Hi! For those of you who don’t know me, I made a game with my co-dev about fangirls in the early 00’s called Terranova, and back in 2020, was searching for a name for this genre of games. I ended up choosing “interface dramas” as saw the games simulating the “drama” of a stage play with the veneer of interface.
I ended up making a huge list of games that fit this bill. And for a long time (six years in fact), it was just me, updating this list in my free time.
But recently, there has been a push by people who are not me (!!!) to get more recognition to this genre. A bunch of gamedevs have been collectively organizing under the tag “Fake OS” and the topic has received some press coverage on Kotaku and 80lv. They even made a tagging helper to encourage Steam-users to custom tag these games.
I couldn’t be more proud…and I really hope that Steam adds a tag for these types of games.
Anyway, just wanted to share about this (not so niche) genre that hopefully gets more spotlight.
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I’m so excited about this! I’ve been trying to google “games that look like windows 95” for years and it hasn’t been a very effective way to find what I wanted. Honestly “Fake OS” does a much better job describing what I was looking for in the first place!
I’m going to spend some time going through all the games in the interface fest list and tagging them, I really hope the community engagement results in an official tag from Steam. The big benefit being discoverability, but secondarily I just want to see these games able to include Fake OS in their top 5 tags!
Also really crossing my fingers that this festival becomes an annual thing. I am hungry for more in this genre!
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I’m a big fan of these style of games, I actually bought a few games because of the list. Really cool to know someone in the community is involved with making such a cool project!
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Yes yes yes!
I made a blog post to that effect, that there’s no proper filter for games that have a “Windows 95” vibe to them. There’s so many of them out there and they explore both interfaces that are real, but also ones that are imaginary, which are some of my favorites.
There was a book I picked up back in the 10’s (ugh so long ago now) called Make it So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction where it broke down, from a designer’s eye, fictional interfaces that only existed in say, Minority Report and Star Trek. It got me thinking a lot about “fake” interfaces and how they were pretty prevalent in movies of the 90’s and 00’s, even if they were shown for only a second in a movie. It totally makes sense why they’d make it into games.
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