What is an obscure piece of media or videogame that you think nobody else here has heard of?

I got this. Someone, please prove me wrong. I'll PayPal you $82.76 if you find this.

There's a cartoon from the 80s (could be late 70snor early 90s) called Howard The Duck.

You'll never find it, because of the wildly popular movie bearing the same name.

The "Howard the duck" I'm referring to was a cartoon movie that was about a Mallard duck who got separated from his flock while they were migrating south for the winter.

Howard finds himself in NYC for the winter, where he spends time with rats and frogs. They show him around NYC via the sewers.

There's a scene where they're beneath the world trade center and Howard and the frog marvel at is enormity. Then, the frog reminds Howard that "Nothing lasts forever; especially in New York." (This is an exact quote, sparing punctuation.)

The VHS I had ended with a music video by some band with the word "dogs" (junk yard dogs? Something like that) in their band name. The music video was trippy AF. There was barking in the song. The visuals were mostly patterns of colorful circles.

Like, this sounds like a fever dream, but if you've seen it and can locate it, it will make sense. I swear.

My memory is shit but I'd describe the art style as watercolor. Animated watercolor. Fro the 80s. So, yeah. Sorry.

Fuck it. $20.

Fuckit 2: 4 payments of $20.69

The Farmers Daughter. It was a text-based video game for the C=64 similar to Zork.

The premise was that you are a traveling lightening salesman whose car breaks down. You stop at a farmhouse to use their phone, and the beautiful daughter answers the door.

Your mission is to try to bang her. If the farmer catches you, he shoots you with his shotgun. If her brothers catch you, they'll analy rape you to death. You need condoms but they are stuck to the shelf.

The Illusion of Gaia for SNES. I don't know anyone who has heard of it.

The original Death Race 2000 starring Sylvester Stallone and David Carradine. It may have had a small comeback when the Death Race remake came out but this isn't the kind of movie you'd see randomly on tv.

In 1990, a series of CGI animation collections began release on VHS tape. The Mind's Eye was the first experience many people (myself included) had with pure computer animation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind's_Eye_(film_series)

The best known segment from the first tape is Stanley & Stella in Breaking the Ice, which was first released in 1987. You can just watch it online now of course!

https://youtu.be/3bTqWsVqyzE?si=28YJchoAQSqfZY0P

The animation style reminds me a lot of Reboot, a childhood favorite. It still amazes me how interesting this style is even today, really shows how much more artistry and vision matter than technology. I believe this is also the first public demonstration of a flocking algorithm.

Ok I'm back with another but I have the answer to this one.

I sent $20 inside a greeting card to Amon Amarth back in like 2000 or so. I'm a melodic death metal nerd and Gothenburg really set the tone. anywho, I'd heard their drummer had a side project, called "Curriculum Mortis"

I got a burned CD from the band. Unmarked. I uploaded it to soulseek. The iPod it was on eventually died.

I went a solid decade with only memories of this band.

I recent found someone uploaded the whole demo to YouTube. Of you enjoy melodic death metal, especially older, grittier less.refined, and also know Amon Amarth, just know, you know something very few know about: https://youtu.be/H1JWaADbcsA

Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future

Show from the 80s that was really just a vehicle for selling toys. They had a line of fighter jet thingies that were light guns you could shoot at the tv and somehow the guns themselves could respond to the lights from the tv and cause the cockpit to eject when it was hit. Not terribly obscure I think, but it was only a thing for like a year or two.

Alright let's go, I love niche things:

Movies:

• Bubba Ho-Tep
• Joe's Apartment
• Six String Samurai
• Krull
• The Greasy Strangler
• A Boy and His Dog
• Fido
• Within the Woods
• Undead or Alive
• Cemetery Man

Tabletop:

• Car Wars (maybe, depends on crowd)
• The worlds worst diagram of ship controls included as an insert in a Paranoia box
• All Flesh Must be Eaten
• Fairy Meat
• Cult of Ecstacy (for Mage the Ascension)
• Did you know that according to Dragon Magazine players can participate in orgying for a number of days equal to their con SCORE?
• Castles and Crusades
• Tunnels and Trolls
• Remember Car Wars? They did a crossover with GURPS, called GURPS Autoduel, and it is amazing.
• HOL (Human Occupied Landfill)
• The second publication of the HOL supplement, Buttey Wholesomeness, where the cover is printed BUTTery HOLsomeness. That one was just a pita to find I started wondering if it was just a PDF concept cover. Only took me like 8 years to find a physical copy.
• Mars Attacks board game

Games:

• Sim Tower
• Redneck Rampage
• The Diablo 1 expansion, Hellfire, that Blizzard said not to make but a division of Sierra of all companies yolod it into existence anyway.
• The Neverhood
• Toy Story for Gameboy
• Battlezone, back in the day when you were fighting green triangles
• Descent
• I wasn't going to at first but I want to throw in some of my favorite Magic the Gathering cards: Nature's Wrath (haha, holy shit mono green, go home you're drunk), the art of the Pride secret vault thing for Bearscape, the art for Spy Network looks like Friend Computer from Paranoia, Kudzu, Stunted Growth

My music taste is so underground you guys I'm very cool like that. There's a surprising number of trans folk punk musicians from the Pacific Northwest. I'm getting sleepy but if anyone wants me to bombard them with folk punk artists (trans or otherwise) lmk I'll totally hook you up

There was an old PC game called "Dominus". I don't really know much about it. My dad just randomly picked it up as an xmas gift one year for me. It was pretty sweet.

You're the lord of a kingdom that gets invaded by like eight armies. You have your own monster units you can deploy. You can deploy traps. You can cast spells. You can go down and fight hand to hand. If they make it to the throne room and kill you, it's game over.

If you capture enemy troops, you can interrogate them. There's a little animation where they get poked with a red hot iron poker. If you capture a leader, you can sometimes negotiate peace. If you capture an enemy mage, you can learn part of a secret spell. I never got a secret spell working, though.

