There are days when I wander around and find myself thinking about the strange turns life takes. Lately, most of those thoughts have been wrapped around one thing: this game I’m creating. What started as a loose idea has slowly become something much bigger to me. It has become the video game I always wanted to make and, in a strange way, the story I always wanted to tell. I wanted something dark, surreal, beautiful, disturbing, and completely different from the normal stuff people expect. I wanted something that feels like discovering an arcade cabinet that should not exist, plugging it in, and realizing that whatever is inside that machine has been waiting for you.
The whole thing started as one of those ideas you almost overlook. Just another apple falling from the brainstorm tree. But instead of letting this one roll away, I picked it up and kept thinking about it. What if I could make an arcade game that felt almost hypnotic? What if the enemies, bullets, music, backgrounds, colors, and movement all became part of the same performance? What if the deeper you went, the stranger everything became? That idea kept growing until I realized I was no longer just screwing around with a game concept. I was building a world.
At the center of it is this evil Queen and the bizarre psychic realm surrounding her. I have always wanted to tell a story about somebody being thrown against something enormous, beautiful, terrifying, and almost impossible to understand. I don’t want the Queen to feel like another generic video game villain standing at the end of a hallway waiting for the player. I want her presence hanging over the entire experience. I want the player to feel her watching, manipulating things, changing the world around him, and slowly revealing what she actually is. There should be moments where the game is frantic and violent, then suddenly quiet and unnerving, almost like the machine itself is thinking.
And I want it to be a real arcade game at heart. No endless upgrade trees, no twenty-minute tutorials explaining what every button does, and no mountain of bullshit standing between the player and actually playing. You step into this strange world and survive. You shoot, move, dodge, rescue minds, build your score, push your Flow higher, and try to stay alive while the game becomes increasingly insane around you. I want it brutally difficult, but I also want somebody who becomes good at it to feel like they are controlling absolute chaos. That feeling where your hands know what to do before your brain has even finished thinking about it is one of the greatest things video games can produce.
The funny thing is that while I’m building it as a video game, part of me is already imagining what the story could become beyond the game. Someday I would love to see this turned into a movie. Not some cheap adaptation that strips everything weird out of it and turns it into another generic science-fiction story. I mean a proper strange, dark, visually overwhelming movie that understands what made the game interesting in the first place. Something full of cosmic imagery, psychological horror, arcade-inspired color, strange environments, and this Queen who can somehow be beautiful, frightening, sympathetic, and completely monstrous at the same time.
And yeah, I’ve already thought about who I would love to see at the center of something like that. Lacey Chabert or Jennifer Esposito would both be incredible to me. I’ve always thought they were great actors, and there is something fun about imagining somebody you have watched for years suddenly stepping into this completely bizarre world that came out of your own head. Obviously that is a dream sitting way off in the distance, but I think you’re allowed to dream big when you’re creating something. The game comes first. It has to earn the right to become anything else. But there is nothing wrong with looking at this little strange piece of software you’re building and wondering where it could someday go.
That dream has actually meant a little more to me recently because I’ve also had one of those miserable reminders that physical things don’t last forever. I just lost my entire Atari collection because of a bathroom leak. That one hurt. This wasn’t just a pile of old electronics and games sitting around collecting dust. Atari represents part of the reason I love this medium in the first place. Those machines came from an era where games had to grab you immediately. You couldn’t hide behind enormous cinematic introductions or endless systems. The idea had to be good. The game had to feel good. You had a joystick, a button, some pixels, some sound, and somebody’s imagination trying to make those limitations feel enormous.
Losing that collection feels like losing a physical piece of gaming history that I had managed to keep with me. You collect this stuff over the years thinking it will always be there, and then something completely stupid and ordinary like water coming through a bathroom can wipe it out. There’s something especially cruel about seeing things that survived decades get taken out by something like that. You can’t really replace the history attached to your own collection. You might be able to buy another console or another cartridge, but it isn’t exactly the same thing.
Maybe that is part of the reason I’m so obsessed with getting this game right. Games disappear. Hardware breaks. Collections get damaged. Companies vanish. Hard drives die. But the ideas survive if somebody cares enough to keep building them. In some weird way, working on this game feels like taking everything I loved about those older machines and pushing it through my own imagination. I’m not trying to recreate an Atari game or pretend we’re still living in 1981. I want to capture that same purity, that feeling that a machine can contain a whole universe even though what you’re actually looking at is movement, sound, color, and code.
So that is where my head has been lately. I’m building this strange little universe one piece at a time. I’m thinking about enemies, weapons, psychic landscapes, impossible rooms, rescued minds, high scores, flashing colors, terrifying bosses, and a Queen waiting somewhere at the end of it all. I’m thinking about what it would feel like to see that same universe projected across a movie screen someday. I’m thinking about the Atari collection I just lost and everything those old games represented to me.
Mostly, though, I’m thinking about finishing the damn thing.
Because right now it is still code, ideas, drawings, plans, mistakes, corrections, and imagination. But every time another piece starts working, it becomes a little more real.
And I want to see just how far this strange little game can go.
