It feels like gaming has officially entered its doom and gloom era.
I can’t remember a point in my life where the discourse surrounding video games was as bleak as it is now.
One particular concern during the modern age of gaming is historic preservation within the medium. Some 20 years ago, we could scarcely have imagined this to be the issue it is now.
Short of all copies of certain games being destroyed in an all-out nuclear war, the prevalence of physical media for the longest time ensured that most games would remain available, even if sometimes against eBay prices that border on extortion.
MMOs were already a thing in the early 2000s, and the thought of ‘what if the servers shut down’ would surely have crossed the minds of some World of Warcraft’s early adapters. Still, there was not yet an industry-wide obsession with live service, and we’d only see the definitive rise of anti-consumerist DRMs in the years following.
Games For Windows Live, anyone?
There were already releases whose obscurity put them on the verge of being lost media, but those cases had more to do with up-front cancellations or extremely limited supply.
Star Fox 2 was known to exist but remained unavailable to the public until 2017, and the NES game Cheetahmen II was supposedly unreleased but can somehow be found for sale on auction sites for idiotic prices.
But a game that would outright stop being available for purchase because the owner of its digital storefront decided to flip a switch? Not too long ago, that was hardly thinkable, yet it has since become an increasingly common occurrence as the market share of digital-only games soared.
As I am sure you may have noticed if you follow my work here, I’m currently on a quest to play and finish every Kirby game before the end of 2026, and for this endeavor I’m restricting myself to the mainline entries. Part of this is born from convenience because the series has a rather large volume of quirky proof-of-concept titles that hinge on a singular gimmick and come in varying degrees of playability. But it’s also a necessity due to some of these games having been exclusive to digital storefronts that no longer exist.
With Sony recently announcing that it would cease publishing physical copies of Playstation games from 2028 onward—I’m sure this is the first time you’ve read about this on Substack—we’re only heading further in that direction, with the feared end result being that a few major gaming companies will curate what we are allowed to buy or even own.
Now that the industry’s future fast approaches with dystopian tread, I do feel vindicated in never getting rid of my game-related possessions.
Just this week I finally started giving my 3DS a proper spin. I’d bought the console all the way back in 2015 for Mario Kart 7, and it had been sitting idle ever since I finished that game. I even had to think real hard about which moving box my 3DS was hibernating in, but I eventually unearthed it and discovered that my neglected handheld is still in top shape, with its near-mint condition—to my great surprise—even extending to its battery.
Consider for a moment the potential here: I have an as-new console I’ve barely touched with a broad library of games ready for me to explore, including high-profile releases belonging to my favorite IPs. If the prospect of an overpriced new Playstation that only runs digital games was by itself not enough to kill my excitement for it, then this surely is.
Beyond the practical reality of tapping a rich vein of new games to try—new in the sense that I have never played them—there is also the sentimental value of gaming-related objects.
I know this is a more muddy topic because it is all too easy to regress into a state of syrup-drenched romanticism when discussing one’s personal attachment to physical media, and while I’m fully capable of indulging such materialist impulses, I also realize it may not make for the most enticing prose within the context of this issue.
So what I’ll do instead is highlight one single object from my collection, and I’d be genuinely curious to hear how many of you are familiar with it, even if just by name.
Introducing the 1997 PC game Sub Culture.
If the low-effort pun in the game’s title is not enough to betray its age, then surely its status as a ‘3D Action Adventure’ being listed as a unique selling point on the front of the box will give it away.
Oh, and maybe it coming in an unwieldy-yet-charming PC big box is by itself a bit of a clue.
In Sub Culture, you control a submarine and must navigate, fight and trade your way across the ocean, with the game’s title referring to the underwater society that populates the sea bedding.
This 1997 PC game was published by Ubisoft—then still adorably stylized as Ubi Soft—and developed by Criterion Studios. Criterion was a young studio back then, but would go on to make a name for itself, first by developing the terrific Burnout series before getting entangled in a semi-successful attempt to revive the Need For Speed IP. As of 2026, the studio appears to be serving a life sentence developing for Battlefield games along with a half dozen other subsidiaries of prolific Saudi video game publisher Electronic Arts.
Despite the involvement of some would-be famous studios, Sub Culture itself never reached fame nor infamy. What little online data I can find teaches me that the total North American sales amounted to just a few thousand copies.
The combination of the game’s title, age and obscurity rendered my search queries into its European sales data fruitless, but given that my physical copy comes with some unprompted environmental storytelling in the form of a big, ugly, orange discount sticker that I haven’t ever dared tear off, it is safe to say that the odds of Sub Culture having been a massive success in my country are as firmly below sea level as the game’s setting.
As it happens, that pompous, bright sticker—that by the way manages to put a writing error in a two-letter word—is likely the reason I even got to play Sub Culture.
It was my mother who bought me the game, and that wasn’t a common occurrence. Our family wasn’t poor, but we weren’t exactly rich either, so the limited household budget combined with her perpetual concern over me playing hyperviolent video games behind her back (guilty) kind of narrowed down the range of suitable games in an age where Blood, Mortal Kombat and Carmageddon dominated store shelves.
But a game about exploring the ocean that featured beautiful cover art and came at a discount price?1 It fit the bill perfectly, and even though I don’t remember ever asking her, I’m convinced she bought this game based purely on vibes—a family tradition I’m proud to continue to this day.
Sub Culture turned out to be one of those games that captured me from the first second I was let loose into its world. The beauty of its 3D-rendered ocean may long have been eclipsed by the likes of Subnautica, Endless Ocean and Abzû, but back then, there was absolutely nothing like it.
