What is an obscure piece of media or videogame that you think nobody else here has heard of?

I swear I'm the only person in the world who has heard of the game "Threads of Fate" for the PlayStation 1. It's the most underrated game I've ever played and deserves more love than it has ever gotten.

I got this. Someone, please prove me wrong. I'll PayPal you $82.76 if you find this.

There's a cartoon from the 80s (could be late 70snor early 90s) called Howard The Duck.

You'll never find it, because of the wildly popular movie bearing the same name.

The "Howard the duck" I'm referring to was a cartoon movie that was about a Mallard duck who got separated from his flock while they were migrating south for the winter.

Howard finds himself in NYC for the winter, where he spends time with rats and frogs. They show him around NYC via the sewers.

There's a scene where they're beneath the world trade center and Howard and the frog marvel at is enormity. Then, the frog reminds Howard that "Nothing lasts forever; especially in New York." (This is an exact quote, sparing punctuation.)

The VHS I had ended with a music video by some band with the word "dogs" (junk yard dogs? Something like that) in their band name. The music video was trippy AF. There was barking in the song. The visuals were mostly patterns of colorful circles.

Like, this sounds like a fever dream, but if you've seen it and can locate it, it will make sense. I swear.

My memory is shit but I'd describe the art style as watercolor. Animated watercolor. Fro the 80s. So, yeah. Sorry.

Fuck it. $20.

Fuckit 2: 4 payments of $20.69

The Farmers Daughter. It was a text-based video game for the C=64 similar to Zork.

The premise was that you are a traveling lightening salesman whose car breaks down. You stop at a farmhouse to use their phone, and the beautiful daughter answers the door.

Your mission is to try to bang her. If the farmer catches you, he shoots you with his shotgun. If her brothers catch you, they'll analy rape you to death. You need condoms but they are stuck to the shelf.

The Illusion of Gaia for SNES. I don't know anyone who has heard of it.

The original Death Race 2000 starring Sylvester Stallone and David Carradine. It may have had a small comeback when the Death Race remake came out but this isn't the kind of movie you'd see randomly on tv.

In 1990, a series of CGI animation collections began release on VHS tape. The Mind's Eye was the first experience many people (myself included) had with pure computer animation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind's_Eye_(film_series)

The best known segment from the first tape is Stanley & Stella in Breaking the Ice, which was first released in 1987. You can just watch it online now of course!

https://youtu.be/3bTqWsVqyzE?si=28YJchoAQSqfZY0P

The animation style reminds me a lot of Reboot, a childhood favorite. It still amazes me how interesting this style is even today, really shows how much more artistry and vision matter than technology. I believe this is also the first public demonstration of a flocking algorithm.

Ok I'm back with another but I have the answer to this one.

I sent $20 inside a greeting card to Amon Amarth back in like 2000 or so. I'm a melodic death metal nerd and Gothenburg really set the tone. anywho, I'd heard their drummer had a side project, called "Curriculum Mortis"

I got a burned CD from the band. Unmarked. I uploaded it to soulseek. The iPod it was on eventually died.

I went a solid decade with only memories of this band.

I recent found someone uploaded the whole demo to YouTube. Of you enjoy melodic death metal, especially older, grittier less.refined, and also know Amon Amarth, just know, you know something very few know about: https://youtu.be/H1JWaADbcsA

Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future

Show from the 80s that was really just a vehicle for selling toys. They had a line of fighter jet thingies that were light guns you could shoot at the tv and somehow the guns themselves could respond to the lights from the tv and cause the cockpit to eject when it was hit. Not terribly obscure I think, but it was only a thing for like a year or two.

Alright let's go, I love niche things:

Movies:

• Bubba Ho-Tep
• Joe's Apartment
• Six String Samurai
• Krull
• The Greasy Strangler
• A Boy and His Dog
• Fido
• Within the Woods
• Undead or Alive
• Cemetery Man

Tabletop:

• Car Wars (maybe, depends on crowd)
• The worlds worst diagram of ship controls included as an insert in a Paranoia box
• All Flesh Must be Eaten
• Fairy Meat
• Cult of Ecstacy (for Mage the Ascension)
• Did you know that according to Dragon Magazine players can participate in orgying for a number of days equal to their con SCORE?
• Castles and Crusades
• Tunnels and Trolls
• Remember Car Wars? They did a crossover with GURPS, called GURPS Autoduel, and it is amazing.
• HOL (Human Occupied Landfill)
• The second publication of the HOL supplement, Buttey Wholesomeness, where the cover is printed BUTTery HOLsomeness. That one was just a pita to find I started wondering if it was just a PDF concept cover. Only took me like 8 years to find a physical copy.
• Mars Attacks board game

