By Historicality. Yum!
- by PJ O’Reilly
Now, we’re not sure if you’re aware — or if you’re even cool enough to be aware — of indie horror sensation, Baldi’s Basics, but rest assured that this is one very peculiar slice of PC video-gaming strangeness. Indeed it’s an experience that pairs grungy kids educational games of the 1990s with an unsettling horror twist, for a 100% adults-only romp that’s currently sat atop a “Very Positive” rating over on ye olde Steam.
Yes, if weird-ass games are your sort of thing, this is…well…this is your sort of thing, friend, and judging by the official trailer of the 2022 remaster, which we’ve lovingly placed above, it’s the sort of janky, homemade horror effort we (or this writer, at least) absolutely loves to dive into out of morbid curiosity. It looks like the sort of game where anything could happen, in a very bad way.
Such is the popularity of Baldi, no doubt due in part to it being featured by several prominent YouTubers, such as Jackseptcieye, who can be seen here being…spanked by an in-game teacher…that there have been calls to have it released on consoles.
With this in mind, and armed with a whole bunch of other questions, YouTuber ‘Nintendrovert’ sat down for a big old chinwag with Baldi’s Basics creator Micah James McGonigle (or Mystman12, as he seems to be best known).
McGonigle mentions his game-making career really getting into its stride when he picked up a 3DS and started using programs such as SmileBASIC — which now has a 4th Switch version — to make his own adventures. He reveals that the original Baldi game was made in two (messy) weeks, and that he’s currently on the lookout for publishers for a console edition of Baldi, which would tie everything together in one neat remastered package.
The interview, which runs for almost two full hours, also digs into a bunch of interesting aspects of McGonigle’s relationship with Nintendo throughout his life and career thus far – as well as letting fans in on how he came up with his Mystman12 username. You can check out the full thing below, and it’s more than worth digging into as there’s lots of fun little Nintendo-specific tidbits to discover, as well as some chat about the developer’s future projects.
Have you played Baldi’s Basics and would you like to see a Switch port? Let us know!
[source youtube.com]
PJ is a staff writer across Pure Xbox and Nintendo Life. He’s been playing video games pretty much nonstop since the early 1980s, and enjoys boring people with tedious stories about how long ago that really is.