The Catamites is a guy who makes freeware games. If you’ve played at least one of his games, chances are you were inspired to seek out more, or maybe to create your own. The games of The Catamites are funny, surreal, boundary-pushing, and full of wonder over the possibilities of videogames and the worlds they can create. They often feature quirky dialogue, strange characters, handcrafted art (pen and paper, clay, dioramas, Legos), and a tendency to toy with game tropes and genre conventions. The Catamites is building one of the most exciting and original bodies of work in gaming.

The Catamites burst onto the scene in 2009 with the Lego-based adventure game Biggles on Mars, and has gone on to craft such instant indie classics as Murder Dog IV: Trial of the Murder Dog, Space Funeral, Drill Killer, and Pleasuredromes Of Kubla Khan. His most recent game is the amazing Goblet Grotto, made in collaboration with J. Chastain.

Like a game design ninja, The Catamites emerges from the mists periodically to deliver a new game and send shockwaves through the community. There is little to no hype about his games before they are released, and he has seldom shared any insight into his development process. This is an author who is truly making games to please himself. But each release is a revelation and a new demonstration of what can be achieved with videogames that can’t be replicated in any other medium.

Almost all of The Catamites’ games are available to download on Game Jolt.

The Catamites has rarely been interviewed, so I was ecstatic when he agreed to answer some questions for me.

Hello, and thank you so much for this opportunity! It’s really an honor. First off, can you tell me a little bit about where you grew up? Were videogames a part of your childhood? What gaming experiences had the most impact on you?

I was first exposed to the x-toxin - which you call “videogames”- when an uncle gave me his old Gameboy with some games for it, I think Tetris and Super Mario Land. The latter definitely had an impact as I remember being pretty bewildered by it. You’d jump up and hit some block and a little blob thing would come flying out and play a sound and leave a little incomprehensible message which I thought said LUP. It was all very self-assured which convinced me that it knew what it was doing and there must be some context I was just missing.

I grew up in Inchicore which is a suburb of Dublin in Ireland, a nice place though quiet, but remember having the sensation pretty quickly that everything in the world happened in America (equivalently, JP) and that the only things that made it to these shores were like the 8th-generation bootleg derivative leavings of real culture and had been poorly replicated too many times to be anything but vague outlines. The blocky abstract little Gameboy sprites were my friend. I have lots of old memories but they’re all pretty tedious.

I only realised it recently but a lot of the videogames I played were actually other people’s, like friends, relatives, someone’s absent older brother, a cousin who had to sit exams and had his SNES games passed out to younger relations, rental copies, this possibly also contributed to feeling of something being lost.

Why do you think you started making games? Is there a developer who has particularly inspired you?

When I was very young I drew a lot of comics with a friend which were all basically an attempt to replicate videogame experiences, lots of blocky little guys moving sideways across flat plains and shooting rayguns at each other. I’m still not sure why these ideas appealed to me.

I downloaded RPG Maker in secondary school for reasons I don’t remember and kind of instinctively fell into making very generic things. There’s some kind of thrill to making your own little guys in charas-project.net and having them walk around a little place, it’s like there’s just enough rudimentary rules (WALK, TALK, BATTLE) to be able to extrapolate a little world and fill in the gaps yourself.

My younger brother also used RPG Maker and I remember he got really into constructing secret rooms for a castle he’d made. If you clicked on a certain chair you’d be teleported to a little dungeon filled with angry skeletons moving randomly around and if they touched you you got teleported to the skeleton dimension and could talk to them and buy special skeleton weapons. The perfect videogame!!

I remember being inspired to try and make my own GFX and make stranger games by playing Wilfred The Hero by Brandonabley and Psychosomnium by Cactus, but I didn’t play that many other games. I hung around on the one RPG Maker forum all the time and only knew about the stuff posted on that forum which limited access and also honestly preferred daydreaming about my own stuff to playing other people’s. I’m shit!

What games do you like to play these days? What are your all-time favorites?

I don’t play that many anymore, I work in an office all day looking at a screen and then come home and there’s gamemaking and emails and things, which are also on a screen, so the prospect of spending more time looking at a screen makes it hard to get into the right mindset for playing a videogame. Sometimes I play Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup or Dragon Quest which are both kind of brutal RPG things about being chased and killed in horrible labyrinths by monsters. I’m really bad at them so there’s basically no time investment, it’s just seeing what interesting stuff you can find before being murdered.

