Anime

Anime is an oddity: an unfinished experiment from 2001, built with Game-Maker, the MS-DOS game-construction kit sold by Recreational Software Designs in the early nineties, which let hobbyists assemble their own titles without programming. It began life as a side branch of a larger project and only surfaced years later, when an archive of its authors' old games was recovered and passed into digital preservation collections.

On paper it is a top-down shooter. You pilot a small spaceship that moves in the four cardinal directions and carries three weapon systems: twin lasers, a wide energy beam that forces the ship to halt while it fires, and a turbo booster that leaves a decaying trail of fire behind you. The authors squeezed some genuinely clever tricks out of the engine — the ship has momentum while moving and shooting, something Game-Maker did not properly support out of the box.

The catch is that this is the entire inventory. There is one map, no enemies and no objective. You drift over an abstract landscape assembled from chunky 20-by-20-pixel colour blocks — a deliberately minimalist look its creators compared to games like Rez — and you try out what each weapon does. After a few minutes you have seen everything there is to see.

So is it worth launching at all? As a game, no. As a historical document, quietly yes. The community around Game-Maker produced piles of half-finished prototypes and most of them are gone for good; this one survived, and it captures a promising idea at the exact moment its makers walked away from it. It is a sketch rather than a painting, and it is fairest to approach it that way.

If that kind of software archaeology appeals to you, Anime runs on oldgame.cz straight in your browser, no installation needed.