And so I spent most of my time with Sub Culture simply exploring its vast underwater world. Since I am operating entirely on decades-old memories, I have no idea whether this game’s map was as big as it felt (probably not), but with the sandbox/open world hype still being several years away, it was remarkable in itself that a full 3D game allowed you to go wherever you pleased without being forced to progress from level to level.
In this sense, my experience with Sub Culture was most similar to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. That game also felt bigger than it really was, but it seemed grand not because of its map size, but through its ability to draw in the player and make them want to be a part of its universe. Hyrule was a world that I was content to exist in to a point where, for the longest time, it suppressed my urge to actually complete its quests.
In this regard, Sub Culture was much the same. From what I can recall, most of the map was open for exploration from the very start, even if it prevented me from upgrading my vessel. I remember spending entire evenings steering my puny submersible through dim-lit underwater cave systems, carefully passing by bandit bases, and finding respite among the peaceful elements of the local wildlife. Along with its fittingly tranquil ambient soundtrack, the whole experience made for hours of feel-good gaming at a time.
The big box promised me a 3D Action Adventure and that is exactly what I got, even if I valued the ‘Adventure’ a lot more than the ‘Action.’
I did on occasions try to engage with Sub Culture’s actual gameplay, which I remember to be surprisingly modern for its time, what with it being an open world game where you could complete missions to gain the favor of different factions.
By today’s standards, such game design may not seem all that original, and it is in fact this very structure that has been robbed of all excitement through its presence in every major Ubi space Soft title in the ongoing Far Cryification of their every franchise, but this is a modern perspective.
Realize that Sub Culture came out a good four years before Grand Theft Auto’s first 3D outing. It didn’t just look, but also played like it was from the future.
Perhaps it being so ahead of the curve proved to be the game’s undoing.
Not content to let you off the hook with just the exploration of a beautiful underwater environment, Sub Culture tried to do many more things. We got an open world mission structure that the more casual gamers of the time—who had perhaps also bought the game based purely on its box art—might not have cared for.
On top of that design was a rather complex trading system with fluctuating, region-based prices, which served as the game’s main money-making loop. It was this aspect that always made me abandon my half-hearted attempts to engage with Sub Culture’s deeper mechanics. As can be predicted, such game systems were not well suited for a child whose first language wasn’t even English.2
Having had experience with other 3D games thanks to my Nintendo 64, I was a lot better at dealing with the characteristic jank of early 3D movement, but I can’t imagine this compounded complexity to have helped Sub Culture’s case as a low-stakes experience for burgeoning gamers.
In retrospect, Sub Culture appears to have been a game that appealed to casual players, but was designed for tryhards. It featured mechanics that could only hope to be grasped by gamers who were already ‘in on it,’ but those already had their Quakes, their Super Mario 64s and their Final Fantasy 7s to play.
It then fell upon my slender shoulders to turn the game into a success. A kid enamored with digital exploration, who was content to ignore a large part of a game’s systems as long as the freedom to roam was there. But going by how much my questing-averse gaming habits annoyed my peers at the time, I can’t imagine this demographic to have been all that large.
And so, Sub Culture turned into a forgotten gem, or rather a sunken treasure, destined to never be unearthed again.
To my knowledge, it never received a remaster, a re-release, let alone a sequel, and even though I still own the original game disc, I’d be hard-pressed to find hardware that’s able to run this ancient video game without me having to invoke some arcane tech ritual.
And yet, it exists. It’s right here in my home.
Because of this, the memory lives on. A memory of a game that was brought into my life courtesy of a garish discount sticker.
It’s a memory that I relive fondly every time I walk past the shelf where it’s been sitting all this time. Like my 3DS, Sub Culture also arrived to my current apartment by way of cardboard box, yet its sentimental connotations compelled me to give it a prominent place in my home before most of the furniture had even been unpacked.
You might now wonder—as do people after long monologues in badly written movies—why are you telling me all this?
Well, because I can.
Had Sub Culture come to me in the form of a download code, I would not have had constant reminders of my experience with its world, and any memory of it would long since have been reduced to the fleeting thought of ‘oh hey, I think I played that game once’ when some random ‘90s nostalgia account mentions it by chance.
It seems that we might one day reach a point where we’ll have to keep our fond gaming memories alive all by ourselves, no longer aided by physical relics and perhaps even unable to play these games ever again because a digital store owner got out the wrong side of bed that day.
I think it’s important to keep storing these memories in spite of all setbacks, because if there is one thing I’m thankful for when the future of this medium seems so bleak, it’s that I am still able to look back and rediscover the joy that this hobby is supposed to bring.
Notes:
All photos taken and edited by me.
Wikipedia was consulted for basic info on Sub Culture, such as its year of release and North American sales data. All other information came from my own, quite old memories, so apologies for any inaccuracies resulting from such a dubious source as the human mind.
For reference, the price on the box is in guilders, which were worth about 2.20 euros around the time we switched to a different currency in the early 2000s, making this game’s price a little over €/$13. Though when adjusted for hyperinflation, it is probably worth like €1000 at this rate.
Attentive readers may have noticed that the box lists Spanish, Italian and Dutch as available languages, but these were just the languages that the user manual had been translated in.
I have a couple of old finds like this that I or my parents bought on “vibes” and they are just brilliant. They might not have been the best games to play ever, but they have a strange little place in our memories and that’s what makes them special.
I do remember the giant PC gaming boxes too 🤣