So, this one was a little bit different. It took a lot of work, so I hope you enjoyed! The music is all available to stream now, and to download for free on my Patreon, royalty free! www.patreon.com/saganhawkes open.spotify.com/artist/3tYN0aD5MYboKohIw2lsdx?si=R0htRHwxRtuf2WyahC18Zg In case you couldn't tell, this video is a work of 'unfiction', a genre of fiction which presents itself as real. AKA, the game doesn't really exist: I made it! This is more than likely just a one off experiment, I'll be returning to real media for the future. Let me know what you thought!
You genuinely had me fooled until I read the rest of this comment. This was really cool, I would be down for more content like this if you're able or willing to. Also, @endman105 already said it, but having the developer implement a way to crash and possibly corrupt a game they're not proud of is so funny
holy crap, so I found this video just after it went live, and so far basically none of the comments have realised it's unfiction yet. To be fair, I just got to the end of the video, and was taken completely by surprise when it turned out not to be real, haha. A sign of a job well done, I think!
I actually had a suspicion that this wasn’t actually a real game/that this wasn’t actually real when you had that clip of you talking about the dream. But this video had me reminded of all the PC games I played at my grandparents, I have no clue where they have them.
Honestly the idea of having the end of the game be about the end of the dinosaurs, and having you unplug an animatronic one and essentially "killing it" is genius
Yeah, it felt a little too on the nose imo. Like the dream about the light at the end of the tunnel layed it on way too thick and went a bit too far. I didn't really hit with me the way it's hitting with others. Now, I personally am not resonating with these kinds of themes right now. It just kind of hurts on top of all the other problems I have with no real catharsis to me. And the video is very well made and well done. But I'm coming away with this mixed feeling about it. I feel like I need to say that for myself, but I would be too mean to just say it in the comments out right in plain sight. So I'm just leave it in a reply.
@@Glitch_Man42 I don't mean for this to come off as rude or insensitive, but the last part of your comment just kind of sounds like a personal problem you have to work through with the way you consume media. It's kind of like how some people complain about "loose ends" in a series when it's not a creator's job to solve every mystery in their creation. It's there so that the audience has something to speculate upon in the future. Genuinely, I hope better days come for you soon since you said you're having real life problems.
So this video is fake? I feel lied to lol I watched the whole thing without realizing I was just thinking “this is a creepy ass game no way this was ever made for kids lol”
Half way though I concluded the video game was much too appropriate for our current horror, with animatronics+liminal spaces. The bone dinosaur sighting in the corner was far too modern to be coincidence. I can still appreciate the art of this. He told a compelling tale.
@@benjamim8046 I mostly listen to all of my videos on yt and rarely, if ever, watch them, so it was a bummer to glance through the comments to see the unfiction bit? I wouldn't have known if it weren't for this comment, which bums me out. Wish he could have verbally said it too, I still would've stuck around and listened but it does take some of the wind out of the sails for me! 🤷🏻♀️
28:42 in the backround you can hear a bird chirp, which is the last recorded sound of a Kauai O’O. The male was calling out for a female to complete the melody of a love song , but there were none left. It’s really sad, but makes it so much more unnerving in game.
It adds to the theme that nothing was meant to last, like there's a sense of foreshadowing that everything's going to go crashing down, everything's going to end.
This has instantly become one of my most favorite pieces of web horror. No supernatural stuff, or William Afton wannabes. Just a lone, buggy 90s horror game, abandoned by the world.
"Where's the download link? I really wanna play this?" And then the reveal that it was unfiction and then i was kinda salty that i couldn't play it myself
the exact moment the screen faded out after pressing the last faded text, it faded into an ad for pringles and I've never experienced a more perfectly timed ad than that
@@dovaluxa8748 Or Pringles is; do I dare say this, .... The killer of the dinosaurs! O_O Only Feed Your Dinosaurs Potato Only Chips People!!! Potato/Corn/Rice Chips will kill your Dinos! lol I got a home insurance ad. Lame
Had me until the LAST moment. Even with all the internet horror tropes (lost media, liminal spaces, creepy glitches, overall unintentionally unnerving atmosphere and presentation) I didn’t think for a SECOND that this wasn’t real. Genuinely impressive stuff
I shouldn't have read this comment because I fully believed this was real as a fan of Myst and having been born in 85. I could have fully believed this was real.
You know, I should have realized this was actually unfiction when Sagan mentioned the Build-a-Dino bit, given it immediately made me go "Huh, that sounds a lot like Mangle from FNAF, but he isn't mentioning the similarity. That's odd..." I will applaud him on making such a convincing piece. The whole time he was showing it off, I was flipping through my memories to recall if I ever encountered this "game" on a PC Gamer demo disc before, because it very much looked like something out of that era.
Wait, FNAF? ...HENRY. HENRY WAS THE ORIGINAL CREATOR. HE WAS NOT PROUD OF HIS CREATION. Also "Sughrue" (Henry's last name in this unfiction) is an anagram for "hug user" but I don't know if that's intentional. (Also also, his last name is spelled two different ways @ 26:56, "Su*gh*rue" and "Su*hg*rue". Sagan also pronounces it as "Shugrue")
I didn’t question it at all, because a dinosaur museum I frequented as a kid had the exact same type of thing. It had a place where you could dig up “fossils” just like this video, and a place you could put together different dinosaur parts to make up your own dinosaur. The entire museum, to young child me, felt very liminal and eerie. They played noises on overhead speakers that I found really creepy. I was absolutely obsessed with the place lol. It’s a great museum, and although much larger than the museum in this video, the vibes were similar enough I didn’t even question anything.
