The 2025 Media That Inspired Me

🎄 This is my last post for 2025. Happy Holidays! See you in your inbox in two weeks for an entirely new year.

Tis the season for “Best of the Year” lists. There are 2025 lists for the best movies, video games, and albums. (People still listen to entire albums, right? Just me?!) But declaring a work of art “the best” is a very classicist idea, and I’m in my formalist era! So please allow me to push the boundaries of the listicle format and turn this newsletter into something more autobiographical.

As an artist, I’m less interested in bests and more interested in inspiration. Nothing inspires me to create like experiencing something cool and saying, “How do I make one of those guys?” So here’s my list of media released in 2025 that inspired me as an artist.

Video Game: Blippo+

I’ve been thinking about making an FMV game for a long time. I’m obsessed with the live action aesthetic in video games and interactive media. I’ve played award-winning FMV puzzle games by Sam Barlowe, the mild but at one time controversial Night Trap, and pretty much all the Netflix Bandersnatch-likes when that was still a thing.

Most of the FMV games I’ve played are either overly serious or unintentionally campy. (I prefer the latter, but I’ll tolerate the former for a unique experience.) Someday I want to make an interactive movie, but there aren’t many examples that I genuinely, unironically love. I love the concept of FMV far more than any example of FMV I’ve actually experienced. But that changed this year with Blippo+. I fell in love with this off-the-wall alien cable TV simulator the moment I saw it previewed on a Museum of Home Video livestream.

Blippo+ is such a joy. It has exactly the kind of nostalgic, bonkers, DIY energy I want to live in. It’s less a “game” with a challenging objective to reach and more of an immersive video experiment. Like a virtual Meow Wolf exhibition. After playing this, I’ve been thinking less about how to make an “interactive movie” (general) and more about how to make my own Blippo-like.

Theater: Los Angeles Immersive Invitational

In my theme park design class earlier this year, the instructor told us about something called the Immersive Invitational. A selection of interactive theater troupes all descend on the LGBT Center in Los Angeles for a weekend. They have 24 hours to create an immersive experience in a small room of the building. They’re given a music genre as a theme, a prop to incorporate, and little budget.

Amanda and I had an incredible time! We talked about the line-up of experiences for several hours, particularly the highlights: a room where I posed as a Jazz drummer to fool a club owner, a room where we ice fished to unthaw a cryogenically frozen Swedish rap star, and a room where we puppeteered a real woman with marionette strings to get her ready to work at a nightclub. Most of the immersive experiences I’ve had were big budget projects by Disney and Meow Wolf. It was so cool to experience memorable interactive live performances that didn’t have the benefit of investment capital, but were still emotionally engaging. My synapses were firing after this one.

Tabletop Game: Five Star Match

I already wrote at length about Five Star Match here, so let me just say that this pro wrestling management sandbox game engaged my creativity like nothing else this year. I made the mistake of trying to play this game while visiting family, where my loved ones wanted to talk to me for some weird reason. Anytime I was interrupted from booking matches for my monster wrestling promotion was painful, because the game encourages deep creative problem solving to put on a great show. This solo RPG put me into a creative flow state like no other.

Movie: Deathstalker

Last year, Psycho Goreman director Steven Kostanski gave us Frankie Freako, my favorite movie of 2024. Frankie Freako is an off-the-wall puppet horror comedy inspired by Ghoulies Go To College that felt like it was made specifically for me. This year, we got Kostanski’s remake of the 1980s sword-and-sorcery fantasy film Deathstalker, starring the voice of Patton Oswalt as a diminutive sorcerer who shoots fireballs but has terrible aim. I love Kostanksi’s playful use of slimy puppets and vintage effects. Deathstalker was absolutely a fun watch, though not the mind-altering experience of Frankie Freako.

The reason Deathstalker is here is because it’s been cool watching the evolution of Kostanski’s films. His movies have a distinctly lunatic vision at any budget. He takes on ambitious projects using clever DIY tactics. Kostanski’s work, along with Hundreds of Beavers and The People’s Joker, are a modern blueprint for totally unique indie projects that refuse to compromise.

Talk: My Love Affair with the Lindenbaum Prize Competition (Narrascope 2025)

This fascinating talk from Narrascope about the modern gamebook scene almost inspired me to participate in a juried game jam for traditional interactive fiction. Almost. I had a unique premise and was constructing the game in my mind. Ultimately, I didn’t participate because I worried Lindenbaum would be IFComp all over again, where I’d be making art for the kudos of strangers and not for myself. But I love gamebooks so much. I’m really glad there’s an active community of authors and readers pushing the medium further. Maybe I’ll write a proper one someday. Maybe. I’m close to it. I think.

