Zarf Updates

Back in April I took a look at the Hugo Award finalists, with an eye to seeing how the votes might divide up. I did this because the 2025 Best Game voting showed an interesting split between "indie" and "big company" voters (in some sense of those very subjective terms).

Well, the 2026 Hugo Awards were announced this weekend, and the results are... boring. No! I don't mean boring; we got a great lineup of new works across SF media, and I was excited to see them. But as statistics, there's not much to say.

(The 2026 Hugo Full Statistics report can be found on the LACon Hugo Award site.)

September is upon us, and with it that least regarded of the early Infocom games: The Witness.

As usual, the source code repository is also live, licensed with the open-source MIT license. In addition, I've posted high-resolution scans of the original folio manual and feelies.

I am always happy to see another Rusty Lake game. It's not a high-velocity studio, but they're reliably high-quality and enjoy experimenting with their chosen form. (Co-op gameplay! Short film!)

I am also always happy to see another Rusty Lake knockoff. These are pretty common; creepy-haunted is not a complicated vibe. I've got a whole folder on these on my iPad. The Strange Case series; Hotel Orpheus; Forgotten Hill...

...My folder is labelled "Submechanical", because when I first played a Rusty Lake game -- or "Cube Escape", as it was titled back then -- I decided it was a Submachine knockoff. It turned out to be a speciation event instead; but of course that's hindsight. My point is that there's nothing wrong with being a knockoff, especially at three bucks on the mobile store.

Now I have played both the new Rusty Lake and a new batch of "if you enjoyed that, why not try...?"

• Servant of the Lake
• Hidden Town (series)

Apparently today is the worst possible day to post about Zork the text adventure? See articles about Duskbloods if you don't follow FromSoftware news, which, to be clear, I don't. Spoiler: everybody's hot for a playable goon named "Zork".

But I shall defy the Trending News gods! I have deployed a new Visible Zorker feature: a search box in the Source pane.

Back in March I made a lot of hay about the decline of GDC. I didn't confidently predict that GDC'27 would be cancelled, but cancellation wouldn't have surprised me.

Well, GDC'27 isn't cancelled. Which we knew. They would have had to announce a cancellation at or immediately after GDC '26. Turning a ship of that size takes a year of lead time, minimum.

Instead, as Cmdr. Takashima almost once said, GDC '27 is open for business. There's a shiny "What's New" page. To quote a couple of lines:

• Introducing a new Business Hall at Moscone West, built specifically for meetings, networking, partnerships, pitches, and getting business done.
• Opening the Festival Hall Tuesday through Thursday (previously Wednesday through Friday).
• Making several pass and pricing changes designed to provide more accessible ways into GDC.

Oh, and I was right about Ball-Park Monday being a flop. That's off the list.

The important part is the new price list. $500 standard; $300 for student/indie; $150 for the expo hall alone; $100 for the "business hall" alone.

In some sense, this completely contradicts GDC's new mission statement:

The GDC Festival of Gaming is where the entire B2B games industry comes together.

That's from an og:description metadata tag on their front page, which is surely the most official possible source. It used to say "the game industry's premier professional event", but this "B2B" language came in last year. Similarly, their 2025 rebrand announcement talked about "the world's premier B2B gaming industry event".

Two articles have popped up in the wake of Cyan's fandom-rattling pitch reel for Anglerfish.

To recap from last week: Anglerfish was the Myst-universe project that Cyan started prototyping in 2024. They teased it as "PREFALL" because it was set in the golden age (and Age) of the cryptic D'ni civilization, centuries before Atrus and his family.

Cyan spent four months building a fully playable prototype of Anglerfish. They pitched it to publishers. They did not get funding. They shelved the game and laid off half the company. Phooey.

Last week, Wired published an article with more details. What we learn here is that Cyan pitched the game in early 2025, at DICE Summit and GDC.

Cyan hoped it would come away from the conferences with a funding agreement between $1 million and $10 million to finish building Anglerfish. But even though the demo was positively received by most publishers, Cyan went home empty-handed, put Anglerfish on ice, and soon laid off 12 people, roughly half of its staff.

-- from "No One Can Afford to Make Myst Games Anymore", Adam Morgan via Wired, 05-Aug-2026

August brings us Suspended, Michael Berlyn's cryogenic nightmare.

As usual, the source code repository is also live, licensed with the open-source MIT license.

The rest of my 2026 Mysterium report. (See part 1 for the Cyan news.)

All the videos are currently available on Mysterium's Twitch channel. They will be archived on their Youtube channel pretty soon.

Another Mysterium has arrived and then faded silently away. Or, I suppose, faded away with its characteristic reverb-y "vrrrwww-WONK-wonk-wonk" noise.

This year's event was in Portland, Oregon. I did not attend in person; cross-country travel feels like too much of a stretch right now. (And I visited Portland just a couple of years ago for XOXO.) But of course I watched all the streamed talks and presentations. Now I bring you the annual report -- in two parts.

Part 1 is the stuff about Cyan itself and what they're doing. Part 2 will be fan activity and community contributions, including the Myst documentary.

All the videos are currently available on Mysterium's Twitch channel. They will be archived on their Youtube channel pretty soon.

EDIT-ADD: The State-of-Cyan video is now up on Cyan's Youtube channel.

I'm embarrassed about this one.

The Witness will be September's release for the Visible Zorker project, but it's already done for Patreon supporters. So I've scanned my Witness feelies for the app already. (You can see the high-res scans here at the Internet Archive.) It's a classic package. The 1938 newspaper is probably Infocom's high point for pure immersive scene-setting.

But the matchbook caught my attention.