Gaming took a central role in the culture war against the culture war. At some point, gamers simply wanted to be free of outside manipulations, a point that became especially touchy since video games often involve the scary stuff like war, conspiracy, pandemic, and violence.
Launching into the lacuna formed between observable reality and the peer pressure echo chamber caused when all public figures must knuckle under the dominant ideological and commercial Narrative, Kvlt Games has made a name for itself with irreverent off-Narrative games.
Luckily founder Roland was able to take some time out to answer a few of our idiotic questions (but declined our request for a deathmatch in Red Alert 2).
What prompted you to start Kvltgames, and who is your intended audience?
I have been interested in game development since I was a teenager. Particularly the development of “independent” games made by creative individuals. I have also spent many years as a an identitarian political activist and at some point, these two fields of activity came together naturally.
My audience are young europeans/white americans who are fed up with the politically correct mainstream entertainment media and want to play something that actually speaks to them and articulates their worldview. On a different level, my audience is any developer with “dissident” views, be it as a coder, designer or artist. I want to draw these people to us, like a beacon, and foster the creation of a dissident gamedev scene. I do not want us to be the only ones anymore.
To this end, we also host so-called “Game Jams”, events where people create small minigames over a short time to experiment and get to know each other. You can find those games on our website under “Heimat Jam”.
With heavy signaling like early 90s graphics, vaporwave music, and using terms like “poz” and “Globohomo,” you are sure to provoke. What result do you hope will come about from this?
Provocation was a big element of our first game, “Heimat Defender: Rebellion”. And it worked: the game was well received by our audience and the outrage of the “powers that be” got us a great marketing campaign for free. But we do not want to be known for pure provocation with nothing behind it, we want to improve quality with every game.
Our team has grown, we are more experienced now and our next title will first and foremost focus on being the best game we can make. Of course there will be plenty of political messaging in it, but you should be able to ignore all that, if you choose so, and still have a great experience.
As of now, you have two games, “Heimat Defender” and “The Great Rebellion.” Do you use a framework/SDK/API or write your own graphics systems? How long does it take to develop a game?
“The Great Rebellion” is currently still in development and will be released in 2023. You will be able to buy it from our website. We currently use the Unity3D Engine for development. Developing a game can take anywhere from weeks to years; in our case, we are close to having worked two years on this title by now. It is very hard to give an exact release date at the moment, but progress is good. It will be considerably more complex than the first game. But if there is one general rule, it is this: It always takes longer than you expect! I still keep being surprised just how much bloody effort it is to polish even a very simple game to a state where it is truly fun.
What has feedback been from the lugenpresse? It seems that YouTube has deplatformed you and some bloggers are writing amusingly nasty things.
We have been defamed and deplatformed a lot, yes. Famously, “Heimat Defender” got put on a list of “youth-endangering media” in Germany, essentially banning it. We also got thrown off the distribution platform “Steam,” which is quite an achievement considering almost nothing gets deleted there. The literal mass shooting simulator “Hatred” for instance is still on there (as it should be).
I think one reason for the over the top reaction was however that we did not just make pure propaganda, but delivered an actual quality product that entertained people, and most importantly, made them laugh. Even our enemies found some of that stuff funny, they won’t admit it, but I know. Anyway, deplatforming and censorship is very annoying, but they are par for the course, it is to be expected from the left wing hegemony. It forces us to be clever and find other ways.
What the presstitutes and bloggers write is indeed quite amusing and I don’t take it seriously, I even put a selection of the best quotes from then on on our website as “endorsement” haha.
The term “kvlt” came out of the black metal underground in the early 2ks. Was there any influence on your work from death metal (Morgoth, Fleshcrawl, Torchure, Atrocity) or black metal bands (Ungod, Absurd)?
The term “kvlt” in “Kvltgames” has been chosen because it just looks and sounds cool, but as a black metal fan I always liked the additional connotation. I cannot cite any direct influences on my work, but metal (and especially black metal) has definitely influenced who I am as a person. I like both classic BM as well as some new bands like Baise Ma Hache or Mgla. In fact, younger me found quite some of my favorite bands like Summoning or Sacramentum on the ANUS.COM metal archives back in the day. I also always liked thrash but never got into death metal much.
