Vinnie's Tomb, Chapter One - The Road To Vinnie's Tomb (1997)

 

Developer: Global Star Software Ltd.

Publisher: Reldni Productions

One Player

Windows

Oddly enough you did not die. Instead, you landed on a strategically placed mountain of breakfast cereal.

Author's Note: This review only covers Vinnie's Tomb Part 1, which as is documented in the review, had a sequel game of a trilogy which never was completed. As of 2022, the second game, Vinnie's Tomb Chapter Two - Shine and Glow Vinnie (1997), is only possible to play if you can boot up an old mid-90s emulation of Windows, which emphasises that, in terms of emulation, PC and Mac software is its own vast land I have yet to even figure out, whilst Vinnie's Tomb Part 1 was converted for Newgrounds. Befitting this bizarre cultural item, even playing it is a story.

Vinnie's Tomb, Chapter One: The Road To Vinnie's Tomb, thus from here to be addressed as Vinnie's Tomb Part 1, is fringe as you can get. It is the creation is made more perplexing because of its context in the modern day. In Canada, there was a man named Troy Scott, and it has been addressed, though is vague, that he died of medical complications on the 4th December 2000¹, his work in music and games as a completely outsider now in the fringe preserved by a group he founded called Reldni Productions. His story, in the obscure vast planes of the internet, now has been mythologized by the holders of Reldni Productions with questions of validity, or at least a sense they want to tell their own strange take on his life. His story through Reldni is now part of the internet's Chinese whispers and mythology, as only fragments of his work, a couple of independently made games and music albums, which are available with an exaggerated back-story. Vinnie's Tomb itself was meant to be a trilogy of games, only for the Reldni Wiki for to talk of the late Troy Scott being kidnappped, mid-interview in 1997, by " by a ski masked figure in a black limousine" preventing the third game from happening². With the timeline involving Scott being frightened into isolated in 1999 by a figure by Mike Alfano², who is likely the same figure in Year of the Alfano (2000), a concept album where Alfano is a gangster figure with a temper and innovated a dance style called the Alfano about shuffling back and forth, undeniably this is a mythology. It does not include the actual truth of who Troy Scott was, if he died in the 2000s or not, and why Vinnie's Tomb, alongside other games documented in these preserved articles, existed in partial form.

The game alone, an ultra-low budget point-and-click adventure which plays to irony, would put some off. Playing to an absurdist humour that is deliberately random and clearly to amuse the creator, Vinnie's Tomb itself is an electronics store that, as time passed, became a tomb, the ancestor of its owner, a pierrot also called Vinnie, setting out to find his rightful hand-me-down. With deliberately bad craftsmanship involved too, this is also a work from the mid-to-late nineties, of the many deceased formats of Windows, to which this was made available for the shareware, with an aesthetic entirely of MS-Paint crudely drawn. I admit, as in all those weird fringes of the internet, all in danger of being lost if it ever was turned off, this belongs to that culture which many would feel would not be even worth preserving, but for me is compelling as part of the weird fixations and foibles of my fellow human being. Probably soaking myself in another's obsessions is a dangerous thing to do, and Vinnie's Tomb Part 1 has one joke which reminds one, as to discuss later on, where this interest in connecting to others should not forget when it is morally dubious, but this is one of those artefacts which was perplexingly fascinating.

Vinnie's Tomb Part 1, in spite of its long introduction, is a slight game, made available in 2016 by a Newgrounds user and coder Mike Welsh, whose interest in preserving over fifteen years of flash animation and work on Newgrounds in itself is to be commended. It is also befitting how this ended up on Newgrounds as the strange uncle of a site which, alongside being a hub for Flash animation before its creator Adobe ended the software in December 2020, is a hub of a variety of internet culture, be it indie games (even known ones), fan art, even animated and video game porn, and everything potentially cool and strange in-between of a variety of qualities and strange humours. Vinnie's Tomb, only from 1997 but a grandfather by now for internet culture, would have at least won a person over from the later generations for its ironic touch. You are warned of what to expect on the first screen when, with a crudely drawn sea creature nearby, the narrator with a strange accentuated accent does so to the player, and you hear what can only be described between a MIDI cacophony mixed with a knock off version of music by The Residents blaring out. You need to get past the bridge, a trick where you needs to find a way to cross without it collapsing, and if you manage to succeed with having to have to restart the game as you fell in and drowned, this turns into a rudimentary point n click with stream of consciousness wackiness.

Even this forced me to realise my taste for point n click games is still to be dealt with, impatience likely a factor for even the most rudimentary of presentations, with icons onscreen the only things to clearly click, to lead me to miss things. Vinnie's Tomb to be honest though, however, also has its fair share of esoteric decisions, especially as Part I has a lot of outright irrational ideas, where key items like cheese and underwear are acquired through a dialogue exposition text when you get certain combinations, or that the diamond you need to open a door is still needed, and needs to be wrenched out of the place it has been placed into. Or that you need to wear the glasses before knocking a yellow ball presumed to be the sun out of the left corner. Yes, even if this is rudimentary, it emphasises my disinterest in the point and click genre I need to overcome with, in how it feels like the puzzles are vague to procrastinate rather than ones based on actual common sense. Here the absurdist tone almost feels justifiable only because this game is very short and you can get back to the sections with ease, when others are longer and could even have game over conclusions.