@@TheUnsightlyRF well, there is the concept of chimeric fossils where, during the early days of paleontology, people would just sort of shove random sets of dino bones together and claim they discovered a new species. if this was actually an old 90s era PnC game it'd still be a reasonable addition if someone was trying to make scary dino museum game.
Holy shit dude this is absolutely incredible,, I know you said this’ll likely be a one off but I’d absolutely LOVE to see more unfiction projects in the future
The subplot of Henry resembling the creator of the museum in the video game and having to come to terms with inevitable ends, then inviting you to click on the scribbles and let the final copy be burnt in that ester egg of a meteor is beyond poetic.
I’ve transcribed the Scribbles! Of the four faded scribbles I have found all but the first. Here they are in order of appearance: 1) ? 2) “As for man, his days are numbered. Whatever he might do, it is but wind” 3) “I am going to die! Am I not like Enkidu?! Deep sadness penetrates my core, I fear death, and now roam the wilderness “ 4) “what is this deep sleep which holds you now? You are lost in the dark and cannot hear me” These are all quotes from The Epic of Gilgamesh. The oldest literature ever discovered. As for the first quote, it could be in reference to the character Enkidu being created from the clay the gods washed from their hands. He is described as a hairy wild man (like the creature encountered in the secret level) and after his death, the character Gilgamesh seeks out a plant that will turn whoever eats it young again (the plant which grows from the man’s mouth?). He finds it, but it is stolen by a snake who tells Gilgamesh that no man can escape death. Hope this helped. Love the video. Got lots more to say but typing is difficult for me. Cheers! Edit: Oh this shit doin numbers!
Ooooooh that’s actually such an insane detail, i was wondering what the hairy monster in the end represented since the video was released. Thanks for transcribing the messages
not sure if anyone else noticed, but the segment of the game he opened towards the end had the sounds of the extinct kaua'i 'ō'ō bird, which caught me really off guard and i tear up whenever i hear that birdsong :(
@@ahmicqui9396I think the reason why the plant does that weird dying thing is to show that there really is no way to escape extinction, also the specific way it falls makes it look like a fake cutout
It wasn't subtle at all, the biggest issue with this whole story was that supposedly kids discovered this stuff. Kids wouldn't have passed the first puzzle.
@@SideQuestStories counterpoint: they have unlimited free time and patience, I would know cause I played Mario fangames that ran at a literal frame per second and was enjoying it
I just imagine you going to your parents, knocking on the door, shaking impatiently, they open the door "hey-" and then you push past them, run to the attack and start furiously rummaging through everything
I think a big part that convinced me at first was you complaining about the gameplay. It’s a really grounded detail; doesn’t build up the horror at all (in fact it intentionally takes away from it by peeling back the curtain a bit), but it adds to the authenticity that the game design wasn’t all that great
I was convinced too and after I watched it a second time what kinda gave it away was his talk about his dream with the white light and his way he talks about being afraid of things being gone forever especially with the game mentioning extinction.
I feel legitimately devastated that this isnt real. I was so excited to play this game. you have lured me into a cardboard cave with a block of cheese and yanked away the stick holding it up so convincingly that I have died within your trap of pure shock that it was a trap alone. Well played Mr Hawk, I hope you stub your toe within the next week.
It's incredibly well done, but as someone who grew up during that era, I think the give away is how much the game uses a lot of modern analog horror tropes. That type of formula didn't really exist until recently. It's very much the kind of stuff that zoomers or younger millenials would make.
@@KyokujiFGCyeah the "glitch" part of the game seems odd and the Reddit part you can see its so fake with those text n stuff lol and the way he discribe is already feels so fake
I genuinely thought this was all real until "an unfiction film by Sagan Hawkes" showed up at the end. I adore the visuals of this game, especially the ending bit in the forest with the weird bigfoot-looking thing. Well done.
I didn't. Sounds fake as hell, especially if you know anything about gaming conventions at the time. The game both sounds incredibly ambitious but also the wrong genre. Some details sound wrong, like something simple like a point and click crashing a lot. And some of the details you'd expect are somehow missing, like the name. I'm annoyed I clicked on this. I'm only 5 minutes in but thanks for sparing me the rest. I'm going to block this channel.
I started getting suspicious at the gameplay, it just felt a bit too ahead of its time in the way it did horror, more like an analogue horror series than what I'd expect from an old CD ROM game. It was very well done tho, and I wasn't fully convinced whether it was real or not until the end.