That sounds like a really good description of Goblet Grotto, actually. Goblet Grotto seems to mash up everything that was ever great about classic RPGs— the sense of wonder and discovery, the danger, the arcane lore found in the manuals that you had to actually use. Is it your tribute to the classics? Is it your roguelike?

The weird thing is I never played any old WRPGs, Stone Soup and Nethack are my only experiences, but it was definitely inspired by those. I started working on it for the Super Friendship Forum “Mysticism” pageant and the idea was to play on stuff like the [P]ray button in Stone Soup. When you kill something in that game you have the option to either eat it or sacrifice it to an evil god, and since food is easy to come by on the upper levels and goes bad quickly I kind of absentmindedly got into the habit of ritual devil worship despite not really knowing what it was meant to accomplish. “If doing something makes a number go up and nothing immediately horrible is happening then it was a good decision” - the cardinal law of videogames. The original joke of Goblet Grotto was encouraging people to engage in this kind of banally awful ritualistic behavior for vague reasons as they explore a brutal hole, which is maybe kind of trite but whatever. It expanded horribly from there.

How is it you came to collaborate with J. Chastain and what was that process like?

Chastain sent me an e-mail after Space Funeral came out, which thrilled me as I love her comics. We talked a good bit about VIDEOGAMES and it was a big impact on me & got me interested in the more “gamey” stuff - strangeness arising from shifts of representation, convoluted GUIs, real-world things abstracted into grotesquerie, this is why things like Murder Dog IV and Crime Zone and Drill Killer were playing more with structure than what I was doing before. Eventually I showed her the Goblet Grotto prototype and she offered to collab on it. It was a cool process but a strange one as I don’t think either of us are naturally collaborative people, so we’d kind of work on our own things and put them all together at the end, I think this is one of the reasons that game is so bizarrely structured, it also became almost a running thing to see how far we could keep up this decadent work method. So it gradually turned from a joke about this super-specific dopey RPG thing into this general dumping ground for ideas about malevolent game spaces. I enjoyed the process a lot tho and it got me working harder. SUPER EAGLE was based on a comic she was doing that was briefly an RPG Maker game, based on either Where Eagles Dare or possibly The Guns Of Navarone (I think these are the same film??). I love the art for both of those games and feel sorry that it was buried in things that are mostly unplayable.

Can you tell me about the runes in Goblet Grotto (they remind me a bit of the alien “language” in the old game Captain Blood)?

They were definitely based on Captain Blood and Chastain’s explication of same at mu-foundation.blogspot.com, but another big influence was Famicon’s “MyZaza” video, which had this awful, squat, gibbering little cartoon person being ordered around by voice prompts and haltingly responding. I liked the idea of this kind of ambiguous relationship with the player character, where it’s at once this kind of neuter probe you use to explore the universe and also has this affective dimension that kind of grinds against that: like Pac-Man Adventure 2 where you have to continually shoot the main character with pellets to make him, weeping, crawl through the horrible bio-industrial command zone. This weird coercive dimension that highlights the hostility of the gameworld, where the probe person dissolves like a tooth in a glass of cola, as well as the odd ways you both control and identify with the little man onscreen. The frantic output of ambiguous, semi-comprehended sigils was very funny to me also and I liked the idea of having to gauge important game states (starving, crippling depression, etc) in this distressing and unusable way.

I understand that a lot of people playing the game are hearing loud and continuous honking sounds from their toad. This is an error and can be fixed by restarting your computer. If problem persists please return toad to source factory.

You tend to work with handmade visuals. Whether Legos, paper cutouts, clay figures, drawings scanned in from a piece of paper, or even your digital art, the visual components of your games always feel handcrafted. Do you make things in any other mediums besides games? What other artistic mediums interest you and inspire you?

I don’t make anything else, I kind of just like the juxtaposition aspect of videogames. Even in normal ones there’s this emphasis on building a image of what’s going on - in terms of game states, narrative, locations, etc - by comparing different discrete objects, like the difference between the “GUI” and the “little guy moving around” areas of the screen, maps, [SHOP] screens, text, external info, all kind of playing off each other. Self-contained little tiles repeated or broken up to denote different types of terrain. Old ASCII games with messages and dialogue that’s also just concretely embodied in the level environment, etc. Doing anything directly with drawings or words or cardboard stuff makes me feel weird and cramped because there’s a feeling you have to focus on the minutiae of each thing rather than just using the weird systemising aspects of videogames to give coherence to whatever garbage you throw in. Write HORSE on a piece of paper that has some four way walk system and it’s a horse, write CORPSE FACTORY on a different piece and have your horse disappear when bumping into it and there’s a little environment already. I do like music and books but I’m kind of overawed by them whereas with videogames who cares, make a horse simulator.