Games:

• Sim Tower
• Redneck Rampage
• The Diablo 1 expansion, Hellfire, that Blizzard said not to make but a division of Sierra of all companies yolod it into existence anyway.
• The Neverhood
• Toy Story for Gameboy
• Battlezone, back in the day when you were fighting green triangles
• Descent
• I wasn't going to at first but I want to throw in some of my favorite Magic the Gathering cards: Nature's Wrath (haha, holy shit mono green, go home you're drunk), the art of the Pride secret vault thing for Bearscape, the art for Spy Network looks like Friend Computer from Paranoia, Kudzu, Stunted Growth

My music taste is so underground you guys I'm very cool like that. There's a surprising number of trans folk punk musicians from the Pacific Northwest. I'm getting sleepy but if anyone wants me to bombard them with folk punk artists (trans or otherwise) lmk I'll totally hook you up

There was an old PC game called "Dominus". I don't really know much about it. My dad just randomly picked it up as an xmas gift one year for me. It was pretty sweet.

You're the lord of a kingdom that gets invaded by like eight armies. You have your own monster units you can deploy. You can deploy traps. You can cast spells. You can go down and fight hand to hand. If they make it to the throne room and kill you, it's game over.

If you capture enemy troops, you can interrogate them. There's a little animation where they get poked with a red hot iron poker. If you capture a leader, you can sometimes negotiate peace. If you capture an enemy mage, you can learn part of a secret spell. I never got a secret spell working, though.

It was super cool. Never met anyone who's played it.

Several years back I watched a Japanese film called Fish Story. It's a pretty weird movie, and the first time I watched it, I hated it, and almost turned it off. It was just kind of boring, and it was really confusing because it kept jumping between different stories, and it was not in chronological order. Then, right at the very end, a short segment tied everything together so incredibly. It blew my mind and I immediately wanted to watch the movie again. I have never experienced anything like that before or since. I don't know anyone else who's ever heard of this movie.

I've never seen a video on this, but surely someone else has heard of it.

Back in the late 2000s, early 2010s, I got a CD in a cereal box with a PC game on it. the game was I think some kind of gamified flight sim, and the interesting part is that there was a decal of a plane on top of the CD surface. On the other side of the CD, there was another game (maybe a racing game?) And it had a corresponding decal, so the CD had decals on both sides and could be inserted both ways in your player to play each game. I've never seen that anywhere else (2 -sided CD or CD readable surface with decals) and I remember the game actually being somewhat fun, but promotional games of the era are very often lost media.

Mad Dog McCree. A literal "video" game. Live action first person pointy shooty thing.

There was a local band where I am 20+ years ago called Naucet. With songs such as "This is Not a Convenient Time to be Stabbed". I have absolutely no idea what happened to the band, where they went, what they did. I can find no reference to them anywhere online whatsoever. I have a musician friend who was friends with them(maybe just one of them, I forget at this point) and has copies of their music on an old hard drive somewhere in a closet. Been a number of years since I've seen/heard from said friend, so I can only assume whether or not he still has that old hard drive. If he does, then for all I know, that might be the only place in existence that you can find that music.

Everyone knows Oregon trail and Amazon trail, but I don't see Yukon trail mentioned as much. Similar game but up the coast of Canada.

Also we had a game called Power Pete that came with this old powermac we had.

And a game called Stay Tooned! Where you get sucked into a cartoon hotel. Each room had cool puzzles and you had to escape

Back in the late 70s and early 80s, when I got to stay home from school, I remember that around 11am the local PBS channel would air short videos from regional public service stations around the country, or low-budget cartoon shorts with an experimental vibe to them, who knows where they were made or by whom.

One example was of a short fella who sang the same "Ey yey-yey-yey" refrain over and over again, those around him got increasingly annoyed but he wouldn't stop. At the end, a mob slowly converges around the character, encircling him... and he just keeps on cluelessly singing the "Ey yey-yey-yey" refrain.
The mob covers the guy, there's a quick collective roar, then it recedes to show a tombstone. The last shot is of the "Ey yey-yey-yey" echoing as we see the image of the grave, frozen on the screen.

Another one, which I vaguely remember was filmed by a North Carolina public television station, a live action short of a kid that gets bullied at school, at the end the bully or bullies have some sort of accident in the woods, the kid is witness to this, and the shot freezes on the kid looking straight at the camera, with a voiceover along the lines of "What would YOU do in this situation?"... and it ends, right there, not with a resolution but with a cliffhanger and a moral question.