SAGAN HAWKES I NEED YOU TO KNOW THAT THIS VIDEO HAS PERMANENTLY CHANGED MY BRAIN CHEMISTRY IN A VERY REAL WAY AND I AM LITERALLY OBSESSED WITH IT AND THE THEMES OF INEVITABLE DEATH THROUGHOUT. this is the first time in a long time a video essay has affected me in this sheer magnitude. as soon as i start my fucking job im giving you my fucking money
This video made me cry. The irony of a game about the inevitable demise of everything and anything that leaves behind remains to be picked up but isn't infinite, to becoming a lost game people will spend years searching for and will ultimately self destruct when trying to dive deep into it
nearing the end of the playthrough i thought something along the lines of "this feels like a modern horror game presented as an old game" but in a "its cool that this weird, creepy little game existed back then, but feels modern" way. the vibes were just...slightly off in a way i cant describe, so i brushed it off. and then i got to the end. fun project, greatly enjoyed! i'd love to see more content like this.
Me too!! Even before the "secret ending" i was getting some modern horror vibes, mainly fnaf lol. But this is still an amazing project i want to see more!!! (And it would be cool if this can be released as an actual game)
@fiona4449 Same. As I was watching this, I was like "wow this game is pretty ahead of its time for hitting the same vibes and story beats of modern horror games. Retro vibe, killer animatronics, liminal spaces, creepy glitches." Then, I went to the comments.
@@sidereus95Yeah, it was pinging my brain that it felt a little too perfect as a found horror game went but I did not reach the "oh this is fake" point. Really great video.
Yeah. It was definitely more of an old game aethstetic (just graphics tbh) without digging in of what it would feel like to play old horror game. Still cool personal project, but I just wish he would at least try out a couple of old games first.
It was really good at feeling like something that wasn't intended to be creepy but would still scare someone as a child. Having to look up at the T Rex's mouth and the descriptions of the Dino's deaths seem almost exactly like a terrifying moment from something that's supposed to be educational (who ever is reading this, just admit it there was a magic school bus episode that scared the shit out of you) at least until the Frankenstein skeleton and rusty robot show up, but hey those were really good to so I'm not complaining.
You got me. Usually when people try to emulate old 3D, the quality and polygons are too high and nothing is compressed enough. It did seem odd how narrative-less the story was but also it was not a AAA game. Hopefully you can get a playable version to us!
@@MontySlython they were, and that was a big reason why point-and-click crowds grew tired of endless puzzles with no narrative. then you had The Ring... which, uh...
I think the lack of a story made it even more convincing, since a lot of those old computer games just plopped you into their world and expected you to figure things out, especially cryptic old puzzle games.
was shocked to see the “an unfiction film” tag pop up at the end because it feels like so much more than smoke and mirrors, it almost feels like it has to be real and he’s just fibbing about it being made up for the video
This is THE best random RU-vid recommendation I’ve ever gotten. Absolutely stellar work. As someone who was a child terrified by Myst, I was 100% sold on this whole thing. The only times I raised an eyebrow were with how perfectly convenient it was for the trip to coincide with you finding it and the little bit about the dreams. Everything else though? Masterful work. Even the glitch seemed perfectly in line with old games falling apart a bit. Also, good call on not making it another “killer cartridge”, and instead making it a lovely allegory for the death of physical media and the current ease with which we could lose access to precious memories and art. I’m blown away and am subbing lol
The use of the kaua'i 'ō'ō alongside the themes of the inevitable decay of all things is crazy, because in the end there will always be another kaua'i 'ō'ō- Even if it's lost media.
The 'glitch' at 20 minutes is my favorite bit, because it's VERY realistic to a very familiar glitch for point and click games of that time, where the colors would completely mess up.
Henry got you to crash the game with the "secret" and ended a game he wasnt proud of. I'm not saying it was on purpose BUT that would be funny in a cruel way
I think you’re right. Between that and the Carnotaurus euthanasia bit, it seems like the overarching theme is extinction, both in its inevitability and its necessity. Nothing lasts forever. Nothing is supposed to. Some things, many things even, you need to let die.
I had to delete my comment and read the pin cause it fooled me. I was legit upset that it got “erased” only to realize it didn’t happen. Good job Sagan!!
30:01 duuudee the orb in the sky coming closer and closer, like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs??? so awesome. like, trying to click in any other direction and not being able to is such a good touch. so beautifully done, made my skin crawl.
I was thinking it was the sun/moon and we were super focusing in on it but after the bit about seeing a light and knowing it was death, this makes 1000x more sense.
Using the end of the dinosaurs and the decay of the exhibit preserving them coupled with withering sanity of the museum owner as an analogy for lost media is actually incredible. Outstanding work Sagan.
me for 99.9% of the video: oh wow! what a journey that was.... what a weird ending though, why would clicking the codes in game do that---WAIT AN UNFICTION *FILM??*
it took me until he got the disk, and then I was like, waaaaait... you cheeky bastard. Really well done though, the "game" looks super authentic & the storytelling is on point.
I had been listening to the video while driving, and only saw the Carnosaur scene, so I earnestly believed the dev made a secret that destroyed the game in spite for working on such schlock. Then I saw that part- but seeing the notes I have seen buried in game code, that seems more plausible than not... 😂
Holy crap my dude, I fell for this hook line and sinker. You presented the game so convincingly that I even ignored how blatantly creepypasta-esque that "glitch" was. Absolutely 11/10 work!
dude, the horror element of the "game" was actually so on point! it's like, the perfect liminal horror, that actually pulls off the "monster in the dark" trope! if you ever direct the production of a playable game, i would love (and hate) to play it! also, my favorite detail in the video i noticed, is in the final "gameplay" part, the bird chirps are of the Kauai O'o, being the last of it's kind singing for a mate that will never respond. all signs pointing to extinction. incredible work, man!