It was super cool. Never met anyone who's played it.

Several years back I watched a Japanese film called Fish Story. It's a pretty weird movie, and the first time I watched it, I hated it, and almost turned it off. It was just kind of boring, and it was really confusing because it kept jumping between different stories, and it was not in chronological order. Then, right at the very end, a short segment tied everything together so incredibly. It blew my mind and I immediately wanted to watch the movie again. I have never experienced anything like that before or since. I don't know anyone else who's ever heard of this movie.

Mad Dog McCree. A literal "video" game. Live action first person pointy shooty thing.

I've never seen a video on this, but surely someone else has heard of it.

Back in the late 2000s, early 2010s, I got a CD in a cereal box with a PC game on it. the game was I think some kind of gamified flight sim, and the interesting part is that there was a decal of a plane on top of the CD surface. On the other side of the CD, there was another game (maybe a racing game?) And it had a corresponding decal, so the CD had decals on both sides and could be inserted both ways in your player to play each game. I've never seen that anywhere else (2 -sided CD or CD readable surface with decals) and I remember the game actually being somewhat fun, but promotional games of the era are very often lost media.

Everyone knows Oregon trail and Amazon trail, but I don't see Yukon trail mentioned as much. Similar game but up the coast of Canada.

Also we had a game called Power Pete that came with this old powermac we had.

And a game called Stay Tooned! Where you get sucked into a cartoon hotel. Each room had cool puzzles and you had to escape

There was a local band where I am 20+ years ago called Naucet. With songs such as "This is Not a Convenient Time to be Stabbed". I have absolutely no idea what happened to the band, where they went, what they did. I can find no reference to them anywhere online whatsoever. I have a musician friend who was friends with them(maybe just one of them, I forget at this point) and has copies of their music on an old hard drive somewhere in a closet. Been a number of years since I've seen/heard from said friend, so I can only assume whether or not he still has that old hard drive. If he does, then for all I know, that might be the only place in existence that you can find that music.

I'd never met anyone but my mom who'd played Solomon's Key prior to Nintendo straight up adding it to the NSO.

The other game I never hear about was the ID4: Independence Day floppies that came in cereal boxes or something. Don't really remember the games that well but I do remember trying to collect them all.

Also, I once basically got gaslighted into thinking that Falling Down was just a fever dream of mine until one day I'd heard the name in a Tech N9ne song and it all clicked again.

It was a game for PC around the year 2000, I don't even know the name of it. I've been searching for it for years. It's a point and click adventure game.

The premise is your spaceship breaks down on an alien planet. If you try to repair the ship immediately a giant alien spider will come and kill you.

After searching for a while you end up making friends with one of the aliens and sneak around one of the villages looking for parts.

I never made it past that point.

I highly doubt anyone will know what this is, I've tried multiple times on that reddit sub for games people can't remember.

My favorite video game as a kid was called Red Storm Rising, based on the Tom Clancy novel of the same name, and played on a Commodore 64. It put you in command of a submarine facing off against the Soviet navy. Graphics were very basic, but it had a very intelligent engine that lead to needing to use real strategy to win.

Almost no one else has ever heard of it.

The game Chex Quest, which was a total conversion of Doom for kids, used as an advertising campaign and included in cereal boxes. Incredibly well done game.

Back in the late 70s and early 80s, when I got to stay home from school, I remember that around 11am the local PBS channel would air short videos from regional public service stations around the country, or low-budget cartoon shorts with an experimental vibe to them, who knows where they were made or by whom.

One example was of a short fella who sang the same "Ey yey-yey-yey" refrain over and over again, those around him got increasingly annoyed but he wouldn't stop. At the end, a mob slowly converges around the character, encircling him... and he just keeps on cluelessly singing the "Ey yey-yey-yey" refrain.
The mob covers the guy, there's a quick collective roar, then it recedes to show a tombstone. The last shot is of the "Ey yey-yey-yey" echoing as we see the image of the grave, frozen on the screen.

Another one, which I vaguely remember was filmed by a North Carolina public television station, a live action short of a kid that gets bullied at school, at the end the bully or bullies have some sort of accident in the woods, the kid is witness to this, and the shot freezes on the kid looking straight at the camera, with a voiceover along the lines of "What would YOU do in this situation?"... and it ends, right there, not with a resolution but with a cliffhanger and a moral question.

EDIT: grammar for clarity

GTA IV Pakistan edition

Basically, just a GTA4 pirate rip and modded and sold on actual disks.

There are several, and they are hard to find online because any uploads of it probably don't exist anywhere anymore, and were already rare due to aforementioned disks.

Some of them are so regional and probably made by one person, the only way to find one is to get a computer HDD with it installed.

Strings (2004) movie. It's a trope-ish fantasy movie, but all of the characters are marionettes. The strings go up to the heavens and are taken into consideration with things like architecture having no roofs, and gates are arches that rise up out of the ground to prevent travel beneath them. Someone gets injured by the string on their arm getting cut, and their arm flops around lifelessly afterwards.

Anna and the appolypse, it's a fantastic zombie musical with insanely good songs. I have never met anyone in the real world or online who have heard of it (except a few who I forced to watch with me).

When I was a kid I was only allowed to play educational computer/video games. The only exceptions to that were 2 games that came with our Win95 computer (when we got the computer it came with a little case full of software/game cds). One of the games was redline racer, a game where you could race motorcycles on pretty cool (for an 8 year old) tracks. The other was G-Police, a game that took place in an outer space colony built inside domes on the moon Callisto. You played as a guy who joined the government police to find out what really happened to his dead sister. The entire game play was executing missions piloting a flying fighter craft and the story was told/discovered via radio transmissions and cut scenes every few missions. I probably put hundreds if not thousands of hours into playing that game over and over between 8 and 10 years old. I actually found redline racer a few months ago on an abandonware site and got it to run on my computer, but the only install options were French, German, and Spanish, none of which I speak. I installed the Spanish version and was surprised at the fact that I could still remember/navigate all the menus. I haven't found G-Police anywhere or ever heard of anyone else who knows it. Part of me wishes I could find it and get it to work for nostalgia, but the other part of me knows that it's going to look like a bunch of boxy awful graphics and I should not taint my happy memories.