It seems the world is shifting away from a belief in humanism/individualism toward an idea of, well, culture being more important than ideology. Do you see evidence of this on the ground in Germany?
I do not know how “ideological” most people here really are. They certainly are good at soaking up whatever the “current thing” is and then acting as a sort of hivemind, but the degree of ideological underpinning is questionable. There is a well oiled consent-creation machinery that pushes whatever is currently useful for globalist elites. People here can literally switch between two contradictory opinions in no time if they are being told to (“every single person dying from Covid is an extreme tragedy” — “risking death of millions via nuclear war with Russia ain’t that bad”).
Through cultural means, you can in any case reach the hearts of people who are not completely retarded yet in a more subtle, but also deeper and longer lasting way. Since I find the current political discourse often just very stupid and boring I decided to go this path, this probably just boils down to my personality. I draw this approach from my own development: I was not very political for a long time in my life, but my aesthetic preferences were shaped by metal and neofolk, which in a way “primed” me for identitarianism on an almost subconscious level. I hope that more good dissident art of all kinds will pop up in the future.
What do you think are the classic videogames that everyone should know?
This is a highly subjective list, and I could make it fill many pages, but I will just cut it down to my personal ten favorite classic games:
- Deus Ex
- Silent Hill 2
- Fallout 1
- Doom
- Quake Deathmatch at a LAN party with your friends, beer, pizza, and metal blasting in your speakers
- Age of Empires 2
- Ultima 7
- System Shock 2
- Super Mario Bros 3
- Turrican 2
Where do you and your team sit ideologically/politically, if you can mention such things in the legal environment in which you find yourselves? You seem to identify as “dissidents”; what does this term mean to you?
To be honest I am as unhappy with the term “dissident” as with most other labels. My goal is the continued existence of European civilization (I do not exclude white Americans/members of the Anglosphere here btw). These people brought a very special spark to the world none other did and I don’t want it to go out. I do not want to “retvrn” to any specific point in history; I think this type of thinking is moot and this “nostalgia” can paralyze right wingers.
That does not mean you can’t take inspiration and energy from looking towards our ancestors — you have to — but your thoughts and actions must firmly be directed towards building the future. I want us to find a sensible path going from where we came to a European future that is not merely reactionary, if that makes sense. I implicitly have put this idea in our new game: the main character is very much a man of his time but he also is aided by ghosts from the European past, spirits of figures like Leonidas or King Arthur. He uses laser guns and other futuristic gadgets as well however.
Our team is ideologically somewhat heterogenic. Our common ground is our disdain for the current order and our desire to build something great instead of having endless online discussions.
It seems security services across the West are very interested in keeping track of dissidents. Are people afraid that you are a honeypot installing spyware on their machines? How would you explain to them that this is not the case?
I wasn’t really confronted with that, but sure, it is a legit concern. If they believe we are some kind of honey pot, I can only point them to the amount of censorship we face and how much we are being fought by the system. Why would they try to hide this honey pot from you at all costs if they want you to step into it? Apart from that, make sure to only download our games from our official websites. We can obviously not guarantee for anything you get from other sources.
If people want to keep track of what you are doing, how do they evade the censorship and follow your latest updates?
The best and most censorship-resistant channels are Telegram and Gab, make sure to follow us there and our website. We now also have a Twitter account for “The Great Rebellion” specifically. You can still follow us on Instagram, let’s see how long this account survives.
Tags: dissident right, kvltgames, trollsk, video games
i never been into video games, but recently i decided to start playing some old classic games, i am now playing street fighter II, but every time i try to play with a strategy i get my ass whooped, i only win when i am just smashing buttons, what to do?
You must give praise to Satan.
That helps, but if you actually want to know, I have a wealth of knowledge on the subject.
show me the forbidden knowledge
It’s worth noting that in Street Fighter 2, the AI both “cheats” (it reads your controls and reacts instantly, and it also has access to “better” versions of every move than the player does) and it tries to play just one step better than the player (to keep them feeding quarters into the machine — they didn’t want people saying “this is too hard” and walking away after just one credit, so they made it intentionally make “mistakes” depending on how bad or well the player is playing in order to keep them interested), so “good play” against the AI largely consists of finding things that it’ll interpret as “not very good” that are just good enough to beat it.