I am one of THOSE people who likes watching other people play horror games. If this game was made in a completely playable format, I could imagine it being a big hit with horror YTers and I would watch the crap out of it lol
Sat down to rewatch it, I kinda hope someone turns this into an actual video game concept cause I would love to play it Maybe a spoof on lost media/mascot horror/old computer games where you find an old CD of a childhood game and the once educational/kids game turns into horror as you have to escape it
You think that’s crazy? I was tipped off even sooner than that. When Sagan goes to the Triassic part of the exhibit and starts talking about the Megazostrodon, the (I’m assuming) Postosuchus that’s devouring it is shown to be in a bipedal stance. Sure, these days we believe Postosuchus to be bipedal, but if this game was real, and made in the early nineties as Sagan claims, then this pseudosuchian would most likely be depicted as quadrupedal. Iam aware that WWD did have their Postosuchus rear up on its hind legs a few times, and that was supposedly the showrunners toying with the idea of the creature being bipedal in reference to a paper at the time arguing such behavior, but again it was the “early nineties” that this game was supposedly made.
@@tricoelacanth1114 Is it sad though that the creature I was most hyped to see was the Camptosaurus that was in the Jurassic hallway? An unappreciated species imo, I chuckled when I saw it posed in the now inaccurate quadruped stance, with the head shape more resembling an iguanodontid than Camptosaurus itself lol
I could forgive the Postosuchus; Chatterjee suggested it could walk on two legs back in the 80s, which was argued against in 1995, before science seesawed again later... I can see either the game being made before that opinion had changed, or just being based on what would at the time have been considered to be slightly outdated info on an obscure-ish animal. Gregory Paul was illustrating Quetz very similar to today's version back in the 80s, there's a painting of his in the book Dinosaurs Past and Present (1987) that is verrrry close in terms of head shape etc... BUT the game model's color pattern is identical to a real museum model which was built way too recently, and I'm embarrassed that I didn't think twice about it when I saw it.
the way you described your feelings about lost media, a genuine panic and fear of things going unfound, is SO relatable. i've never seen anybody else have the same sort of reaction to lost media, so it's really comforting to know i'm not alone
I feel the same, but in the opposite direction. I feel a genuine existential panic and sadness when I think of all of the media I will never see come to fruition. Like...for slightly silly examples...I will never live to see Friday the 13th Part 30, or play Final Fantasy 25. I feela loss for the things that I will never even have the chance to consume. And lets not even get started on the profound existential dread that flows through me when I think too long about the imperminance of absolutely everything when it comes to the death of the universe.
This was a phenomenally realized project about a subject well worth exploring, one that I think resonates with us all at least a little. The way you handled it, the storytelling, is particularly fantastic. You kept your cards close to your chest and played them at just the right times. You should be proud; this is outstanding work.
Honestly the only part which gave away that the game was fake was just how legitimately incredible its grasp of tension and horror was. You did such a great job that your only mistake was being too good at this.
the thing that give away the fake is the end. CD/DVD ROMs cannot overwrite on its own except if the thing somehow could program the drive to spin/read faster, and even then that would likelier to broke the drive.
@@cursedryona6265 that and: -E10+ rating doesn't exist yet at the day (it existed like in 2005 or 2006 for the first time) -Conspicuously lack of menu UI
@@meyers0781 While true in theory, I did have some disks simply implode by doing very specific things in games. Of course, they were very old and badly stored, which may have played a good part of it, but one in particular had it happen on two different copies following the exact same steps, which was really weird. I really wanted to know what caused it.
Hyperlink decay is real and terrifying. Over time, the bits that store the link data can become corrupt by just one character and break the link entirely.
Bit decay in general is real and terrifying and is why I've moved all my media to lossless formats whenever possible. An .mp4 or .jpeg file loses just a handful of bits of data every year but add that up over hundreds or thousands of years and you quickly realize that media preservation is a much more difficult thing than previously imagined.
That's not at all what the cause of hyperlink decay or more accurately link decay is. It's just the fact that as time passes what a link is pointing at can just stop existing as the website/files goes down or changes how they link to pages. It has everything to do with the internet as a whole changing and nothing to do with the data itself being corrupted.
@@kaijuultimax9407 Just in case you're not joking... "Lossless" formats aren't any more or less prone to the physical decay of storage mediums than any other format. The only difference is that lossless formats of media don't use any forms of compression that would result in some information from a source file being lost or distorted. For example, when exporting a song from a DAW, if you export to MP3, some information will be lost, just not a very noticeable amount. Whereas if you export to FLAC, the output will not lose any information. With this in mind, converting an MP3 to FLAC, for example, will not result in restoring information; you'll just have a FLAC of the MP3's audio, distortion and information loss and all. So no, "lossy" formats do not decay over time. Storage mediums can and do however, so the only way to ensure digital information is preserved is to keep multiple copies and maintain them.
