Where to start? This is not a namedrop by any means but back in the late 1990s I met David Bowie at an Eidos party at the now long-defunct E3 gaming show in Los Angeles. Bowie had provided the soundtrack for an Eidos game I can no longer remember the name of but nevertheless seemed nonplussed by gaming in general. When we were talking about the game itself, he rolled his unusual eyes, one black, one blue and simply said, “Games eh?” in an assassin-esque decapitation of the entire industry.
Now, decades later as I read through the notes for ShipOS 1994 I might just have finally got it. You see you have to be “in” gaming to get some of gaming’s quirks. Like this one, a shipping simulator built on a Windows 95-esque operating system called ShipOS that has just been released on Steam by the equally transfixingly named Border Collie Games. To anybody else it would seem like nonsense. To me? I like it!
You get the feeling that not everything is taken seriously here when you look at the System Requirements. Minimum says, “Literally a potato would do.” The Recommended? “A fresher potato.”
They conclude that “This game should be able to run on your toaster.” They are probably correct.
The game’s descriptions set its slightly insane stall out with, “So you’ve been dumped with the family’s failing shipping empire and you have no idea where to start. Isn’t it funny how often things like these happen…
It happens so often in fact that we decided to help out by developing ShipOS 1994, the industry’s leading integrated shipping management operating system.”
Border Collie Games consists of solo dev Eoin, and this is his first game. Eoin says, “Building ShipOS 1994 has been an incredible journey, and I genuinely can’t wait for players across the globe to dive into it. Already, we’ve built a growing community over on our Discord server and the Steam Community, where a number of new game ideas have spawned to life and have been implemented in game so feel free to come and join us!”
This is the kind of indie game we love, it never takes itself seriously, has a dose of insanity, and somewhere beneath the surface has found a community of players. Check it out on Steam it is available now and has a demo in case you want to play it before committing.