So it’s sort of like poker? Bluff your way to victory. Screaming “Allahu Ackbar!” and mashing buttons does not seem so odd at this point.
Turrican 2 on C64 or Amiga?
Much as I love the Bummers and 6502 machines in general, you would kind of want to play almost anything on the higher-powered Amiga…
http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/turrican/
The 68ks were great machines too, it’s just that Amiga bungled the corporate side of things and then Apple was the only player, which tainted a once-great chip with the stench of AIDS and quinoa.
While I like sweet music of Chris Hulsbeck music on Amiga, C64 version is superior in my eyes.
BTW there were few metal injected titles in recent times that I know of: Metal Warrior series, Slain, Butcher (who knows, knows), then there was Hatred with some writing by Warcrimer from Infernal War/Voidhanger and Ancestors Legacy with music by no one other than Rob Darken.
Guy from the interview have pretty based taste, I must say. Reznor’s soundtrack to Quake is in my opinion his best work. And I have DooM version of “behind the crooked cross” burned in my mind so much that, I can’t listen to the original past the opening riff (too happy sounding!). Not to mention that I got to know nazi anthem from Wolf3D. 3D Realms games were also pretty subversive back then. And Deus Ex. And all of them from Texas!
This one?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRyk6ihLzKw
Hmm. I thought that few of his tracks were used in the game, but this seems not to be the case (I haven’t played that game nor listened to said tracks). Perhaps they were rejected or the release listed by metal-archives is fake.
All Wikipedia-style group blogs are full of fake information. Editors > democracy.
They claim Paulo didn’t play bass on Beneath the Remains or Arise yet Max Cavalera’s book gives him credit for recording some but not all the bass tracks. Paulo is the real Stronger Than Hate bass outro player you dumb fags! Fuck Metal-Archives jews!
Kanye?
Kunta Kinte?
Kyrie Irving?
As much respect as I have for what they got out of the C64, the Amiga version is objectively superior in any way.
As a former 6502 coder, I admire the heck out of a lot of what people did with those 1mhz 8bit machines, including the original Castle Wolfenstein, Stellar Seven, even apps like GEOS (http://toastytech.com/guis/a2geos.html) but it is going to be hard to beat an 8mhz 16bit machine with independent sound and graphic processors.
Dunno if Kvlt Games are going to read this comment section, but if so, they need to know that they lose a *ton* of points for having Silent Hill 2 on their list but not Resident Evil Remake (either the Gamecube version of the HD remaster, which are both the same except for resolution). The Silent Hill games are basically lame Zelda games with a spooky wallpaper and an (admittedly pretty well done) ambient soundtrack. The first three Resident Evil games are actual *horror* games, where the game’s mechanics work with the wallpaper to deliver the stress. People like to talk about “lol Resident Evil is just jump scares”, but that’s not the real source of the fear in those games. Resident Evil mostly plays on *anticipation*; it works by making sure you know what’s going to happen and that you dread it. Everyone talks about the dog-through-the-window jumpscare, but no one ever talks about the moment where you get a dog whistle as a key item, knowing you’re going to have to blow it in the main lobby, and knowing what’s going to happen when you do. The whole game is set up to create moments like this, making it impossible to kill everything, but then making you backtrack through common areas of the mansion frequently, so you always know “oh shit, now I have to go back through that area where I had to not burn that corpse and there’s going to be a Crimsonhead there…”, and then tops *that* off where even the decision to *save the game* is fraught with tension, since simply saving your game costs you limited resources. The Silent Hill games are to Resident Evil what Cradle of Filth is to Emperor, and seeing a game developer praise the former is kind of shocking.
Didn’t Resident Evil also spawn a notoriously incoherent movie franchise?
Both Resident Evil and Silent Hill spawned terrible movies. Resident Evil never was fertile ground for movies (most of its horror was conveyed through the mechanics/gameplay, not through the ancillary elements such as aesthetics or story, so it was basically impossible to translate), and Silent Hill was more fertile ground for such a translation but was done ineptly.
