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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The movie Tampopo, about ramen. Great film.

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.