I really wish we could've seen the whole of this realm in the game, because each of these 'stations' hint at so much. Thanks for taking the time to go through each one and letting it play fully.
I feel like the game got chopped off part way through this realm, and we never got to the final realm with the "firebird." Part of the previous realm you could see a "map" on one wall that showed all four realms, the final one with the "firebird." There was talk of a sequel called "Cult." Which never happened, although at one time you could find vague references to people who were working on it. And the Dream Machine here does make reference to the "Cult of the Child Horus." Ah, what could have been.
The bit starting at 12:18, about "cobwebs in the sky", is a reference to a series of prophecies that the Hopi purportedly made before European contact, foretelling the appearance of Europeans and their technology. These prophecies circulate in a lot of places, perhaps most famously in the film Koyaanisqatsi, but their origins are questionable; the skeptic Jason Colavito has a blog post, titled "Did the Hopi Predict the End of the World?", that traces their history. Also, I think the voice actor talking about these prophecies is doing a Rod Serling impression. I can see why, given that Serling was the definitive voice of detached, authoritative commentary on surreal phenomena for millions of American Boomers who grew up with The Twilight Zone, but it's a cultural nuance I wouldn't necessarily expect from a game made by Britons. Which describes a lot of this section of the game, actually. The stuff about the government conspiring with the aliens, found in the first radio segment and the hacker files, comes from the conspiracy theories disseminated on American radio by Milton William Cooper in the 1990s. The telltale is the claim that JFK was assassinated to cover up the alien conspiracy; Cooper originated this claim, and The X-Files copied it in the episode "Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man", which aired just after Drowned God came out. The bit about militias fighting UN peacekeepers at 4:57 reflects the real beliefs of right-wing conspiracy theorists (including Cooper and many of the real-life militias that existed in the 1990s) that some kind of global New World Order was going to seize control of the US. The Second Amendment talk at 15:15 is in the same vein. Even the preacher's cadence at 8:44 is something not everybody would get; a lot of Southern pastors deliver sermons this way (my Southern mother describes it as an effort to put the congregation into an almost hypnotic state), but I've seen Americans from outside the South observe this type of speech and have no idea that it's a widespread phenomenon. I know nothing about the people who designed the game aside from Horse, but the making-of documentary makes it seem like they were all British. How did they capture the feel of 1990s America's paranoid underbelly so well? It's not as if British people could never do so - I've seen people make similar comments about the atmosphere of Neil Gaiman's American Gods - but it does make me wonder how much firsthand experience the game designers had with American culture.
Fantastic info, thanks! I didn't know those details about the Hopi, but I took the in-game meaning of "cobwebs in the sky" to be a reference to nuclear annihilation. The cobwebs would be the smoke trails and "rolling thunder" would be the sound. I had a friend who grew up Pentacostal so I definitely got the preacher part, hah. We used to talk about that kind of stuff, also light up and browse RUclips for these kind of conspiracies. That's how I knew about the 144,000 reference in the files, which could be interpreted as the number of people who would be saved in the Rapture. If you don't mind me asking, do you know how much Horse was into Discordianism and big of a theme it is in the game? Maybe the novels are interesting, but to me it seems... stupid, for lack of a better word.
@@PhillipOliverWholes Thanks. One of my favorite topics to delve into is ancient Egypt-themed Myst clones and the origin of their ideas. (Most of them are built on ideas from fringe history that have a long and convoluted background.) Drowned God may not deal very much with ancient Egypt, but it's still fascinating to trace its cultural genealogy, as it were. To my knowledge, the only Discordian reference in the game is "All hail Discordia!" in the final message from Keter, though it's entirely possible that there are more that I'm not aware of. I have no idea how much Horse was interested in it. And as for Discordianism itself: yeah, it's exactly what you'd expect from a goofy parody religion invented by a couple of college kids (i.e., people who are very often not as clever as they think they are). But Malaclypse the Younger, one of its founders, eventually took it in a different direction: "I started out with the idea that all gods are an illusion. By the end I had learned that it's up to you to decide whether gods exist, and if you take a goddess of confusion seriously, it will send you through as profound and valid a trip as taking a god like Yahweh seriously… [Eris] is an absurdist deity who shows that nonsense is as valid as sense, since Eris is as preposterous a deity as ever invented. Yet, if you pursue her, it can be a valid spiritual experience that can carry you to the point where you no longer relate to things in terms of deities and nondeities." I'm not sure I understand that, but it's certainly an unusual perspective.
@@derekj3466 Thanks, I wonder because someone told me that some characters in the game are "Greyfaces," or something like that, and said to check that and Discordianism out. Googling shows some results for "The Curse of Greyface" and "Agents of Greyface," but eh, I don't feel like looking into it more than than honestly. I guess he was referring to Keether, but I wonder if understanding more about it would help understand the plot any better.