@@kaijuultimax9407who tf would care about some data a thousand years into the future 😂 like they’ll be living lives in full dive vr and living to be 1000 and you think they care about some vacation photos you took a thousand years ago 😂😂😂😂
I'm almost upset this isn't a real game. It nails the aesthetic of old dinosaur exibits. I've seen one of these irl, animatronics and all. While obviously it was open to the public and didn't have killer robots, this "game" nails the feeling I felt looking at the rundown robots. Seeing the rubber skin peeling off their shells, the jerking movements and how sometimes they would freeze up and just...stare, the broken audio, the background ambiance playing, the unsettling nature of entering the occasional empty exibit. It nails the unnerving and somber feeling looking at all the disrepair. The killing of the dinosaur near the end hurt my soul, to see you have to put it out of it's misery. Amazing and incredible work, I really hope to see more.
Damn, you really had me the whole time; genuinely thought we were looking at an actual, obscure 90s game. So many games released back then that went totally under the radar, I could believe something like this existed. Honestly if you wanted to you could probably make a really interesting horror game after seeing what you put together here, that hidden scene at the end with the meteor impact gave me chills.
Rat-a-tat-tat Rat-a-tat-tat ...that and a train engine are what I recall from a children's game made to help train kids to distinguish different noises (say, talking in a crowded theater) 😅 May not be lost, but I can't recall the name. ------- A more spooky one that I'm near-100% sure is lost media is a point-and-click flash horror mystery in a sepia/noir photorealistic tone. You're a woman called to investigate a house where owners died, and similar stuff & puzzles to the popular Scary House...but there's a story of a girl, that gradually pulls your character in as if they were part of the family/gradually possessed as they piece together clues...by the time all the clues are put together, you're commanded to the bathroom...where the character is fully taken over and slits her throat in a graphic and realistic style...it was submitted on Ugoplayer (when that was a flash place like New Grounds) around fall (maybe Halloween?) and I think was quickly taken down...and Ugoplayer a few years later.
The end speech really hits home in a weird way. I’m an artist, I’ve been studying illustration since I was a kid. And I would always look at the same few artists for inspiration. One of them heavily influenced the style of how I work. To the point where I wonder if it would ever be the same without them. That artists work is gone from the internet now. All their blogs and posts deleted, and the wayback machine for all their sites that I can track down didn’t archive their images. So it’s just gone. It’s odd how impactful they were. Just a little fanart blog that got me into my career. But I feel almost like I lost a friend.
can i ask if you remember their name or what fan art for what piece of media they drew? sorry if im being nosey or anything like that im just genuinely pretty curious! and im sorry you cant find their work anymore. something similar has happened to other artists i personally follow/used to follow but theyre still around online and i can still find their deleted art by looking it up. but now that ive read your comment.. and i hope this doesnt sound really cheesy, the idea that at some point every artist i currently follow/used to follow and such, their work will just be gone completely with no archiving or anything left, that would definitely make me really sad :')
@@ANGELVISCERAL no need to be sad, if you can, help archive the work of the artists you like! I didn’t really have the knowledge at the time, They did a lot of fullmetal alchemist art, in a super unique pen and ink adjacent style. Most of their accounts went by Obersten, there’s a few images floating around still by them but a staggering majority of their work is just gone. There was just pages of it, now you’re lucky If you can find their most popular work reposted on Pinterest. It’s just odd to see someone vanish like that, and I thought it was interesting in comparison to the topic! You aren’t nosy, I probably skimped on the details to be honest.
The same thing happened to me. An artist I looked up to just went poof one day. It makes me sad to think about but I'm happy I got to experience their art
Especially since it seems like it’s actually meant to represent Enkidu from the story of Gilgamesh, which is all about death and legacy and impermanence and stuff
What’s even creepier is that bird song is the last known recording of the doomed Kauai ‘O’o, a bird that was calling for a mate that would never come. That was definitely an intentional choice.
The realization that all things will eventually die, and how the lost media community tries so hard to dig for any scrap that may have managed to survive hits really hard considering that the game is about the extinction of dinosaurs, and the feeling of powerlessness that comes from the fact that we'll never be able to bring them back to life. The "secret" in the game erasing the disk data after witnessing what seems to be the impact of the meteorite really drives it home. We can't make things last forever, but we can look back on the things that we lost. Extremely solid video, I'm in awe! Definitely would like more content like this.
Yeah, but when you think about it in the context of the story in the video itself, it does make Henry a bit of dick; he hears that someone is looking for a childhood game and tells him to do something if he manages to find a copy, without telling him that doing said sequence will permanently delete the gameXD
@@Mathee...just *after* telling them that he's embarrassed or even ashamed of his work not only on that game, but for his entire time with the company that made it. Would love to see more games from that company if he decides to do more unfiction.
maybe this sounds a little pretentious, but the way you described the lost media community as searching for “dinosaurs” kind of made me think of paleontologists and the vaguely melancholy vibes that come with that field: because we search for and try to dig up old things, piecing together whatever is left to try and understand what they may have looked like before they died. there’s no way to truly bring these things back in their completely original form, but we find and display them to the public anyway just to remind and teach people that they existed. heck, there’s even people who try to recreate fully-lost media the way paleontologists try to reconstruct dinosaurs and guess what they may have been like when they were alive
One thing i haven't seen many people talk about is the fact that the end of the game literally is a throwback to his "Dream" where he's in a jungle, he can just barely hear a dinosaur, but he knows its a dinosaur, and the light at the end of the tunnel is literally the moon/asteroid type of thing. "I saw this light, i looked up and i knew, yeah, that's death." might be my favorite Lost Media video OAT, even though it's not real.
