“LSD Dream Emulator” is a PS 1-era game, it became cult classic for it being released only in Japan, and remaining widely unknown up till today. In the game you have to achieve no goal,there are no battles, nothing but exploring completely random environments. The main appeal for players is its insanity.
The only thing you have to do in it is to wander deeper and deeper into your simulated consciousness. Daring to face hallucinations that get more and more messed-up – without getting killed. Do you really want to get yourself into that trip?
The upper video was taken at the beginning of the game, while the bottom one (featuring the narration by the YouTube user who uploaded it), is from the final part of it.
You might have heard of minecraft. You might even have played it, since you can play the (now outdated) classic version for free in your browser window. You might even be addicted to it and begin to neglect your daily psychedelic fix. You no longer have to split your time between the two.
For those of you who have not stumbled over it yet; Minecraft is your unlimited box of legos poured out between your numberless friends all over the internet (and psst, you won’t have to tidy up your room afterwards… don’t tell your mom I said this).
Video Game Commercials seem to be a big juicy invitation to let your imagination go bonkers. Short bursts of associations that are meant to fuel your desire to explore the logics and rules of crazy mushroom kingdoms.
Yellow Magic Orchestra had a great sense for the psychedelic dimension in the electronic dreams of the late 70’s and early 80’s. And the clip for the track computer games has it all: early computer games, electronically generated images, Kraftwerk and traditional symbols in one mind-blowing trip (to the left).
Pong is a classic in the history of video games. While there might not be much to see, everyone will recognize it instantly.
Now Plasma Pong adds a little twist to the familiar and classic Atari design by letting you manipulate the trajectory of the ball through the plasma surrounding it.
Another great thing about the game is that it includes a sandbox mode where you can just play around with the real-time fluid and particle effects for the joy of it.
The Amiga 500 was my very first computer system. It used DD floppy disks with 880 kb storage space. On those less than 1 mb disks you had games like elite and frontier: elite II that allowed almost limitless exploration of a virtual space literally bursting with solar systems.
But with the copies of those games came something else that challenged the notion of space maybe even more. The teams that “cracked” the copy-protection of those games often attached so-called demos to the code that was run from the disks. So before the game would load you would see – just like a little intro – demonstrations of crazy coding skills in the form of often mind-blowing animation, flickering images and pulsing color.
Those demos were at a most a few kb of code generating ever-changing images in real-time. Usually what you saw was far beyond the things you thought were possible within the technical limitations of your system. Typically some more or less abstract and alien imagery was rotating in front of your eyes, bursting into millions of colorful pieces, turning itself inside out into something totally different, dancing in fluid animation or travelling into impossible depth of space.
Somehow the dense economy of the code resulted in aesthetics and images not unlike the things you see under the influence of psychedelic substances (of course psychedelic substances were not unknown among the members of the demo scene). So, what does math and geometry have to do with psychedelic aesthetics?
Why is this new Intel commercial for 2nd generation Intel Core i5 processor psychedelic?
Moving between alternate realities has forever been the trademark of the psychedelic (and shamanic) world view. Although here this happens on a computer desktop (Beware, as Terence McKenna said, computers and drugs are both ways to expand consciousness, only different parts of it…), one only needs to re-imagine this clip as the flight of the shaman through alternate realms, flying between parallel window-worlds in his other-worldly mission. And indeed, it seems to me that the dynamics of this video might remind many a psychedelic voyager, of their own trips, running, flying from inner demons, and into new frontiers through a labyrinth of window-worlds. Highly psychedelic!
The Daily Psychedelic Video 