Leveraging a 90s tech landscape for a contemporary information dystopia in 2025

As I believe many projects here (on itch.io) start as a prototype or learning exercise, Floppy/Write isn’t really any different. A few weeks ago, I started making this as a way to learn C++ and coded it as a text-based terminal adventure—partly to dive into basic C++ concepts while also exploring emergent and interactive narrative.

The dialogue system I created relied heavily on predicting and interpreting what the player wrote in their notebook. I didn’t create an inventory system and the player could only travel from location to location using north, south, east, and west as commands. The story was about small-town real estate corruption and it unraveled as you added notes to your notebook. If you wrote the right words or strings of characters, it would determine what new things became available to you.

I realized that this system—using a mostly invisible dictionary for the player to catalog—was an interesting mechanic for a narrative about identity manipulation. It played with the ways we acknowledge markers or traits and redefine our understanding of ourselves and others. As this story evolved, I realized I needed to incorporate a proper interface and more complex graphics than just ASCII to see its full potential.

I’m a formally trained oil painter with no academic background in sciences, and until a few years ago, a lot of this felt completely inaccessible. I started painting simple pixel-art tiles for objects and items I thought I’d need for the story. As I was going, two things started bothering me: first, modern tech is too sleek and organic for the 24x24 tiles I had decided to use; second, my notebook system didn’t really make sense without some absurd oversights as a hacking tool in today’s tech landscape.

I was thinking of the protagonist as having real language-based superpowers that open the world further and further as you log observations into this "notebook" (which is now a laptop.) This power felt much closer to the simplicity of phreaking or social programming in the early internet years. I kept thinking of Hackers (1995) and The Matrix as two dystopian tech fictions that leveraged this same kind of narrative abstraction through loose implementations of the available technologies. I’m by no means striving for realism with these mechanics, and I definitely don’t have the knowledge or time to build a retro-futurist ’90s dystopian infrastructure for hacking a blockchain-based government ID system. But I do think that being able to pick up a phone and access information to manipulate data on an IBM is much closer to what this notebook mechanic represents than what one would have to do today to achieve the same effect.

I’m also just a sucker for a good luggable computer or the insatiable mystique that Palm Pilots and BlackBerrys had when I was a kid. I started playing with Arduinos about 10 years ago to make interactive art pieces that responded to light. My favorite was a plan (partially implemented) to make a plate reverb that reverberated the frequency of colors picked up by a sensor outside my window. Plate reverbs are terrifying, and I stopped when I realized just how much tension I’d need to actually create a reverb effect—I wasn’t sure I could move it without shooting a spring into someone.

Projects like these really inspired my love for hardware modification, which drives a lot of my aesthetic interests in an era when PCBs were actually easier to solder by hand. As this story develops, I want it to feel extremely contemporary in terms of its social narratives and politics, but I think leveraging this era’s simplicity and design provides a nostalgic and modifiable lens for tackling the complex moral conundrums we face today. Real-life tech development has exploded, propelling us into a very visceral stage of late-stage capitalism. Keeping the setting in the early information age allows us to see the world and characters as neighbors and participants rather than as friends and foes.