Ctrl+Alt+Destroy, the video game that may never see the light of day
In 2020 and 2021, I worked for a studio in Portland called Meister, and one of the independent projects we developed was the video game Ctrl+Alt+Destroy. It’s an indie combat game built around the premise: what if computers woke up and rebelled against everything and everyone during Y2K? The environments and some of the computers have a very ’90s look. Remember those conspiracy theories saying the world would end and computers would break down when the year 2000 arrived? Well that’s basically what it’s about.
The idea is really fun. In fact, the whole concept came from an internal studio exercise called “Aggie,” a kind of exquisite-corpse-style dynamic where we made random drawings just for fun and idea generation. This was one of the concepts that got picked.
At first, the project was meant to be very simple highly graphic and small in scope but little by little it grew more complex, eventually moving into 3D and involving more and more people. I even had to jump into 3D prop modeling myself (I learned the basics of Blender for that).
On Ctrl+Alt+Destroy I did a bit of everything: writing for a teaser (that never got made), storyboards, visual development, environments, 3D modeling, props pretty much everything. I grew quite fond of the game, although toward the end it started to feel a bit overwhelming as it kept expanding when, at its core, it was something very simple and small. It even went from having a single office setting to including a laundromat and a bowling alley.
I think some small projects should stay small in budget, production time, and team size something like Bill Plympton’s “Dogma” (the American animator known for his quirky short films), which has three principles: “Cheap,” “Short,” and “Fun.”
As of today, the game hasn’t been released, but I really enjoyed the experience of developing the game’s concept art together with a whole team. Here’s some of the work we did, along with the link to the game’s Steam page:
