So, this one was a little bit different. It took a lot of work, so I hope you enjoyed! The music is all available to stream now, and to download for free on my Patreon, royalty free! www.patreon.com/saganhawkes open.spotify.com/artist/3tYN0aD5MYboKohIw2lsdx?si=R0htRHwxRtuf2WyahC18Zg In case you couldn't tell, this video is a work of 'unfiction', a genre of fiction which presents itself as real. AKA, the game doesn't really exist: I made it! This is more than likely just a one off experiment, I'll be returning to real media for the future. Let me know what you thought!
You genuinely had me fooled until I read the rest of this comment. This was really cool, I would be down for more content like this if you're able or willing to. Also, @endman105 already said it, but having the developer implement a way to crash and possibly corrupt a game they're not proud of is so funny
holy crap, so I found this video just after it went live, and so far basically none of the comments have realised it's unfiction yet. To be fair, I just got to the end of the video, and was taken completely by surprise when it turned out not to be real, haha. A sign of a job well done, I think!
I actually had a suspicion that this wasn’t actually a real game/that this wasn’t actually real when you had that clip of you talking about the dream. But this video had me reminded of all the PC games I played at my grandparents, I have no clue where they have them.
the exact moment the screen faded out after pressing the last faded text, it faded into an ad for pringles and I've never experienced a more perfectly timed ad than that
@@dovaluxa8748 Or Pringles is; do I dare say this, .... The killer of the dinosaurs! O_O Only Feed Your Dinosaurs Potato Only Chips People!!! Potato/Corn/Rice Chips will kill your Dinos! lol I got a home insurance ad. Lame
Honestly the idea of having the end of the game be about the end of the dinosaurs, and having you unplug an animatronic one and essentially "killing it" is genius
28:42 in the backround you can hear a bird chirp, which is the last recorded sound of a Kauai O’O. The male was calling out for a female to complete the melody of a love song , but there were none left. It’s really sad, but makes it so much more unnerving in game.
It adds to the theme that nothing was meant to last, like there's a sense of foreshadowing that everything's going to go crashing down, everything's going to end.
25:38 I’ve never heard someone talk about the same existential anxiety at the loss of your own memories and the fact that they will inevitably be lost to time. You can never backup a memory and every time you remember it the neurons in your brain are replaced and reinforce the new connection in the same way as *last* time you remembered it, not the first, and as a result, you will have your favorite memories warped and fade more and more every time you remembered them. This is unavoidable. It haunts me
It can be scary but I take some solace in knowing that even though I don’t remember it, it still exists it still happened. That little kid in my memories still exists through me in the present. Though I may not remember him fully he still exists. We both feel happiness sadness, anger, and calm; you can’t always fully remember everything but specifics aren’t always important, sometimes even just remembering the vague feelings you had back then can be enough
The 'glitch' at 20 minutes is my favorite bit, because it's VERY realistic to a very familiar glitch for point and click games of that time, where the colors would completely mess up.
One thing i haven't seen many people talk about is the fact that the end of the game literally is a throwback to his "Dream" where he's in a jungle, he can just barely hear a dinosaur, but he knows its a dinosaur, and the light at the end of the tunnel is literally the moon/asteroid type of thing. "I saw this light, i looked up and i knew, yeah, that's death." might be my favorite Lost Media video OAT, even though it's not real.
wait if the end of the game means dead it might mean that when he completed the game trough that secret ending it meant the death of the disk and the death of the dinosaurs being the most powerful creature on earth got is end
@@FelixCattus I gotta ask, did both of them have that dream or only the other user? The other user couldn't find his copy, perhaps because of completing that secret. Maybe the game could've crashed before he completed the secret?
@@The-S-H3lf-Eater It seemed like a really clever misdirection since the OP talks about a scary face coming from a glitch that appears making the dino face distort. That makes you believe the dream is just a weird interpretation of that glitch until the actual apeman ester egg is revealed.
@@ahmicqui9396I think the reason why the plant does that weird dying thing is to show that there really is no way to escape extinction, also the specific way it falls makes it look like a fake cutout
It wasn't subtle at all, the biggest issue with this whole story was that supposedly kids discovered this stuff. Kids wouldn't have passed the first puzzle.
@@SideQuestStories counterpoint: they have unlimited free time and patience, I would know cause I played Mario fangames that ran at a literal frame per second and was enjoying it
28:13 I wish I could watch that moment for the first time again. I'd completely forgotten the face drawing up until the MOMENT we get a close-up on the creature, and I swear I felt my soul leave my body. Jesus that's a good setup and payoff, the face wouldn't have been nearly as scary just by itself.
I think a big part that convinced me at first was you complaining about the gameplay. It’s a really grounded detail; doesn’t build up the horror at all (in fact it intentionally takes away from it by peeling back the curtain a bit), but it adds to the authenticity that the game design wasn’t all that great
I was convinced too and after I watched it a second time what kinda gave it away was his talk about his dream with the white light and his way he talks about being afraid of things being gone forever especially with the game mentioning extinction. Edit: 3 more things that also gave it away was the plant creature mentioned only once and never brought up again up until the end of the video, the convenience of him going to his parents house to visit with the possibility of the game being there and the creepy "glitch" jumpscare looking more unique compared to the rest of the jumpscares.
You know, I should have realized this was actually unfiction when Sagan mentioned the Build-a-Dino bit, given it immediately made me go "Huh, that sounds a lot like Mangle from FNAF, but he isn't mentioning the similarity. That's odd..." I will applaud him on making such a convincing piece. The whole time he was showing it off, I was flipping through my memories to recall if I ever encountered this "game" on a PC Gamer demo disc before, because it very much looked like something out of that era.
Wait, FNAF? ...HENRY. HENRY WAS THE ORIGINAL CREATOR. HE WAS NOT PROUD OF HIS CREATION. Also "Sughrue" (Henry's last name in this unfiction) is an anagram for "hug user" but I don't know if that's intentional. (Also also, his last name is spelled two different ways @ 26:56, "Su*gh*rue" and "Su*hg*rue". Sagan also pronounces it as "Shugrue")
I didn’t question it at all, because a dinosaur museum I frequented as a kid had the exact same type of thing. It had a place where you could dig up “fossils” just like this video, and a place you could put together different dinosaur parts to make up your own dinosaur. The entire museum, to young child me, felt very liminal and eerie. They played noises on overhead speakers that I found really creepy. I was absolutely obsessed with the place lol. It’s a great museum, and although much larger than the museum in this video, the vibes were similar enough I didn’t even question anything.
@@TheUnsightlyRF well, there is the concept of chimeric fossils where, during the early days of paleontology, people would just sort of shove random sets of dino bones together and claim they discovered a new species. if this was actually an old 90s era PnC game it'd still be a reasonable addition if someone was trying to make scary dino museum game.
I'm almost upset this isn't a real game. It nails the aesthetic of old dinosaur exibits. I've seen one of these irl, animatronics and all. While obviously it was open to the public and didn't have killer robots, this "game" nails the feeling I felt looking at the rundown robots. Seeing the rubber skin peeling off their shells, the jerking movements and how sometimes they would freeze up and just...stare, the broken audio, the background ambiance playing, the unsettling nature of entering the occasional empty exibit. It nails the unnerving and somber feeling looking at all the disrepair. The killing of the dinosaur near the end hurt my soul, to see you have to put it out of it's misery. Amazing and incredible work, I really hope to see more.
Watch Sagan private this video to really deepen the Lost Media aesthetic and create tons of fake memories of "lost point-and-click dino horror museum" games that'll surface years later
I feel legitimately devastated that this isnt real. I was so excited to play this game. you have lured me into a cardboard cave with a block of cheese and yanked away the stick holding it up so convincingly that I have died within your trap of pure shock that it was a trap alone. Well played Mr Hawk, I hope you stub your toe within the next week.
It's incredibly well done, but as someone who grew up during that era, I think the give away is how much the game uses a lot of modern analog horror tropes. That type of formula didn't really exist until recently. It's very much the kind of stuff that zoomers or younger millenials would make.
@@KyokujiFGCyeah the "glitch" part of the game seems odd and the Reddit part you can see its so fake with those text n stuff lol and the way he discribe is already feels so fake
I’ve transcribed the Scribbles! Of the four faded scribbles I have found all but the first. Here they are in order of appearance: 1) ? 2) “As for man, his days are numbered. Whatever he might do, it is but wind” 3) “I am going to die! Am I not like Enkidu?! Deep sadness penetrates my core, I fear death, and now roam the wilderness “ 4) “what is this deep sleep which holds you now? You are lost in the dark and cannot hear me” These are all quotes from The Epic of Gilgamesh. The oldest literature ever discovered. As for the first quote, it could be in reference to the character Enkidu being created from the clay the gods washed from their hands. He is described as a hairy wild man (like the creature encountered in the secret level) and after his death, the character Gilgamesh seeks out a plant that will turn whoever eats it young again (the plant which grows from the man’s mouth?). He finds it, but it is stolen by a snake who tells Gilgamesh that no man can escape death. Hope this helped. Love the video. Got lots more to say but typing is difficult for me. Cheers! Edit: Oh this shit doin numbers!
Ooooooh that’s actually such an insane detail, i was wondering what the hairy monster in the end represented since the video was released. Thanks for transcribing the messages
"Where's the download link? I really wanna play this?" And then the reveal that it was unfiction and then i was kinda salty that i couldn't play it myself
It was a bit disappointing to see that the whole lost media hunt was fake, but your thoughts on lost of nostalgic media hits hard. It hit specially hard since my first thought when reading the reddit post was that the game may be the first one you showed as probable suspects! I loved that one so much! It was sold as a dinosaur encyclopedia in my country and I would spend entire days reading the encyclopedia articles and finding the fossils to rebuild the dinos. So, thanks for that nostalgia trip
30:01 duuudee the orb in the sky coming closer and closer, like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs??? so awesome. like, trying to click in any other direction and not being able to is such a good touch. so beautifully done, made my skin crawl.
I was thinking it was the sun/moon and we were super focusing in on it but after the bit about seeing a light and knowing it was death, this makes 1000x more sense.
Holy shit dude this is absolutely incredible,, I know you said this’ll likely be a one off but I’d absolutely LOVE to see more unfiction projects in the future
nearing the end of the playthrough i thought something along the lines of "this feels like a modern horror game presented as an old game" but in a "its cool that this weird, creepy little game existed back then, but feels modern" way. the vibes were just...slightly off in a way i cant describe, so i brushed it off. and then i got to the end. fun project, greatly enjoyed! i'd love to see more content like this.
Me too!! Even before the "secret ending" i was getting some modern horror vibes, mainly fnaf lol. But this is still an amazing project i want to see more!!! (And it would be cool if this can be released as an actual game)
@fiona4449 Same. As I was watching this, I was like "wow this game is pretty ahead of its time for hitting the same vibes and story beats of modern horror games. Retro vibe, killer animatronics, liminal spaces, creepy glitches." Then, I went to the comments.
@@sidereus95Yeah, it was pinging my brain that it felt a little too perfect as a found horror game went but I did not reach the "oh this is fake" point. Really great video.
Yeah. It was definitely more of an old game aethstetic (just graphics tbh) without digging in of what it would feel like to play old horror game. Still cool personal project, but I just wish he would at least try out a couple of old games first.
It was really good at feeling like something that wasn't intended to be creepy but would still scare someone as a child. Having to look up at the T Rex's mouth and the descriptions of the Dino's deaths seem almost exactly like a terrifying moment from something that's supposed to be educational (who ever is reading this, just admit it there was a magic school bus episode that scared the shit out of you) at least until the Frankenstein skeleton and rusty robot show up, but hey those were really good to so I'm not complaining.
I work closing shifts in future world at Epcot where I’m usually left alone in my pavilion after closing. The music doesn’t stop playing and everything feels so eerie. This video seriously captures that feeling really well and it gets me every time. I love it.
You got me. Usually when people try to emulate old 3D, the quality and polygons are too high and nothing is compressed enough. It did seem odd how narrative-less the story was but also it was not a AAA game. Hopefully you can get a playable version to us!
I think the lack of a story made it even more convincing, since a lot of those old computer games just plopped you into their world and expected you to figure things out, especially cryptic old puzzle games.
the way you described your feelings about lost media, a genuine panic and fear of things going unfound, is SO relatable. i've never seen anybody else have the same sort of reaction to lost media, so it's really comforting to know i'm not alone
I feel the same, but in the opposite direction. I feel a genuine existential panic and sadness when I think of all of the media I will never see come to fruition. Like...for slightly silly examples...I will never live to see Friday the 13th Part 30, or play Final Fantasy 25. I feela loss for the things that I will never even have the chance to consume. And lets not even get started on the profound existential dread that flows through me when I think too long about the imperminance of absolutely everything when it comes to the death of the universe.
@@Sisren86 i get the same feeling after a series ends , people will forget it , i might be the only to remember it and if i die , so would the series . Whenever a story ends , I'll be left with thought of what happened after that ? The never explored and never thought about part of the story ? What if i die without being famous enough to be remembered like michael jackson , donald trump , tom cruise etc ? Would i become a lost media too ?
Lost media's is basically terrifying nostalgia....remembering something and searched it on google and n o t h i n g showed up and the dread feeling that you know that it existed somewhere, but it's nowhere to be found
I never understood that feeling till this year, where I saw a fanmade visual nkvel I enjoyed like was scrubbed from the internet, and it was very obscure so its highly unlikely to have been preserved.
There's something so unnerving and... unnatural about googling something and getting... nothing. Google is where you find everything and anything and when you find nothing... you wonder if it ever existed.
For me it's seeing decrepit play places and smelling....that smell. I cannot for the life of me, figure it out, best I can describe it is like a clay, earthy smell? Like modeling clay Never really figured out what it was
Yeah, it felt a little too on the nose imo. Like the dream about the light at the end of the tunnel layed it on way too thick and went a bit too far. I didn't really hit with me the way it's hitting with others. Now, I personally am not resonating with these kinds of themes right now. It just kind of hurts on top of all the other problems I have with no real catharsis to me. And the video is very well made and well done. But I'm coming away with this mixed feeling about it. I feel like I need to say that for myself, but I would be too mean to just say it in the comments out right in plain sight. So I'm just leave it in a reply.
@@Glitch_Man42 I don't mean for this to come off as rude or insensitive, but the last part of your comment just kind of sounds like a personal problem you have to work through with the way you consume media. It's kind of like how some people complain about "loose ends" in a series when it's not a creator's job to solve every mystery in their creation. It's there so that the audience has something to speculate upon in the future. Genuinely, I hope better days come for you soon since you said you're having real life problems.
So this video is fake? I feel lied to lol I watched the whole thing without realizing I was just thinking “this is a creepy ass game no way this was ever made for kids lol”
Half way though I concluded the video game was much too appropriate for our current horror, with animatronics+liminal spaces. The bone dinosaur sighting in the corner was far too modern to be coincidence. I can still appreciate the art of this. He told a compelling tale.
@@benjamim8046 I mostly listen to all of my videos on yt and rarely, if ever, watch them, so it was a bummer to glance through the comments to see the unfiction bit? I wouldn't have known if it weren't for this comment, which bums me out. Wish he could have verbally said it too, I still would've stuck around and listened but it does take some of the wind out of the sails for me! 🤷🏻♀️
This is THE best random UA-cam recommendation I’ve ever gotten. Absolutely stellar work. As someone who was a child terrified by Myst, I was 100% sold on this whole thing. The only times I raised an eyebrow were with how perfectly convenient it was for the trip to coincide with you finding it and the little bit about the dreams. Everything else though? Masterful work. Even the glitch seemed perfectly in line with old games falling apart a bit. Also, good call on not making it another “killer cartridge”, and instead making it a lovely allegory for the death of physical media and the current ease with which we could lose access to precious memories and art. I’m blown away and am subbing lol
This video made me cry. The irony of a game about the inevitable demise of everything and anything that leaves behind remains to be picked up but isn't infinite, to becoming a lost game people will spend years searching for and will ultimately self destruct when trying to dive deep into it
Absolutely love the use of the kauai 'o'o bird song in the last sequence. The whole video is a celebration of Lost media and the passionate people that seek it out for rediscovery and preservation purposes. So I couldn't think of a better use of that bird song. Fantastic work!
Random thing that kind of gave away that the game isn’t real for me was the ESRB rating on the disk. The E10+ rating was not put into effect until 2005, and the game looks like it was from wayyy before that time.
Holy crap my dude, I fell for this hook line and sinker. You presented the game so convincingly that I even ignored how blatantly creepypasta-esque that "glitch" was. Absolutely 11/10 work!
I genuinely thought this was all real until "an unfiction film by Sagan Hawkes" showed up at the end. I adore the visuals of this game, especially the ending bit in the forest with the weird bigfoot-looking thing. Well done.
I didn't. Sounds fake as hell, especially if you know anything about gaming conventions at the time. The game both sounds incredibly ambitious but also the wrong genre. Some details sound wrong, like something simple like a point and click crashing a lot. And some of the details you'd expect are somehow missing, like the name. I'm annoyed I clicked on this. I'm only 5 minutes in but thanks for sparing me the rest. I'm going to block this channel.
I started getting suspicious at the gameplay, it just felt a bit too ahead of its time in the way it did horror, more like an analogue horror series than what I'd expect from an old CD ROM game. It was very well done tho, and I wasn't fully convinced whether it was real or not until the end.
20:00 Can't be creepier than the time my copy of Assassin's Creed 3 froze & it suddenly played every single audio file in the entire game simultaneously. That's only happened to me once. Lol
The use of the kaua'i 'ō'ō alongside the themes of the inevitable decay of all things is crazy, because in the end there will always be another kaua'i 'ō'ō- Even if it's lost media.
not sure if anyone else noticed, but the segment of the game he opened towards the end had the sounds of the extinct kaua'i 'ō'ō bird, which caught me really off guard and i tear up whenever i hear that birdsong :(
dude, the horror element of the "game" was actually so on point! it's like, the perfect liminal horror, that actually pulls off the "monster in the dark" trope! if you ever direct the production of a playable game, i would love (and hate) to play it! also, my favorite detail in the video i noticed, is in the final "gameplay" part, the bird chirps are of the Kauai O'o, being the last of it's kind singing for a mate that will never respond. all signs pointing to extinction. incredible work, man!
I am one of THOSE people who likes watching other people play horror games. If this game was made in a completely playable format, I could imagine it being a big hit with horror YTers and I would watch the crap out of it lol
The catastrophe crow video messed me up so much I couldn’t allow myself to watch until I knew if it was real or fake 🤣 but I love this so much kinda wish I just let myself think it was real for a bit
DAMN,, I didn’t even consider that this could be an unfiction film until you said it outright- this whole thing was so convincing & grounded from start to finish! You got me hook, line, sinker, and the whole damn fishing pole. Fantastic work as always!
Rarely do I watch a video without checking the comments at some point but I was so lost in this whole thing- like eager to see if you could find it, excited when you ‘found’ the physical disk, and enthralled by the gameplay. I jumped at the submarine part when the dinosaur snapped it’s head towards the window. All that to say, getting to the end & seeing it was fake- my heart Sagan, my heart. It was shattered, and then immediately it remineralized once I fully processed everything. Like what an absolute masterpiece??? You are genuinely one of the few creators on here that feels like they genuinely enjoy the stuff they cover. Its so refreshing to see someone who actively has my similar interests, but has the creative energy to expand on them and actually create/ add to the community. I might not be making sense but raaaaah you are so talented & im glad to bear witness to your content!!!
Also this just showed me how gullible and dumb I really am cos I legit started having false memories of this game; I started to wonder if I too had played this game, now I feel like an idiot seeing this was fake lol
was shocked to see the “an unfiction film” tag pop up at the end because it feels like so much more than smoke and mirrors, it almost feels like it has to be real and he’s just fibbing about it being made up for the video
The subplot of Henry resembling the creator of the museum in the video game and having to come to terms with inevitable ends, then inviting you to click on the scribbles and let the final copy be burnt in that ester egg of a meteor is beyond poetic.
This perfectly captured both the feeling I’d have playing a game I enjoyed playing but was deeply unsettled by as a child, and also that desperation to not lose something that is impermanent by design, such as life. Loved this as much as I hated it, an incredible story!
SO SAD AT THE REVEAL OF THE LAST BIT. The whole video was so convincing and pant shittingly unnerving I wanted to play it so bad... Seriously well done, I just wish it was playable :')
Ah, but isn't that just the way with unfiction games? Pretty much all of the best ones give you at least a little bit of that "darn, I wish this was a real thing I could play" feeling. It's part of what makes the concept compelling, and is almost a key part of the genre tbh
@@gayrurumon true, but imo a lot of them aren't quite so convincing, or maybe I'm just biased. I feel like Triassic Hall was close enough to the games I did play and that creeped me out that it really struck a chord with me
This has instantly become one of my most favorite pieces of web horror. No supernatural stuff, or William Afton wannabes. Just a lone, buggy 90s horror game, abandoned by the world.
You think that’s crazy? I was tipped off even sooner than that. When Sagan goes to the Triassic part of the exhibit and starts talking about the Megazostrodon, the (I’m assuming) Postosuchus that’s devouring it is shown to be in a bipedal stance. Sure, these days we believe Postosuchus to be bipedal, but if this game was real, and made in the early nineties as Sagan claims, then this pseudosuchian would most likely be depicted as quadrupedal. Iam aware that WWD did have their Postosuchus rear up on its hind legs a few times, and that was supposedly the showrunners toying with the idea of the creature being bipedal in reference to a paper at the time arguing such behavior, but again it was the “early nineties” that this game was supposedly made.
@@tricoelacanth1114 Is it sad though that the creature I was most hyped to see was the Camptosaurus that was in the Jurassic hallway? An unappreciated species imo, I chuckled when I saw it posed in the now inaccurate quadruped stance, with the head shape more resembling an iguanodontid than Camptosaurus itself lol
I could forgive the Postosuchus; Chatterjee suggested it could walk on two legs back in the 80s, which was argued against in 1995, before science seesawed again later... I can see either the game being made before that opinion had changed, or just being based on what would at the time have been considered to be slightly outdated info on an obscure-ish animal. Gregory Paul was illustrating Quetz very similar to today's version back in the 80s, there's a painting of his in the book Dinosaurs Past and Present (1987) that is verrrry close in terms of head shape etc... BUT the game model's color pattern is identical to a real museum model which was built way too recently, and I'm embarrassed that I didn't think twice about it when I saw it.
I was going crazy for the first 5 min convinced that the post was about Eyewitness Dinosaur Hunter. I had spent so many years myself barely remembering that scary point and click dino game my dad let me play in the 2000s. Great video, I was so immersed
Especially since it seems like it’s actually meant to represent Enkidu from the story of Gilgamesh, which is all about death and legacy and impermanence and stuff
What’s even creepier is that bird song is the last known recording of the doomed Kauai ‘O’o, a bird that was calling for a mate that would never come. That was definitely an intentional choice.
Using the end of the dinosaurs and the decay of the exhibit preserving them coupled with withering sanity of the museum owner as an analogy for lost media is actually incredible. Outstanding work Sagan.
fnaf: dino museum edition 27:30 THE ONE BIRD THAT I LOVE THAT WENT EXTINCT'S LAST RECORDED AUDIO IS IN THE BACKGROUND IVE NEVER BEEN SO HAPPY ARGHGHGHHGHGHG
Damn, you really had me the whole time; genuinely thought we were looking at an actual, obscure 90s game. So many games released back then that went totally under the radar, I could believe something like this existed. Honestly if you wanted to you could probably make a really interesting horror game after seeing what you put together here, that hidden scene at the end with the meteor impact gave me chills.
Rat-a-tat-tat Rat-a-tat-tat ...that and a train engine are what I recall from a children's game made to help train kids to distinguish different noises (say, talking in a crowded theater) 😅 May not be lost, but I can't recall the name. ------- A more spooky one that I'm near-100% sure is lost media is a point-and-click flash horror mystery in a sepia/noir photorealistic tone. You're a woman called to investigate a house where owners died, and similar stuff & puzzles to the popular Scary House...but there's a story of a girl, that gradually pulls your character in as if they were part of the family/gradually possessed as they piece together clues...by the time all the clues are put together, you're commanded to the bathroom...where the character is fully taken over and slits her throat in a graphic and realistic style...it was submitted on Ugoplayer (when that was a flash place like New Grounds) around fall (maybe Halloween?) and I think was quickly taken down...and Ugoplayer a few years later.
me for 99.9% of the video: oh wow! what a journey that was.... what a weird ending though, why would clicking the codes in game do that---WAIT AN UNFICTION *FILM??*
it took me until he got the disk, and then I was like, waaaaait... you cheeky bastard. Really well done though, the "game" looks super authentic & the storytelling is on point.
I had been listening to the video while driving, and only saw the Carnosaur scene, so I earnestly believed the dev made a secret that destroyed the game in spite for working on such schlock. Then I saw that part- but seeing the notes I have seen buried in game code, that seems more plausible than not... 😂
"an unfiction film by sagan hawkes" I audibly voiced my suprise. I exited the drawing I was using this as background to and everything. INCREDIBLY well made, and the way you present it, I would download Triassic Hall if it were real.
I had almost literally the exact same reaction lmao. I was ALSO drawing, while watching this vid picture-in-picture. When I read that line, I froze up for a few seconds as I processed it, then immediately pulled up the full window like "hold the FUCKING phone." Suddenly way too compelling for background noise, and my drawing sits abandoned lol
The end speech really hits home in a weird way. I’m an artist, I’ve been studying illustration since I was a kid. And I would always look at the same few artists for inspiration. One of them heavily influenced the style of how I work. To the point where I wonder if it would ever be the same without them. That artists work is gone from the internet now. All their blogs and posts deleted, and the wayback machine for all their sites that I can track down didn’t archive their images. So it’s just gone. It’s odd how impactful they were. Just a little fanart blog that got me into my career. But I feel almost like I lost a friend.
can i ask if you remember their name or what fan art for what piece of media they drew? sorry if im being nosey or anything like that im just genuinely pretty curious! and im sorry you cant find their work anymore. something similar has happened to other artists i personally follow/used to follow but theyre still around online and i can still find their deleted art by looking it up. but now that ive read your comment.. and i hope this doesnt sound really cheesy, the idea that at some point every artist i currently follow/used to follow and such, their work will just be gone completely with no archiving or anything left, that would definitely make me really sad :')
@@ANGELECSTASY no need to be sad, if you can, help archive the work of the artists you like! I didn’t really have the knowledge at the time, They did a lot of fullmetal alchemist art, in a super unique pen and ink adjacent style. Most of their accounts went by Obersten, there’s a few images floating around still by them but a staggering majority of their work is just gone. There was just pages of it, now you’re lucky If you can find their most popular work reposted on Pinterest. It’s just odd to see someone vanish like that, and I thought it was interesting in comparison to the topic! You aren’t nosy, I probably skimped on the details to be honest.
The same thing happened to me. An artist I looked up to just went poof one day. It makes me sad to think about but I'm happy I got to experience their art
The ending sequence is probably one of the bleakest things I’ve ever seen. Everything’s either dead or dying, everything’s gone dark, the sun is only hiding behind what I can only assume is volcanic ash, and it all ends in a blinding bath of light, just like in your “dream” when you, yourself, died. This is easily a new favorite of mine, fantastic work!
@@dottie8361 me as well! I keep thinking about it. Haha it reminded me of playing the museum in vtm:Bloodlines because I was always so sure the dinosaurs would come after me. There’s just something so perfectly universal about a creepy dinosaur game and I never realized it until this. I think it was the dinosaur fixation of the 90s and early 00s lol
27:52 the bird sound is the last recorded kaui o’o before extinction. It’s the last of its species and it tries calling out for a mate with no idea he’s the only one left it’s a really sad sound
Had me fooled up until that very last part which suddenly became creepy pasta (although the convenience of owning that thing should have tips me off). Bravo.
Hyperlink decay is real and terrifying. Over time, the bits that store the link data can become corrupt by just one character and break the link entirely.
Bit decay in general is real and terrifying and is why I've moved all my media to lossless formats whenever possible. An .mp4 or .jpeg file loses just a handful of bits of data every year but add that up over hundreds or thousands of years and you quickly realize that media preservation is a much more difficult thing than previously imagined.
That's not at all what the cause of hyperlink decay or more accurately link decay is. It's just the fact that as time passes what a link is pointing at can just stop existing as the website/files goes down or changes how they link to pages. It has everything to do with the internet as a whole changing and nothing to do with the data itself being corrupted.
@@kaijuultimax9407 Just in case you're not joking... "Lossless" formats aren't any more or less prone to the physical decay of storage mediums than any other format. The only difference is that lossless formats of media don't use any forms of compression that would result in some information from a source file being lost or distorted. For example, when exporting a song from a DAW, if you export to MP3, some information will be lost, just not a very noticeable amount. Whereas if you export to FLAC, the output will not lose any information. With this in mind, converting an MP3 to FLAC, for example, will not result in restoring information; you'll just have a FLAC of the MP3's audio, distortion and information loss and all. So no, "lossy" formats do not decay over time. Storage mediums can and do however, so the only way to ensure digital information is preserved is to keep multiple copies and maintain them.
@@kaijuultimax9407who tf would care about some data a thousand years into the future 😂 like they’ll be living lives in full dive vr and living to be 1000 and you think they care about some vacation photos you took a thousand years ago 😂😂😂😂
Henry got you to crash the game with the "secret" and ended a game he wasnt proud of. I'm not saying it was on purpose BUT that would be funny in a cruel way
I think you’re right. Between that and the Carnotaurus euthanasia bit, it seems like the overarching theme is extinction, both in its inevitability and its necessity. Nothing lasts forever. Nothing is supposed to. Some things, many things even, you need to let die.
I had to delete my comment and read the pin cause it fooled me. I was legit upset that it got “erased” only to realize it didn’t happen. Good job Sagan!!
I have the exact same "phobia" I have never heard someone describe it so perfectly, this fear of things being forgotten, to not experience it again, drives me into panic sometimes. Im slowly getting to accept that's how time works, but I still cannot delete anything, I archieve everything.
I don’t like things being forgotten either and it’s definitely a weird obsession to have, but I can agree with you. I’ve been trying to look for something for years now but I’m about ready to give up and consider it long and gone media, which is a shame. I’d love to tell about it sometime but I’d rather not now, not here either. All I can really say is that I saw a commercial for it on tv, it being a ringtone of some sorts that you had to text and buy..Think of Psycho Teddy, as the german version of that ringtone mascot song was considered lost media for a while as well. It’s a shame how quickly people seem to forget something existed once, without a trace.
@@galaxydeathskrill5607 Ah yeah that's true. Sometimes solutions are so plain and simple that even those can be forgotten about LMAO. I'll definitely try keeping some type of diary or notepad or whatever. Thanks for the hint.
The similarities to Fnaf were so many that if it was real i could see it as one of the games Scott Cawthon used to play as a teen that later subconsciously inspired his games.
i’m just speculating here, but i feel like it’s meant to place you in the perspective of an animal watching the meteor approach: the moon is suddenly getting closer and bigger, you can’t get away from it no matter how hard you try. there’s a white-hot flash, and then there’s nothing
this is an incredible project honestly, i feel like a real copy of triassic hall is just out of reach, it feels real and playable even if it’s probably just bits and pieces for the video. the fading from prerendered cutscenes to the basic models of actual gameplay with that fuzzy pixelated transition in particular really sells it for me, im still having a hard time believing it’s not a real game. just truly incredible work, it’s awe inspiring.
You know, seeing the honestly weirdly scientifically accurate Quetzalcoatlus in the cretaceous bit should've tipped me off. In the 90s it would've looked a lot more pinheaded.
And that's a problem, this video convinced me that this game used to exist until I saw the quetzalcoatlus. Edit: I haven't finished watching this video by the way, I went to the comments to see if anyone noticed how out of place the quetz looked.
@@AverageNetizen7908 to be fair, they also have a really up to date Postosuchus and a fairly modern looking Dunkleosteus silhouette, so something was indeed up. That said, they did nail the 90s dinosaur game atmosphere in other ways. Putting Dimetrodon in the triassic area is something only a 90s educational game would ever do, it's fallen out of style nowadays.
Honestly the only part which gave away that the game was fake was just how legitimately incredible its grasp of tension and horror was. You did such a great job that your only mistake was being too good at this.
the thing that give away the fake is the end. CD/DVD ROMs cannot overwrite on its own except if the thing somehow could program the drive to spin/read faster, and even then that would likelier to broke the drive.
@@cursedryona6265 that and: -E10+ rating doesn't exist yet at the day (it existed like in 2005 or 2006 for the first time) -Conspicuously lack of menu UI
@@meyers0781 While true in theory, I did have some disks simply implode by doing very specific things in games. Of course, they were very old and badly stored, which may have played a good part of it, but one in particular had it happen on two different copies following the exact same steps, which was really weird. I really wanted to know what caused it.
Not gonna lie, you had me hook line and sinker for the entire video. I'm sad I can't play this for myself, but you did such an excellent job of keeping the premise believable that I'm not even mad about it. Great job tying the hairy man face from the beginning back in
The realization that all things will eventually die, and how the lost media community tries so hard to dig for any scrap that may have managed to survive hits really hard considering that the game is about the extinction of dinosaurs, and the feeling of powerlessness that comes from the fact that we'll never be able to bring them back to life. The "secret" in the game erasing the disk data after witnessing what seems to be the impact of the meteorite really drives it home. We can't make things last forever, but we can look back on the things that we lost. Extremely solid video, I'm in awe! Definitely would like more content like this.
Yeah, but when you think about it in the context of the story in the video itself, it does make Henry a bit of dick; he hears that someone is looking for a childhood game and tells him to do something if he manages to find a copy, without telling him that doing said sequence will permanently delete the gameXD
@@Mathee...just *after* telling them that he's embarrassed or even ashamed of his work not only on that game, but for his entire time with the company that made it. Would love to see more games from that company if he decides to do more unfiction.
maybe this sounds a little pretentious, but the way you described the lost media community as searching for “dinosaurs” kind of made me think of paleontologists and the vaguely melancholy vibes that come with that field: because we search for and try to dig up old things, piecing together whatever is left to try and understand what they may have looked like before they died. there’s no way to truly bring these things back in their completely original form, but we find and display them to the public anyway just to remind and teach people that they existed. heck, there’s even people who try to recreate fully-lost media the way paleontologists try to reconstruct dinosaurs and guess what they may have been like when they were alive
SAGAN HAWKES I NEED YOU TO KNOW THAT THIS VIDEO HAS PERMANENTLY CHANGED MY BRAIN CHEMISTRY IN A VERY REAL WAY AND I AM LITERALLY OBSESSED WITH IT AND THE THEMES OF INEVITABLE DEATH THROUGHOUT. this is the first time in a long time a video essay has affected me in this sheer magnitude. as soon as i start my fucking job im giving you my fucking money
I just imagine you going to your parents, knocking on the door, shaking impatiently, they open the door "hey-" and then you push past them, run to the attack and start furiously rummaging through everything
Surprisingly good for a fake 'lost media' thing, they're usually way more cheesy or try-hard but you don't even pretend that there's a 'dark backstory' to this one, and it doesn't need it. Imagery of the wild man at the end is very very good. Nice work!
Dinosaurs on display at a museum serving as a metaphor for lost media being dug up is pretty clever. I also like the references to Gilgamesh, I think it's allegorically fitting to the overall theme of memory and legend sustaining people (or games) beyond their natural lifespan, frequently resurfacing and just as quickly fading back into obscurity, but always alive so long as there are people tending the archives. I can only imagine how many sleepless nights you poured into bringing this project to life. Tremendously creative production. This is one of the most original video concepts I've seen in years, and your execution was fantastic.
Using the extinction of the dinosaurs as a sort of metaphor for lost media and the whole entropy of it is genius edit: also Eyewitness Dinosaur Hunter was "My" childhood dinosaur game and legit thought this was going to be a review of it
Gigabased Dinosaur Hunter appreciator. Loved that thing so much as a kid, peak paleo vibes. Good thing I scrolled through the comments looking for other recognizers, I was 100% sure this was it just based on the description, lmao.
Same here. I remember playing that all the time when I was a kid. Actually managed to find a downloadable version that works on modern systems and it was like a blast from the past. Honestly, turning something like that into a horror game like what they did here seems like almost a no-brainer.
Yeah I played Eyewitness Dinosaur Hunter as a kid as well and immediately thought of it with the description. This game had and interesting and eerie feel to it. I remember it also had a second disc that had 3D landscapes with dinosaurs you could explore.
This is so well done! I genuinely believed this was real and was on the edge of my seat the entire time, watching it at night made it more unsettling for me, I only realized it wasn’t real when I came back to rewatch it today, I hope you make more things like this.
This whole time I couldn't stop thinking about how suspiciously similar to FNAF this concept was, to the point where I started to wonder if maybe Scott had also played this as a kid and took inspiration from it, only to be hit with the end reveal. This is honestly one of the coolest videos I've watched.
oh this is SO cool i think what really gets me about this one is that there's nothing that really obviously gives this away as unfiction. a few things seem a little weird, or like a convenient coincidence, but they are in the realm of something that COULD happen
this is absolutely amazing. i remember seeing this post and was CERTAIN it was a misremembered memory of 3D dinosaur adventure, since everything described in the post could be attributed to something in the game (creepy museum minigame, minigame where you have to go through a maze, etc). i'm so happy to learn of a piece of forgotten media and to see that it's been restored as a piece of art to the internet. edit: I WAS FOOLED
Lol. Okay, but did you actually see that post? Was that part real (at least insofar as Sagan made that post for the purposes of this video) or did you confuse it with something else? I'm curious, because the human brain is really good at convincing itself that certain things are true if they seem to make enough sense, even to the point of just making up a memory out of basically nothing. Recent examples that stand out in my mind are certain facebook posts going around lately featuring AI generated old-timey photos, showing completely fictional events that Did Not Happen, with a bunch of responses under them from elderly users saying things like "I remember watching this on TV!" or even "Yup, I remember this, I was there when it happened". No Grandpa your ass was not "there", there was never any "there" for you to be!
Ended the video in awe of how perfectly the story of the game lined up with not only the closing of the game company but the message of the lost media as whole. Didn’t realize it was unfiction till the end spectacular work, definitely earned a subscription from me
The concept of cranky huge animatronics has always terrified me, even when I was small and had only ever met them at amusement parks. That's what got me into fnaf, too - and got me out of it when things moved away from that atmosphere. I can totally understand the kid moving away from the screen when it got creepy, I would've been like that too! EDIT: Okay so it's fictional, wow!! You really captured my childhood there, fooled me. I love this sm
Spoilers: Had me until the LAST moment. Even with all the internet horror tropes (lost media, liminal spaces, creepy glitches, overall unintentionally unnerving atmosphere and presentation) I didn’t think for a SECOND that this wasn’t real. Genuinely impressive stuff
I shouldn't have read this comment because I fully believed this was real as a fan of Myst and having been born in 85. I could have fully believed this was real.
I can't believe I never once questioned it, the furthest I came was thinking "wow I can't believe you found out how to beat the game that easily old games like this are usually super cryptic"
Sat down to rewatch it, I kinda hope someone turns this into an actual video game concept cause I would love to play it Maybe a spoof on lost media/mascot horror/old computer games where you find an old CD of a childhood game and the once educational/kids game turns into horror as you have to escape it
Man, this reminds me of a game I played ONCE before screaming in terror and turning it off. I wanna say it was some maze wandering game with dinosaur jump scares as a game over.
Oh! Creating things you're not proud, of and the "unplugging" of the ancient, deprecated technology that bites back at you, and the anxiety of not being able to experience everything tying up with the concept of inevitable extintion is quite clever.
DUDE THIS IS SO GOOD !!!?!???? THE IMAGERY, THE SOUND DESIGN, THE ATMOSPHERE, LIKE THIS IS GENUINELY TOP TIER LOST MEDIA HORROR. YOU GENUINELY HAD ME FOR THE ENTIRE VIDEO
So, this one was a little bit different. It took a lot of work, so I hope you enjoyed!
The music is all available to stream now, and to download for free on my Patreon, royalty free!
www.patreon.com/saganhawkes
open.spotify.com/artist/3tYN0aD5MYboKohIw2lsdx?si=R0htRHwxRtuf2WyahC18Zg
In case you couldn't tell, this video is a work of 'unfiction', a genre of fiction which presents itself as real. AKA, the game doesn't really exist: I made it!
This is more than likely just a one off experiment, I'll be returning to real media for the future. Let me know what you thought!
You genuinely had me fooled until I read the rest of this comment. This was really cool, I would be down for more content like this if you're able or willing to. Also, @endman105 already said it, but having the developer implement a way to crash and possibly corrupt a game they're not proud of is so funny
holy crap, so I found this video just after it went live, and so far basically none of the comments have realised it's unfiction yet. To be fair, I just got to the end of the video, and was taken completely by surprise when it turned out not to be real, haha. A sign of a job well done, I think!
Oh my god I thought this was real until right now. This was so high quality man
I actually had a suspicion that this wasn’t actually a real game/that this wasn’t actually real when you had that clip of you talking about the dream.
But this video had me reminded of all the PC games I played at my grandparents, I have no clue where they have them.
So after all of this you are telling me that it was all a lie?
Ngl, you really got me, it was well made up
the exact moment the screen faded out after pressing the last faded text, it faded into an ad for pringles and I've never experienced a more perfectly timed ad than that
Before the dinosaurs died, they had pringles
@@dovaluxa8748lucky
@@dovaluxa8748 I guess once you pop, the only way to stop is extinction.
@@dovaluxa8748 Or Pringles is; do I dare say this, .... The killer of the dinosaurs! O_O
Only Feed Your Dinosaurs Potato Only Chips People!!! Potato/Corn/Rice Chips will kill your Dinos! lol
I got a home insurance ad. Lame
XD got to love perfectly timed ads
Honestly the idea of having the end of the game be about the end of the dinosaurs, and having you unplug an animatronic one and essentially "killing it" is genius
@@darkdoubloontv8906 …oh, that wasn’t the moon was it
@@thatkidwiththehoodieheaven or the afterlife of what you believe in
@@crazedbanette2647 I was alluding to the asteroid lmao
yea, a dummies idea of genius :)
I feel like it's more about the death of the museum
28:42 in the backround you can hear a bird chirp, which is the last recorded sound of a Kauai O’O. The male was calling out for a female to complete the melody of a love song , but there were none left. It’s really sad, but makes it so much more unnerving in game.
It adds to the theme that nothing was meant to last, like there's a sense of foreshadowing that everything's going to go crashing down, everything's going to end.
What the actual freak? I hate and love this game, its so horrific
i knew that chirp sounded familiar!! that call is so haunting
That was the last of the species before they became extincted
Jack can you draw Sydney with a pet Austroraptor
25:38 I’ve never heard someone talk about the same existential anxiety at the loss of your own memories and the fact that they will inevitably be lost to time. You can never backup a memory and every time you remember it the neurons in your brain are replaced and reinforce the new connection in the same way as *last* time you remembered it, not the first, and as a result, you will have your favorite memories warped and fade more and more every time you remembered them. This is unavoidable. It haunts me
solution is just live in the moment
First world problems lol.
It can be scary but I take some solace in knowing that even though I don’t remember it, it still exists it still happened. That little kid in my memories still exists through me in the present. Though I may not remember him fully he still exists. We both feel happiness sadness, anger, and calm; you can’t always fully remember everything but specifics aren’t always important, sometimes even just remembering the vague feelings you had back then can be enough
T
Raccoon pfp!
The 'glitch' at 20 minutes is my favorite bit, because it's VERY realistic to a very familiar glitch for point and click games of that time, where the colors would completely mess up.
Exactly. It's so brilliant and convincing. This dude knows his stuff.
I would get the exact same glitch on my old Sierra games - Quest For Glory, King's Quest, etc.
Yes! Some old games do often have that posterization effect. It scared me more than most actual horror media sometimes :D
Especially running old games on 64-Bit systems, these old games REALLY don't like to be off of Win 95/98
The glitch looks like something from analog horror
One thing i haven't seen many people talk about is the fact that the end of the game literally is a throwback to his "Dream" where he's in a jungle, he can just barely hear a dinosaur, but he knows its a dinosaur, and the light at the end of the tunnel is literally the moon/asteroid type of thing. "I saw this light, i looked up and i knew, yeah, that's death." might be my favorite Lost Media video OAT, even though it's not real.
@@Mig_V And the bearded man.
wait if the end of the game means dead it might mean that when he completed the game trough that secret ending it meant the death of the disk and the death of the dinosaurs being the most powerful creature on earth got is end
It seems like a plothole since that seemed to trigger the game to brick up forever like a sendoff but still works after he played it again
@@FelixCattus I gotta ask, did both of them have that dream or only the other user? The other user couldn't find his copy, perhaps because of completing that secret. Maybe the game could've crashed before he completed the secret?
@@The-S-H3lf-Eater It seemed like a really clever misdirection since the OP talks about a scary face coming from a glitch that appears making the dino face distort. That makes you believe the dream is just a weird interpretation of that glitch until the actual apeman ester egg is revealed.
The subtle callback to the hairy man from the very beginning was brilliant. Everything came full circle in the end, well done
I do wonder if the hairy man with horns is supposed to be some sort of specific creature or just some random critter he made up.
@@uberrex8073This is Enkidu from the Epic of Gilgameš. The plant he coughs up is probably the fruit of life.
@@ahmicqui9396I think the reason why the plant does that weird dying thing is to show that there really is no way to escape extinction, also the specific way it falls makes it look like a fake cutout
It wasn't subtle at all, the biggest issue with this whole story was that supposedly kids discovered this stuff. Kids wouldn't have passed the first puzzle.
@@SideQuestStories counterpoint: they have unlimited free time and patience, I would know cause I played Mario fangames that ran at a literal frame per second and was enjoying it
28:13 I wish I could watch that moment for the first time again. I'd completely forgotten the face drawing up until the MOMENT we get a close-up on the creature, and I swear I felt my soul leave my body. Jesus that's a good setup and payoff, the face wouldn't have been nearly as scary just by itself.
I straight up went pale when that happened, it felt like time fell over and froze mid-air.
I thought its a bigfoot but that turns out it was the alien disguised as a human who made the museum
I think a big part that convinced me at first was you complaining about the gameplay. It’s a really grounded detail; doesn’t build up the horror at all (in fact it intentionally takes away from it by peeling back the curtain a bit), but it adds to the authenticity that the game design wasn’t all that great
@@toagradius8856 same, especially the whole 'it's really annoying how often the dinosaurs appear in the rooms' thing.
I was convinced too and after I watched it a second time what kinda gave it away was his talk about his dream with the white light and his way he talks about being afraid of things being gone forever especially with the game mentioning extinction.
Edit: 3 more things that also gave it away was the plant creature mentioned only once and never brought up again up until the end of the video, the convenience of him going to his parents house to visit with the possibility of the game being there and the creepy "glitch" jumpscare looking more unique compared to the rest of the jumpscares.
Bionicle
@@Halfcrabs Yo-yo, Piraka
Oooooooh, that's a good point! I guess sometimes, you have to just tell yourself "Trust me, brain, this is a GOOD idea". /hj
You know, I should have realized this was actually unfiction when Sagan mentioned the Build-a-Dino bit, given it immediately made me go "Huh, that sounds a lot like Mangle from FNAF, but he isn't mentioning the similarity. That's odd..."
I will applaud him on making such a convincing piece. The whole time he was showing it off, I was flipping through my memories to recall if I ever encountered this "game" on a PC Gamer demo disc before, because it very much looked like something out of that era.
Honestly killer animatronics made me think of fnaf right away so shame on me for not figuring it out.
Wait, FNAF? ...HENRY. HENRY WAS THE ORIGINAL CREATOR.
HE WAS NOT PROUD OF HIS CREATION.
Also "Sughrue" (Henry's last name in this unfiction) is an anagram for "hug user" but I don't know if that's intentional. (Also also, his last name is spelled two different ways @ 26:56, "Su*gh*rue" and "Su*hg*rue". Sagan also pronounces it as "Shugrue")
I didn’t question it at all, because a dinosaur museum I frequented as a kid had the exact same type of thing. It had a place where you could dig up “fossils” just like this video, and a place you could put together different dinosaur parts to make up your own dinosaur. The entire museum, to young child me, felt very liminal and eerie. They played noises on overhead speakers that I found really creepy. I was absolutely obsessed with the place lol. It’s a great museum, and although much larger than the museum in this video, the vibes were similar enough I didn’t even question anything.
@@TheUnsightlyRF well, there is the concept of chimeric fossils where, during the early days of paleontology, people would just sort of shove random sets of dino bones together and claim they discovered a new species. if this was actually an old 90s era PnC game it'd still be a reasonable addition if someone was trying to make scary dino museum game.
I am confused. Is this a fake game?
I'm almost upset this isn't a real game. It nails the aesthetic of old dinosaur exibits. I've seen one of these irl, animatronics and all. While obviously it was open to the public and didn't have killer robots, this "game" nails the feeling I felt looking at the rundown robots. Seeing the rubber skin peeling off their shells, the jerking movements and how sometimes they would freeze up and just...stare, the broken audio, the background ambiance playing, the unsettling nature of entering the occasional empty exibit. It nails the unnerving and somber feeling looking at all the disrepair. The killing of the dinosaur near the end hurt my soul, to see you have to put it out of it's misery.
Amazing and incredible work, I really hope to see more.
I wish this was real too
@michaelbalog7409 no sadly it's a arg/film thing
@michaelbalog7409 watch until the end,not just skip the ending,watch the ending
Dude, it’s not real?? Man, I feel lied to lol
Watch Sagan private this video to really deepen the Lost Media aesthetic and create tons of fake memories of "lost point-and-click dino horror museum" games that'll surface years later
I feel legitimately devastated that this isnt real. I was so excited to play this game. you have lured me into a cardboard cave with a block of cheese and yanked away the stick holding it up so convincingly that I have died within your trap of pure shock that it was a trap alone. Well played Mr Hawk, I hope you stub your toe within the next week.
It IS real. I had this. Look up 3-D Dinosaur Adventure.
It's incredibly well done, but as someone who grew up during that era, I think the give away is how much the game uses a lot of modern analog horror tropes.
That type of formula didn't really exist until recently. It's very much the kind of stuff that zoomers or younger millenials would make.
@@KyokujiFGCyeah the "glitch" part of the game seems odd and the Reddit part you can see its so fake with those text n stuff lol and the way he discribe is already feels so fake
@@originaltitan6418 I don't see how the Reddit part or how he describes the game as "fake"
It actually reminds me a bit of Eyewitness Virtual Reality Dinosaur Hunter by DK Multimedia. You could try that.
I’ve transcribed the Scribbles!
Of the four faded scribbles I have found all but the first. Here they are in order of appearance:
1) ?
2) “As for man, his days are numbered. Whatever he might do, it is but wind”
3) “I am going to die! Am I not like Enkidu?! Deep sadness penetrates my core, I fear death, and now roam the wilderness “
4) “what is this deep sleep which holds you now? You are lost in the dark and cannot hear me”
These are all quotes from The Epic of Gilgamesh. The oldest literature ever discovered. As for the first quote, it could be in reference to the character Enkidu being created from the clay the gods washed from their hands. He is described as a hairy wild man (like the creature encountered in the secret level) and after his death, the character Gilgamesh seeks out a plant that will turn whoever eats it young again (the plant which grows from the man’s mouth?). He finds it, but it is stolen by a snake who tells Gilgamesh that no man can escape death.
Hope this helped. Love the video. Got lots more to say but typing is difficult for me. Cheers!
Edit: Oh this shit doin numbers!
Thank you for this, I couldn't see the letters clearly enough to read them. Now the story of this video and the theme is very clear.
The second one could also reference his death of illness
@@IcyKalino prob, friend ✌️
Ooooooh that’s actually such an insane detail, i was wondering what the hairy monster in the end represented since the video was released. Thanks for transcribing the messages
that's so awesome :0 honestly can't wait to see more content like this from sagan in the future! the story writing of this video is incredible
"Where's the download link? I really wanna play this?"
And then the reveal that it was unfiction and then i was kinda salty that i couldn't play it myself
Don’t think there is one, the game is from the 90’s and I don’t think it would work on modern software
@@swedishdogeYTIt's fake. This is an "unfiction film" which is in the ARG sphere of content creation. There is no game, never was.
@@swedishdogeYT Theres many ways to play games from the 90s like that though, theres the DOS emulators and playing in various compatibility modes etc
@@cybersilver5816 wait what? Explain, this some sort of creepy pasta or something
@@MontySlython never mind I found out it’s not real
It was a bit disappointing to see that the whole lost media hunt was fake, but your thoughts on lost of nostalgic media hits hard. It hit specially hard since my first thought when reading the reddit post was that the game may be the first one you showed as probable suspects! I loved that one so much! It was sold as a dinosaur encyclopedia in my country and I would spend entire days reading the encyclopedia articles and finding the fossils to rebuild the dinos. So, thanks for that nostalgia trip
30:01 duuudee the orb in the sky coming closer and closer, like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs??? so awesome. like, trying to click in any other direction and not being able to is such a good touch. so beautifully done, made my skin crawl.
I was thinking it was the sun/moon and we were super focusing in on it but after the bit about seeing a light and knowing it was death, this makes 1000x more sense.
Yeah pretty sure that's supposed to be the moon
@@Fircasicewrong, untrue, didn’t see the dinosaur in the forest if you did then you’d know the moon was created by astronaut
You find a secret, and get closer and closer to see how it ends. But you end with it.
Ooh, scary shit.
Holy shit dude this is absolutely incredible,, I know you said this’ll likely be a one off but I’d absolutely LOVE to see more unfiction projects in the future
I did not expect to find you in this comment section, madam. Hope you have a great day!
ARIANA WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE
hi izzzyzzz ur awesome
What is this, a crossover episode?
@@charlieflight6124 It makes sense. Their content and tastes seem very similar.
nearing the end of the playthrough i thought something along the lines of "this feels like a modern horror game presented as an old game" but in a "its cool that this weird, creepy little game existed back then, but feels modern" way. the vibes were just...slightly off in a way i cant describe, so i brushed it off. and then i got to the end. fun project, greatly enjoyed! i'd love to see more content like this.
Me too!! Even before the "secret ending" i was getting some modern horror vibes, mainly fnaf lol. But this is still an amazing project i want to see more!!! (And it would be cool if this can be released as an actual game)
@fiona4449 Same. As I was watching this, I was like "wow this game is pretty ahead of its time for hitting the same vibes and story beats of modern horror games. Retro vibe, killer animatronics, liminal spaces, creepy glitches." Then, I went to the comments.
@@sidereus95Yeah, it was pinging my brain that it felt a little too perfect as a found horror game went but I did not reach the "oh this is fake" point. Really great video.
Yeah. It was definitely more of an old game aethstetic (just graphics tbh) without digging in of what it would feel like to play old horror game.
Still cool personal project, but I just wish he would at least try out a couple of old games first.
It was really good at feeling like something that wasn't intended to be creepy but would still scare someone as a child. Having to look up at the T Rex's mouth and the descriptions of the Dino's deaths seem almost exactly like a terrifying moment from something that's supposed to be educational (who ever is reading this, just admit it there was a magic school bus episode that scared the shit out of you) at least until the Frankenstein skeleton and rusty robot show up, but hey those were really good to so I'm not complaining.
I work closing shifts in future world at Epcot where I’m usually left alone in my pavilion after closing. The music doesn’t stop playing and everything feels so eerie. This video seriously captures that feeling really well and it gets me every time. I love it.
You got me. Usually when people try to emulate old 3D, the quality and polygons are too high and nothing is compressed enough. It did seem odd how narrative-less the story was but also it was not a AAA game. Hopefully you can get a playable version to us!
tbf I remember old point and clicks especially the bizarre horror theme ones to be very sparse with the narrative details myself.
I think the lack of a story made it even more convincing, since a lot of those old computer games just plopped you into their world and expected you to figure things out, especially cryptic old puzzle games.
@@moch126Or have been expected to have and read the accompanying manual
the way you described your feelings about lost media, a genuine panic and fear of things going unfound, is SO relatable. i've never seen anybody else have the same sort of reaction to lost media, so it's really comforting to know i'm not alone
I feel the same, but in the opposite direction. I feel a genuine existential panic and sadness when I think of all of the media I will never see come to fruition. Like...for slightly silly examples...I will never live to see Friday the 13th Part 30, or play Final Fantasy 25.
I feela loss for the things that I will never even have the chance to consume.
And lets not even get started on the profound existential dread that flows through me when I think too long about the imperminance of absolutely everything when it comes to the death of the universe.
@@Sisren86 i get the same feeling after a series ends , people will forget it , i might be the only to remember it and if i die , so would the series . Whenever a story ends , I'll be left with thought of what happened after that ? The never explored and never thought about part of the story ? What if i die without being famous enough to be remembered like michael jackson , donald trump , tom cruise etc ? Would i become a lost media too ?
@@Sisren86the way things are going, if you live another five years you'll probably see all of those things...
WAS THAT THE BITE OF THE CRETACEOUS PERIOD?!!!
WAS THAT THE BITE OF 66 MILLION B.C.??!?!?!??!?!
xD
WAS THAT THE METEOR OF DINOSAUR EXTINCTION?!!?
@@Thyfunidoge 😲
GET OU-
Lost media's is basically terrifying nostalgia....remembering something and searched it on google and n o t h i n g showed up and the dread feeling that you know that it existed somewhere, but it's nowhere to be found
I never understood that feeling till this year, where I saw a fanmade visual nkvel I enjoyed like was scrubbed from the internet, and it was very obscure so its highly unlikely to have been preserved.
There's something so unnerving and... unnatural about googling something and getting... nothing.
Google is where you find everything and anything and when you find nothing... you wonder if it ever existed.
@@sammy_wills fr tho
For me it's seeing decrepit play places and smelling....that smell.
I cannot for the life of me, figure it out, best I can describe it is like a clay, earthy smell? Like modeling clay
Never really figured out what it was
@@milchesarreal6964 is it a Box, perhaps?
wow, it's really weird how the themes of the game are so entwined with the concept of lost media.
Yeah, it felt a little too on the nose imo. Like the dream about the light at the end of the tunnel layed it on way too thick and went a bit too far. I didn't really hit with me the way it's hitting with others.
Now, I personally am not resonating with these kinds of themes right now. It just kind of hurts on top of all the other problems I have with no real catharsis to me. And the video is very well made and well done. But I'm coming away with this mixed feeling about it. I feel like I need to say that for myself, but I would be too mean to just say it in the comments out right in plain sight. So I'm just leave it in a reply.
@@Glitch_Man42 I don't mean for this to come off as rude or insensitive, but the last part of your comment just kind of sounds like a personal problem you have to work through with the way you consume media. It's kind of like how some people complain about "loose ends" in a series when it's not a creator's job to solve every mystery in their creation. It's there so that the audience has something to speculate upon in the future.
Genuinely, I hope better days come for you soon since you said you're having real life problems.
So this video is fake? I feel lied to lol I watched the whole thing without realizing I was just thinking “this is a creepy ass game no way this was ever made for kids lol”
Half way though I concluded the video game was much too appropriate for our current horror, with animatronics+liminal spaces. The bone dinosaur sighting in the corner was far too modern to be coincidence.
I can still appreciate the art of this. He told a compelling tale.
@@benjamim8046 I mostly listen to all of my videos on yt and rarely, if ever, watch them, so it was a bummer to glance through the comments to see the unfiction bit? I wouldn't have known if it weren't for this comment, which bums me out. Wish he could have verbally said it too, I still would've stuck around and listened but it does take some of the wind out of the sails for me! 🤷🏻♀️
This is THE best random UA-cam recommendation I’ve ever gotten. Absolutely stellar work. As someone who was a child terrified by Myst, I was 100% sold on this whole thing. The only times I raised an eyebrow were with how perfectly convenient it was for the trip to coincide with you finding it and the little bit about the dreams. Everything else though? Masterful work. Even the glitch seemed perfectly in line with old games falling apart a bit.
Also, good call on not making it another “killer cartridge”, and instead making it a lovely allegory for the death of physical media and the current ease with which we could lose access to precious memories and art.
I’m blown away and am subbing lol
Did you also notice how perfectly the end lined up with the dream?
This video made me cry. The irony of a game about the inevitable demise of everything and anything that leaves behind remains to be picked up but isn't infinite, to becoming a lost game people will spend years searching for and will ultimately self destruct when trying to dive deep into it
That also reminds me of Killswitch.
Gae
Absolutely love the use of the kauai 'o'o bird song in the last sequence.
The whole video is a celebration of Lost media and the passionate people that seek it out for rediscovery and preservation purposes. So I couldn't think of a better use of that bird song.
Fantastic work!
Random thing that kind of gave away that the game isn’t real for me was the ESRB rating on the disk. The E10+ rating was not put into effect until 2005, and the game looks like it was from wayyy before that time.
It looks like 1996, Titanic style
Holy crap my dude, I fell for this hook line and sinker. You presented the game so convincingly that I even ignored how blatantly creepypasta-esque that "glitch" was. Absolutely 11/10 work!
Same. Had me till the last second. Was really well done.
I genuinely thought this was all real until "an unfiction film by Sagan Hawkes" showed up at the end. I adore the visuals of this game, especially the ending bit in the forest with the weird bigfoot-looking thing. Well done.
this is why i am skeptical of everything online. hell i thought the ps5 was a 4chan publicity stunt until i saw it in a store
@@FritzAfton-r9e yeah, i feel secure in thinking that ai isn't going to cause a misinformation apocalypse
I thought the same thing too!
I didn't. Sounds fake as hell, especially if you know anything about gaming conventions at the time. The game both sounds incredibly ambitious but also the wrong genre. Some details sound wrong, like something simple like a point and click crashing a lot. And some of the details you'd expect are somehow missing, like the name.
I'm annoyed I clicked on this. I'm only 5 minutes in but thanks for sparing me the rest. I'm going to block this channel.
I started getting suspicious at the gameplay, it just felt a bit too ahead of its time in the way it did horror, more like an analogue horror series than what I'd expect from an old CD ROM game. It was very well done tho, and I wasn't fully convinced whether it was real or not until the end.
20:00 Can't be creepier than the time my copy of Assassin's Creed 3 froze & it suddenly played every single audio file in the entire game simultaneously. That's only happened to me once. Lol
The use of the kaua'i 'ō'ō alongside the themes of the inevitable decay of all things is crazy, because in the end there will always be another kaua'i 'ō'ō- Even if it's lost media.
Bro I noticed that to 😢
not sure if anyone else noticed, but the segment of the game he opened towards the end had the sounds of the extinct kaua'i 'ō'ō bird, which caught me really off guard and i tear up whenever i hear that birdsong :(
I know, as soon as I heard it my heart sunk 😢
"Singing for a female...who will never come."
holy CRAP
I knew it, I always get sad when I hear it.
@@ambermoon6004same
dude, the horror element of the "game" was actually so on point! it's like, the perfect liminal horror, that actually pulls off the "monster in the dark" trope!
if you ever direct the production of a playable game, i would love (and hate) to play it!
also, my favorite detail in the video i noticed, is in the final "gameplay" part, the bird chirps are of the Kauai O'o, being the last of it's kind singing for a mate that will never respond. all signs pointing to extinction. incredible work, man!
YESSSSS SOMEONE ELSE NOTICES!! The attention to detail is MWAH!! Divine.
I am one of THOSE people who likes watching other people play horror games. If this game was made in a completely playable format, I could imagine it being a big hit with horror YTers and I would watch the crap out of it lol
Ironic how the disc no longer works, and now he game is extinct.
God I want more of this
Genuinely horrific stuff.
The catastrophe crow video messed me up so much I couldn’t allow myself to watch until I knew if it was real or fake 🤣 but I love this so much kinda wish I just let myself think it was real for a bit
Athena P spotted 🫵
Ngl tho the hairy man guy genuinely scared the shit out of me. His lifeless eyes staring at the screen was unnerving.
I agree same. When I close my eyes his stare is there. I need more explanation on what he is lol.
@@Picorinigo I’ve seen some people say in the comments that he’s based off of the Enkidu from the book of Gilgamesh, or he’s just a furry man.
Literally me when phone battery runs out
Time stamp?
@@DynoSkrimisher 28:15
The ending slowly starting to match up with your dream, and all the questions being answered, it gave me chills man.
DAMN,, I didn’t even consider that this could be an unfiction film until you said it outright- this whole thing was so convincing & grounded from start to finish! You got me hook, line, sinker, and the whole damn fishing pole.
Fantastic work as always!
Rarely do I watch a video without checking the comments at some point but I was so lost in this whole thing- like eager to see if you could find it, excited when you ‘found’ the physical disk, and enthralled by the gameplay. I jumped at the submarine part when the dinosaur snapped it’s head towards the window. All that to say, getting to the end & seeing it was fake- my heart Sagan, my heart. It was shattered, and then immediately it remineralized once I fully processed everything. Like what an absolute masterpiece??? You are genuinely one of the few creators on here that feels like they genuinely enjoy the stuff they cover. Its so refreshing to see someone who actively has my similar interests, but has the creative energy to expand on them and actually create/ add to the community. I might not be making sense but raaaaah you are so talented & im glad to bear witness to your content!!!
Also this just showed me how gullible and dumb I really am cos I legit started having false memories of this game; I started to wonder if I too had played this game, now I feel like an idiot seeing this was fake lol
begging for you dudes to release this as an actual game.
same :0
Would love it as a dungeon crawler style game for old amigas
Sadly this is probably just a bunch of pre rendered animations. I would love this as a game though.
@@MakeshiftAutomaton Ik. Id still kill for this to be an actual game like the concept is amazing.
was shocked to see the “an unfiction film” tag pop up at the end because it feels like so much more than smoke and mirrors, it almost feels like it has to be real and he’s just fibbing about it being made up for the video
Dude, you gotta make a horror game or a playable version of this. This is ridiculously well done
The subplot of Henry resembling the creator of the museum in the video game and having to come to terms with inevitable ends, then inviting you to click on the scribbles and let the final copy be burnt in that ester egg of a meteor is beyond poetic.
This perfectly captured both the feeling I’d have playing a game I enjoyed playing but was deeply unsettled by as a child, and also that desperation to not lose something that is impermanent by design, such as life. Loved this as much as I hated it, an incredible story!
SO SAD AT THE REVEAL OF THE LAST BIT. The whole video was so convincing and pant shittingly unnerving I wanted to play it so bad... Seriously well done, I just wish it was playable :')
Ah, but isn't that just the way with unfiction games? Pretty much all of the best ones give you at least a little bit of that "darn, I wish this was a real thing I could play" feeling. It's part of what makes the concept compelling, and is almost a key part of the genre tbh
@@gayrurumon true, but imo a lot of them aren't quite so convincing, or maybe I'm just biased. I feel like Triassic Hall was close enough to the games I did play and that creeped me out that it really struck a chord with me
@@jellocello11 oh yes, it's definitely one of the most well executed and convincing unfiction games I've seen, no doubt
This has instantly become one of my most favorite pieces of web horror.
No supernatural stuff, or William Afton wannabes. Just a lone, buggy 90s horror game, abandoned by the world.
It felt Jumanji/Ringu, except with the cd game being the one dying
As a huge dinosaur nerd, something already felt off when the Quetzalcoatlus in the Cretaceous Hall looked suspiciously modern.
You think that’s crazy? I was tipped off even sooner than that. When Sagan goes to the Triassic part of the exhibit and starts talking about the Megazostrodon, the (I’m assuming) Postosuchus that’s devouring it is shown to be in a bipedal stance. Sure, these days we believe Postosuchus to be bipedal, but if this game was real, and made in the early nineties as Sagan claims, then this pseudosuchian would most likely be depicted as quadrupedal. Iam aware that WWD did have their Postosuchus rear up on its hind legs a few times, and that was supposedly the showrunners toying with the idea of the creature being bipedal in reference to a paper at the time arguing such behavior, but again it was the “early nineties” that this game was supposedly made.
@Targon117 Ooh, good point! I think the rest of the creatures look passable for the period though. Clearly, Sagan is one of us.
@@tricoelacanth1114 Is it sad though that the creature I was most hyped to see was the Camptosaurus that was in the Jurassic hallway? An unappreciated species imo, I chuckled when I saw it posed in the now inaccurate quadruped stance, with the head shape more resembling an iguanodontid than Camptosaurus itself lol
@@Targon117 I was pleasantly surprised to see that one too. Then again, where there's Allosaurus, Camptos will surely follow.
I could forgive the Postosuchus; Chatterjee suggested it could walk on two legs back in the 80s, which was argued against in 1995, before science seesawed again later... I can see either the game being made before that opinion had changed, or just being based on what would at the time have been considered to be slightly outdated info on an obscure-ish animal.
