Glorious Trainwrecks

I'm aware that this is a chapter of life that not everybody will be familiar with, but something that's often bemoaned in the independent game making community is the loss of the era where we were just starting out seeing what we could do with computers, when the Internet was just five Commodore 64s in America sending the word "Hello" to each other every twenty minutes, and your creations couldn't be scrutinized by anyone else who knew better than you, so you were just amazed at what you could do when you got anything new working. Products of this time were usually piecemeal attempts thrown together with any library graphics and sound effects that you could get your hands on, a MIDI soundtrack that you dredged up from Windows' sample libraries, and no worries at all given to presentation or polish - but they were a lot of fun to make. And it's this spirit that Glorious Trainwrecks celebrates.

Perhaps the greatest tribute to the time that the site has yet produced, under the "Breathtaking Triumphs" section, is The 100-in-1 Klik and Play Pirate Kart, apparently the result of attempting to produce an entry for a game making contest, then realizing that nobody had done anything the weekend before the entry was due and then making a combined effort to cobble together one hundred different games for submission. The result is a bizarre masterpiece that instantly made me nostalgic for the nonsense that we cooked up on the now long dead hard drives - oddities like Cat Golfing and a game where you have to drive a banana around space while avoiding a bouncing wizard are accompanied by articles that really do give me a lot of nostalgia for the unmitigated garbage I used to create (as opposed to being unable to finish a game), like the one about shooting upside-down rockets that fire Sputniks and pop with a noise that sounds like someone tapdancing over bubble wrap.

I'd love to tell you that this makes any more sense in context

The site also holds a number of classic games that fall into the trainwreck category, and the one to get into the spirit of this the most is The Last Eichhof. It's quite nice to see that it's still alive here, as I first discovered this on one of those shareware CDs that came out in about 1995 that was a bit like a small Internet in round flat form - the game is a sort of postmodern impressionist artistic journey in the form of a shoot-em-up. Or it could just be the result of someone sticking a load of random things into a beer-themed game that shouts at you occasionally in German - you can decide for yourself.