LSD: The Game and Ligotti

The video game "LSD" is an old favorite of mine. It originally appeared on Sony's Playstation game system, and was released in Japan as the first and only "dream emulator" of its kind. Through bootleg, import, and emulator, however, it eventually made it across the Pacific to the U.S. Despite an underground history here and abroad, it remained fairly obscure and never really became a highly sought item for gamers or aesthetes. Now, it lives on primarily through PC driven emulators (software allowing computers to play console games), Youtube videos like the one below, and in freakish memories.

Why am I commenting about it here? Because this offbeat item holds a very tenuous, but almost certainly unintentional tie to the weird. The plotless game's origins are said to derive from a creator's "dream diary" and a lot of drug induced visions (or at least imagined approximations of what LSD-laced nightmares would be like). Without knowing it, the game was crafted into a terrible stage performance of weird horror whose best literary representative is unquestionably the fiction of Thomas Ligotti.

"LSD" takes the digital dreamer through many nightmare realms: a deserted urban setting next to the sea, decaying houses peeping through greenish haze, and wild psychedelic environments that hurt the eyes with their senseless imagery and ultra-vibrant colors. Although there are moving objects like rainbow colored trains, wind up soldiers, and balloon elephants, one never encounters another person besides a shadowy figure that stalks the player and, in one curious dream, kills him temporarily with a single well placed gunshot. The deathly loneliness and outlandish dreamscapes, vacillating between bleak and beautiful, are like Ligottian visions teleported to screen.

As one progresses through the dreams, they tend to get weirder and weirder, interspersed with strange video vignettes of carnivals and UFOs, among other things. The missionless exploration of the video game coupled with its unsettling surroundings and interactive isolation definitely make what can be labeled a weird video game experience. And, in some instances, a Ligottian experience: one that worms through the brain with direct auditory and visual cues, rather than processed literary ones. "LSD" is a genuinely weird performance, perhaps a better video game analog to supernatural literature than any other thus far seen, despite its unanticipated origin that probably didn't have the weird at all in mind when it was strung together.



-Grim Blogger