@@PhillipOliverWholes I kind of doubt it. The "Curse of Greyface" is just the Discordian metaphor for taking things too seriously, and the "Agents of Greyface" are just people who take things too seriously. Of course, the classic form of alien found in the game is known as a "Grey alien" or "Grey", but that's unrelated. If I had to guess, I would say Horse got "All hail Discordia!" from the Illuminatus trilogy. I haven't read it, but as I understand it, the trilogy is a parody of conspiracy theories (one whose over-the-top, pulpy American approach probably makes for an interesting contrast with the murky, cerebral European parody of conspiracy theories, Foucault's Pendulum) and includes references to Discordianism simply because one of its authors was a fan. Horse seems to have regarded conspiracy theories with a rather unsettling level of seriousness, unlike the Illuminatus trilogy, but he still may have read the trilogy and picked up its Discordian references without necessarily intending a deeper meaning.
@@PhillipOliverWholes the cobwebs... People found carvings in ancient rock, the theory go's, people saw what looks like cobwebs in the sky this go's into alien theory but also, the plasma apologize...
15:09 I swear this sounds like Jonathan Frakes's voice, and I assumed it was some clip from Beyond Belief, except he didn't start hosting that show until more than a year after this game was released. It might be from Paranormal Borderline, though.
In the margana part the transmission this received says we are coming we are legion and the woman on the radio says they are coming they are legion Then Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” “My name is Legion,” he replied, “for we are many.” Jesus is talking to a demon-possessed man that's the context, even this game has the alien demon connection.
the translation would be something like this "Remember don't miss this big summer sale than on... (probably a city name speaks to fast) ... on the corner... (says the street names but again the accent and the fast talking doesn't help) we have all kinds of shoes more than 500 models on the best low prices...(said the store name or brand but again the accent and the fast talking make it hard to understand) So it's a radio advertise to me sound like is a real one for the way the salesman talks seems like a add from the 60s or 70s also the accent is kinda neutral to me sound like mexican accent (more likely). Cheers! To anyone still wondering after those years.
Harry Horse predicted watermelon sugar on the radio back in 1996.
I really wish we could've seen the whole of this realm in the game, because each of these 'stations' hint at so much. Thanks for taking the time to go through each one and letting it play fully.
I feel like the game got chopped off part way through this realm, and we never got to the final realm with the "firebird." Part of the previous realm you could see a "map" on one wall that showed all four realms, the final one with the "firebird."
There was talk of a sequel called "Cult." Which never happened, although at one time you could find vague references to people who were working on it. And the Dream Machine here does make reference to the "Cult of the Child Horus." Ah, what could have been.
Arcadia = Amazon
Amazing. Love this game thank you for uploading. You can hear the end comments of the game for a second - ‘order of state, state of disorder…’
This really fills in some plot holes. Thank you.
For non spanish speakers, the spanish ad on 9:50 talks about selling shoes. That made me.laugh hard while playing the game by how unexpected it was
Thank you, I heard something about feet so lol
The bit starting at 12:18, about "cobwebs in the sky", is a reference to a series of prophecies that the Hopi purportedly made before European contact, foretelling the appearance of Europeans and their technology. These prophecies circulate in a lot of places, perhaps most famously in the film Koyaanisqatsi, but their origins are questionable; the skeptic Jason Colavito has a blog post, titled "Did the Hopi Predict the End of the World?", that traces their history. Also, I think the voice actor talking about these prophecies is doing a Rod Serling impression. I can see why, given that Serling was the definitive voice of detached, authoritative commentary on surreal phenomena for millions of American Boomers who grew up with The Twilight Zone, but it's a cultural nuance I wouldn't necessarily expect from a game made by Britons. Which describes a lot of this section of the game, actually.
The stuff about the government conspiring with the aliens, found in the first radio segment and the hacker files, comes from the conspiracy theories disseminated on American radio by Milton William Cooper in the 1990s. The telltale is the claim that JFK was assassinated to cover up the alien conspiracy; Cooper originated this claim, and The X-Files copied it in the episode "Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man", which aired just after Drowned God came out. The bit about militias fighting UN peacekeepers at 4:57 reflects the real beliefs of right-wing conspiracy theorists (including Cooper and many of the real-life militias that existed in the 1990s) that some kind of global New World Order was going to seize control of the US. The Second Amendment talk at 15:15 is in the same vein. Even the preacher's cadence at 8:44 is something not everybody would get; a lot of Southern pastors deliver sermons this way (my Southern mother describes it as an effort to put the congregation into an almost hypnotic state), but I've seen Americans from outside the South observe this type of speech and have no idea that it's a widespread phenomenon.