Moraff's Escapade for early Windows, or more specifically, the glitch levels in it.

If you spam the "next level" cheat button (which if I remember correctly is F8) enough times you'll go past the levels that were intentionally designed and start exploring the game's RAM.

There was a curious video game I played for a week straight in the early 90’s before my copy got stolen at a party.

It was called Scrongjhul and featured a fish with legs who had extra big knees with spikes. It was sort of a platform game but then part mystery story and part choose-your-own-adventure.

I think you had to get to the top of a mountain for something special. If you did it enough times and collected codes the game would generate then you could send off for some special prize.

there is this film from the late 80s called miracle mile about a guy who answers an incoming call at a payphone outside a diner in los angeles, and its a panicked military officer who dialed the wrong phone number who says he just launched americas nukes and that a nuclear retaliation will hit american soil in about an hour. a lot of the film is spent without being fully convinced of the authenticity of the phone call and the film has a slightly dreamlike pacing which makes it feel pretty tense, and theres a scene that stuck with me where the main character has a nosebleed in the diner after the phone call. i feel like even as far as cult films go this one is a little under the radar and, even though its not a life altering film, probably deserves a little more credit than it gets.

Movies:

• Kubo and the Two Strings. Some of the story elements are a bit too obvious, but the overall story is charming and the art style (stop motion with puppet-like characters) is just plain cool.

• Kirikou and the Sorceress. Wonderfully weird with an interesting story

• Triplets of Belleville. The entire movie is "told" without words, except for a single sentence right at the start and one right at the end.

Games:

• Terranigma (SNES). Main characters revives / creates an entire world that was doomed ages ago. It's kind of bittersweet when you're done reviving the continents, plants and animals and then the humans start f*cking stuff up. Great music and visuals too, despite being 16-Bit style

• Ōkami. One of my all-time favorites but due to minimal marketing, not many people are aware that this game even exists. Charming art style and interesting gameplay concept.

I loved a lot of ps1 era rpgs

One that always stuck with me was Legend of Legaia

Never met anyone who played it and the sequel on ps2 was terrible.

Some unique things I never saw in a turn based rpg again:

1. Armor you could buy and equip per slot and you were able to mix and match.. This meant you could look really stupid when farming money for different sets but it was exciting to get a new item and equip it and see

2. This was a turn based rpg but had some inspiration from arcade fighter games of the time.. You would enter your attacks like up down left right x y z and then say ready and your character would do a combo.. You could randomly enter combos and learn new specials and finishes etc.. Also a lot of ways to learn them through exploration and such

Not unique the game has a ton of fun side quests, games and secrets as well..

Arx Fatalis for og Xbox. I have it and haven't played it, but nobody I know has ever heard about it.

Okay, here's one: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Action Game. Not the SCUMM engine adventure game made by LucasArts, no I'm talking about the godawful action platformer that Tiertex smeared across every console and home computer of the early 90's like shit across the handicap stall in the men's room of a Ruby Tuesday. I knew it as the particularly heinous MS-DOS port but they put it on everything from the Commodore 64 to the Game Boy.

The controls are bad, the mechanics don't make sense, the level design is bullshit, the enemy design and placement is unfair, the graphics are mediocre, the audio is bad to horrible depending on the port...it has no redeeming qualities.

I hope it's obscure because lord it deserves to be forgotten. How do you take a white hot license like Indiana Jones and fuck it up so comprehensively?

Beltain - Wild In The West

My grandparents knew the guy that produced this music video for a local band. I'm pretty sure the VHS copy they had was one of few in existence. It's been on YouTube for over a decade and only has 122 views, but it's a gem.

I have never met anybody else who played the Wall-E game for Wii.

Eternal Champions. An old fighting game for Sega. I've never met anybody in real life who has heard of it. It was so awesome. Xavier was the shit.

The movie Tampopo, about ramen. Great film.

Nerve Damage, a game that was I think made on a random gamejam, and the whole premise is to make a game that's actively trying to be as uncomfortable as possible to play, while also getting you into the flow and actually makes you enjoy it.

Unfortunately, I didn't find how to play it, and it didn't release as far as I know. I've heard about it on some kind of GDC presentation about Innovative/Obscure game design.

While that actually means that someone has indeed heard of, I've never met anyone else who got to play it. Or heard about it.

The Belgian 80's metal band Ostrogoth.

Their website doesn't exist anymore and the only band-run social media page is on Facebook.

If you're a fan of retro heavy metal, give them a listen! They still tour, though you won't be finding much about it online.

25+ years ago there was a release on some Warez sites called “beer police”.

From what I remember, It was a game set in some future sci-fi world with flying cars with a 5th element vibe.

Only ever saw it for a few hours at a mates house, so my memory is sketchy, but I’ve never found any other mention of it.

Chakan the Forever Man on my Sega GameGear. I played it SO many times.

An old MS-DOS game from the 90s called Solar Winds, by Epic Megagames. It was top down and you flew around battling spaceships and doing missions in space. I absolutely loved it as a kid. Pretty sure you can get it for free now.

Actually yes hereit is https://www.playdosgames.com/online/solar-winds/

Permanently Deleted

When I was a kid I went to a Primus show and they were playing music before the acts came on. One was “Smoke On The Water” covered by Tom Jones and I’ve never been able to find it or even any information about it. I know it was this song and artist as I asked the engineer, it was a great rendition and I wish I could find a copy

Ok so I don't know the name of it. But it was a sidescroller shooter game for the Sega Genesis. You played as like a kid and blasted enemies and there were upgrades. I think it had gun in the name.

