lIn January 2020, players of Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time stumbled upon a buried starship: a fully functional “Arwing” fighter from another classic Nintendo game, Star Fox 64. The Arwing was added as a programmer’s shortcut to, in creature, teach a dragon to fly. Once the dragon was in the air, the ship was hidden in the source code of Ocarina of Time, where hackers unearthed it 22 years later.
“It’s amazing to me that it was there all along — it just took a lot of digging to find it,” said Billy Basso, a Chicago game developer. “It’s completely unimportant, but it helps people get attached to how games are made, the creators behind them, and the time and place. It connects you to history in a way.” Basso hopes to make similar connections with Animal Well, an eerie pixel-art cave system whose creator hopes there are still plenty of secrets left to uncover ten years from now.
In Animal Well, you play as a squishy emoji-esque critter in a world of “ambiguously hostile” larger organisms that range from giant ghost dogs to extremely creepy flamingos. There are no level-ups or traditional weapons, as in a horror game like Resident Evil, “you never feel able to dominate your environment.” Rather, progress is about using deceptively domestic cartoon objects like Frisbees and yo-yos to interact with other animals and prevent them from becoming their dinner.
While Animal Well’s twisting subterranean geography is reminiscent of Metroid, interactions with creatures riff on the whimsical item puzzles of point-and-click adventures like Monkey Island, albeit with different solutions per puzzle. Some are pretty obvious: dogs go well with Frisbees, for example. Others, Basso hopes, will take years to unravel. Animal Well is a single player game, but players may still need to work together, if only by exchanging theories on forums and social media. Basso also plans to encrypt the source code so that players can’t hack into the secrets, as they did with Ocarina of Time.
This eclipse isn’t just for the challenge. Animal Well is a silent protest against the pitiful state of preserving video games in an online era, mainly focused on live service games that are only playable as long as publishers keep the servers running. “Even with the PS3 and Xbox 360 generations, I’m having trouble signing into those accounts, downloading games, or patching them,” Basso says. “It’s already a problem, and it will be so much worse for the next generation.”
Animal Well, on the other hand, is built to last. “When I’m making puzzles that might take 10 years to solve, I want the game to be playable in 10 years.” The game doesn’t rely on third-party tools like Unity, which can lose compatibility over time, and Basso may end up hosting it itself rather than leaving it to a digital retailer like Steam. Animal Well is also designed to run more independently of your PC’s OS or configuration than other games, to get around compatibility issues.
Basso plans to release Animal Well in a finished state, with no updates or downloadable extras to boost sales after launch. Like games from before the broadband revolution, he wants it to feel “like this physical artifact that has already hidden everything in plain sight”.
Where the fossilized Arwing from Ocarina of Time was an accidental circumstance, Animal Well is an intentional time capsule, a haven from the creator’s daydreams and nightmares that invites further discussion of the video game community’s struggle to protect its own history. It’s a fascinating project, and a moving one. “The world will change around the game, and the way it interacts with the game will change,” Basso noted. “But not the game itself.”