It may be said again that the only decent videogame movie ever has been Doom (although Tron should be mentioned somewhere).
the first mortal kombat movie is fine
Not as good as Doom. It has Karl Urban, Rosemund Pike, and that bigger Polynesian version of Vin Diesel guy, not to mention a script that does its best to capture the paranoia of the original game, which was basically an attempt to explain the ongoing failure of Western Civilization as it went into the Clinton years.
If doom is an analogy for the collapse of western civilization then so is my dick
Best game ever
Well, it appears deflated, anyway.
Vicious cycle
The worst offense ever done to this medium is movies trying to be video games and video games trying to be movies (not necessarily movies based on video games and the other way around).
I think it takes some skill to adapt either way. I have to admit having trouble with most video games past the turn of the millennium. Old school games are casual and self-evident; newer stuff tries to be interactive movies with lots of technique, which pretty much makes it niche.
It’s not wrong to be influenced by movies, there’s just to much focus on blockbuster kicks. I think the most underrated game genre is the visual novel.
“Visual novel,” you mean comic books for adults? Sure, a lot of creativity went in there. The big problem with nowadays fiction is that it seems like a tour of justifications by characters rather than actual conflict, development, and refinement. The “too much focus on blockbuster kicks” seems to be an industry-wide problem: the more we democratize, or share the pie, the less of a slice anyone has except for whoever makes something moronic enough to appeal to the whole herd.
I think you are referring to graphic novels, visual novels are games with (you guessed it) heavy focus on story.
Oh, right. Thanks!
VNs are just less interactive, more mundane adventure games.
Yes, but Resident Evil has iconic gameplay, and great stories and premise, albeit a cheesy 80s horror storyline. Resident Evil Remake is probably the greatest video game ever made. If you like puzzle solving, back tracking, and limited ammo fighting against a horde of enemies, you’ll love Resident Evil. The Resident Evil film franchise is terribly bad. Never understood how they could get the games right, but not the films. The source material is literally written for them.
I second this question despite knowing little about the video games. It seems tricky to write a game into a movie, but when the game universe is rich, not hard to find some plot that demonstrates enough of it… they should have watched Doom instead.
I agree. From what I’ve read, Capcom(the developer of Resident Evil) didn’t want the film to resemble the games. Kinda stupid if you ask me since the core fans wanted this. So they hired a hack director, Paul Wes Anderson to take on the role. He was desperate to give his hot wife work so he cast her as the lead, even though her character has never been in any Resident Evil games. It’s so frustrating that the films are so terrible.
Please promise me you’ll play Resident Evil 1 Remake one day, Brett. Whenever you have time. It really is a great gaming experience, and it’s not an action shooter at all. It requires a lot of thought to progress throughout. One reason I’ve lived the franchise so much is that it requires a little bit of memory, puzzle solving, and intuition. It’s like being trapped in a labyrinth or maze and trying to find your way out by finding keys and solving puzzles. Just imagine the new safe room craze that’s going on but in a video game format. I highly recommend it!
Seems like fun. Is this the same Wes Anderson who makes the candy-coated movies? He certainly has a devoted fanbase! I rarely make it to a video game console or gaming computer, but I’ll keep “Resident Evil 1 Remake” in mind for when I do.
No, this is Paul Wes Anderson. He directed the Mortal Kombat film from the 1990s, and Event Horizon. Both solid films, but he went on to make complete shite afterwards. He’s married to Milla Jovovich.
Definitely look forward to your Resident Evil experience. It would be cool if you did a review of the game here on death metal.org. Maybe a new direction for the site..video game reviews.
Might as well find a new direction since most of the death metal out there is uninspiring.
Fandom is cherry-picked at this point. If it were not death metal “upholding the old school,” no one would care about most of this stuff.
We praise the few exceptions but I am not sure to what end, since the audience seems to have run off to yet another hybrid trend.
Exactly. Metal is pretty much dead. Even Rock is dead at this point. With the exception of Desecresy and a few others, Metal has lost its edge and purpose, unfortunately. I would love to read your thoughts on video games.
