Golf Club Wasteland lets you play golf in the ruins of a climate apocalypse

Igor Simić has always had a penchant for dark comments about the world around him. One of its earliest games, called Children’s Play, asked the player to run a factory run by children and prevent them from falling asleep on the assembly line while a mutated teddy bear criticized sweatshops.

It was while recording music for Child’s Play that he met his future collaborator at Golf Club Wasteland, Shane Berry. In the studio break room, Simić heard Berry’s voice for the first time and immediately cast him as the hideous teddy bear.

From there, the two began a working relationship that spanned multiple videos and shorts, with Golf Club Wasteland finally making their first commercial attempt at a game. Both they and their fellow collaborators had day jobs from the beginning, so they began to think of something they could easily do in the afternoons after work.

Screenshots of the Wasteland Golf Course

“I remember a couple of us were watching TV and [Donald] Trump was becoming more likely [presidential] candidate, and it was becoming a reality, “says Simić.” And also, Elon Musk, on the other hand, was more in the spirit of the age not just as an entrepreneur, but as a public figure. And also, Bernie [Sanders] I was talking about 1%, and somehow all of that merged in my head, and I realized, ‘If the Earth suffers a massive climate change catastrophe, from the perspective of someone like Trump, that’s a real estate guy on golf courses, that’s a clean slate, because then the whole Earth can be a golf course. ‘”

His vision was further fused in 2017, when a viral photo of golfers finishing their games as an Oregon wildfire burned behind them did the rounds.

From Beacon Rock Hill Golf Course on Facebook

The idea of ​​a golf game also matched the need for a less complex project. Simić tells me that the team never aimed to create a realistic golf game with Golf Club Wasteland. Its development touchstones were simple: the minimalist golf title Desert Golfing, Worms, and an MS-DOS game called Gorillas where the player types at an angle and force to throw bananas at another gorilla on the other side of town.

The end product, Golf Club Wasteland, is an enchanting and haunting experience. It takes place in the post-apocalypse where almost all human life has been wiped out. Earth is now used solely as a golf course for the ultra-rich who escaped to Mars during the catastrophe that destroyed their home. His images are minimalist yet striking, with paths traced through demolished brutalist architecture with looming neon signs, wandering wildlife like ball-kicking cows and a towering giraffe, and empty buildings. It’s a solitary game that has more to do with the slight bewilderment involved in hitting a shot despite all the destruction than a high score, although you can play to finish in as few hits as possible if you wish.

A good score unlocks journal entries that give an insight into the history and world of Golf Club Wasteland, but even if you’re missing most of your shots, you can seamlessly pick up the vibe of the music. Golf Club Wasteland is tuned to its own radio show called Radio Nostalgia From Mars, a mix of stories, calls, safety PSAs, and soothing music that underscores the desolation of the Earth as you play golf. The dissonance between its soothing melodies, strange government warnings, and melancholic stories shared by the world’s inhabitants are not just the perfect backdrop for golf from hell, they are essential to understanding the world you’re playing golf in.

Berry derived Radio Nostalgia de Mars from his own audio experiences, from being in a death metal band at the age of 12 to DJing, a career in the Japanese underground techno scene, and commercial audio work. But most appropriate for the Golf Club Wasteland score was his work on cable radio in Tokyo, producing radio programs that reached a few million listeners in cafes and convenience stores.

“We not only had to produce all the music [for Golf Club Wasteland]We also had to make up a story, basically within the radio show, the world of what is happening on Mars, “says Berry.” The premise is so absurd that we discovered very quickly that if we made the radio show largely satirical or slanted towards the Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams angle, it did not lend itself to the pathos and reality of the game, despite its crazy premise. It became quite interesting to explore the plausibility of that world and the reality of the insanity of going to Mars. “

A chance meeting at an art exhibition in Frankfurt further aided Berry and Simić’s desire to make the Golf Club Wasteland absurd a reality. There, they met a woman named Janet Biggs, who had worked as part of the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, where scientists simulate what it would really be like to live on Mars. They spent an evening with Biggs, listening to her tell stories about her everyday life in the habitat.

“It was at that meeting that I realized that reality was pretty absurd,” says Berry. “We didn’t have to do anything more than describe what he would really like to be on Mars, and that would be fun and funny in and of itself and would give the game a kind of plausibility. So there was a balance between this the humor of the signs and the building clouded with this plausibility of the radio show that is a bit self-referential and a bit irreverent, but which also leans more toward realism than the absurdity of the underlying premise. “

As you can probably see, Golf Club Wasteland does not shy away from political issues and comments, and in fact explicitly embraces them. Simić says they wanted to get away from anything that might seem preachy and described the Golf Club Wasteland as “anti-escapist entertainment” – it relates to real life, of course, and climate change is treated as a fact of reality. for instance. Berry adds that they also wanted to be very explicit about the idea that simply moving to Mars to escape reality is not an easy option for humanity.

“We can barely live underwater, and we can barely live in a desert for a couple of weeks without major problems, and a lot of those problems stem from us being humans and emotional creatures … It’s not going to be very moving for Mars.” , He says.

Simić adds: “Maybe one thing that people might take as a point or a message or something like that is in the stories from the Radio Nostalgia for Mars soundtrack, the stories are mostly normal people of different nationalities who wrote with me. a memory of their past life on Earth, since they are counting from Mars. And actually, these memories are of simple things, like a walk in the park, riding a bike around your neighborhood, drinking coffee, singing, dancing with friends in Havana, in Italy, in Berlin, etc. So, these are things that we have now, but the radio and the game try to make you think of the things you have now as if you have lost them forever. emotional message “.

Golf Club Wasteland was almost a hard sell for me given the total saturation of my daily life in alarming news headlines about an increasingly dark future. I don’t want to pretend that there is something reassuring about the idea of ​​any kind of apocalypse, especially one inevitably presided over by the 1%. But the Golf Club Wasteland performance had a seductive calm that worked for me precisely because of how different it was with its theme. If the rich play golf in our ruins, it will be just like this: serene, carefree, and careless as a ball rolls through a broken satellite dish, slides down the neck of a bewildered giraffe, and lands with a thud on the ruined surface. . used to live.

Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @Patovalentino.