I feel like we are kind of at the start of a new renaissance of sorts in independent games. Are there any young developers doing work today that is inspiring for you?

I don’t really play much so I’m just kind of abstractly amazed by most of the new games coming out on freeindiegam.es, etc. I like the general impression of games made by people who are indifferent or hostile to canon history of vidcon medium to this point, like most of the Twine things which are about things that aren’t other videogames, an important leap. I still just listen to music and hoard scrap fragments for when I make things.

Kind of a biased aside but I feel excited about stuff like Quimdung as well, idea that all the big console companies hopping the “indie” “crowd sourcing”” train will lead to resurgence of all this strange scrappy shareware made by weirdos, drip tar and piss all over pristinely minimalist iconsoles.

Just following up on the new developer thing — it’s not that I’m resistant to influence or feel sniffy about videogames (or at least exciting free ones), it’s more that I don’t actually like playing videogames at all. My favourite ones are where you have to kinda build up and refresh your image of this startling little self-contained world from a handful of mystery scraps, but that’s also why I like “shitty” or “blank” vidcons with minimal affect. Good ones unsettle me for some reason to do with levels of private emotional intensity being channeled thru these strange interaction structures, feeling yourself change as you engage with opaque structures. “When you gaze into the void..” - DarkNietzche87 but there’s something in the way you engage with these things that gives me the willies and I guess it’s why I always think of videogames as having this vague malevolent quality. Trying to understand the little world and being taken apart yrself in the process, it’s not that I have any moralistic objections to this as it could be the most interesting thing about videogames, but I’m not equal to these bold new experiences.

Space Funeral is pretty much an indie classic at this point. Why do you think this is the most widely played of your games?

I believe the freeware videogame scene was hungry to embrace the “moe” aesthetic in all forms and guises and this videogame came out at the exact right time to capitalise on this. Leg Horse was a HIT. I attribute all my terrific success to the essential purity of my soul.

Timing and the purity of your soul aside, do you think there was a sense of familiarity people felt about the traditional JRPG trappings, and the MSPaint art, so they were more comfortable embracing Space Funeral than with your previous games?

I think it’s like how Final Fantasy VII is the most popular of the series, the stock JRPG template is a magic box that lends an illusion of coherence to whatever stupid shit you happen to throw at it, the more arbitrary the better. Mark E Smith’s description of repetitive music with really weird vocals sitting on top applies directly here. Like this really banal accumulation thing that can support any kind of content / can do anything in music as long as it has a 4/4 beat and you’ll still be viable support act for the Ramones.

I think it’s popular because it kind of simulates what I remember about playing JRPGs without most of the horrible tedious shit that forms the actual experience of playing those games. There’s the bare bones of a plot and little cartoon guys moving around and scraps of dialog that don’t really mean anything but it all seems reasonably assured of itself and there’s that accumulation system under it so you can just kind of drift through in a fugue and look at things and read jokes. I also stole several excellent songs for the soundtrack.

I think some of what people love about your games is the effortlessness—apparent or actual—with which you create them. Veggie Tales 3D may be the epitome of this. Do you prefer making a game quickly or spending more time developing it? Is the decrease in the frequency of your output of late because you are spending more time with your games, or is it just due to other circumstances?

I got a job, so it’s tougher to go on a tear and make quick things. Also, it takes longer to make things in Unity, I’m still not used to the scripting. But I’ve always kind of played with long, impossible projects in the background and then given up and puked out something quick to relieve myself! The quickest one was Twenties Flappers Vs The Mummy btw and Veggie Tales 3D was modeled on that working method, a single piece of paper used for all the GFX and everything thrown out as quickly as possible. It was supposed to inaugurate a whole bunch of quickly shot out papergames with minimal thought involved but I got sick of it halfway through.

I generally end up feeling embarrassed about short things that I just build to amuse myself but it’s like building things from paper and paint, the scrappiness of it all forms a corrective to my natural pedantry, and I enjoy the first feelings of throwing ideas around.

You’ve been working in Unity recently. What do you like about it? You going to stick with it for a while?