Edit: I was right it did have gun in the name

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunstar_Heroes

I recently worked my way through the old games library on archive.org and found some gems I used to play.
The game that got me looking there in the first place was Lost Dutchman Mine (still holds up!), but then I just kept scrolling and have bookmarked dozens of games. I won't list them all, but some favourites I grew up playing (and still occasionally revisit) that I don't think were massively (or at least still would be) well known:
Xonix - the first pc game I ever played, back when monitors only had 2 colours lol
Jones in the Fast Lane The Sims if it was a board game
Mario is Missing Yes, the Mario. I was the only person I know to own and play this game
Home alone and Home Alone 2 both on 5¼-inch floppy
Goblins I never got far in this game as a kid, and I have resorted to digging up the walkthrough even today to progress lol

Not a game, there is also Jerry Springer the Opera, a satire which I feel went far too low under the radar, and more people should watch (I think most people assume that the first act - a mock up JS episode, is all it is, but it really isn't). I've listened to it so many times I can literally sing you the whole thing from beginning to end (OST is much better quality than the live recording, and is on YT too). 😂(CW: contains some outdated and offensive terms and slurs)
E: here's a no-spoiler taste, the ad break
Edit again (I'm now re-watching it and this part just came up and reminded me lol): some folks here might be familiar with I Just Wanna Fuckin' Dance, which is from the opera!

There are probably many more, but I've just woken up, so that's all that comes to mind rn..

I am looking for a sci-fi story that I read in the 80's. It was a story about the future and I am sorry but the only vivid detail I remember was that parents had actually gone to a store to purchase a gift (a bicycle I believe), and the person at the store thought it was strange to have people actually come to the store, but let them in to shop.

https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/50126/what-short-story-has-a-future-bicycle-shop-owner-surprised-when-two-parents-actu

Decades ago, my dad bought a PC that came with a free CD for a game called Retribution. The box art looked unlike anything I'd ever seen before (basically 3D graphics at a time when the Mega Drive reigned supreme). Sadly, the disc didn't work, but I've tried to get my hands on a copy, to no avail.

Looking at the graphics now, they weren't even that good...but for the mid-nineties for a small child, absolutely amazing.

Starsiege. No, not tribes. Starsiege, third game in the earthsiege series. Tribes was actually a spin off in the same universe that got much more popular (with good reason, tribes was awesome).

Starsiege was a pc game that came in a bigass box, complete with multiple books filled with lore from the game's universe. It wasn't as well received as mech warrior (another mech sim), so it didn't have a big community. But those of us that played it loved it to death. I think you can still get the game running if you don't mind fucking with a bunch of sketchy third party patches.

Hand of Manos. Most likely thee worst movie ever made. I found it for a screen writing class. The assignment was watch a bad movie then present it to the class. Easiest A+ of my fucking life.

Another weird one is, there used to be a sex Tetris type game for Windows 98 or earlier. Little naked people would drop down and when you got a full line they would jump off the screen. I don't know how that got on the family PC, but it was on it. I played it. So there's that.

On the Internet, everything is fundamentally both obscure yet ubiquitous, or so it seems. But in real life, there are at least 2 things that seem to be obscure to the point that people don't believe me when I mention it:

1. A Super Nintendo game released in the US as Super Ninja Boy. It was a follow-up to (or maybe remake of) Little Ninja Brothers on the NES. I've even been told that I was confused and that I'm probably thinking of Legend of the Mystical Ninja.

2. On the original Playstation, there used to be a series of demo discs that would have "hidden" features on them if you pressed the right button(s). One of those demo discs had the entire music video for Usher's song "Pony" and other than randos on the internet and my friends/family who saw it with me, I've never met anybody that remembers it. If anybody here does remember that demo disc, I think there was another hidden music video on there, I vaguely remember a band, with various shots of the drummer wearing black athletic-type shorts with a white band around the leg but beyond that I really do not recall.

All from the early 90's...

Life and Death II: The Brain - An old DOS medical game

Deadlock: Planetary Conquest- a competitive SimCity-like game

The Dagger of Amon Ra - A point and click mystery adventure game

Edit: added subtitle to Deadlock and video links

My girlfriend in high school introduced me to Fishing with John and it's comedy gold. Way before Tim and Eric and all the other absurdist comedy shows. I highly recommend it!

In 1997 the creator of Ren & Stimpy had a (somewhat) interactive flash based comic called The God Damn George Liquor show. I have that still. It's definitely out there strange and not constrained by cable tv Standards & Practices. Highly enjoyable for what it is.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goddamn_George_Liquor_Program

The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One - A D&D podcast. It's cast should be pretty familiar if you're into other D&D podcasts - Brennan Lee Mulligan is the DM, Aabria Iyengar, Erika Ishii and Lou Wilson are players - but it doesn't seem to have many listeners.

It strikes a nice balance between scripted narrative performances and actual play. It's edited and scored with a light touch that stops it dragging like the raw sessions of something like Critical Role, but preserving the authentic character breaking reactions as the dice takes it somewhere interesting. The players don't seem to be in on a "script", anymore so than the normal sort of out of session discussions you might have in a narrative heavy game at home, but the DM does a very good job of keeping it focused. It's also thankfully not another billion player table, three is much more comfortable.

The vibe is excellent. From cozy slices of life to drama that plays on your heartstrings as three childhood friends reconnect and go on an adventure. Its trailer conveys the tone pretty well honestly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q9et3Othu4

Oh man, every time someone asks a question along these lines I always think of the movie Hank and Mike. I found it in a discount bin at a grocery store probably a decade ago so I took a little time to actually look into it more this time. I knew it was Canadian and unlikely a big hit, but apparently it was just so poorly received. It made less than $17,000 of the $2M it cost, and it's real tough to find anyone even reviewing it. I even struggled to find the music from it. (The one song is badass). And it's got a couple B-tier actors that I remember doing a great job, and I think Joe Mantegna really went for it in his role as the god Pan. Chris Klein kills it in this song.

