Early internet and occult gaming with Chantal Ryan
The early internet was the playground of Chantal Ryan’s childhood. Now she leads a team to release darkwebSTREAMER, a cyber-horror role-playing game.
CM: How did you come up with the idea for darkwebSTREAMER?
In my last year at university, I really needed a creative outlet. I played Dungeons & Dragons with friends online… we would often talk about how a game could be better, that’s what got my brain into a game design space. Then I was watching a horror movie [Dybbuk Box: The Story of Chris Chambers] at like 2am completely alone. I messaged my friend and said “I just had an idea for the best video game ever” and he said “let’s do it”.
So you started a company to pursue making the game?
The only reason I created a company was because the government offered to send us to Gamescom, the largest game show in the world in Cologne, Germany. To allocate those funds we needed to be a registered company. I will put it on the record that I still find the idea hilarious. The ‘I run a company thing’ does not suit my personality at all.
You don’t want to be a businesswoman; you want to be a woman that makes games?
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Exactly. I want to be a person on a project. I happen to lead the project, and I like that everyone does what I say, but I don’t like having to be relied on and make sure that all the accounting is done, and all the bureaucracy. I am a creative through and through.
The vibe of darkwebSTREAMER is very 90s. What do you remember about being online at that time?
I got my computer [a Compaq] when I was eight, this was in the 90s. It had a CD drive, very high tech. Games would come with like six CDs because it couldn’t capture all the data on one. A lot of the games had the dialog on this CD, the environments on this CD. Every five minutes or so, we’re trying to load a conversation, so put CD two in.
Now, we’re done with the conversation, go put CD one in.
Where there’s a cut scene in a video game today, you had to physically change the disc?
Yeah, it was annoying as hell, but looking back there was a joy to that physical participation in your game experience, the analog-ness of it. These are things I spend a lot of time thinking about. I always call darkwebSTREAMER an archival project. It’s not 100 per cent true to life or history, but to me the intent is to capture the feeling of what it was like to be in that space online.
What fascinates you about the occult internet?
I was looking for the magic. We were told it didn’t exist, but I was like, “if I can just find the right doorway”. That’s very much what the internet felt like to me. It was quite easy to find like witches’ web pages where they would have digital rituals; animated images of candles, spells written down, incantations. The early internet was very conspiracy-minded, it was full of magic and a lot of people talking about the occult and secrets.
How do you balance playing and making games and taking time to recharge?
It hasn’t been easy. The things that keep me grounded… from six to nine pm are my three sacred hours of the day where I am just a mother and wife. I get out in nature as much as I can. I love nature. It’s unbelievable that my job is my job, because I should be a witch in the forest somewhere, that is my happy place.
This article first appeared in The Game Edition of CityMag.