EDIT: grammar for clarity

The game Chex Quest, which was a total conversion of Doom for kids, used as an advertising campaign and included in cereal boxes. Incredibly well done game.

My favorite video game as a kid was called Red Storm Rising, based on the Tom Clancy novel of the same name, and played on a Commodore 64. It put you in command of a submarine facing off against the Soviet navy. Graphics were very basic, but it had a very intelligent engine that lead to needing to use real strategy to win.

Almost no one else has ever heard of it.

It was a game for PC around the year 2000, I don't even know the name of it. I've been searching for it for years. It's a point and click adventure game.

The premise is your spaceship breaks down on an alien planet. If you try to repair the ship immediately a giant alien spider will come and kill you.

After searching for a while you end up making friends with one of the aliens and sneak around one of the villages looking for parts.

I never made it past that point.

I highly doubt anyone will know what this is, I've tried multiple times on that reddit sub for games people can't remember.

I'd never met anyone but my mom who'd played Solomon's Key prior to Nintendo straight up adding it to the NSO.

The other game I never hear about was the ID4: Independence Day floppies that came in cereal boxes or something. Don't really remember the games that well but I do remember trying to collect them all.

Also, I once basically got gaslighted into thinking that Falling Down was just a fever dream of mine until one day I'd heard the name in a Tech N9ne song and it all clicked again.

GTA IV Pakistan edition

Basically, just a GTA4 pirate rip and modded and sold on actual disks.

There are several, and they are hard to find online because any uploads of it probably don't exist anywhere anymore, and were already rare due to aforementioned disks.

Some of them are so regional and probably made by one person, the only way to find one is to get a computer HDD with it installed.

Strings (2004) movie. It's a trope-ish fantasy movie, but all of the characters are marionettes. The strings go up to the heavens and are taken into consideration with things like architecture having no roofs, and gates are arches that rise up out of the ground to prevent travel beneath them. Someone gets injured by the string on their arm getting cut, and their arm flops around lifelessly afterwards.

Anna and the appolypse, it's a fantastic zombie musical with insanely good songs. I have never met anyone in the real world or online who have heard of it (except a few who I forced to watch with me).

there is this film from the late 80s called miracle mile about a guy who answers an incoming call at a payphone outside a diner in los angeles, and its a panicked military officer who dialed the wrong phone number who says he just launched americas nukes and that a nuclear retaliation will hit american soil in about an hour. a lot of the film is spent without being fully convinced of the authenticity of the phone call and the film has a slightly dreamlike pacing which makes it feel pretty tense, and theres a scene that stuck with me where the main character has a nosebleed in the diner after the phone call. i feel like even as far as cult films go this one is a little under the radar and, even though its not a life altering film, probably deserves a little more credit than it gets.

When I was a kid I was only allowed to play educational computer/video games. The only exceptions to that were 2 games that came with our Win95 computer (when we got the computer it came with a little case full of software/game cds). One of the games was redline racer, a game where you could race motorcycles on pretty cool (for an 8 year old) tracks. The other was G-Police, a game that took place in an outer space colony built inside domes on the moon Callisto. You played as a guy who joined the government police to find out what really happened to his dead sister. The entire game play was executing missions piloting a flying fighter craft and the story was told/discovered via radio transmissions and cut scenes every few missions. I probably put hundreds if not thousands of hours into playing that game over and over between 8 and 10 years old. I actually found redline racer a few months ago on an abandonware site and got it to run on my computer, but the only install options were French, German, and Spanish, none of which I speak. I installed the Spanish version and was surprised at the fact that I could still remember/navigate all the menus. I haven't found G-Police anywhere or ever heard of anyone else who knows it. Part of me wishes I could find it and get it to work for nostalgia, but the other part of me knows that it's going to look like a bunch of boxy awful graphics and I should not taint my happy memories.

Moraff's Escapade for early Windows, or more specifically, the glitch levels in it.

If you spam the "next level" cheat button (which if I remember correctly is F8) enough times you'll go past the levels that were intentionally designed and start exploring the game's RAM.

I loved a lot of ps1 era rpgs

One that always stuck with me was Legend of Legaia

Never met anyone who played it and the sequel on ps2 was terrible.