The crude humor kinda puts people off I think but the satirical aspects cut a little deeper than the movie needed to. And probably when I discovered it I was depressed and had a drinking problem and the overall mood of it really felt at home to me at the time so I was able to just live in those aspects of the film and really absorb the more subtle message. It's definitely absurd in many points but there's a lot of heart in it.

There was a game I played on my grandma's TurboGrafx 16 many years ago. I cannot remember the name, and searching over the years still has me befuddled.

It was a racing game, but with an RPG element where you had to continually upgrade your car and take on local race champs. I loved it and cannot for the life of me find the damn thing.

Edit: holy shit I think I found it. Final Lap Twin

These religious NES games. The one I remember was called Exodus. It was basically a ripoff of an existing game, but Moses themed.

Temple of Apshai

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Apshai

You've never heard of it, and modern RPGs wouldn't exist without it.

There was a text based game sample pack on Apple II C that I can't remember the name of.

If you typed in a command too simple, it would give a preprogrammed response, apparently offended that you took the game for an idiot. You could look around, pick up items that it described, open and close drawers, go up and down stairs, unlock doors if you find the key, dig in the ground if you find a shovel, all through typing in actions and reading the text that came up in response.

There were at least 3 samples on the floppy disk, one an adventure on a crashed spaceship, one finding a buried treasure in a desert, and one centered around a white house (not the White House, but a house that was white.) All the samples ended just when it got interesting and advertised where to get the full games.

Edit: the whole idea of gaming on an Apple 2c seems foreign to every single person I have ever mentioned it to. Someone must have done it, because my family found 2 different computers at garage sales in the 90s that each came with stacks of games on 3 inch floppy disks. Some where educational games, I learned to type properly with one of those. Some were bootleg versions of popular games with handwritten labels. The original Maria Bros comes to mind as one of those, it was on a disk with Joust. Some were the original floppy disk from the publisher. Oregon Trail was one we spent countless hours on, and I especially liked Wings of Fury.

My dad brought home "Xexyz" for NES one year. I have never heard anyone ever reference this game in any nostalgia reviews and had to actually go look up the name myself after vaguely remembering it as that side-scroling NES game that started with an x.

The band "scruffy the cat"

I've never met anyone else that knows they existed

When I was little my parents had an Amiga 500 computer. My mother was never into gaming except for one. It was a boulder-dash clone called "Emerald Mine" (in which you collected emeralds, not diamonds) made my an obscure German studio. I think it was never widely spread and mostly stayed within Western Eu, but who knows, I might be wrong.

There was a door (plugin) for The text-based *BBS game Legend of the Red Dragon called Violet's Tavern.

You could sit at the bar and buy a drink that enhanced your stats, You could go upstairs and pay for a hooker to replenish your energy or you could try to seduce the barmaid / owner and actually have kind of a sweet encounter with her.

It had a betting mechanic I don't remember if it was blackjack, dice or what but you could game it a little bit by throwing a shit ton of money at it a few times. The initial odds to win or somewhat higher than the extended odds to win so if you hit it and hit big you just walk away. Sometimes you ended up empty but more often than not it worked.

I used to have this game for the NES called Xexyz. It was this really strange game that tried to be several different genres in one, and I actually had a ton of fun with as a kid. I don't think I've ever met anybody else who has ever heard of this game, let alone played or enjoyed it. I'm not even super sure how I came to owning it in the first place; I think it was in a box of random games my aunt got from a flea market at one point, maybe.

If any of you are sitting on an NES emulator with an archive of every official ROM and haven't tried this game, it's definitely worth checking out. Weird little gem that nobody seems to know about, it seems.

I recorded a film off the tv channel Sy-Fy a few years backcalled AfterDeath (not the 2023 film that comes up in a search). It's possibly not that obscure, but I believe it was a low budget film so maybe not at all well known. Anyhow, it didn't record all the film for some reason so I have never seen the end (last 15min or so), but despite the clear lack of quality it had an interesting premise (a group of young people who wake up in a beach cabin but apparently in the middle of some quasi-nowhere). I was intrigued as to how the approach to playing out the scenario would end but maybe I enjoyed it more for not having been able to see the ending if it was z bad one!

I saw Repo! The Genetic Opera when it came out in 2008. It's an opera, very little dialouge, if any, I haven't watched it in a while. Paris Hilton has a main role.

https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/14353-repo-the-genetic-opera

I don't think it's totally forgotten, but an old nes game no one talks about called Bump n jump. You play a buggy in a top down style racer; think spy hunter. You're meant to race to the end of levels, crashing into (or avoiding) other vehicles for points. You can jump over bridges and gaps as well, and each level ends with a huge leap of faith ocean jump.

I feel like it was largely forgotten in gaming history, but I loved it when I was a child I put many hours into it.

Two movies from the 90s... "Ruben and Ed," and "... And God Spoke."

And God Spoke was a revelation the first dozen times i watched it, it was full of tiny little blink-and-you'll-miss-them moments. Haven't seen it in years.

Ruben and Ed is just surreal, with at least two scenes that have stuck in my head lo these thirty years.

When I was a kid I saw this stop motion animation on tv about a little kid afraid to go to bed. This crescent-moon headed bird man comes and steals his eyes. It ends with the boy, blind, stumbling around in the dark.

It was awesome.

This song I downloaded from a file sharing application in the early 2000s. I've been searching for the artist for about two decades, nothing (the forum posts that come up when you search for it are also me).