I know nothing about the people who designed the game aside from Horse, but the making-of documentary makes it seem like they were all British. How did they capture the feel of 1990s America's paranoid underbelly so well? It's not as if British people could never do so - I've seen people make similar comments about the atmosphere of Neil Gaiman's American Gods - but it does make me wonder how much firsthand experience the game designers had with American culture.
Fantastic info, thanks! I didn't know those details about the Hopi, but I took the in-game meaning of "cobwebs in the sky" to be a reference to nuclear annihilation. The cobwebs would be the smoke trails and "rolling thunder" would be the sound.
I had a friend who grew up Pentacostal so I definitely got the preacher part, hah. We used to talk about that kind of stuff, also light up and browse RUclips for these kind of conspiracies. That's how I knew about the 144,000 reference in the files, which could be interpreted as the number of people who would be saved in the Rapture.
If you don't mind me asking, do you know how much Horse was into Discordianism and big of a theme it is in the game? Maybe the novels are interesting, but to me it seems... stupid, for lack of a better word.
@@PhillipOliverWholes Thanks. One of my favorite topics to delve into is ancient Egypt-themed Myst clones and the origin of their ideas. (Most of them are built on ideas from fringe history that have a long and convoluted background.) Drowned God may not deal very much with ancient Egypt, but it's still fascinating to trace its cultural genealogy, as it were.
To my knowledge, the only Discordian reference in the game is "All hail Discordia!" in the final message from Keter, though it's entirely possible that there are more that I'm not aware of. I have no idea how much Horse was interested in it.
And as for Discordianism itself: yeah, it's exactly what you'd expect from a goofy parody religion invented by a couple of college kids (i.e., people who are very often not as clever as they think they are). But Malaclypse the Younger, one of its founders, eventually took it in a different direction: "I started out with the idea that all gods are an illusion. By the end I had learned that it's up to you to decide whether gods exist, and if you take a goddess of confusion seriously, it will send you through as profound and valid a trip as taking a god like Yahweh seriously… [Eris] is an absurdist deity who shows that nonsense is as valid as sense, since Eris is as preposterous a deity as ever invented. Yet, if you pursue her, it can be a valid spiritual experience that can carry you to the point where you no longer relate to things in terms of deities and nondeities." I'm not sure I understand that, but it's certainly an unusual perspective.
@@derekj3466 Thanks, I wonder because someone told me that some characters in the game are "Greyfaces," or something like that, and said to check that and Discordianism out. Googling shows some results for "The Curse of Greyface" and "Agents of Greyface," but eh, I don't feel like looking into it more than than honestly.
I guess he was referring to Keether, but I wonder if understanding more about it would help understand the plot any better.
@@PhillipOliverWholes I kind of doubt it. The "Curse of Greyface" is just the Discordian metaphor for taking things too seriously, and the "Agents of Greyface" are just people who take things too seriously. Of course, the classic form of alien found in the game is known as a "Grey alien" or "Grey", but that's unrelated.
If I had to guess, I would say Horse got "All hail Discordia!" from the Illuminatus trilogy. I haven't read it, but as I understand it, the trilogy is a parody of conspiracy theories (one whose over-the-top, pulpy American approach probably makes for an interesting contrast with the murky, cerebral European parody of conspiracy theories, Foucault's Pendulum) and includes references to Discordianism simply because one of its authors was a fan. Horse seems to have regarded conspiracy theories with a rather unsettling level of seriousness, unlike the Illuminatus trilogy, but he still may have read the trilogy and picked up its Discordian references without necessarily intending a deeper meaning.
@@PhillipOliverWholes the cobwebs... People found carvings in ancient rock, the theory go's, people saw what looks like cobwebs in the sky this go's into alien theory but also, the plasma apologize...
15:09 I swear this sounds like Jonathan Frakes's voice, and I assumed it was some clip from Beyond Belief, except he didn't start hosting that show until more than a year after this game was released. It might be from Paranormal Borderline, though.
In the margana part the transmission this received says we are coming we are legion and the woman on the radio says they are coming they are legion
Then Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” “My name is Legion,” he replied, “for we are many.”
Jesus is talking to a demon-possessed man that's the context, even this game has the alien demon connection.
9:44 if someone who speaks Spanish could translate that, I'd appreciate it.
the translation would be something like this "Remember don't miss this big summer sale than on... (probably a city name speaks to fast) ... on the corner... (says the street names but again the accent and the fast talking doesn't help) we have all kinds of shoes more than 500 models on the best low prices...(said the store name or brand but again the accent and the fast talking make it hard to understand)
So it's a radio advertise to me sound like is a real one for the way the salesman talks seems like a add from the 60s or 70s also the accent is kinda neutral to me sound like mexican accent (more likely).
Cheers! To anyone still wondering after those years.
@@mariomendez7727 Thank you.
What the hell is this from?
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drowned_God
A computer game from 1996 called Drowned God. If you know nothing about it, you're in for a trip.