Some unique things I never saw in a turn based rpg again:

1. Armor you could buy and equip per slot and you were able to mix and match.. This meant you could look really stupid when farming money for different sets but it was exciting to get a new item and equip it and see

2. This was a turn based rpg but had some inspiration from arcade fighter games of the time.. You would enter your attacks like up down left right x y z and then say ready and your character would do a combo.. You could randomly enter combos and learn new specials and finishes etc.. Also a lot of ways to learn them through exploration and such

Not unique the game has a ton of fun side quests, games and secrets as well..

There was a curious video game I played for a week straight in the early 90’s before my copy got stolen at a party.

It was called Scrongjhul and featured a fish with legs who had extra big knees with spikes. It was sort of a platform game but then part mystery story and part choose-your-own-adventure.

I think you had to get to the top of a mountain for something special. If you did it enough times and collected codes the game would generate then you could send off for some special prize.

Movies:

• Kubo and the Two Strings. Some of the story elements are a bit too obvious, but the overall story is charming and the art style (stop motion with puppet-like characters) is just plain cool.

• Kirikou and the Sorceress. Wonderfully weird with an interesting story

• Triplets of Belleville. The entire movie is "told" without words, except for a single sentence right at the start and one right at the end.

Games:

• Terranigma (SNES). Main characters revives / creates an entire world that was doomed ages ago. It's kind of bittersweet when you're done reviving the continents, plants and animals and then the humans start f*cking stuff up. Great music and visuals too, despite being 16-Bit style

• Ōkami. One of my all-time favorites but due to minimal marketing, not many people are aware that this game even exists. Charming art style and interesting gameplay concept.

Chakan the Forever Man on my Sega GameGear. I played it SO many times.

Arx Fatalis for og Xbox. I have it and haven't played it, but nobody I know has ever heard about it.

Eternal Champions. An old fighting game for Sega. I've never met anybody in real life who has heard of it. It was so awesome. Xavier was the shit.

25+ years ago there was a release on some Warez sites called “beer police”.

From what I remember, It was a game set in some future sci-fi world with flying cars with a 5th element vibe.

Only ever saw it for a few hours at a mates house, so my memory is sketchy, but I’ve never found any other mention of it.

The Belgian 80's metal band Ostrogoth.

Their website doesn't exist anymore and the only band-run social media page is on Facebook.

If you're a fan of retro heavy metal, give them a listen! They still tour, though you won't be finding much about it online.

Nerve Damage, a game that was I think made on a random gamejam, and the whole premise is to make a game that's actively trying to be as uncomfortable as possible to play, while also getting you into the flow and actually makes you enjoy it.

Unfortunately, I didn't find how to play it, and it didn't release as far as I know. I've heard about it on some kind of GDC presentation about Innovative/Obscure game design.

While that actually means that someone has indeed heard of, I've never met anyone else who got to play it. Or heard about it.

An old MS-DOS game from the 90s called Solar Winds, by Epic Megagames. It was top down and you flew around battling spaceships and doing missions in space. I absolutely loved it as a kid. Pretty sure you can get it for free now.

Actually yes hereit is https://www.playdosgames.com/online/solar-winds/

Okay, here's one: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Action Game. Not the SCUMM engine adventure game made by LucasArts, no I'm talking about the godawful action platformer that Tiertex smeared across every console and home computer of the early 90's like shit across the handicap stall in the men's room of a Ruby Tuesday. I knew it as the particularly heinous MS-DOS port but they put it on everything from the Commodore 64 to the Game Boy.

The controls are bad, the mechanics don't make sense, the level design is bullshit, the enemy design and placement is unfair, the graphics are mediocre, the audio is bad to horrible depending on the port...it has no redeeming qualities.

I hope it's obscure because lord it deserves to be forgotten. How do you take a white hot license like Indiana Jones and fuck it up so comprehensively?

Beltain - Wild In The West

My grandparents knew the guy that produced this music video for a local band. I'm pretty sure the VHS copy they had was one of few in existence. It's been on YouTube for over a decade and only has 122 views, but it's a gem.

The movie Tampopo, about ramen. Great film.

I have never met anybody else who played the Wall-E game for Wii.

Decades ago, my dad bought a PC that came with a free CD for a game called Retribution. The box art looked unlike anything I'd ever seen before (basically 3D graphics at a time when the Mega Drive reigned supreme). Sadly, the disc didn't work, but I've tried to get my hands on a copy, to no avail.

Looking at the graphics now, they weren't even that good...but for the mid-nineties for a small child, absolutely amazing.

When I was a kid I went to a Primus show and they were playing music before the acts came on. One was “Smoke On The Water” covered by Tom Jones and I’ve never been able to find it or even any information about it. I know it was this song and artist as I asked the engineer, it was a great rendition and I wish I could find a copy