Operation Sandman, amazing movie with Ron perlman and also the adventures of Pete and Pete

There was this old game called Twistingo that my grandma had on her computer. Made by a long defunct company called eGames, it was basically like if Zuma and Bingo had a child. There were balls with numbers that'd slowly advance down a track, and you had one or more bingo cards. If the ball had a matching number on your card, you'd click on the number and the ball would vanish. If the balls reached the end, you lost. Really fun game, I still have the old disc for it.

Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio. It was a tex based strategy game on the TRS 80 written in basic. You played a feudal lord and tried to grow your empire. Each turn was a year. It was a text only game, but I'm pretty sure they had a graphics version at one point. When I say graphics, it was the upper half of the ASCII character set mapped over to block characters. This was in the 70's.

Captain goodnight. Still one of the best games I've ever played. First game I saw that allowed piloting planes, helicopter, jeeps, tanks and run around killing enemies all with a solid story.

Toomba 2: The evil swine return is a piece of nostalgia I can never share

Alter Aeon is a fun MUD with multiclassing. I love my wizard / cleric / thief

They also have a nice wiki

Symbian, mobile Java games

There was this PC FMV game back in the early 90's where there's this woman doing all kinds of things that gets herself killed and all you do is flip the right switches at the right time and enter 3 digit codes.

One of the earlier games I had on a CD-ROM. Back then it wasn't a disc tray. You eject an entire disc jewelcase-like thing and put your cd inside the case and shove it back in like a floppy disk.

Crusader: No Remorse and No Regret.

Given the amount of videos on these games you'd think they were super popular and well known, but when they were brand new nobody knew about 'em. To this day, I rarely find anyone who actually played them when they were first launched on an actual DOS computer and not through GOG and DOSBox.

Even today, it's rare that I run into people who know how awesome they are. They had it all; bitchin' graphics, insane action, amazing FMV with actual acting and costumes... Other than the controls, they still hold up today.

Right offhand, Rita Pfeiffer. There have been times where I was her only Spotify listener. Probably also nobody has heard of Knife the Puppets but me and my wife. My favorite musician at the moment is probably Ashley Virginia, a little known folk singer out of North Carolina. I've been obsessed with the Hushabyes since Lindsey Verril of Little Mazarn introduced them to the world. I'm getting a cassette player mostly for New New Sincerity, Lindsey's label, but there are some cassettes I want from the Spinster Sounds collection.

I'm sure I've seen some ultra rare movies, but I watch so much weird old trash that I have no idea how well known any of it is. I've seen Tales from the QuadeaD Zone twice. I follow Blood Tea and Red String on Instagram. I excited for the sequel. One of my all time favorite movies is a 1977 X-rated version of Cinderella with full song and dance numbers (a few of them genuinely fantastic!) and Sy Richardson as the fairy godmother.

EDIT: I forgot the real crown gem! We own a copy of the original cut of a movie called Freedom Deep! It's basically a feature length music video for a band called Goya's Child. The version of Freedom Deep you can find online is the new cut. It has lots of obnoxious narration over the music and nonsense 9/11 content thrown in. The rare DVD version is still not a great movie, but it's a painfully fun ultra long grunge music video! Oh I need to make some people I work with watch Freedom Deep.

Nintendo game called Solomon's Key.

It was a great early puzzle game.

Back in the heyday of flash videos and before youtube, there was a clerks spoof featuring marvel comics heroes that I remember as being enjoyable, clever, and ultimately just a good tribute/ripoff of the source material. I have no idea how to find that again.

I had this game I swear was Atlantis related, but involved you flying a tri-plane, shooting down other planes. It was very cool.

Has anyone seen the 80's animated series The Mysterious Cities of Gold? It took me forever to find it and before I did I started doubting if it even existed or if I made it all up in my head. It takes place in the 1500's and it follows this group that is looking for the lost cities of gold. At some point early on they find an ancient aircraft that is made of solid gold, solar powered and in the shape of a giant condor.

Most obscure videogames I ever played:

1. A 3D, first person pacman clone that I played on a 286 MS DOS laptop in the nineties. I don't remember its name and I've never seen it since.

2. A programming game from the early 2000s called something like Fleet Commander. (But none of the many games named something like Fleet Commander that I can currently find online are it.) This game had a VB-inspired, event driven programming language. You used it to command fighters, bombers and fleet command ships. Each ship had its own AI script it would execute.

"Mail Order Monsters," which came out in the 8-bit era (mine was C64). Basically, you started out with a "base monster," like plant, insect, reptile, etc. Then you battled someone else's. The winner got some money, which could be used to upgrade your monster with abilities, extra limbs, and so on. You could save your monster on a floppy disk and battle on someone else's system.

My love affair ended when a friend figured out how to hack that data file on the floppy and make an invincible monster

The video game Star Goose that came on a floppy disk.

In honor of Xmas, I found this video a decade ago, and it is the version I hear in my head every year.

Last Xmas - Slugabed ruined it

There was this one game called calling for the wii. Since the Wii controller had a speaker, it would ring like a phone and you would answer it, then followed by game's sound out of it as if you are talking on the phone. Plus it had a story I found interesting.

Piratenmassaker

My brothers and I had a handheld game in the 80s that was basically a star wars knock off. It even started each attack sequence with a fast version of a star wars theme. The enemies were all Tie Fighters (all digital pieces that lit up when active been off when not), and you shot them with lasers Galaga-style. If you died, it played part of Jupiter from The Planets by Gustav Holst.

It was called ASTRO Thunder.

In the 70s we had a cassette tape kids story about a wizard who lived in a mountain and kept all the winds in a box.

The story was about someone who went in and retrieved the winds.

It involved blowing up sections of passageways (the narrator talked of lighting the blue touchpaper), and the wizard woke up and chased the hero.

He had a walking stick so his steps were reproduced including that, and he was calling, "My wind! Somebody's stolen my wind!".

