Small Radios Big Televisions: heading for delisting, but still a weird classic
Tune in.
Small Radios Big Televisions may be my favourite kind of game. I'm not just saying that because it's set on something that looks like an oil rig - I love oil rigs - and involves the collection of old audio cassettes. I'm saying that because it's a game that you play by playing - in the purest sense. You load up, ideally with no idea of what's coming your way, and then you prod and poke and work your way towards an understanding, not just of what's going on, but of how everything operates in the most basic of manners.
If you do want to know a bit more, I can tell you. This is a puzzle game of sorts, set within a series of dioramas. You explore the oil rig, room by room, opening doors, following paths and getting lost. Some screens just have doors, while some might have a piece of machinery with a missing cog, say, or a series of switches that need flipping.
Some screens might have cassette taps for you to collect, and when you pick these up, you can play them in a device that looks very much like tha cassette player for an old Commodore 64. Swoon etc. These cassettes wing you off to a strange bucolic world. You might glimpse a tree or a field of wheat, or you might be gently floating down a river. Cassette tapes can also be messed up in useful ways, by whacking them in a magnetic field. Then the landscapes they'll show you are glitchy and different and may contain new opportunities.
In the simplest sense you're solving puzzles and finding keys in order to open a series of locked doors. But this game refuses to be conceptually simple and so these most basic elements are filled with a sense of mystery and hidden intent, filled with a potency. I have puzzled my way through this game for the best part of a morning and it's been like visiting a strange land where odd rules govern things. Like I said: it's my favourite kind of game.
Small Radios Big Televisions came out in 2016, incidentally, and the reason we're talking about it today is because it's about to be delisted by Warner Bros, which is in the act of killing off a bunch of old Adult Swim games. This is stupid, although presumably it makes sense on a spreadsheet somewhere, and it's just another indicator that the wrong people often end up in control of art. Happily - but not super happily for everyone involved, I know - Owen Deery, the founder of Fire Face, the studio that made Small Radios Big Televisions, has responded by making the game free on their website. This is an incredibly kind thing to do.
You know what scares me, though, and what makes the kind of things Warner Bros is happy to do without thinking even more frightening? It's that I had no idea this game even existed until it was endangered. I am absolutely happy to say that is my own fault and I should be more aware of things, but just knowing all this does change my relationship with a storefront as massive as Steam. What else lurks out there that is brilliant, strange, hard to put into words? What else am I missing, and what else is in danger from shareholders?