Many will not even get through this, regardless of short length, as cacophony is apt for it all, a game truly weird for just the sake of being weird, sometimes inspired even if by accident for me, other times even for my forgiving taste in strange cultural objects feeling like it is trying and failing. Some odd cultural references that would be dated even in the nineties appear, of a snake in the garbage you need to talk to being bigger than Wayne Newton at Las Vegas, that "Donny Osmond is hosting a benefit concert there for seven legged spiders from a windy city...", or that one concern to get key items is to shut up a monster who sings like Leonard Cohen at night and keeps everyone up. These at least reveal the tastes of its creator which, in hindsight, is fascinating to learn of, but other jokes are not like this. It is random for the sake of it, sometimes succeeding for me even as accidental surrealism, but there is a fine line between succinct surrealism and just trying, or rambling humour which is a greater issue. All the voice acting, crudely recorded, has weird accents and intonations, all non-professional and crudely recorded in the modern day, and the music is likely to be maddening for some. (The Residents comparison, even though that band is superior and honed their music, is apt in mind that, if you played a song like Constantinople from Duck Stab (1978) in a loop, it might drive someone mad too, with the same manic energy here from a professional recording). The humour is the kind that amuses oneself but required your own codes of what you find funny, rather than what is funny to yourself but could gain a reaction from others even if shocked laughter. One joke, only one thankfully, crosses a potential line where the aforementioned snake you need to talk to, whose brother you meet instead, is meant to be a "queer snake". Not the worse language to use, and what Troy Scott meant with the term queer, either the derogatory term re-appropriated by LGBTQ people or the old term for being "odd", is up to meaning seeing how quirky the game is, but this is a good reminder to be aware when you even find entertainment or interest in soaking in these strange cultural objects to be aware of this.

In terms of aesthetic, most will be put off by it too. As mentioned, it is Microsoft Point to the point Scene 3, in grassy land before you enter the central cave of the narrative, has flowers drawn by the spray paint function of the software that are just dots. Text boxes, the old ones from old computers where you have to press okay to continue, present the exposition, and dialogue scenes are progressed by clicking a click-at-a-time slider at the bottom. One non-playable character you encounter is an invisible horse, only invisible (until you get to look at him) because it is explicitly said that the creator cannot draw horses. This is the moment where I find myself having to figure out what I feel for Vinnie's Tomb Part 1, a curious artefact I am glad to struggle through, am glad to learn of more even if it means having to go through the juvenile mythology behind it which obscures the actual history, maybe find joy slowly with that weird mythology, and admitting that this is not a game many would want to play. The game itself is a time capsule, not a great game, but alongside the fascination with this content, even this crude art style done without irony and deliberately could be appropriated for an indie game and you could get something that sells like a cult gem on Steam.

That later bit is not a joke, as considering the steps into old and even "ugly" aesthetic, like the embracing of old Playstation One era polygonal aesthetic, even Nintendo 64's Vaseline smeared polygons being looked back to for artistic interest, old crude low budget PC software, even Microsoft Paint-core, could be something you get a great game from. This, even if a mess, still has the whit around it to have secrets within it, even if such secrets involve a mini-game where you have to slowly manoeuvre your pierrot up screen, unable to even see the traps you have to avoid and thus having to go by pure luck. This is the type of work which, to be cruel, would be looked at as a exhibit to gawk at for how unnatural it is, a misfortunate creation in the world of video games which is yet artificially made to be like this too. The paradox is that, in among this, there are moments which captured my own taste in the weird which felt good, even if you have to scrape off so much which is not really that inspired.

And even that questionable content can be digested as it fascinates me as a cultural object from a different era like a museum exhibit, which makes this a confused one to deal with. Truthfully, only those intrigued by any of this should try Vinnie's Tomb Part 1. Part 2 was released in 1997 too, but still exists in form that has not converted to a more accessible form, one which requires a knowledge of how to run an old Windows emulator from the past. Part III itself never existed or is lost, and there is an entire history of titles which Troy Scott was said to have created, possibly lost for real from a time where immediate preservation was not common online. That this is all part of the mythology itself confuses things further. This follows the same camp as when fan fiction, both the truly worst and memorable, is exonerated and preserved online, though Vinnie's Tomb is an obscure work few may know of.  

This is, to be harsh again, a work of whims and rambling sense of humour, a stream of consciousness alongside the music Troy Scott made which Reldni Productions have made available for free, made as home-produced improvisations on what he could create. This is something most would not appreciate, but I have come to this entire catalogue with empathy even if I am to be cautious in that too. To openly borrow a joke from an actual video game critic and author, Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, this is exactly like finding a dead squirrel with a fez on its head³, a curiosity to look at that raises questions. I find that metaphor cruel as, rather than being distracted by something odd on the side of the road, I came to Vinnie's Tomb willingly and with empathy for any misfit. The metaphor is more apt, artificially being kept back by Reldni Productions' mythology, this raises interesting questions, such as whether that is a hat or if the squirrel fell out a tree eating a yogurt³, and here whether Vinnie's Tomb is actually the outsider art piece uncovered from a passed creator, or this is entirely fabricated for some strange in-joke. That fabrication is harmless, thankfully not used for cheating people if it was revealed to be the truth, but it just asks further questions to scratch your chin about.

 

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1) This is referenced in Scott's biography on a fandom wiki, and is referencing the following on RootsWeb.

2) As documented in the third game's wiki.

3) This was befittingly taken from a review of The Good Life (2021) as premiered on November 10, 2021 on Escapist Magazine's website and Youtube, a game from the cult figure SWERY, the Japanese developer/Buddhist monk behind such strange video game titles to cover one day like Deadly Premonition (2010), which just from the review is a befittingly weird game one wishes to just play for its own bizarre content.