I think it was probably on the front of a magazine or something. I don't know if it's a traditional story or something written for that production but I thought it was brilliant at the time.

Clonk rage was a game that I wished got a new one, it was basically lemmings x worms x teraria where you would gather resources and avoid danger while trying to kill all your opponents clonks... so many memories of playing it multiplayer... it got open sourced a while ago, (open clonk) if your interested

Music from two bands in the DC area from the 90s. Testicular Momentum and Scooter Trash. Searchs for these bands are more likely to turn up results for testicular torsion or scooter rentals in Washington than the bands.

Testicular Momentum is proper original industrial music from before Nine Inch Nails stole the name for a pop music sub genre.

Scooter Trash is hard rock. The kind of music that’s suitable for hearing if you’re drunk in a loud bar.

As for particular media…

TM has a track on a various artists cassette: https://www.discogs.com/artist/238652

Same with ST but a more recent digital release: https://www.discogs.com/release/2804166-Various-Fuck-Corporate-Wank-Volume-2

I'm still bummed that the band Splashdown was screwed over by the music industry. They were too jazz for pop fans and too pop for jazz fans but had an amazing sound and a brilliant vocalist in Melissa Kaplan. They released a couple EPs and a brief album (Stars & Garters) before their major label debut Blueshift was permanently shelved.

They posted a goodbye collection of demos & b-sides before dissolving into Universal Hall Pass, Freezepop, and Anarchy Club.

Edit: Got nostalgic and searched for news - happy Sol Invictus to me I guess! https://splashdown1.bandcamp.com/track/metamorphosis

There's also the Pine Salad Productions fan-dub of a few Dirty Pair and Macross episodes from the late-80s, I think? I had a 5th gen VHS of a few ("The Dirty Pair Does Dishes" was one). Insane dubs that were absurd and utterly unrelated to the actual plots or even characters. I thought they were hysterical when I was a young edgy person.

A friend found "remastered" versions a few years ago and...the humour has not aged well, to put it mildly. Watch at your own risk. Glad I'm no longer edgy I suppose.

Getbackers. It was an anime that I liked as a kid. I tried to rewatch it recently and realized how bad it is.

How about Wally Gubbins? A series of silly skydiving videos. My father has a ton of them on VHS. I loved it as a kid. I just looked, you can even find them on YouTube. So maybe not that obscure.

In terms of software I remember having several ad games. So, games that are basically just an ad. I had a Bifi game. Some weird game about colours where I don't remember what it was for. And a "game" about Chesterfield Cigarettes. I remember that I had to install QuickTime Player to run it. It was basically like Google Streetview when you walked into buildings with a few interactive elements put in. No idea where I got it. Might even still have the CD somewhere.

Edit: I found the Chesterfield thing: https://archive.org/details/see_you

Either windows 95 or 98 I used to play this game my mom set up for me but doesn't remember. Now she needs my help to plug in a USB cable but somehow has a job that uses software and procedures too complicated for me... Anyway I can remember if it was entirely this or just part of it, but the memorable part was the sliding puzzles, like the ice caves in Pokemon. The character might have had skates or something but it's a vague memory that could be wrong.

Major Havoc.

Super cool arcade game c. 1988 featuring a simple line drawing type environment where the Major runs through hallways, a little like the original Prince of Persia. The controls were a cylindrical scroll wheel and a jump button. The really cool thing though was that there were pads on the floor that would trigger various effects, like a gun that shoots a star shaped bullet down the hall that you had to avoid. Many new and exciting challenges to face with every quarter. Ah, good times.

Pigskin footbrawl

One Way Heroics (Plus)

Made by a guy in Japan. Uses a custom engine and has really intricate rpg elements, super cool and I'm a huge fan. Basically you're constantly moving right because a black fog is consuming the world and if you aren't fast enough then it'll consume you too. Kind of plays like a Roguelike, but runs can have the shorter objectives, or the really long ones.

Granted it's not perfect:

• It was made by one guy so after a certain amount of time you kinda see most things, needs mods (which doesn't exist) or more content.
• You only get one stat per level-up, and if you get like "carryweight" five times in a row, then you kinda just got low-rolled and are weak-af
• You can't actually determine what biomes you end up in so sometimes you just get volcano 3 times in a row and it kinda sucks, it would be nice to see biomes up ahead and chart a course
• There's some "degen weeb" dialogue that's funny about once and then kinda weird. (Characters simp hard af for you after your run if you get SSS rank in a category they rate you in, theres some "prefixes" that give alternate dialogue to npcs, so if you get a "Naughty" Dosey/Frida/Mila then all her dialogue is degenerate af for the rest of the run)

But I still love the game, and one of my first projects I plan on is making a hexagonal-grid version of the engine that would enable the above (gameplay) issues to be fixed, something might come out of it tbh.

Flying Saucer by Postlinear Entertainment, its a flight simulator(of a flying saucer) within a alien conspiracy world.

A solar powdered handheld called something like Keep the devil rising.

This is an odd one. Deep Africa is an episode from an obscure series called Inflated, which came out some 20 years ago. I remember someone at a party having a VHS of it.

It features blowup dolls as the main characters. It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen it, probably hasn’t aged well, but I remember aspects of it being funny, if not absurd.

https://youtu.be/nZIpv6TaBE8

Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio. Try and grow a city-state by strategically distributing resources. Poor distribution results in death by famine, disease or invasion. Good distribution keep state growing and eventually become king to win the game. I played it on a Commodore PET.

My "Learn to Play Didgeridoo With Gram Doe" CD.

OK, I'll go all-in on this:

2000 AD Comics' Nexus, The computer game.

Made for the Commodore C128 computer (which oddly ran Microsoft Basic), it was a simple single-screen platform shooter with the twist that you could pile up the bodies of your enemies and use them as platforms.

