⠀I want to talk about the things that inspired me as a way to give back the good vibes they gave me, as well as to contextualize Plexos and explain the web of experiences that led to the conception of its idea. There are 4 main "categories" where we can fit in all of the media out there that I would consider inspired me, and those are as follows.
⠀I'm guessing there's no surprise to anyone with this one. Although Webcore is relatively new, and I'm particularly fond of the YouTube ENA series, it was primarily the rise of Vaporwave that has always made me think of doing something like this; I didn't know if it was going to be a game or an app, but it was going to have a WIMP GUI. After all, that 1 vaporwave song we all know about was released under the alias MACINTOSH PLUS, the original Macintosh being the first successful PC to do away with the command line and embrace the power of the graphical user interface.
⠀Nowdays, putting your art inside a window border feels like a simple yet profound way to sprinkle in the subtlest way of storytelling; the implication being that it was made a file at some point, and it's now being accessed by someone. It somewhat makes you think of the feeling of finding an unknown file thrown into some directory you've never accessed before, like when you explore someone else's flash drive, or that night you stayed up late playing at your cousin's PC and out of boredom began looking around their files.
⠀Of course there's also music, and to be completely honest, I haven't quite figured out what's so particular about certain specific songs that make me think about millennium era sound design, but I can name some artists. Windows 96 is a great brazilian composer and producer I've never let go of since I found him, and Dera Palné's album "uwu safe zone" became sort of like The Sims Buy Menu music for me, in the sense I use it to concentrate on anything I'm working, like it's part of my irl soundtrack. By the way, Dera is also the person that will be making Plexos' own SFX library, and furthermore they launched a new EP recently so GO LISTEN.
⠀I've made a tiny collection of webcore art from DeviantArt that I really liked, and you can find it → here. I also have a personal Spotify playlist with the songs I often listen to while coding Plexos, which you can check out → here.
⠀In recent times (and I mean the last decade, even though I'm 22 I grew up playing old games rawr) and along with Vaporwave's rise to the top of niche internet cultures, a ton of games have been made where the gameplay is bound to a WIMP GUI that, of course, is set to pretend to be the frontend of an actual operating system.
⠀Something very notable about them is the sheer variety in which they come, and it really shows how the access and exploration of a personal computer's filesystem is such a powerful and flexible context for story-telling. While Hypnospace Outlaw has you navigating the alt web of the 90s, moderating the userbase and trying to avoid downloading any viruses, Secret Little Haven will make you go through someone's coming of age, telling their story through their files and applications, similarly to Cibele.
⠀There have also been games where you'd briefly interact with a computer to further the game's narrative or complete a puzzle, like in classic Resident Evil games when you'd need to find a password to open some door locks, or perhaps more memorably when GTA IV had you going into a cybercafé to respond to your mom's emails.
⠀While I know way more OS games than I was able to play, just knowing they exist manages to inspire me, even on top of the inspiration the ones I did play give me. Here's a list of some of the ones I was able to try out → come around.
⠀Little time after I began coding the foundations for what would become Plexos, back when the only goal was making a web app that felt like an OS and figure out the rest later, I thought to myself "there's no way I'm the first one that thought of this", and guess what! Not by a very long shot, and in fact, there's a page that maintains a huge list of every page made with that aesthetic in mind. I present to you → Simone's Computer.
⠀Finding all these pages was really exiting, as I'd have the opportunity to check out how other people fared with their similar projects. Soon I realized, however, that most of them were either bare-bones thematic portfolios or just proof of concepts quickly put together. There were the more elaborate ones though, like AaronOS with its cool library of tools, and perhaps most importantly → Windows93.
⠀It made me really happy to see that this has been done so successfully before, and it made me want to push on even more. I've played around with Win93 and it's really fun! I hope I can achieve something similar with Plexos, although in a more focused, clean and useful way, as opposed to building it from the pretences of a parody.
⠀Around 2015, I found a little piece of software on the Steam Store calling itself a "game". It was free, some of my friends had opened it for not more than 10 minutes, it had mixed reviews, and looked as if the game's concept was hard to grasp for most people. The product in question is called Anarchy Arcade, and what it is: a Source Engine 3D representation of your Windows desktop, with a strong theming around videogame arcades.
⠀The arcade cabinets the game offered where then not built-in minigames, but merely the 3D interface that would represent your files and internet bookmarks; a stylized shortcut, in essence. I got obsessed with this game, I spent way more time than I'm proud of just making all my spaces look cool, filling them with cabinets and furniture, and in fact, this thing sparked something in me that would make me want download games to my hard drive, not necessarily to play them, but just to have them be cabinets in AA.
⠀So, it got to a point where I really started to crave a way to access some kind of WIMP looking app to sort of pretend I'm using a computer within Anarchy Arcade. Now I know I could have done that with Windows93, but back then, this whim alone was a huge push for me to begin development on Plexos.
⠀AAs developer, SM Sith Lord, is a really cool guy! And there's an AA discord where they've been really supportive of my project. There are, in fact, a couple of ways in which I'm trying to make Plexos "compatible" with AAs shortcuts, and we've also talked about integrating it as an actual GUI feature within Anarchy Arcade. The ball is on my side to keep at it and turn this into an actual product, so we'll see about those prospects in the future, but for now I really wanted to shout-out AAs Discord for being so nice to me for all this time! Thank you guys :)
⠀Big reminder that I have a discord server, and if you're interested in any of the things I talk about on these blogs then I 100% invite you to come around and chat with us! Let's be nerds together → https://discord.gg/dxvScfqDRA
⠀To any artist and creator out there: thank you very much for sharing your art to the world. ❤️❤️❤️
- Pentacoro
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