Music: Awkward Dance Music by Windows96

Windows96 was a happy discovery for me on YouTube Music. I listen to a lot of instrumental music while I write. Windows96 is exactly the kind of peppy, dream-like, electronic Vaporwave I can listen to again and again. In the case of Awkward Dance Music, I have!

This entry breaks the format a bit. Windows96 didn’t inspire me to create music, but the Brazilian composer’s beats kept me energized while I developed games this year, so it’s going on the list.

YouTube: Resurrecting Sinistar

Sinistar is a startling arcade game. The first time I heard the game’s titular planet villain scream “Run, coward!” in a loud, ultra-compressed baritone, I was taken aback! And I was in my twenties, lol. I love Sinistar’s artwork and appreciate its pioneering use of voice clips, but I knew nothing about the game.

Now I’ve watched a 2.5 hour YouTube documentary about Sinistar! Initially, I was skeptical about the runtime, but there was something very unique about this documentary. The filmmaker unearthed multiple iterations of the game’s original source code to tell the story of development from the programmers’ perspective. As a narrative designer who works alongside programmers every day, it was fascinating to see a project from their perspective, like how Sinistar’s initial solo programmer refined and perfected a small chunk of code for a year, because they didn’t have the vision for the full game. This was a deeply nerdy and perspective-shifting YouTube video.

Book: Good Game, No Rematch by Mike Drucker

Every so often, a comedian ends up working in video games. It happened to me! I considered comedy writer my profession for many years, until I switched to narrative designer around 8 years ago.

This is only anecdotal, but I’ve had a lot of Google Meet calls with comedians reaching out to me about transitioning to my industry. With the state of linear media these days, I don’t blame them. I try my best to help, though games is not exactly paradise either.

Mike Drucker did this same switch, but in reverse. Though he interned at SNL with aims of a comedy career, he is a passionate, lifelong gamer. The book chronicles his life through the lens of how video games affected and inspired him. Drucker landed his dream job as a localization writer at Nintendo after his SNL internship. Then, when he got the chance to write and produce an internet comedy show about video games, he decided to leave Nintendo to pursue comedy writing. In the book, he says he regrets leaving Nintendo, even though he went on to have an Emmy winning career as a writer for Samantha Bee and The Tonight Show.

That level of candidness Drucker has about his life is what inspired me so much. It’s what I try to achieve with Equip Story, though I’m not nearly as brave as he is divulging his inner demons. When I was a comedian, hearing more successful comedians complain about their lives and careers irked me. The water in LA is poisoned with jealousy. Now I read about Drucker’s struggles with depression and trauma with both empathy for a fellow creative traveler and awe at his willingness to bleed on the page.

The book is hilarious, by the way! He’s very funny! And there’s a whole section on solo RPG recommendations, which was fantastic.

Podcast: “The Autumn, She’s Been Hit!” by Twenty Thousand Hertz

I don’t expect to cry listening to a podcast. I frequently laugh, genuinely at a joke or derisively at a clueless politico. But I never cry. This episode of Twenty Thousand Hertz, a show about the art of sound design, had me tearing up. The episode is about a teen boy dying of cancer who was a superfan of the developer Bungie. This was back in the late 90’s, when Bungie was a relatively small indie working on a new game called Halo. For the boy’s Make-a-Wish, he decided to go behind the scenes at Bungie with his best friend and family. The staff cannot believe anyone would use their wish to visit their offices. They were not that well known back then. So the staff pull out all the stops for the teen, including having him record a voice line for the game that ends up becoming famous within the fandom.

As a developer, sometimes I get so deep in the weeds with rewrites and ship dates I forget that real people play our games. Games affect their lives, sometimes in deep, meaningful, powerful ways. I could imagine being the teen and I could imagine being one of those developers. Both sides filled with joy, excitement, and painful sorrow. The story reminded me why being a game developer matters, even beyond personal artistic fulfillment. It’s like skipping stones in a lake. You have no idea how those ripples affect the creatures who live there, but that’s part of what it means to be alive.

🎲 Your Turn: What media inspired you to be creative this year? It could be something from 2025 or earlier. I’d love to know, since I have some time off coming up! Reply directly to this email or hit the orange button below and leave a comment the whole world can read.