Cyberchess

Chess with holographic pieces and neon design should be cool. Cyberchess from 1992 thought so too, but reality was soaked in pixels and frustrations.

It's classic chess with a futuristic wrapper. You can play against the computer or another player, you see the board from a three-dimensional perspective, a perspective that sometimes confuses more than it entertains. The graphics boast a cyberpunk look — dark board, glowing pieces, stripes and scrawls on the screen. During the game it beeps at you like the computer is slowly dying. No crude MIDI orchestra, just sterile electronic tinkering.

The mechanics are clear — normal chess rules, the computer plays stupidly at low levels, at higher ones it puts up a fight. The interface isn't intuitive. Entering moves is tedious, the board overview isn't optimal — precisely that pseudo-3D perspective slows you down and forces you to calculate where exactly each knight actually is. At the easiest level it's pleasant to play, higher difficulty levels assume you don't trust your own eyes at all and you're guessing in the dark.

Cyberchess isn't a bad chess engine, it's more of a trainer for boring lessons where everyone pretends they're having fun with the visual effects. In the nineties there were perhaps a few people fascinated by the combination of chess and sci-fi aesthetics, but for the average player it was entertainment for about fifteen minutes.

Playing it today is mainly because there's nothing else — or you want to see how people thought the future looked. Emulation in a browser doesn't cost you even the time I spent writing this paragraph. Ideal for archivists of cyberpunk aesthetics, not for chess players.