But let’s stay 1.0 for now: You play as an observer. Your task is to detect and immediately punish all kinds of felonies to increase public morality and social control. Well and good, at first. Sent the zoophile back to where he belongs, +6! Showed that filthy hooker, +2! Took the dangerous drugs away from the kids, +5! Ha, finally caught that nimble pickpocket in the act, +10!

The more you increase your score, however, the more you become aware that this game has no goal. As you steer your society towards morality, you will eventually realize that if you choose the path of surveillance, you choose the path that has the most fatal consequences. Punishment alone does not educate. Punishment works as long as it lasts. Whenever the surveillance level drops and the guiding and punishing hand ceases to do its work, a moral decline of unknown proportions will ensue.

Most modern governments chose the path of surveillance nevertheless, ignoring all sociologists’ and educationalists’ advice. 2001 might well have been a fateful year to release such a game.

In OH FUCK! STOP! SHARING INFORMATION! you get to be an action hero with a purpose: Destroy information. Kill Wikipedia. Take your idiosyncratically called “Fuckrifle”, and blast all the smart stuff to pieces. Travel back in time, way back to the year 200X, and show that you care about the future generations; blow the machine’s corebrain to smithereens, so your ancestors will be able to live a life in peace and well-dosed ignorance. And do NOT go down in history!

Deus Ex Machina is generally considered one of the first art games ever created. Your task in the game is to help the last piece of DNA on earth survive and evolve inside a computer environment; you do this by mastering several rooms like “The D.N.A welder”, “The Beau Bank”  or “The Blood Clot Disperser”. Sounds like fun yet?

There’s still more to it: Accompanying your attemps to create life inside the machine is a great soundtrack, featuring the voices of Ian Dury (That intelligent New Wave guy with his own memorial bench in London’s Richmond Park) and Jon Pertwee (The Third Doctor, Doctor Who). Imagine 80s synth pop on a mixtape with Shakespeare quotes with little Pink Floyd touches. I am not one to cherish progressive concept art rock, but this is delightful, hombre. And yes, you are right: The Sinclair ZX Spectrum did not have those fancy onboard soundcards we have nowadays. They solved that in a very creative and artistic way.

The game came as two cassettes: One for the game, TZX tape for the ZX Spectrum – the other one for the soundtrack, to be fed into your stereo. I’d almost call that a synaesthetic connection of media, breaking the boundaries of technology at that time, and also developing a game concept that always takes the same time to play, yet still is fun to play.

So, is it fun to play? Personally I’d say yes, although there are some hurdles to overcome. Setting up an emulator, having the soundtrack play along and then at first be completely puzzled a out how to proceed. And then realize: Hot damn, you can’t proceed, the soundtrack is still telling you things about that very level you are in, you just have to survive!

If you’re interested in what the game looks like, take a look at that guy’s videos on the omnivorous youtube, it’s almost as good as playing the game yourself! However, if you’d rather enjoy a trainload of information on the game, the full downloadable soundtrack, the game itself as a tape image file and virtually anything that has ever been said by anyone about Deus Ex Machina, don’t look any further than World of Spectrum