Thank you for being willing to read them. The problem is that I am crap at most video games and lose interest. I play Red Alert 2 sometimes because it is basically like solitaire with machine guns. I used to love getting stoned, blasting death metal, and playing Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Carmageddon 2, and Descent. After that, video games became more like movies, and required more of me than I was willing to give, so as a good benevolent sociopath devoted obsessively to developing a philosophy, I stuck with a few classics and bailed out on the rest.
You gotta give him points though for mentioning System Shock 2. Nothing beats that in terms of first person horror and doesn’t get nearly as much praise at it deserves. Story, mechanics and atmosphere are all top notch and having things like still being vulnerable to attack when going into your inventory just add to the immersion as it just makes more sense in real time situation.
And there’s a Lunix version!
There’s a time when I would have put System Shock 2 in my top 3 of all time (along with Doom 2 and Fallout 1), but I feel that of the Looking Glass games from that era, Thief: The Dark Project has held up better.
Also, as much as I hate to praise a game that fills as many of its tiny cracks with “muh diversity” propaganda as it can, Arkane’s Prey (and its “Mooncrash” expansion) does System Shock 2 better than System Shock 2 ever did.
Yes! Thief: The Dark Project is also one of my favourites. The story is about as dark as it gets. Shame that anyone who tries the first Thief game nowadays ends up playing the inferior Thief Gold edition. Those extra levels they added ruin the pacing and the content is pretty shabby compared to what was in the base game.
This is why piracy of abandonware (or near-abandonware) is vital, and Steam will be the devastation of gaming.
I feel like Gold is overall an upgrade as long as you know about the console command to skip levels, and you use it to skip the utterly worthless Thieves’ Guild level. The other two new levels are both solid (Mage Tower is actually one of the game’s highlights, IMO), removing the softlock possibilities in Bonehoard, Cathedral, and The Lost City is an obvious improvement, the revamped patrols in Cragscleft are a clear improvement, fixing the bugged raft in Strange Bedfellows is an obvious improvement, and I appreciate that it makes me spend less time in Undercover (which is a bottom three mission in the original game). As long as you know how to skip levels (Thieves’ Guild makes this almost necessary…), the only real downgrade is that Gold ruins the start of Assassins (in the original, their route is randomized, and they can actually split up; in Gold, they always take the same route), but the other fixes and improvements outweigh this.
Also, in terms of first-person horror, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is *miles* scarier than System Shock 2.
Yeah, too bad that later games from Ken Levine, Bioshock and especially Bioshock Infinite, are some of the most anti-white games ever, rivalled only by newer Wolfensteins. There you are supposed to take delight in brutally killing whites and they aren’t there as just some generalized representatives of humanity. No, it’s precisely about inflicting righteous violence against game’s version of (heinous and ignorant, yet strangely succesful) Anglo/Germanic population. First two Bioshocks, despite interesting premise, inspiring setting and aesthetics, are so packed with jewish characters and jewish projections, that they feel like some sort of gated, intrajewish dispute and gives off those jewish supremacism vibes. Actually, Levine’s touch can be already seen in Thief games and their origins as a subversion of Arthurian myth. There’s obligatory muh superstitious, oppressive christians and muh greedy, dumb aristocracy. Its earliest draft was supposedly called Better Red Than Undead, if you can believe it. And one of his other games was Freedom Force vs The 3rd Reich. Of course.
The best games are ones that do the storytelling through interactions and visual means rather than endless exposition anyway. That said Deus Ex is still good.
The failure to mention Red Alert 2 makes this message suspicious.
The Resident Evil games are (for the most party) very good, I loved playing the originals on PS1 and if I would have made a Top 20 List instead of a Top 10, I would probably have put RE1 in there (I prefer its atmosphere over part 2). I can’t relate to your negative view of Silent Hill at all though – they are very different experiences and I don’t see sense in comparing them in this way. Your analysis of the Silent Hill games is completely off and the “Cradle of Filth – Emperor” – analogy is just absolutely ridiculous, but to each their own I guess.
I can’t believe Lemmings did not make the list. I also noticed Red Alert 2 was absent for some reason (probably a typo). Emperor in my view was great up through In The Nightside Eclipse but then faded away. Some of the related projects like Ildjarn and Zyklon-B are worth investigating!