SO SAD AT THE REVEAL OF THE LAST BIT. The whole video was so convincing and pant shittingly unnerving I wanted to play it so bad... Seriously well done, I just wish it was playable :')
Ah, but isn't that just the way with unfiction games? Pretty much all of the best ones give you at least a little bit of that "darn, I wish this was a real thing I could play" feeling. It's part of what makes the concept compelling, and is almost a key part of the genre tbh
@@gayrurumon true, but imo a lot of them aren't quite so convincing, or maybe I'm just biased. I feel like Triassic Hall was close enough to the games I did play and that creeped me out that it really struck a chord with me
DAMN,, I didn’t even consider that this could be an unfiction film until you said it outright- this whole thing was so convincing & grounded from start to finish! You got me hook, line, sinker, and the whole damn fishing pole. Fantastic work as always!
I second this. Even if the entire story has been spoiled I think it would still be a great game to send to friends who havent seen the video and watch them trying to complete it. Probably some easter eggs could be added.
I mean, if he doesn't, somebody else totally should. Heck, throughout most of the video when I was still under the impression this was real, but had scrolled ahead just enough to see the "since I last played the disk no longer boots up" line (but not the line about this being unfiction), I kept thinking somebody should totally remake this, if it truly isn't playable anymore.
27:53 The inclusion of the Kauai o'o birdsong as bg music did not go unnoticed T^T The implications of using the last known recording of an extinct race for a dinosaur based game is pure genius. Props to you for making this, mate!
"an unfiction film by sagan hawkes" I audibly voiced my suprise. I exited the drawing I was using this as background to and everything. INCREDIBLY well made, and the way you present it, I would download Triassic Hall if it were real.
I had almost literally the exact same reaction lmao. I was ALSO drawing, while watching this vid picture-in-picture. When I read that line, I froze up for a few seconds as I processed it, then immediately pulled up the full window like "hold the FUCKING phone." Suddenly way too compelling for background noise, and my drawing sits abandoned lol
i’m just speculating here, but i feel like it’s meant to place you in the perspective of an animal watching the meteor approach: the moon is suddenly getting closer and bigger, you can’t get away from it no matter how hard you try. there’s a white-hot flash, and then there’s nothing
I have the exact same "phobia" I have never heard someone describe it so perfectly, this fear of things being forgotten, to not experience it again, drives me into panic sometimes. Im slowly getting to accept that's how time works, but I still cannot delete anything, I archieve everything.
I don’t like things being forgotten either and it’s definitely a weird obsession to have, but I can agree with you. I’ve been trying to look for something for years now but I’m about ready to give up and consider it long and gone media, which is a shame. I’d love to tell about it sometime but I’d rather not now, not here either. All I can really say is that I saw a commercial for it on tv, it being a ringtone of some sorts that you had to text and buy..Think of Psycho Teddy, as the german version of that ringtone mascot song was considered lost media for a while as well. It’s a shame how quickly people seem to forget something existed once, without a trace.
@@galaxydeathskrill5607 Ah yeah that's true. Sometimes solutions are so plain and simple that even those can be forgotten about LMAO. I'll definitely try keeping some type of diary or notepad or whatever. Thanks for the hint.
THIS RIGHT HERE! As a kid in the 90s I always played these creepy point and click adventure games. Some like Jumpstart 4th Grade Haunted Island came away with the impression to educate but just ended up terrifying the crap out of me as a kid. This game has the same kind of blend to it, but if I had this one back in my childhood alone in the dark playing this game at night I probably would've gotten nightmares. GREAT video!!
this is an incredible project honestly, i feel like a real copy of triassic hall is just out of reach, it feels real and playable even if it’s probably just bits and pieces for the video. the fading from prerendered cutscenes to the basic models of actual gameplay with that fuzzy pixelated transition in particular really sells it for me, im still having a hard time believing it’s not a real game. just truly incredible work, it’s awe inspiring.
Not gonna lie, you had me hook line and sinker for the entire video. I'm sad I can't play this for myself, but you did such an excellent job of keeping the premise believable that I'm not even mad about it. Great job tying the hairy man face from the beginning back in
@@dottie8361 me as well! I keep thinking about it. Haha it reminded me of playing the museum in vtm:Bloodlines because I was always so sure the dinosaurs would come after me. There’s just something so perfectly universal about a creepy dinosaur game and I never realized it until this. I think it was the dinosaur fixation of the 90s and early 00s lol
Oh! Creating things you're not proud, of and the "unplugging" of the ancient, deprecated technology that bites back at you, and the anxiety of not being able to experience everything tying up with the concept of inevitable extintion is quite clever.
Dinosaurs on display at a museum serving as a metaphor for lost media being dug up is pretty clever. I also like the references to Gilgamesh, I think it's allegorically fitting to the overall theme of memory and legend sustaining people (or games) beyond their natural lifespan, frequently resurfacing and just as quickly fading back into obscurity, but always alive so long as there are people tending the archives. I can only imagine how many sleepless nights you poured into bringing this project to life. Tremendously creative production. This is one of the most original video concepts I've seen in years, and your execution was fantastic.
