watch some guys turn a crash test dummy into a five-dimensional monolith with a sledgehammer while Debussy’s Clair de Lune played softly in the background. What else would have spoken to our sense of imminent apocalypse — and, crucially, what else could have made us laugh about it?

This is how I justify the act of going back, which I have been doing over and over again since the pandemic began.

I don’t want to write about what changed, or how it ended. I want to write about the peculiar relief of coming back to something old and loved and set aside, and the concomitant sadness of realising that it still speaks to you. You are still, in part, the person who could love this thing; you haven’t changed that much, no matter what you like to think of yourself, or else it’s worn a place for itself inside your heart simply by inhabiting it for so long. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I went to Car Boys first. I buried my face in the familiar narrative as it began to emerge from the early-game vehicular wreckage, like a very unhappy toddler clinging to a horribly well-worn blanket. A true story: Clair de Lune played as a dear friend walked down the aisle at her wedding in late 2018, and my heart stopped for every wrong reason in the world.

despite all your rage, you are still drinking hot sauce in your dressing gown.

Then I went to Law-Abiding Citizen, the production of which is ropey even by the standards of what I hate calling ‘online video content.’ The intolerable poignancy of a man (who isn’t Link from Zelda, but also he might look like him, but also he might just be video producer Russ Frushtick??) flinging himself into an active volcano! Then Monster Factory, and the unbridled love the two McElroy brothers bear their abominable creations, no matter how unsightly or unflatteringly dressed. God knows how I found myself back at SEO Play; I barely kept up with video game news even when these videos were airing. This week, I have spiralled far enough that I’ve ended up in the archives of ‘nightmare public access show’ Gill and Gilbert, which started airing after my unqualified enthusiasm for all this nonsense had started to give out. Turns out that it’s funny and good. Of course.

The apocalypse progresses, albeit very slowly. These days the channel is mostly video essays, much more slickly branded, and that’s fine. Nothing gold can stay. The essays are actually pretty interesting, when they crest across my YouTube subscriptions. The work — I tell myself this a lot, about so many things — the work remains, a testament to a moment in time, even though the moment isn’t ever coming back. You can return to look at what’s left, and to remember the person you were when you needed it most. Nothing beside remains. But what remains will always have mattered to you once.