Editor's note: Emily discusses the premise of each Stories Untold episode below. If you'd rather not spoil things for yourself, play before reading.
We're nearly two decades into the new millennium, but so much of our cultural identity is still lodged somewhere in the latter half of the 20th century - the retro synths of Kavinsky and Cliff Martinez invading Hollywood through Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive in 2011, the 16-bit carnage of Hotline Miami. Even for me, most of my memories from the first decade of the Noughties are inexorably linked to that French opiated dancefloor aesthetic which penetrated my radio during my early 20s. It's almost as though a wormhole keeps opening up between the 1980s and the 21st century, creating a strange fusion of both periods. Whether this kind of nostalgia is unique to our particular moment in time or not, it's become something of a recurring theme in the work of designer Jon McKellan.
McKellan's distorted-VHS aesthetic will be familiar to you if you've played Alien Isolation, the 2014 release that recreates the analogue visual style of Ripley Scott's 1979 film right down to vector distortions in the title sequence. As the game's UI designer, McKellan helped to formalise the method for making digital look analog - including weird experiments like running game footage through a battered old VHS player for authentically ancient-looking results.
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