Amnesia blends a Hitchcockian wrong-man scenario with the setting of a paranoid thriller from the mid-’70s, spiking it all with a somewhat satirical take on New York City in the mid-1980s.
I tracked down a copy, along with a document preserving essential facts from its ornate packaging, via the website Abandonia, and after spending time in its world, I found the experience captivating-both as a game, and in the way Disch’s unique literary sensibility made itself felt throughout. Not many video games boast such acclaimed authors as their architects the more I read about it, the more eager I was to play. He also wrote the all-ages book The Brave Little Toaster, as well as its sequel, The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars. I still have memories of one of them, The M.D.: A Horror Story, leaving me deeply unsettled on a family trip over twenty years ago. But his novels of the uncanny also extended to work in horror, including a thematically connected quartet of novels uprooting the seemingly upright archetypes within modern communities. Disch, probably best-known for his science fiction, particularly the award-winning Camp Concentration. He learned that he was named John Cameron III-or was it Xavier Hollings? As the game’s text appeared-sometimes witty, sometimes terrifying-I found myself hooked.Īmnesia was written by none other than the writer Thomas M. He rode the subway, and wandered the streets of a surprisingly detailed Manhattan. In my re-playings of the 1986 text-based computer adventure game that followed, my character was chased by the police squatted in a tenement just south of Times Square canvassed an abandoned storefront church and quarreled with a celestial ferryman in the afterlife. Stability, many children, and a farm in Australia followed, as did a peaceful death, haunted by the thought that something wasn’t quite right, that a mystery had gone unsolved.
There wasn’t much to it: he awoke, amnesiac, in a hotel room stumbled to the hotel’s gym, passed out, had a disquieting flashback to time spent in a Texas prison and eventually donned a tuxedo and made his way to a chapel, where a sinister man packing a gun made sure the wedding went off without a hitch.
The first time I played Amnesia, my character found a happy ending.
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