I like making 3D things but I dunno why, it’s probably hurtful to the imagination or something, like how all the different ways of communicating info through videogames suddenly devolved into a choice between the stock 3RDPERSON / 1STPERSON camera and movement decisions on the consoles, with all the different types of content mediated through those. But I’m still kind of attracted to that idea and to sensations of moving little guys through 3D space.

I believe Jungle Max was your first game in Unity, but it was Pleasuredromes of Kubla Khan where you really mastered using it to create an explorable space, which I think is what Unity does best. Was Pleasuredromes developed quickly? What inspired you to make it?

It was done for a 7 day contest on saltw.net, along with the vgood Twine game Weird Tape In The Mail, although in my defence I only really had time to work on two of those days. I think it was based on a joke in the book “Against The Day” where one of the characters gets work performing in a whiteslavery street theatre routine put on in the Chinatown district, where prurient rich white people get to watch in titillated horror as women pretend to be dragged screaming into the sewers by Yellow Peril types, my god, those perverse orientals, who can fathom their depraved minds, koff, koff, hem. I liked the idea of this ludicrous theme-park performance acting as horrible mirror image of ideology and desire, like those Disney animatronic things with the kids of all nations. It later morphed into this other thing.

The stuff about Joe Walmart was based on an old Ken Levine interview at the time of the original Bioshock about how videogame players wouldn’t want to experience such a rich and meaningful story if you weren’t able to kill mutants,  as well as some video I saw once about “how to be a game designer”” which advised the viewer- with the world-weary cynicism of one who has truly ‘seen it all’! - that people in Walmart don’t care about art or themes. I was delighted by the idea of all these gentle, sensitive corporate vidcon designers trying to make Important Art but being held back from their task by howling prole morlocks. Let my people go.

Pleasuredromes is a fine example of your persistent interest in edutainment. It would have been a perfect fit on the Games 4 Schools website! Where does this interest stem from?

I like the ambiguity of function of that stuff… With regular videogames most of the focus is still on “having fun” and so a lot of effort is put into making you like and engage with what’s happening, through presentation and “flow” and careful dripfeeding of rewards and prizes, so they have this kind of needy, cringing, servile aspect that can feel very revolting and suffocating. Edutainment titles are like those overly-detailed German truck simulators, or the stock software that comes with your computer, things that kind of blur the line between videogames and neutral application programs with some other specialised function. For example many videogames have a linear nature that relies on concentrated and consistent effort while the edugames I have played were mainly bundles of unrelated minigames spread laterally around, demonstrating a laudable indifference to concepts of progress or accomplishment. The relentlessly artificial interests that they need to assume on the part of the player (“>Tell me more about these colourful mosaics”) also aids in the impression of highly specialised objects sitting slightly apart from human life and regarding it with wary indifference, like cows.

There are probably a lot of reasons to be wary of the kinda Reithian values embedded in this stuff but even then I find it more liberating than more pure entertainment, which demands that you not only do what it tells you but that you LIKE it at the same time. The Games4Schools website is officially no longer canon as I forgot the password some time ago.

After Games4Schools came the mysteryzone website on geocities (which seemed like a perfect fit for The Catamites), and now your games’ current home on the web is harmonyzone.org, is that correct? By the way, I love the NES worldmaps page on mysteryzone and still look at it every once in awhile.

I enjoy the geocities ethos of innumerable disorganised web 1.0 experience units but wanted to be able to upload my videogames there as well and had been reading something C Bren wrote about sites (http://seminal.us/tips.html) that would be at least slightly more autonomous than the free stock ones. Harmony Zone is my canon web fortress at the moment.

I noticed that you added Twine to the Resources page on harmonyzone. I’d love to see a Twine game from you. Your writing is so unique and dialogue is such a big part of many of your games. Have you made anything with Twine?

I’m uncomfortable with the directness of text and prefer to communicate everything via funny cartoon animals. It’s like the juxtaposition thing again of directly represented text vs text as component in some looser structure that gives me more wriggle room for getting things across, like having a little plastic shipwreck for your octopus to live in to mitigate the fear of being spied on by predators. I’m the octopus in this metaphor.

I want to mention A1 Reviews. I followed it for a while before I was made aware that it was your work, and you take no credit for it on the blog. I have to say, it is just amazing. Sometimes it is a satire on game reviews, but other times it is sincere look at work you admire. It often feels like a dip into your stream-of-consciousness. Why don’t you explicitly associate it with The Catamites? What is the purpose of this blog for you?