DUDE….! The entire time I was like “no fucking way, creepypasta stuff exists, here?! IN THIS WORLD?!” You absolutely had me hook line and sinker, absolutely unabashedly brilliant work!!
Using the extinction of the dinosaurs as a sort of metaphor for lost media and the whole entropy of it is genius edit: also Eyewitness Dinosaur Hunter was "My" childhood dinosaur game and legit thought this was going to be a review of it
Gigabased Dinosaur Hunter appreciator. Loved that thing so much as a kid, peak paleo vibes. Good thing I scrolled through the comments looking for other recognizers, I was 100% sure this was it just based on the description, lmao.
Same here. I remember playing that all the time when I was a kid. Actually managed to find a downloadable version that works on modern systems and it was like a blast from the past. Honestly, turning something like that into a horror game like what they did here seems like almost a no-brainer.
Yeah I played Eyewitness Dinosaur Hunter as a kid as well and immediately thought of it with the description. This game had and interesting and eerie feel to it. I remember it also had a second disc that had 3D landscapes with dinosaurs you could explore.
You know, seeing the honestly weirdly scientifically accurate Quetzalcoatlus in the cretaceous bit should've tipped me off. In the 90s it would've looked a lot more pinheaded.
And that's a problem, this video convinced me that this game used to exist until I saw the quetzalcoatlus. Edit: I haven't finished watching this video by the way, I went to the comments to see if anyone noticed how out of place the quetz looked.
@@AverageNetizen7908 to be fair, they also have a really up to date Postosuchus and a fairly modern looking Dunkleosteus silhouette, so something was indeed up. That said, they did nail the 90s dinosaur game atmosphere in other ways. Putting Dimetrodon in the triassic area is something only a 90s educational game would ever do, it's fallen out of style nowadays.
Stuff like this is what truly scares me about an apocalypse. People can reproduce, science can be relearned, but art and history can be destroyed and never again exist. With how much relies on the internet or other technology to continue existing, a truly horrific loss would occur should infrastructure fail for good in a wide scale. Many ancient scriptures would be destroyed without the air conditioning, countless files lost if the internet goes down. A portion of the past forever lost. The thought of an apocalypse becomes far worse when that comes into account.
Would the internet going down really cause the loss of any files? Isn't all of that just stored on data drives? I get it would make the files more obscure and unknown to the public, but they would be there right?
This whole time I couldn't stop thinking about how suspiciously similar to FNAF this concept was, to the point where I started to wonder if maybe Scott had also played this as a kid and took inspiration from it, only to be hit with the end reveal. This is honestly one of the coolest videos I've watched.
14:11 Right off the bat, that Windows XP era logo and E10+ rating are pretty bad giveaways this isn't a real 90s game. Should've instead used the Windows 95 era logo, and the K-A rating (kids to adults) that was only really used in the 90s.
well the OP did say the game could of been from the early late 90's or 2000's he wasn't sure, windows xp came out in 2001 so it didn't take me out of it
this is absolutely amazing. i remember seeing this post and was CERTAIN it was a misremembered memory of 3D dinosaur adventure, since everything described in the post could be attributed to something in the game (creepy museum minigame, minigame where you have to go through a maze, etc). i'm so happy to learn of a piece of forgotten media and to see that it's been restored as a piece of art to the internet. edit: I WAS FOOLED
Lol. Okay, but did you actually see that post? Was that part real (at least insofar as Sagan made that post for the purposes of this video) or did you confuse it with something else? I'm curious, because the human brain is really good at convincing itself that certain things are true if they seem to make enough sense, even to the point of just making up a memory out of basically nothing. Recent examples that stand out in my mind are certain facebook posts going around lately featuring AI generated old-timey photos, showing completely fictional events that Did Not Happen, with a bunch of responses under them from elderly users saying things like "I remember watching this on TV!" or even "Yup, I remember this, I was there when it happened". No Grandpa your ass was not "there", there was never any "there" for you to be!
Ended the video in awe of how perfectly the story of the game lined up with not only the closing of the game company but the message of the lost media as whole. Didn’t realize it was unfiction till the end spectacular work, definitely earned a subscription from me
For a moment in the part where you looked in the old cd box I thought that the now typical Lost media trope of "but that ONE specific cd was gone" was going to happen. It's rare to see the opposite happen.
this was absolutely INCREDIBLE! the way your dream matched up with the ending sequence, the strange hairy creature from the drawing just APPEARING; watching this alone at night, it actually made my heart drop with how scary it was to me. can't get over the dedication you put into everything here (of course, including the game itself); i was 100% fooled, i FINALLY get to experience what people must have felt during the Blair Witch Project zeitgeist haha
oh this is SO cool i think what really gets me about this one is that there's nothing that really obviously gives this away as unfiction. a few things seem a little weird, or like a convenient coincidence, but they are in the realm of something that COULD happen
Dang! that got me! I actually wrote a semi angry reply that says "Didn't even dropped a download link, this game is abandonware, who the hell would sue you?"... should have finished the video before sending that. The "game" looks so authentic and really fit 90s boom of run of the mill Myst clone titles, you should really make that into a fully working game if not already and drop a release to Itch or Gamejolt or wherever because that is really well done.
