The Glory of Bottomless Cex Tat or; On Road Trip Adventure (2002)

Earlier this week Michael made a request on their blog to post about some kind of obscure game, and of course I wanted to participate. I considered talking about Mirrors, a fascinating PC-88 adventure/VN type game that really prefigured and subsequently informed a lot of Domino Club's subsequent output.

Playing it after the English patch was released gave me some interesting experience with PC-88 emulation and what using the device was like beyond the cool screencaps that circulate on social media. Additionally, the way that the straightforward choice-based gameplay and graphics that are obviously collaged-together and modified photos from music magazines and travel guides are an inspiring early touchpoint for the idea that videogames can be and look like anything, and be made by digitally reappropriating anything around you.

But then I remembered I actually already wrote a bit about it on here! Oops. And, as a matter of fact, I had spent the past week or so absorbed in another kind of obscure-ish game: Road Trip Adventure.

I hesitated to use this as my example of an obscure game for two reasons: I was kind of, not so much peer-pressured but peer-intrigued into playing it due to Melos and Sylvie playing it, and now even more of my friends are playing it. So actually, within this very specific niche, I do see a lot of people talking about it! Additionally, I've more than once gotten the response from other people that their main familiarity with this game is not playing it, but seeing stacks of copies of it for something like 50p in their local thrift store, or honorably named UK secondhand shop chain Cex.

But... mysterious non-notariety is kind of its own obscurity, right? And Michael said to swallow any concerns about a game not being obscure enough, so OK, I'll talk about it.

It can be fun or interesting to try playing the game the protagonist does at the beginning of Nabokov's Transparent Things, where he tries to imagine the pencil on his desk travelling backwards, disassembled at the factory where it was made and the raw materials returning to, ie, a pine forest. With more mainstream cultural products, we have a lot of contextualizing information (well, for certain elements; videogame companies are famously more withholding or unsure on their raw materials, for ex.) about how they end up in front of us, particularly if it is a product attached to a celeb artist identity or with a huge budget funding the "cutting edge technology" behind it.

Behind the scenes material, interviews, information released for the purpose of building hype and so on, are of course all advertising, but they serve to cultivate the desire for the product while also justifying the importance of the outsize cultural space it seems to take up. See, it's a masterwork! Therefore the golden road to millions of sales and cultural ubiquity is successfully paved. On the one hand, it's important to consider the motives and bias that went into creating this material rather than accepting its narrative at face value as "gaming history." But there's also the silent absence of all the other stuff that doesn't have the budget or fame for the effort to be put into this act of self-presentation and self-preservation. You kind of have to swim against the stream to even start thinking about them in this way.

"Tat" is a UK term that I've found pretty useful for my own purposes since moving over here. It captures "stuff," but more specifically stuff, that while not "dirty" or "garbage" nevertheless feels like it is occupying space in a not fully consciously deliberate way. High Street vaguely "Scottish" souvenir shops, things like commemorative tins and calendars and ashtrays your parents acquire over time, yet never get rid of because, strictly speaking, it's not useless... and yes, unremarkable "budget" gaming titles that are distributed to beef up the offerings of a particular console or format, especially for types of game (games for children, games for girls, games for casual play or family multiplayer, etc) that are less prestigious and therefore command lower budgets, also count. Social media, for example, becomes full of tat when there's an engagement-baity post that fills space by encouraging endless riffing on concepts like "movies from the 80s" or "cups." Why? Well, because it's a bit empty with nothing there...

This is all to say that it completely bemuses me that Road Trip Adventure exists in the form that it does. I can't play the game, by which I mean I can't make the connections of how it came to be back to its origin, because there's too many bits that recede into unimaginable blind spots. It seems to be the second PS2 entry of the Choro-Q series in Japan, which has an accompanying line of toy cars, picked up and adapted cheaply to fill out the roster of racing titles in the US and EU territories. Straightforward enough to start. But this game has a bizarre, massive "open world" before "open world" was a formalized thing, full of quests and minigames, which you entirely play driving around as a car who talks to other cars, which seems entirely counterintuitive to someone looking for more of an arcade-style or family multiplayer type racer.