Cherry Coke had a promotional game called something like The Lost Island Of Alanna they gave out in the mid 90s. There was a little attack of them in the waiting room of the principles office at my school.

It was a pretty well done short Myst-like.

When you beat it the reward was a guide to read secret messages that were hidden in the squiggles that covered the cherry coke label at the time.

Elroy Goes Bugzerk and Elroy Hits the Pavement.

Man I want another Elroy game!

I remember playing Big Sky Trooper for the SNES which was about killing the alien slugs and you had to navigate the solar system.

There was a dnd game for the intellivision

sometimes I feel like Nintendo's Custom Robo series counts as only 2 games ever existed outside of Japan: Custom Robo [Battle Revolution] for Gamecube, and Custom Robo Arena for DS. Luckily there's been 3 spiritual successors since then: Cyberspace Colosseum, WizardPunk, and Battlecore Robots.

There's also this B-movie from the 60s called The Creation of the Humanoids. It's not that spectacular per se, but it is the source of the "You are a robot" sample used in Powerman 5000's When Worlds Collide and the Metal Arms: Glitch in the System theme music.

No idea what the movie’s actual title was but there is a wonderfully poorly dubbed kung fu movie by the American title “Shaolin V Ninja”

The voices are terrible, sometimes the characters answer their own questions, music is stolen from Star Trek II at points and it features probably the best “I’ve been stabbed” sound in cinematic history at about 1 hour, 13 minutes. Highly recommend. https://youtu.be/h6iYROUoHUE?si=6h7DzxRMD6x4YSLl

Also it’s that specific dub, there seems to be a more shared version on youtube that is better translated (and not as stupid).

Permanently Deleted

I played the heck out of TankPot back in the day. One of the best early games to have a high number of simultaneous multi-player, I think 64, split poverty 4 teams of tanks. Played through the browser, it moved around to different sites a few times over the years and now has its own dedicated site: https://tankpit.com/

A friend and I used to play Liero Xtreme lots when we were kids. I have never seen any mention of that game anywhere on any forum in my years on the internet

There were four promotional songs put together to promote the 1960's Adam West Batman. One of them is Miranda sung by Adam West. It's, uh, something, yeah.

The games I've made.

A former roommate of mine had a DVD he had gotten from a friend who got it from a film festival. I believe it was Dreamscape but I haven't been able to find a copy to confirm this actually it.

I'll throw mine in:

Video games: Weird Dreams and Spectre VR both for PC back in the early 90s iirc

Music: one artist i really enjoy that unfortunately died from covid in 2020 though he was only in his 20s... His name was Cesar Alexandre and i got to know and love much of his work as Lindsheaven Virtual Plaza. In fact, my first thought when i heard the opening track from their EP Daily Night Euphoria was that it would have been a great soundtrack for Spectre VR...

Captain Zoom in Outerspace

It was direct to TV Galaxy Quest before Galaxy Quest.

I remember a 3D version of Tetris on an early IBM PC clone. Very early like 8088 or 286 PC. Don't remember the name and it was only wireframe and 1color (amber or greenscreen?) but I was very impressed with it. Seemed ahead of its time.

I watched Star Blazers every week as a kid.

There's this youtube channel, on which someone does piano fugue improvisations, it is really good, and it has only a few thousand views

Here is an example, but there are more: https://youtu.be/YLW47a6Jk50?si=6coaJGDotT9B3JU1

There's also hours long live session during which he improvise many baroque pieces, I listen to it every now and then, and it's always a blast

beyond ynth

The Legend of Alon D'ar. Never talked to anyone who's played it. I know some people have due to YouTube videos, but it's not a great game and I ended up beating it because I had nothing better to do.

Back in the 90s maybe into early 2000s, my family managed to acquire a lot of VHS tapes, and some of them were fairly obscure

Two that I remember particularly fondly were 2 animated movies

Epic: Days of the Dinosaur, which was about 2 kids raised by dingos, kind of a weird fantasy movie

And Return to Treasure Island, which was pretty much just a straight-up if somewhat comedic adaptation of Treasure island, which was apparently made the USSR, and the Russian version had live action sequences that didn't appear in the English version I had.

Maybe not super obscure, but I loved BMX XXX on the original Xbox. It was overshadowed my the plethora of other games like Tony Hawk, Aggressive Inline and SSX but I still love it.

Movie: Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man

Music: Buggie Techinica by Polysics

Secret Dungeon

It was my second attempt at making a game(the first time i wrote "horizontal" instead of "Horizontal", making movement not work. I gave up for 2 years from making games because of that). It was made by me and a friend.

It was supposed to be a platformer in which you could kill enemies and bosses and have a lot of secrets. It was never published because we gave up

A-Train DS, or A列車で行こう DS, a Japanese game about managing trains. Basically like Transport Tycoon/OpenTTD, but focuses on Japanese train. It was actually really good, it actually made me obsessed with Japanese trains. Coolest thing about this game is, you can actually "ride" the train you built. It was like a dream come true for childhood me.

Yet, I rarely heard anyone online talks about this game. I really recommend others to play this game... If you can read Japanese as I am not sure that there is English translation for this game...

Sundog: Frozen Legacy (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunDog:_Frozen_Legacy) originally for Apple II but brought to PC. My friend and I spent countless hours roleplaying as Han Solo, trading contraband and pulling bounties. If you want an incredible space trading/combat sim experience, forget Star Citizen, this game is for you!

I've never met anyone who knows this game https://classicreload.com/braminar.html

Legacy of the wizard, rygar, cypher (strider)

Chromadrome 2. A PC game about simply controlling a small blob-thing speeding down a straight path with holes and other obstacles and keeping it away from them. Sorry of a precursor to mobile games such as subway surfer or whatever they are called. Never met someone who heard about it even though it made it's way onto Steam many years later.

The Parking Lot Is Full webcomic.