Gregory Paul was illustrating Quetz very similar to today's version back in the 80s, there's a painting of his in the book Dinosaurs Past and Present (1987) that is verrrry close in terms of head shape etc... BUT the game model's color pattern is identical to a real museum model which was built way too recently, and I'm embarrassed that I didn't think twice about it when I saw it.
I was going crazy for the first 5 min convinced that the post was about Eyewitness Dinosaur Hunter. I had spent so many years myself barely remembering that scary point and click dino game my dad let me play in the 2000s.
Great video, I was so immersed
the reveal at the end with the creepy face drawing from earlier being part of that secret was gnarly dude
Especially since it seems like it’s actually meant to represent Enkidu from the story of Gilgamesh, which is all about death and legacy and impermanence and stuff
yeah it scared the shit out of me when that thing popped up LOL
What’s even creepier is that bird song is the last known recording of the doomed Kauai ‘O’o, a bird that was calling for a mate that would never come. That was definitely an intentional choice.
The authenticity of the animations is actually mind-boggling. Insane attention to detail to recreate the quirks these games had
Using the end of the dinosaurs and the decay of the exhibit preserving them coupled with withering sanity of the museum owner as an analogy for lost media is actually incredible. Outstanding work Sagan.
fnaf: dino museum edition
27:30 THE ONE BIRD THAT I LOVE THAT WENT EXTINCT'S LAST RECORDED AUDIO IS IN THE BACKGROUND IVE NEVER BEEN SO HAPPY ARGHGHGHHGHGHG
Damn, you really had me the whole time; genuinely thought we were looking at an actual, obscure 90s game. So many games released back then that went totally under the radar, I could believe something like this existed. Honestly if you wanted to you could probably make a really interesting horror game after seeing what you put together here, that hidden scene at the end with the meteor impact gave me chills.
Rat-a-tat-tat Rat-a-tat-tat
...that and a train engine are what I recall from a children's game made to help train kids to distinguish different noises (say, talking in a crowded theater) 😅
May not be lost, but I can't recall the name.
-------
A more spooky one that I'm near-100% sure is lost media is a point-and-click flash horror mystery in a sepia/noir photorealistic tone. You're a woman called to investigate a house where owners died, and similar stuff & puzzles to the popular Scary House...but there's a story of a girl, that gradually pulls your character in as if they were part of the family/gradually possessed as they piece together clues...by the time all the clues are put together, you're commanded to the bathroom...where the character is fully taken over and slits her throat in a graphic and realistic style...it was submitted on Ugoplayer (when that was a flash place like New Grounds) around fall (maybe Halloween?) and I think was quickly taken down...and Ugoplayer a few years later.
me for 99.9% of the video: oh wow! what a journey that was.... what a weird ending though, why would clicking the codes in game do that---WAIT AN UNFICTION *FILM??*
it took me until he got the disk, and then I was like, waaaaait... you cheeky bastard. Really well done though, the "game" looks super authentic & the storytelling is on point.
You have just perfectly crystallised my own thought process over the last half an hour 😅
Yeah he got me it wasn't unbelievable until the cut scence is when I was like wait a minute
I had been listening to the video while driving, and only saw the Carnosaur scene, so I earnestly believed the dev made a secret that destroyed the game in spite for working on such schlock. Then I saw that part- but seeing the notes I have seen buried in game code, that seems more plausible than not... 😂
Can someone explain what unfiction is please? I'm confused
The eerie call of an extinct animal in the background indelibly heightens the fact that everything will go lost eventually. 27:52
And maybe in a much, much worse way than suffocating on toxic air.
I looked up the word "indelibly", and the use of it here seems kind of ironic. (not meant as a criticism, just an interesting thing I noticed)
@@catbatrat1760 MIGHT have used the word wrong, i just wanna sound smart--
@@lapalomabuteng I mean, I dunno about wrong, just ironic.
the game dev essentially purposefully getting you to erase one of the last remaining copies of the game is awesome
"an unfiction film by sagan hawkes"
I audibly voiced my suprise. I exited the drawing I was using this as background to and everything.
INCREDIBLY well made, and the way you present it, I would download Triassic Hall if it were real.
I had almost literally the exact same reaction lmao. I was ALSO drawing, while watching this vid picture-in-picture. When I read that line, I froze up for a few seconds as I processed it, then immediately pulled up the full window like "hold the FUCKING phone." Suddenly way too compelling for background noise, and my drawing sits abandoned lol
" No One Can Find This "Creepy Dinosaur" Game... "
Sagan: Finds it in the attic
More like; "Fine, I'll make it myself"
I mean- this is how you usually find cursed artefacts
@@masterzoroark6664 They tend to be in the place you’d least expect!
The end speech really hits home in a weird way. I’m an artist, I’ve been studying illustration since I was a kid. And I would always look at the same few artists for inspiration. One of them heavily influenced the style of how I work. To the point where I wonder if it would ever be the same without them.
That artists work is gone from the internet now. All their blogs and posts deleted, and the wayback machine for all their sites that I can track down didn’t archive their images. So it’s just gone.
It’s odd how impactful they were. Just a little fanart blog that got me into my career. But I feel almost like I lost a friend.
can i ask if you remember their name or what fan art for what piece of media they drew? sorry if im being nosey or anything like that im just genuinely pretty curious!
and im sorry you cant find their work anymore. something similar has happened to other artists i personally follow/used to follow but theyre still around online and i can still find their deleted art by looking it up. but now that ive read your comment.. and i hope this doesnt sound really cheesy, the idea that at some point every artist i currently follow/used to follow and such, their work will just be gone completely with no archiving or anything left, that would definitely make me really sad :')
@@ANGELECSTASY no need to be sad, if you can, help archive the work of the artists you like! I didn’t really have the knowledge at the time,
They did a lot of fullmetal alchemist art, in a super unique pen and ink adjacent style. Most of their accounts went by Obersten, there’s a few images floating around still by them but a staggering majority of their work is just gone. There was just pages of it, now you’re lucky If you can find their most popular work reposted on Pinterest. It’s just odd to see someone vanish like that, and I thought it was interesting in comparison to the topic! You aren’t nosy, I probably skimped on the details to be honest.
thats so sad, who was it?
The same thing happened to me. An artist I looked up to just went poof one day. It makes me sad to think about but I'm happy I got to experience their art
The ending sequence is probably one of the bleakest things I’ve ever seen. Everything’s either dead or dying, everything’s gone dark, the sun is only hiding behind what I can only assume is volcanic ash, and it all ends in a blinding bath of light, just like in your “dream” when you, yourself, died.
This is easily a new favorite of mine, fantastic work!
... The twist on this was pure art. I honestly had to watch it a second time just to appreciate everything you did.
I’m also here watching a second time! There’s something so convincing about the setting that has just really stuck with me
@@dottie8361 me as well! I keep thinking about it. Haha it reminded me of playing the museum in vtm:Bloodlines because I was always so sure the dinosaurs would come after me. There’s just something so perfectly universal about a creepy dinosaur game and I never realized it until this. I think it was the dinosaur fixation of the 90s and early 00s lol
27:52 the bird sound is the last recorded kaui o’o before extinction. It’s the last of its species and it tries calling out for a mate with no idea he’s the only one left it’s a really sad sound
that's the most depressing thing i think i've read in over a decade, dang
yep, the pauses are meant for a female to sing along
Game dev walking through a dinosaur exibit: "Hey, y'know what would be terrifying?"
game dev probably had a nightmarish field day with those pop-up dino books
@@ephemeral999 now im picturing someone opening a page, it casually pops up, and they flinch back like they touched a hot stove.
Had me fooled up until that very last part which suddenly became creepy pasta (although the convenience of owning that thing should have tips me off). Bravo.
Hyperlink decay is real and terrifying. Over time, the bits that store the link data can become corrupt by just one character and break the link entirely.
Bit decay in general is real and terrifying and is why I've moved all my media to lossless formats whenever possible. An .mp4 or .jpeg file loses just a handful of bits of data every year but add that up over hundreds or thousands of years and you quickly realize that media preservation is a much more difficult thing than previously imagined.
That's not at all what the cause of hyperlink decay or more accurately link decay is. It's just the fact that as time passes what a link is pointing at can just stop existing as the website/files goes down or changes how they link to pages. It has everything to do with the internet as a whole changing and nothing to do with the data itself being corrupted.
Huh... kinda like DNA deterioration
@@kaijuultimax9407 Just in case you're not joking... "Lossless" formats aren't any more or less prone to the physical decay of storage mediums than any other format. The only difference is that lossless formats of media don't use any forms of compression that would result in some information from a source file being lost or distorted. For example, when exporting a song from a DAW, if you export to MP3, some information will be lost, just not a very noticeable amount. Whereas if you export to FLAC, the output will not lose any information. With this in mind, converting an MP3 to FLAC, for example, will not result in restoring information; you'll just have a FLAC of the MP3's audio, distortion and information loss and all.
So no, "lossy" formats do not decay over time. Storage mediums can and do however, so the only way to ensure digital information is preserved is to keep multiple copies and maintain them.
@@kaijuultimax9407who tf would care about some data a thousand years into the future 😂 like they’ll be living lives in full dive vr and living to be 1000 and you think they care about some vacation photos you took a thousand years ago 😂😂😂😂
Henry got you to crash the game with the "secret" and ended a game he wasnt proud of. I'm not saying it was on purpose BUT that would be funny in a cruel way
I think you’re right. Between that and the Carnotaurus euthanasia bit, it seems like the overarching theme is extinction, both in its inevitability and its necessity. Nothing lasts forever. Nothing is supposed to. Some things, many things even, you need to let die.
Anus unus moment, you suck Markiplier.
I had to delete my comment and read the pin cause it fooled me. I was legit upset that it got “erased” only to realize it didn’t happen. Good job Sagan!!
If you think its stupid then you should check yourself. ignorance is the reflection of stupidity, because nothing is set to stay forever.
@@Dubloon418 No,i want to play a fun game with dinosaurs.
I have the exact same "phobia" I have never heard someone describe it so perfectly, this fear of things being forgotten, to not experience it again, drives me into panic sometimes. Im slowly getting to accept that's how time works, but I still cannot delete anything, I archieve everything.
for ir to stop existing as times passes, it's madness.
Try Taoism
I don’t like things being forgotten either and it’s definitely a weird obsession to have, but I can agree with you. I’ve been trying to look for something for years now but I’m about ready to give up and consider it long and gone media, which is a shame. I’d love to tell about it sometime but I’d rather not now, not here either. All I can really say is that I saw a commercial for it on tv, it being a ringtone of some sorts that you had to text and buy..Think of Psycho Teddy, as the german version of that ringtone mascot song was considered lost media for a while as well. It’s a shame how quickly people seem to forget something existed once, without a trace.
a tip for memories is to make a diary(i mean in physical book) of you, as for material - maybe you could write about it there as well.
@@galaxydeathskrill5607 Ah yeah that's true. Sometimes solutions are so plain and simple that even those can be forgotten about LMAO. I'll definitely try keeping some type of diary or notepad or whatever. Thanks for the hint.
The similarities to Fnaf were so many that if it was real i could see it as one of the games Scott Cawthon used to play as a teen that later subconsciously inspired his games.
