Rena Game, Plunderludics, and the Artistic Resistance to Commercialism

I was reading the Far Away times manifesto “How to Make Good Small Games”, agreeing with its points and paying attention to the games it chooses to mention. Now, I think a lot of people don’t tend to check out the games that are used as examples in essays like this, I don’t think a lot of people play the games used as examples or subjects in videos, either. There’s a certain sense of detachment from them, a level of implicit trust given to the author to generally know what they’re talking about, know that the games they use are good examples, and know that they’re relevant and well placed and feed into the topic. I know this, because that’s what I do.

But I’ve been making it a point to go out of my way to play small, interesting games I see online, and the game at the end of the third bullet point caught my eye. Right there, there’s this amazingly enticing screenshot of a character from… I think Higurashi¹? with a bunch of terrible looking unaliased pixel circles, a cute girl with a gun standing in the corner, and a level that was very blatantly made by hue shifting a photo of some bricks and then cutting rectangular geometry out of it. Amazing. Obviously, since I like to think I have taste, I went to the page and played through it.

So, the game. Rena Game. I have no idea who Rena is, but I love this terrible coolfonts jpeg logo. I’m pretty familiar with this general style of game because I am in my early 20s, did not go outside a lot growing up, only used terrible hand-me-down office work laptops until I was 19, and didn’t have a whole lot of money to spend on video games. So, safe to say, I played a lot of what I will affectionately call “Garbage”². Low brow flash games, I Wanna Be The Boshy, Happy Wheels, Cave Story, Super Meat Boy at such an inconsistent framerate that sometimes I would die by clipping through the level collision, and so on. I know this kind of janky difficult freeware game well, and I love them.

The immediate Rena Game first impression is that it hits this on an aesthetic and mechanical level instantly - the levels all use that classic “the texture is the hitbox” style, everything has this disgusting crusty bilinear filtering to it, especially when zoomed in, and the player’s hitbox can only generously be described as “noticeably rectangular”. The game’s sense of humour fits too - it’s not really hard to notice that every single enemy sprite is a screenshot from a visual novel or anime or music video, and the only direction the game gives you is to “defeat 9 bosses and see the ending”. It’s very straightforward and, somehow, knows exactly what it wants to be.

Rena Game is a tight experience. It’s funny, I laughed out loud a lot. I think the visual design works amazingly with the sound design, I think the mechanics are very well implemented, I love the push and pull between needing to turn left and right to aim while also needing to turn to block projectiles with your shield, and it doesn’t overstay its welcome either in its boss fights or as an experience. Great stuff.

If you are looking for a recommendation for a weird webgame to play: play Rena Game. There’s a bit where you get put on a hoverboard and you think “ok the game is going to have me do some boss fights on this thing now to spice it up” and then you immediately run into a no hoverboards sign and are back to walking. That was a very Megaman Sprite Game joke, and I found it charming. The game is charming, there’s a lot more little bits like that in there that give the game a real personality.

And that’s something interesting to me – this game has a personality. It’s charming, it has a real authorial voice and yet it’s made almost entirely out of plundered assets, satisfying jank, and hot glue. Rena Game is so interesting to me in many ways because it feels so antithetical to how games, entertainment, and art are treated in our current day. It’s free, unpolished, derivative of and in parody of commercial IP. If itch.io wanted to shift into being a “serious” site³ that appeals to shareholders, this is the kind of game they would incinerate. If IP law were tightened even further, this is the kind of work the creators of Ranma or Higurashi or Darude could claim infringes their “rights”.

So like, I don’t really think Rena Game is that “deep”. I think a lot of its beauty comes from the experience of interacting with the piece and drawing conclusions through observation and analysis. So maybe a lot of what I’ve taken away from it is just freak aspects of my personality: I love awful bilinear filtering, I love when music juxtaposes the action, I love copyright infringement, I love when you can just walk past a boss to skip its fight entirely and then its battle music will continue playing for the rest of the game until the ending is finished. I’m very predisposed to like this game.

The attitude and my interpretation of the guiding philosophy behind Rena Game brings me to plunderludics. Plunderludics - itself playfully derivative of plunderphonics - is stated as “an approach to game development .. using existing videogames as raw material to make new videogames (think collage, remix, sampling, etc.)” The stated movement itself is pretty niche, but you could make a real case for its scope being wide, encapsulating many unrelated movements like modding and speedrunning, where users transform (often wide appeal) games into much more niche experiences through techniques like alternative play and source code modification.

I first came across plunderludics as a movement through the Håfténs newsletter promoting a workshop boshi’s place ran at their experimental game space in Brooklyn [^12]. Now, unfortunately, I live at least a couple miles away from New York City, so I couldn’t attend, but I was fascinated by it. I love the philosophy behind it, I love the expression of play, and I love how it manifests as something so antithetical to the brand consolidation dragon that every large entertainment company wants to ride.

They have a good few works showcased - many like Mario Tag, Mario Mario’s Bro Skater 2, and Auto Mario, otherwise known as Good Luck. These Mario-centric works really evoke some classic older pieces, like Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds, or Ennuigi, and I think it’s pretty hard to assume that wasn’t intentional to some degree. And I love that! The layers of inspiration, stealing, remixing, whatever you want to call it go beyond the text of the games into the inspiration behind them and the ideas being conveyed.

There’s a little bit of confusing and redundant terminology when talking about remixing games, mostly due to how classic the idea “let’s remix a commercial product” is⁴. Auto Mario / Good Luck calls itself a (meta)game, linking to the book Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames.

Art that riffs on and parodies commercial products is great, and personally I think there’s a real need to keep things subversive. I have no bigger pet peeve than when a fan scene is creative and experimental while riffing off an existing work and the IP holder responds by either shutting it down or subsuming it into its own brand identity.

It’s pretty obvious to see Rena Game as a work parallel to plunderludics, with that same crash and burn philosophy of stealing and parodying and joking and playfully reinterpreting. The ending feels amazingly evocative for a short webgame with a boss fight against Darude set in the basement of a Papa John’s, the music is weirdly calming. Juxtaposition and surprise run in this game’s bloodstream, and all that for a game that simply describes itself as “fun boss fight game!”

I want to see more games exploring the idea of stealing, subverting, remixing, and building upon existing work, spitting in the face of or playfully ruffling the hair of the existing copyright holders. Maybe it’s a loving tribute, maybe it’s a biting parody – maybe it’s both.

Unfortunately, the legality of remixed works are often questionable and when Nintendo comes serving up a cease and desist, it’s hard for a smaller creator to cough up the money to fight them even if they have a valid case. IP law desperately needs to be ripped apart and rebuilt from the ground up, in a way that advocates for and protects the people responsible for creating art and furthering mediums - the artists who create works and the artists who build upon them⁵. We can dream, right?

Textually, Rena Game makes simple statements. “Defeat all nine bosses and see the ending”. “No hoverboarding”. I’m worried I may be putting words in the author’s mouth with my interpretations, but I don’t really care: now it’s my turn to plunder. Within its subtext, Rena Game makes plenty more statements, like “fuck IP purity” and “isn’t it amazing that you can make a beautiful game out of stretched out JPEGs, a Papa Johns, and bouncy balls?”