NGL I didn't expect this to turn out to be like an ARG or something like that, it's impressive how convincing you made it look! It's a shame "Escape: Triassic Hall" never actually existed, cause NGL I actually wanna play it! If there doesn't exist a playable version of this unifiction game, somebody should make one!
@@patatedouce6774 "unfiction" is just a fancy made up name for "fiction that pretends to be real life". I appreciate stories like this, like the Basilisk one, but there it was described as Fiction from the beginning, here instead he pretends all of this is real up to the last minute of the video. Betrayal.
@@Italian_Isaac_Clarke Yeah I love unfiction, but having that at the end like that kinda felt like a rug being pulled from under me aha.. I really wish people would stop with the "it's only unfiction if it's deceptive" bs
@@skylarkblue1 Our ancestors, maybe even before Homo Erectus, evolved to also share stories and myths around a campfire. We like stories, we are human, there is NO NEED to pretend something made up was real, just make up a good story and people will like it...
@@Italian_Isaac_Clarketo be fair, sometimes unfiction can be fun. Stuff like internet horror was once built on it, and to an extent still is. I feel like maybe this video took it too far though?
Not so fun Bird fact! The Bird you hear from 27:50 to 29:20 is from the 1987 recording of the last Kaua'i 'ō'ō Bird trying to call a mate, not knowing he was the last of its species. The pauses in its call were meant for the female to join in the duet. These Birds also mated for life. The call was probably in reference to the extinction of the Dinosaurs. I cried a lot when I first learned this :(
This is a weirdly normal topic for unfiction, in my experience, but extremely well done! I love the little touches of realism you added, like censoring the last name of the first game dev you emailed, like they asked to remain anonymous. Though claiming the game erased itself at the end after there being no conspiracy or supernatural themes at all was really weird and jarring. Why would the game erase itself because you reached a secret area? Still, great work here, you had me hooked.
DUDE THIS IS SO GOOD !!!?!???? THE IMAGERY, THE SOUND DESIGN, THE ATMOSPHERE, LIKE THIS IS GENUINELY TOP TIER LOST MEDIA HORROR. YOU GENUINELY HAD ME FOR THE ENTIRE VIDEO
I can't believe I never once questioned it, the furthest I came was thinking "wow I can't believe you found out how to beat the game that easily old games like this are usually super cryptic"
This brought back memories of watching my dad play Mansion of Hidden Souls on the Sega CD. The graphic quality, the eerie silence, the statues moving when they shouldn’t - it TERRIFIED me, and this brought all those feelings back! Your presentation highlighted just how creepy these games were back in the day, well done indeed! Can’t wait to show my husband!
I'm not going to lie, 23:19 (haha just like monster's inc) was the exact moment i realized that this was an unfiction piece. This is what I'm assuming is a quetzalcoatlus or hatzegopteryx, both of which paleo-scientists still thought were proportioned like Ridley from metroid in the 90s. you thought you could get me...
This is genuinely the most convincing unfiction work I've seen, it follows the format of searching for some obscure old game like so many other videos. The actual game is creepy and unnerving but never so over the top that it seems unrealistic, there's never a big jumpscare or anything that breaks the immersion that this is just a youtube video about an old creepy game. The atmosphere is thick and great the whole way through. Amazing work, would love to see more like this from you.
Sagan, you CANNOT add a shot of a Garfield Lucky Cat and expect me not to immediately need that more than anything so i can add to my "started out as ironic but then roped back around to unironic adoration of this stupid orange Cat" collection. Oh and 10/10 video, as always too. Lol
I was wondering for like a significant portion of this video if it was a bit Sagan was pulling and lo and behold I get to the end lmao. The game felt a little *too* similar to something like FNaF to quite feel like a real game from the 90's, and the fact that the game stops working after discovering the secret level is so poetically perfect. Of course it isn't real. This is genuinely really cool and effective, though. These sorts of mysterious pieces of lost media are really interesting to make horror stories about, and the amount of creativity people find in that is really inspiring.
As someone who grew up with the games you can tell straight away this is a modern interpretation of the 90s. The graphics were just so... old modern? If that makes sense. Like probably someone from the Middle Ages walking about a renaissance fair. Some things might be familiar but it's all very fake and unauthentic. The kids view of the past rather than what it actually was.
@@Mockthenerd I don't mind that tbh. It was convincing enough for me to not be sure, the aesthetic kind of reminds me of some of those weird PC adventure games like Bad Day on the Midway that have kind of similar aesthetics.
@regularshowman3208 If it's prerendered, then they typically put way more detail into it. Even the have you suggested has a lot going on. Here, you could outright turn the camera up and down, which wasn't very common in older games. I must admit, although I was 90% sure, I had to look at the comments to be fully sure. I think it really hit me when I looked at it and went, "Hey, that looks like the stuff I make for my fun fake 90s adventure game art."
The first thing that had me scratching my head at this was the E10+ rating on the disc. For an early 90's CD-ROM game to have an E10+ rating, it'd have to have been re-released in 2005 or later, which wouldn't make much sense for a game so obscure that nobody can find it. Bravo though- great idea for a video and stellar execution.