I wanted the site to be an autonomous IP to up the market resale value. It was purchased by prominent videogame developer in February for use in a viral multimedia campaign. I won’t say who bought it but his name rhymes with “fon blow”.

The central purpose of the site was making jokes and whiling away the time. The game review format was stolen from my friend Rusalka-Mask / cicadamarionette.com since it seemed like a funny, elastic structure to dump all these scraps of thought into.

Those games by Magical Zoo look awesome and one can really see the influence on your work. Have you ever had a chance to actually play Golden Grave or any of their other games?

I never even tried, emulating Japanese adventure games from the 80’s seems like a task in itself aside from the problems in playing them when I don’t actually know any Japanese  It’s nice to see these cool little rabbitholes while acknowledging that you’ll never have the time to explore them properly, like William Blake’s prophetic works or knowing astronomy or playing Dwarf Fortress. They’re still out there.

I admire Dwarf Fortress as well, though I can’t play it. Speaking of which, about these long, impossible projects you’ve worked on in the background… can you tell me about one?

I’d rather not, they’re all the kinds of things you look back on and feel gross about. Imagined projects draw on your own mental image at the time of who you are and what’s worth doing and so they have a very low shelflife, it’s like the famous cliche about seeing pictures of your old haircuts. Whereas things you’ve made have to incorporate some bit of reality just because you can’t be too precious if you want to finish something so you have to disengage superego a bit.

For a long time I’ve wanted to ask you: Was there a Murder Dog 1-3? I once saw a screenshot that looked suspiciously like an earlier adventure of our favorite canine supervillain.

Murder Dog 1 was a collab with Tales Of Games that was a side-scrolling murder-em-up, like the NES Robocop games. Murder Dog 2 was a vague dreamy story I was playing around with after the first one collapsed that had to do with navigating the dog through a sort of maze of perception and memory after an anti-MD cabal mount a psychogeographic assault on our hero. Murder Dog IV was made for a SuperFriendshipClub forum pageant about “justice” since I still had the character lying around and was lazy, it was supposed to be based on Bertolt Brecht’s “Trial Of Lucullus” but got progressively dopier as I worked on it and the murdering parts came to the foreground. My favourite part of franchise trivia is the title screen one of the ToG’s guys did for the first one which suggested the existence of multiple identical Murder Dogs, just like the Battletoads.

Are there other unfinished (or finished but unreleased) Catamites games sitting on a hard drive somewhere?

Classified… Illegal information…

Your most recent releases were a pair of small games for Quimdung’s free GameDog project for mobile phones. Girl Cube and Magic Wand both seem to tease and toy with the player. And I think they both comment on inevitability and predictability in videogames. What was the inspiration for these?

Just the idea of malevolent shovelware being produced for this unsettling console I thought was funny. Magic Wand is kind of an arcade thing based on grinding slowly around checkerboard rooms filled with bombs and monsters. Girl Cube is a dating sim based on pictures I saw of the Girlfriend Construction Kit for DOS. GameDog is A+ console software which has been heavily championed by Shigeru Miyamoto and John Romero along with many other famous, popular people. You are missing out on the “new zeitgeist” if you don’t play and talk about it all the while and will certainly die alone when it becomes world’s only topic of conversation.

Do you currently have any games in development or is there anything on the horizon?

No.

The Catamites has achieved something of a legendary status among indie gamers and game developers. I’ve spoken with a number of developers who cite you as a direct inspiration for them to make games. You know how there are authors that are referred to as “writer’s writers”? I think you may be an indie developer’s developer. So, how do you feel about being an inspiration to a bunch of people?

[silence, vague hissing and crackling from other end of phone etc]

Hm, there seem to have been some technical difficulties there.  Ok, I have one more question for you. As someone who’s made a lot of games, what advice do you have for any budding indie developers out there?

YOU MUST CREATE A VIDEOGAME OR BE ENSLAVED BY ANOTHER MAN’S.

POSTSCRIPT: You may have noticed that, in the above article, the link to A1 Reviews takes you to a tumblr error page. Shortly after this interview was wrapped up, the site disappeared from the net. I contacted The Catamites to find out exactly what happened. Here is his explanation:

“Sorry to inform that A1 died peacefully in his sleep after I started feeling gross about identifying more & more with my own grotesque fantasy doppelganger.”

Luckily for all of us, the Wayback Machine saved a snapshot of the site as it was on April 20, 2013.

#thecatamites #gjinterview #interview #spacefuneral