Unearthed Treasure Room Is A New Kind Of Showcase

The following article is based on an interview with Melos Han-Tani and Liz Ryerson. It has been edited for length and clarity of content.

June is the month of video game showcases. Summer Game Fest on June 6th followed by over a dozen events featuring advertising all flavours of games. Studio-led initiatives like IOI Showcase and Devolver Direct, programs like the Latin American Games Showcase, meant to highlight regions of game development, not to mention the Wholesome Direct, which is more about a unified aesthetic or tone. These events are a chance for developers to make the best first impression to their audience. They are also an orgiastic holiday where fans bathe in a fountain of new titles.

One of the most interesting of these showcases came just before Summer Game Fest. That’s the Unearthed Treasure Room, a program run by writers/artists/composers Melos Han-Tani and Liz Ryerson. Unearthed Treasure Room curates a selection of idiosyncratic independent games. Unlike other showcases like Day of the Devs, though, these games aren’t new or upcoming titles. They are past releases that you can try out or buy right now.

Why take this approach, rather than focus on games that are in development? Well, Melos and Liz are both sceptical of novelty. “People seem to care a lot less once the game is already out,” Liz says. “A lot of games that might be unusual or different take longer to develop a cult following, and so don’t benefit from these streams at all, if they would ever be included in the first place.”

Melos similarly points out how the type of game advertised at Summer Game Fest and its associates is inevitably limited by market pressure. Games with “short development times, a lack of popular appeal” or even those “not on Steam” don’t make it on stage. Neither do fan games or ROM hacks, despite the existence of yearly fan showcases like Eevee Expo and SAGE (Sonic Amateur Games Expo).

That’s not to say that Melos or Liz dislike showcases per se. “As a commercial dev,” Melos says, “I prefer showcases as an outreach method compared to the ‘e-mail the press and wait’ methods of the 2010s.” They compare the experience of watching a showcase to leafing through a magazine. Liz similarly tunes into Summer Game Fest, “because it represents the space as a whole,” and “there’s always a chance they might introduce me to something I haven’t seen before that I’m interested in.” Even though she can’t help but groan at its ridiculous spectacle.

The problem then is less the format than the companies represented. Summer Game Fest and its peers host many of the largest and most popular studios in the games space. Yet Melos can’t help but see their output as an artistic dead end. “I think the goal of a lot of gaming corporations,” they say, “is to employ the power of childhood-rooted fandom and make long, compulsive experiences to keep people uncurious about the wider gaming world.” In exchange for “the stable livelihoods of a mere 100 or 1000 people working at their corporations,” they box players within what Melos calls ‘the Cave of Plain Experiences.’

Melos and Liz have both been on this beat for a while. Melos wrote in the past about “deadgames” and “treatmills” on their blog; Liz wrote at length last year about games culture as generational nostalgia for a non-existent past. The two of them hail from an earlier era of writing about games, when (Liz says) “there was much more conversation on blogs and forums around free games that disappeared after a few years.” While this conversation continues on sites like YouTube, the platform “favours hype around specific content creators versus critical engagement from a broader community.” Alternatives like Backloggd are growing but still comparatively small.

The two of them sought to model visions of game development and coverage that they preferred. Melos organised the newsletter After Journey’s End, which grants independent developers the final word on their projects. Liz hosted and helped organise the Experimental Games Showcase at GDC. So when Liz came up with the idea of running a stream around Summer Game Fest in order to talk about lesser-known games, Melos was a natural point of contact.

Liz and Melos were aided by beanlette, who created the logo for Unearthed Treasure Room as well as editing the video itself. “I met noah/beanlette in Tokyo last year,” Melos says, “so we got into contact when I was looking for help. Liz and I having to communicate the visual vibe helped with naming and framing everything.” beanlette’s expertise also helped set a standard for future installments of the showcase, if that happens one day. (Liz says that “it would be nice to continue to do this stream once or twice a year,” but that there are no concrete plans right now.)

These three artists, though, aren’t the only ones spotlighted on Unearthed Treasure Room. The showcase pulls from a wealth of independent talent, including John Thyer (Facets), Em Reed (IT CAME FROM THE ORGONE CHAMBER) and Bennett Foddy (Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy). It was important to Melos that they aim for “a nice mix: academics highlighting marginal games, YouTubers who do good curatorial work, developers and writers.” 

Of course, folks like Foddy, Thyer and Reed aren’t just developers, but writers and thinkers in their own right. Liz calls out Foddy’s website https://thatsnot.fun/ in particular for introducing her to games like Infernium and Clockwork Calamity in Mushroom World. These were valuable recommendations, says Liz, “especially because I saw no one else talking about them.”

As stated previously, Unearthed Treasure Room is unique among June showcases for including fan projects, like rom hacks, alongside original independent games. For instance, John Thyer is set to discuss Love Yourself, a Super Mario World kaizo hack for beginners, first released in 2022. Liz, of course, has experience in this field, having participated in the Doom mod development scene for many years. “So many people rely on pre-made engines and assets,” she says. “So many commercial games start out as mods too. Where do you draw the line?”

Liz names out two fan productions, the Super Mario 64 ROM hack B3313 and Doom II’s Myhouse.wad, as two of her recent favourite pieces of culture. “They received a bunch of attention online and embody our era,” she says, “regardless of where they came from.” While you’d never see a project like Myhouse at Summer Game Fest, Melos and Liz are more than happy to give it a spotlight.

Which raises the question: how do you find projects like Myhouse.wad to begin with? It’s as much a matter of technique as it is cultivating curiosity. “If I want to frame this generously,” Melos says, “it's a lack of education on how to seek out interesting things online that leads to famous person X or Y recommending The Last of Us or something.” Curating for yourself demands further exploration by “following links deeper from what you’ve already played.” For instance, “if you like a game in an itch.io bundle, you can look at the other bundle games, or at games by that developer.” They also recommend checking Steam Event pages, which “stay up forever.”

Liz, on the other hand, recommends seeking out the Independent Games Festival’s Nuevo Awards. “A lot of these games don't have a ton of visibility even when they should,” she says. “So if you're into those kinds of games, I’d definitely check out the past several years of nominations and honourable mentions.” (Examples of Nuevo Award winners include Cart Life, Anthology of the Killer, and this year’s Consume Me.) Other recommendations include Steam Curators (Weird Games For Your Pleasure), YouTubers (mara, Eurothug4000) and the last few years of GDC’s Experimental Games Showcase, which are available to watch for free via the GDC Vault.

While Melos and Liz both worked hard to put Unearthed Treasure Room together, they insist that the production was not theirs alone. “A large amount of the work is spread out to each contributor,” Melos says, “meaning that the showcase can have a bigger impact than if everyone was just doing their own thing.” Granting contributors creative control over their segments allowed for greater scalability.

This lesson is greater than just Unearthed Treasure Room. That’s because Unearthed Treasure Room was never just about finding “some new games to play.” It was about engendering curiosity, as well as “inspiring other social groups to try their own thing with curation and discussing games.” Perhaps that’s a tough fight to win compared to just making somebody want to play a game. But if Unearthed Treasure Room inspires you, the reader, to seek out and champion your own favourite buried treasure (perhaps with your friends!) then that’ll be a victory.