There is a submerged cave at Greece's Mani peninsula said to be where Orpheus descended after the shade of Eurydice; today, according to one tour guide, it's where swimmers like to stop and have a shit
www.ft.com/content/6c96...
I'm in the FT magazine this weekend, writing on one of my favourite subjects
There is a submerged cave at Greece's Mani peninsula said to be where Orpheus descended after the shade of Eurydice; today, according to one tour guide, it's where swimmers like to stop and have a shit
www.ft.com/content/6c96...
I'm in the FT magazine this weekend, writing on one of my favourite subjects
This is somehow the most haunting bit of in-game lore I have ever read.
A real honour to write something for Jacob's new book, and a real pleasure to have an excuse to carry out this particular investigation
A third of the way through the Anachronox demo, the player encounters a hulking alien merchant. “My sorrow runs deep,” the merchant, whose name is Demonstrare, says. “I will only exist for the short duration of this demo. I do not exist in the full version. “Write the company. Tell them that you want me in the full version.” What Demonstrare, even with his curse of self-awareness, did not anticipate was that if anyone did ask Ion Storm to bring him over to “the full version,” it wouldn’t have mattered. The demo shipped on a disc stuck to the cover of a PC Gamer — where it shared space with now-forgotten
titles like Throne of Darkness and The Corporate Machine — four months after Anachronox itself had been released, and three months after Ion Storm’s parent company had shut down the studio. Demonstrare never made it to Anachronox. And while twenty-five years later the game can run on modern hardware, the demo does not. Demonstrare is gone. Recently, I asked Richard Gaubert, the writer of Anachronox, if the developers ever heard anything about Demonstrare. Gaubert didn’t even remember the character.
Here is a little bit of @duncanfyfe.net's afterword for "How Can We Bear to Throw Anything Away?"
BACK ALL WILL RISE on KICKSTARTER if you're into
💜 citizen sleeper x ace attorney
🔥 revenge against the epstein class
🤑 marxist-animist weirdness
🃏 card-based narrative
🇮🇳 set in alternate india
✨ dreams of dead gods
🍃 branching stories
✊ WE NEED YOUR SUPPORT
www.kickstarter.com/projects/spe...
Chapter 1 of Moby Dick, page 1 The phrase ‘Call me Ishmael’, the first sentence of the book, is highlighted in blue, with careful highlighting on the very big C at the start. Above this, written in ballpoint pen ‘His name’
Love the glimpse into the beautiful mind that notated this used copy of Moby Dick I got
14 years ago we accidentally hired a genius to write the script for 80 Days. Now she’s narrative director on a deck-builder about billionaire busting.
Check out All Will Rise:
"rich dipshit owner doesn't understand the industry he's bought into and clumsily destroys what made it good" feels less like a narrative unique to the washington post and more like the music that's been playing in the background of all our lives for at least 40 years
in 2026, let's bring back the concept of "selling out" and once again make it contemptible
I think it's important to know that an oral history of Tim Curry's greatest line delivery exists
here it is
(and yes, it was his first take, and yes, they kept it anyway because how could you not)
26 // Space is the final frontier and it’s where Tim Curry’s Soviet Premier wants to go in Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3. You can learn more than you ever wanted to know about the game’s most infamous scene in this oral history from @duncanfyfe.net.
videogameresearchlibrary.com/an-oral-hist...
Only in print (and extremely beautiful there), my profile of Formula 1's sim racing champion, Jarno Opmeer:
essesmag.myshopify.com/products/ess...
On the Little Mermaid's missing ending — why no children's author can agree on how the story should end
www.ft.com/content/385c...
On trying to find Roger Ebert's favorite video game and what his affection for it tells us about how we approach art:
remapradio.com/articles/a-w...
On the foundation and fallout of Disco Elysium: how two Estonian novelists' successes and failures in literature led to the creation of a video game masterpiece, and an endless font of strife
www.ft.com/content/5ae5...
Anyway here are the four pieces, you don't have to read all of them:
In a world where this makes no economic sense, I like to think of I read this nomination as a validation of that.
Increasingly, the only kind of writer I want to be is the one who does two to four pieces of good writing a year, and that's it. You don't need to hear from me all the time: the work is enough, also nobody needs that much of it.
But: I really do believe that four pieces a year ought to be a perfectly normal amount for a writer to publish. Four pieces is a totally normal amount to want to READ from a writer in a year. Actually that number is too high. This nomination is for TWO of the four pieces, and that's great.
This nomination — a second consecutive one! for journalism! — is so appreciated, not least because I had a grand total of FOUR pieces published this year, which I worried is really not very many. (I spent most of this year writing things to be published in 2026, 2027 and beyond.)
🎉 #NewYorkGameAward nominees for Games Journalism:
Duncan Fyfe @duncanfyfe.net
Felipe Pepe @felipepepe.bsky.social
Jackson Tyler @abnormalmapping.bsky.social
Joseph Earl Thomas
Lewis Gordon @lewisgordon.bsky.social
Nicanor Gordon @nicanor.bsky.social
People Make Games @chrisbratt.bsky.social
The far right is obsessed with Lord of the Rings and Musk keeps posting about "hobbits" because modern scientific racism owes more to fantasy worlds and gaming systems than genetic science, and they see both as effective mediums for right-wing propaganda www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...
This was one of the all-time bangers of deep dive journalism from Waypoint. I was a part of Sierra fandom and closely followed these developments as they happened, and it's unreal to see it retold but with all of the wild, crazy financial business shit laid bare.
Rediscovered this electric article from 2020 by the great @duncanfyfe.net about the death of Sierra, a studio that was so so important to my childhood.
And all your favourite characters from the movies are here
Friends, I am in the market for editing work at the moment. I really enjoyed a stint editing stories for BBC Future earlier this year and am currently looking for more such opportunities! Anything from news & features to book chapters and so on. I'm game.
Please share!
For the FT this weekend, I wrote about the foundation and fallout of Disco Elysium: how two Estonian novelists' successes and failures in literature led to the creation of a video game masterpiece, and an endless font of strife.
www.ft.com/content/5ae5...
