A demo for a lost videogame based on George Orwell’s 1984 has emerged from the memory hole

In 1996, a US studio called MediaX began working on a videogame inspired by George Orwell’s 1984. It was called Big Brother, and you played a member of the resistance called Eric Blair (which was Orwell’s real name), breaking into and sabotaging government installations across 12 levels with hundreds of puzzles. Yes, they were turning Orwell’s classic dystopian novel into an adventure game.

MediaX’s Big Brother was canceled in 1999 or 2000, possibly because the licence had expired before the game could be completed. It had been shown at E3 in 1998, with a release date of September that year and a $30 price tag, but at some point after that it was delayed and subsequently thrown down the memory hole.

A demo from January of 1999 has recently surfaced on the Internet Archive, though before you race to download it I’d take a watch of the video embedded above. It’s an adventure game of the “find wrench” and “turn valve to adjust water pressure” variety, only in first-person, as if someone remade Myst with Quake’s graphics. Apart from the posters declaring WAR IS PEACE and HATRED IS POWER it doesn’t feel particularly Orwellian, nor does it look like a particularly interesting videogame.

I’m glad it’s been preserved for the sake of history, but if it’s a properly dystopian videogame you’re looking for then Papers, Please already exists. And there’s another official adaptation of 1984 on the way, with a Steam page that declares it’s been adapted “by the Narrative Designer of Subnautica, Talos Principle and FTL.”

Jody’s first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia’s first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He’s written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody’s first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he’s written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.