BELDING, Mich. — Do you have fond memories of flipping through a rolodex to find a phone number? Did you enjoy having to wind a cassette tape up with a pencil? Can you imitate the sound of a dial-up modem connecting to the internet?
If you answered yes to any of those questions, a new PC game being developed in West Michigan will scratch your itch for 90s nostalgia.
INSPIRATION
Call Hating is being developed by Jon Bergen, a chiropractor from Belding, Michigan who found inspiration for the game while working in his office.
"One day I was just on the phone, I was you know, press one for English... press, whatever to talk to a representative. And I was thinking, well, this is kind of like a game in a way because if you really boil it down a video game is just input and output," Bergen explained.
This most basic of things that people do on a daily basis, became a basic premise for a computer game that Bergen would embark upon making.
"I thought well, you know, this is a really frustrating experience that I think a lot of people have had, and they can probably connect with it. And so it kind of just got the wheels turning from there," Bergen added.
While the game is set in present day, you play a character who is surrounded by outdated technology that might take being born in the last millennium to recognize.
"You have a Rolodex, you have an old touchtone phone [and] you have an old laptop with basically Windows 95 on it. And so there's a lot of the gameplay is based on kind of escape room type challenges," Bergen said.
If you aren't familiar with escape rooms, they are games that take place in a single room with the goal of escaping by solving a series of puzzles.
Bergen says he also got a lot of inspiration from the Monkey Island series of games, specifically The Curse of Monkey Island—a point-and-click adventure game released in 1997.
GAMEPLAY
Many of the challenges you encounter in the game will seem easy at first, but end up having multiple layers as you work to complete them.
In one challenge, you need to talk to your Internet Service Provider to get your connection working again, but you have to talk to an AI named A.N.I.T.A. who needs all sorts of information from you.
"[The] AI on the phone... keeps asking for different information like your account number, your PIN number, your password, your Social Security number, your bank information."
And the requests for account information keep getting more and more ridiculous as your progress.
The game will sometimes remind you of the classic book series, "Choose Your Own Adventure" with the choices you make in the game affecting what happens next and helping determine which ending you'll get.
"As far as actual endings, there's about four main endings... There are different ways you can die, so I don't really call those endings. There are different ways that you can lose, like, if you run out of time, you get a call on the phone, and it's your boss and you get fired. And then you have to start over. If you do the little mini-games, [and] if you fail, you end up dying, like the house burns down or something."
Bergen said his goal in providing multiple endings was to give the game replay value. Once you complete the game the first time, it will still offer you something new if you go back and make different choices the next time you play.
MINI-GAMES
While your main task in the game is to not get fired from your job, you can only achieve this by completing several different tasks in the form of mini-games.
When talking to your ISP, you need to provide a ton of information to verify your account.
"You have to find all this information all over the office and solve a lot of different little kind of minigames and problems in order to find that information and put it into the phone," said Bergen.
A lot of the tasks required the complete the game have one or several of these mini-games attached to them. For example, just to use the phone, you'll need to untangle one of those incredibly long phone cords that use to be standard on phones in the 90s.
The mini-games can be as trivial as remembering your username and password or as insane as trying to survive on an alien planet inside a bullet train heading toward an incinerator.
ABOUT JON BERGEN
Jon Bergen is a dad of five and his wife and kids are a big source of encouragement, ideas and feedback for the game.
Even though he is a chiropractor by trade, Bergen says he has always been drawn toward gaming and game design.
"It's been kind of a hobby for a while. But you know, again, it's not something I really got serious about until the pandemic hit," Bergen explained.
Bergen had to close his chiropractor office during the shutdown early in the COVID pandemic, allowing him to focus more on what he called a "fun little hobby."
He says that he had done some basic modding to already published games in the past, but never designed one from scratch until he published a puzzle game on Android in early 2022. That game is called FruitCode and is available for free on the Google Play Store.
That game's development happened alongside Call Hating's development and was a learning process for Bergen to better understand how to publish a game.
Bergen says that he created all of the pixel graphics by himself for Call Hating in an app called Aseprite and developed the game on the open-source engine, Godot Engine.
RELEASE DATE
Call Hating will be released on March 1, 2023, on PC via Steam and Bergen says he hopes to also release the game on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store in the future.
Are you developing a game in West Michigan and want to share your project? Contact Steven Bohner at sbohner@13onyourside.com.
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