29:03 the way he's clicking the landscape but each time it gets closer to the moon and the cursor reacts... love it
i think thats a meteor
I don't think it was the moon. I think it was a meteor.
i’m just speculating here, but i feel like it’s meant to place you in the perspective of an animal watching the meteor approach: the moon is suddenly getting closer and bigger, you can’t get away from it no matter how hard you try. there’s a white-hot flash, and then there’s nothing
@@anonymous-rq2lh Sagan had this
Sequence in a dream, and described it as a light at the end of a tunnel
@@emplikac0007 where did he talk about this? i’d love to hear more of his creative process and inspiration for this project
this is an incredible project honestly, i feel like a real copy of triassic hall is just out of reach, it feels real and playable even if it’s probably just bits and pieces for the video. the fading from prerendered cutscenes to the basic models of actual gameplay with that fuzzy pixelated transition in particular really sells it for me, im still having a hard time believing it’s not a real game. just truly incredible work, it’s awe inspiring.
You know, seeing the honestly weirdly scientifically accurate Quetzalcoatlus in the cretaceous bit should've tipped me off. In the 90s it would've looked a lot more pinheaded.
Truth.
Who you calling pinhead
And that's a problem, this video convinced me that this game used to exist until I saw the quetzalcoatlus.
Edit: I haven't finished watching this video by the way, I went to the comments to see if anyone noticed how out of place the quetz looked.
@@AverageNetizen7908 to be fair, they also have a really up to date Postosuchus and a fairly modern looking Dunkleosteus silhouette, so something was indeed up.
That said, they did nail the 90s dinosaur game atmosphere in other ways. Putting Dimetrodon in the triassic area is something only a 90s educational game would ever do, it's fallen out of style nowadays.
SAME
That secret area actually scared the hell out of me, would NOT play that at night
Honestly the only part which gave away that the game was fake was just how legitimately incredible its grasp of tension and horror was. You did such a great job that your only mistake was being too good at this.
the thing that give away the fake is the end. CD/DVD ROMs cannot overwrite on its own except if the thing somehow could program the drive to spin/read faster, and even then that would likelier to broke the drive.
I have heard a complaint about 2 of the dinos being too modern for the time
@@meyers0781 Well yeah, that too. I was mostly talking about his normal playthrough, not the allegedly secret section with the beast man at the end.
@@cursedryona6265 that and:
-E10+ rating doesn't exist yet at the day (it existed like in 2005 or 2006 for the first time)
-Conspicuously lack of menu UI
@@meyers0781 While true in theory, I did have some disks simply implode by doing very specific things in games. Of course, they were very old and badly stored, which may have played a good part of it, but one in particular had it happen on two different copies following the exact same steps, which was really weird. I really wanted to know what caused it.
Not gonna lie, you had me hook line and sinker for the entire video. I'm sad I can't play this for myself, but you did such an excellent job of keeping the premise believable that I'm not even mad about it. Great job tying the hairy man face from the beginning back in
The realization that all things will eventually die, and how the lost media community tries so hard to dig for any scrap that may have managed to survive hits really hard considering that the game is about the extinction of dinosaurs, and the feeling of powerlessness that comes from the fact that we'll never be able to bring them back to life.
The "secret" in the game erasing the disk data after witnessing what seems to be the impact of the meteorite really drives it home.
We can't make things last forever, but we can look back on the things that we lost.
Extremely solid video, I'm in awe! Definitely would like more content like this.
Yeah, but when you think about it in the context of the story in the video itself, it does make Henry a bit of dick; he hears that someone is looking for a childhood game and tells him to do something if he manages to find a copy, without telling him that doing said sequence will permanently delete the gameXD
@@Mathee...just *after* telling them that he's embarrassed or even ashamed of his work not only on that game, but for his entire time with the company that made it. Would love to see more games from that company if he decides to do more unfiction.
I disagree. Anything is possible so we can't lose our stuff
maybe this sounds a little pretentious, but the way you described the lost media community as searching for “dinosaurs” kind of made me think of paleontologists and the vaguely melancholy vibes that come with that field: because we search for and try to dig up old things, piecing together whatever is left to try and understand what they may have looked like before they died. there’s no way to truly bring these things back in their completely original form, but we find and display them to the public anyway just to remind and teach people that they existed. heck, there’s even people who try to recreate fully-lost media the way paleontologists try to reconstruct dinosaurs and guess what they may have been like when they were alive
Lost media mfs finding out dinosaurs are extinct and there’s nothing they can do:
I ACTUALLY WANTED TO PLAY THAT GAME GRAAAAAA 29:54
SAGAN HAWKES I NEED YOU TO KNOW THAT THIS VIDEO HAS PERMANENTLY CHANGED MY BRAIN CHEMISTRY IN A VERY REAL WAY AND I AM LITERALLY OBSESSED WITH IT AND THE THEMES OF INEVITABLE DEATH THROUGHOUT. this is the first time in a long time a video essay has affected me in this sheer magnitude. as soon as i start my fucking job im giving you my fucking money
REAL
29:45 GDI I was like "Wow!! What a satisfying story! Crazy how that happened in real life"
SAME! XD
Yup lmao.
I just imagine you going to your parents, knocking on the door, shaking impatiently, they open the door "hey-" and then you push past them, run to the attack and start furiously rummaging through everything
Surprisingly good for a fake 'lost media' thing, they're usually way more cheesy or try-hard but you don't even pretend that there's a 'dark backstory' to this one, and it doesn't need it. Imagery of the wild man at the end is very very good. Nice work!
This actually sounds like a great premise for a horror game, though. It'd breathe new life into the "evil animatronics" subgenre.
If only there was one with more of a Chuck E. Cheese vibe, maybe with you watching monitors while maintaining power.
@@LGJ_ProductionsWhere are the puzzles, the exploration and the unique and varied environments doing something like that though?
@macdaddymario I think he's making a joke about fnaf
@@LGJ_Productions That'd just be reviving an old one. I said it'd breathe NEW life into the genre.
Dinosaurs on display at a museum serving as a metaphor for lost media being dug up is pretty clever. I also like the references to Gilgamesh, I think it's allegorically fitting to the overall theme of memory and legend sustaining people (or games) beyond their natural lifespan, frequently resurfacing and just as quickly fading back into obscurity, but always alive so long as there are people tending the archives. I can only imagine how many sleepless nights you poured into bringing this project to life. Tremendously creative production. This is one of the most original video concepts I've seen in years, and your execution was fantastic.
Using the extinction of the dinosaurs as a sort of metaphor for lost media and the whole entropy of it is genius
edit: also Eyewitness Dinosaur Hunter was "My" childhood dinosaur game and legit thought this was going to be a review of it
Gigabased Dinosaur Hunter appreciator. Loved that thing so much as a kid, peak paleo vibes. Good thing I scrolled through the comments looking for other recognizers, I was 100% sure this was it just based on the description, lmao.
Same here. I remember playing that all the time when I was a kid. Actually managed to find a downloadable version that works on modern systems and it was like a blast from the past.
Honestly, turning something like that into a horror game like what they did here seems like almost a no-brainer.
Yeah I played Eyewitness Dinosaur Hunter as a kid as well and immediately thought of it with the description. This game had and interesting and eerie feel to it. I remember it also had a second disc that had 3D landscapes with dinosaurs you could explore.
This is so well done! I genuinely believed this was real and was on the edge of my seat the entire time, watching it at night made it more unsettling for me, I only realized it wasn’t real when I came back to rewatch it today, I hope you make more things like this.
This whole time I couldn't stop thinking about how suspiciously similar to FNAF this concept was, to the point where I started to wonder if maybe Scott had also played this as a kid and took inspiration from it, only to be hit with the end reveal. This is honestly one of the coolest videos I've watched.
That disclaimer at the end hit me like a sledgehammer, you had me convinced until the very end. Wow! Amazing video.
The glitch part made me go "Is this secretly SananHawkes' analog horror series starting point?"
and the end... yep
There ARE other genres than analog horror. If anything, this would be closer to digital horror, but in general, analog horror is not a catch-all term.
yeah that was the moment i stopped watching and unsubbed, wish he would make real lost media
@@Mercuryreal what?? Just appreciate the art he's making lol, the video itself is a great commentary on lost media as a whole... But you do you ig.
@@Mercuryreal You wish that he would... create lost media?
Buddy, I don't think it works like that
28:15 I don’t get scared often but that gave me goosebumps 🥶
oh this is SO cool
i think what really gets me about this one is that there's nothing that really obviously gives this away as unfiction. a few things seem a little weird, or like a convenient coincidence, but they are in the realm of something that COULD happen
this is absolutely amazing. i remember seeing this post and was CERTAIN it was a misremembered memory of 3D dinosaur adventure, since everything described in the post could be attributed to something in the game (creepy museum minigame, minigame where you have to go through a maze, etc). i'm so happy to learn of a piece of forgotten media and to see that it's been restored as a piece of art to the internet.
edit: I WAS FOOLED
Lol. Okay, but did you actually see that post? Was that part real (at least insofar as Sagan made that post for the purposes of this video) or did you confuse it with something else?
I'm curious, because the human brain is really good at convincing itself that certain things are true if they seem to make enough sense, even to the point of just making up a memory out of basically nothing. Recent examples that stand out in my mind are certain facebook posts going around lately featuring AI generated old-timey photos, showing completely fictional events that Did Not Happen, with a bunch of responses under them from elderly users saying things like "I remember watching this on TV!" or even "Yup, I remember this, I was there when it happened". No Grandpa your ass was not "there", there was never any "there" for you to be!
@@gayrurumonI think they meen seeing the post in the video.
Ended the video in awe of how perfectly the story of the game lined up with not only the closing of the game company but the message of the lost media as whole. Didn’t realize it was unfiction till the end spectacular work, definitely earned a subscription from me
The concept of cranky huge animatronics has always terrified me, even when I was small and had only ever met them at amusement parks.
That's what got me into fnaf, too - and got me out of it when things moved away from that atmosphere.
I can totally understand the kid moving away from the screen when it got creepy, I would've been like that too!
EDIT: Okay so it's fictional, wow!! You really captured my childhood there, fooled me. I love this sm
Spoilers:
Had me until the LAST moment. Even with all the internet horror tropes (lost media, liminal spaces, creepy glitches, overall unintentionally unnerving atmosphere and presentation) I didn’t think for a SECOND that this wasn’t real. Genuinely impressive stuff
I shouldn't have read this comment because I fully believed this was real as a fan of Myst and having been born in 85. I could have fully believed this was real.
It's so good!
Read this comment in the first two minutes of the video, video ruined, I'm not gonna watch it.
PLEASE MARK THIS COMMENT AS SPOILERS GEEZ.
Seriously you just ruined the whole video for me, UA-cam was just scrolling through comments and showed me this
I can't believe I never once questioned it, the furthest I came was thinking "wow I can't believe you found out how to beat the game that easily old games like this are usually super cryptic"
Sat down to rewatch it, I kinda hope someone turns this into an actual video game concept cause I would love to play it
Maybe a spoof on lost media/mascot horror/old computer games where you find an old CD of a childhood game and the once educational/kids game turns into horror as you have to escape it
Man, this reminds me of a game I played ONCE before screaming in terror and turning it off. I wanna say it was some maze wandering game with dinosaur jump scares as a game over.
Is it "1916: The Unknown War"?
In retrospect, i should've been more suspicious when it didn't take him 3 days of tinkering to get an old pc game working
that was my first thought when he popped it in lol, i was like "wait would this even work on modern operating systems?"
Oh! Creating things you're not proud, of and the "unplugging" of the ancient, deprecated technology that bites back at you, and the anxiety of not being able to experience everything tying up with the concept of inevitable extintion is quite clever.
DUDE THIS IS SO GOOD !!!?!???? THE IMAGERY, THE SOUND DESIGN, THE ATMOSPHERE, LIKE THIS IS GENUINELY TOP TIER LOST MEDIA HORROR. YOU GENUINELY HAD ME FOR THE ENTIRE VIDEO