What do you mean by “but then faded away”? “In the Nightside Eclipse” was their last release. Samoth died of AIDS while in jail, and that ended up being their final release.
It was very sad, sort of like how Morbid Angel went down with a cocaine plane after recording Covenant, or Incantation died in that flare-up at Three Mile Island shortly after Diabolical Conquest was released. Very sad also how At the Gates were blown up by Muslim immigrant terrorists shortly after The Red in the Sky is Ours came out, and Varg Vikernes got sent to Siberia incommunicado after Hlidskjalf. Nature is harshly unforgiving to metal bands who lose The Path. The only ones that survive are the ones who keep making quality material, even if very slowly.
Lemmings was a very fun game, I loved playing it on the Amiga but I always thought the concept wore out its welcome a bit too fast to make it into my list of all time favorites. I never felt compelled much to play much more after the first few levels. In regards to Command & Conquer, I must confess – only ever played the original game and never got hooked on it. Always was a Warcraft/Starcraft – guy.
I completely agree with your view on Emperor.
Those old Amigas were amazing. People today cannot quite grasp what they were, but the equivalent would be getting a machine that runs twice as faster as anything else and has movie-style graphics capability. This was in a $500 machine! I always tell the story of watching an Amiga 500 with two disk drives outpace the Mac SE with 20mb HD I had at the time, and this was in emulation of the Macintosh. They were zippy little machines and the graphics still look good… it may be controversial, but I think slightly lower color depth provided the nice visual clarity of those classic games.
Warcraft/Starcraft had their appeal, speaking of bright shiny graphics that still managed to convey a lot of atmosphere. I never got too far into them but this was unrelated to the games themselves; sometimes your gaming machine becomes a web server at 3:00 AM and there just is not much that you can do about it. C&C really was limited to Red Alert 2, in my view. The first in the Red Alert series seemed a bit aimless, but they nailed it on the second, and everything after that was extraneous and unfocused. However, I generally skipped the missions (basically a giant training session) and went on to Skirmish mode. I mean, it’s the Cold War… one needs unending war.
In the same way, I think Carmageddon 2 superior to Carmageddon, and found the sequels that came later a bit lukewarm. If I had to pick a game from the classic era that defined what was cool, though, I have to go with Robotron 2084. It went from video game to prophecy, sort of like Idiocracy and High Noon in the movie world!
I will always dig classic Emperor. It is hard to think of other bands that went so far, so fast although most of the early black metal canon had similar penetration (Bathory, Immortal, Darkthrone, Gorgoroth, Enslaved, and so on). I think Ungod never got the attention they deserved, and I periodically throw on Absurd for fun, although most RAC just sounds like angry rap with guitars to me.
“I think Carmageddon 2 superior to Carmageddon” – I’m dissapointed.
It has everything the first does. I wish they had ported over the levels from the first, but the second game has better gameplay and graphics and ends up being a lot more fun. The third one had its moments but never retained the coolness of the early stuff.
Speaking of “digging classic Emperor”, this might be the best 5 minutes of recorded audio ever:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaslkvldT-g
Interesting. More conventional death/rock rhythm in some ways.
lol this fag likes mgla
The big question is when they are going to re-issue Red Alert 2 so you can fight as NSDAP. You can already fight the Americans and Soviets (I enjoy their plaintive cries).
Efforts to curb “conspiracy theories” in effect becomes THE conspiracy. A regime running out of time.
And no one will say it’s just Tammany Hall reborn…
“Luv me Waldgang.” XD
https://youtube.com/watch?v=46tm2o0PXMA
Someone please rescue this demo from youtube with one of those mp3 converters. :)
https://youtube-dl.org/
https://mega.nz/file/fg4VQRqB#k6sP3SI5dAXWnmsaoVUWWqZW90upTJxLXc-ZY1nKKAY
https://twitter.com/amerika_blog/status/1586010489653710848
Please consider expanding that list by:
* sodomize the weak
* vomit on gOD’s child
* Be excellent to each other
* Good to the good, bad to the bad
This is what I call a testosterone multiplier. Unlike other modern physics, the higher is not brought lower. Hails. :)
https://youtube.com/watch?v=e22GMFhd5mY
Free Life for Germany. Second Play.