💡 Half-light Histories: Exploring the Experimental Realism of Kentucky Route Zero and Disco Elysium

Abstract: When the history of videogames is represented within popular culture, it is often done from a highly nostalgic perspective that highlights its most iconic characters or commercially successful games. Kentucky Route Zero (2013-2020) and Disco Elysium (2019) are two heavily literary, independently produced adventure games that address more distant and obscure corners of gaming history. Kentucky Route Zero does this through frequent references to how early computer engineering and tabletop board gaming came together to form some of the first videogames. Much of this is layered with subterranean imagery as a direct allusion to Colossal Cave Adventure (1976), a game crafted from its creator’s simultaneous passion for programming, Dungeons & Dragons, and spelunking. Disco Elysium makes similar historical references to tabletop board gaming and addresses the intersection between science and new media art that many early videogames represent (Wilson, 2008).

This paper examines how each of these games metatextually represents the histories of computing and videogames. Both games narratively depict the invention of videogames as a new medium and present this narrative using experimental and artistic storytelling techniques. This paper analyzes these two narratives and argues that there is significant potential for videogames to metatextually remediate their own histories, fluidly linking these histories to broader histories of art and technology. Aubrey Anable’s work on Kentucky Route Zero (2018) serves as a starting point, presenting disorientation as a productive mode of analysis for both history and narrative. Additionally, Timothy J. Welsh’s work on the mixed realism of videogames (2016) helps unpack how both Kentucky Route Zero and Disco Elysium’s representations of videogame history exist between reality and fiction. This paper is useful for anyone interested in the history of videogames and computing, the literary genre of magic realism, or the relationship between analog and electronic gaming.

Keywords: Kentucky Route Zero, Disco Elysium, literary games, textual analysis, realism, history, technoculture

Recommended citation: Bailey, A. (2024) “Half-light histories: Exploring the experimental realism of Kentucky Route Zero and Disco Elysium” In Ready Reader One: The Stories We Tell About, With, and Around Videogames, edited by Megan Condis and Mike Sell, Louisiana State University Press. https://lsupress.org/9780807180891/ready-reader-one/