The localization adds to the strange charm. The translation from Japanese, I have to assume, was done like many others at the time, with strict technical parameters, little context, and under duress. It's awkward but also often poetically compact or counterintuitive in the way Stephen describes in his iconic essay on Monster Party:

I guess by “videogame writing” I mean both a formal and a historical quality. Firstly you have writing that has to adapt itself to the rhythms of an alien format. Vast swathes of the textual resources that prose has accumulated now have to be discarded. The specialised information demands of the format pushes writing back to that weirdly atavistic hierarchical state which modern writing has tried to erase (in the idea of that holistic writing where landscape description, point of view, minor gesture or utterance has as much weight and significance as a big dramatic speech) – here writing is not just split into the totally trivial, the vaguely-informative and the imperative, but it also kind of has to openly declare itself as such each time that it appears. Secondly you have the conditions that early international releases in particular had to go through: writing might have to be forced into a tiny textbox with a character limit, and then translated into another language by someone with only a very hazy grasp of what’s intended to be conveyed, and then compressed AGAIN into the same tiny textbox with the same character limit. And indeed sometimes rewritten entirely in localisation due to additional copyright or content requirements, etc. These elaborate restrictions might remind us of oulipo or surrealist writing but I think the texts themselves have an interesting difference. Surreal texts tend to privilege the noun, or noun-combination, the material fragment which emerges in rare and surprising ways. By contrast videogame writing tends to avoid any nouns or adjectives but the most commonplace - they tend towards convoluted directional assemblages, circling around some meaning that they cannot directly represent. Like being shouted instructions in a dark room. Language as sliding ice puzzle, with only the vaguest traces of any origin in human life: the “sorry” in “sorry, I’m dead” placed as ceremoniously on a doily on this aimless self-cancellation.

When you, as a little car, drive into another little car's house, it is not an exaggeration to say you basically cannot predict the turns the dialogue could take. The absurd premise of Car World, encountered stripped from the context of the Choro-Q series, put through the abstraction layer of localization and translation limited by both technical specs and the limited time and resources afforded to pulling off a budget title, especially one which has a LOT more content than it seems like it would at a glance, means Road Trip Adventure arrives as a fun but often jarringly inexplicable experience.

Plus, ok, important side note: when you are driving around as a little car you can change radio stations. Well, ok. You can pick one of two. One plays a few tracks of quite standard videogame music. The other is unique to the localized version and includes around 4 early 00s indie pop songs by two different bands. The Push Kings seem to mostly be preserved in some YouTube videos of coffee house shows, and Waking Hours remains mainly in this self-made amateur music video by the band. Where did they find these guys? and ... why?? The decisions, conversations, technical and legal processes and so on that went into making this a reality are likely a bigger mystery than how the Nada Surf Catz theme came about.

Not in spite of, but because of the strange circumstances of its emergence, Road Trip Adventure is a very good game, in that it captures the arbitrariness that, in my opinion, is videogames' main aesthetic effect, and which can create an enticing opacity and mysteriousness. I would even go so far as to compare it to, generally considered a bona-fide art game, LSD: Dream Emulator, in that it gives you the ability to navigate a space in an unconventional way (in LSD, the ambiguous connections between zones, in Road Trip Adventure, that you're a fucking car), and the experience of that space, from seeing charmingly themed cities approach on the horizon, the simulated comings-and-goings of resident cars, or turning on to a realistically-scaled cloverleaf interchange to enter the freeway, create moments of interest and surprise.

Like piracy and emulation, the bargain bin can be another site which enables these unexpected encounters, retired from the "main event" of capitalist media, and the stories of technical progress and market dominance that "make history" from that perspective. This is especially true of the wildly innovative CD-ROM era. Discounted multipacks of Maxis games from Office Max, intended for people who suddenly had personal computers but uncertainty about what to do with them, were how I first encountered Yoot Saito's work on Sim Tower and Toshio Iwai's work in Sim Tunes.

Am I saying every game in the 50p shelf at Cex will be as unique and fun as this one? No, definitely not. But thinking about why this game is the way it is, in the context where it's encountered as a curiosity, or background noise, makes me think both about the ubiquity and anonymity of "tat," and the drawbacks of the self-presentation of "mainstream culture" on the other hand. An individual piece of tat can be interesting or not, but it creates the space that is the strange background from which major works and mainstream culture have to emerge. What crazy stories would we find if we thought about it more?