In December of 2016, I rubbed my hands harder, trying to keep my fingers going numb as I waited for the demo of Undertale Yellow to start. I had been googling linux commands for the past hour to get the game to work on the family's old Ubuntu; the only computer in the house we were allowed to download freeware on. My sister poured herself a glass of milk and pulled up a chair beside me. And we enjoyed one of the best afternoons we have ever had. Those few hours would quickly become precious memories. Afterwards, we gushed about when the game would come out. Maybe Summer of 2017?
Oh, how innocent we were.
As of Fall of 2021, the game is still in development hell. Every couple of months, I think of the game and I wonder: Why do I still bother waiting?
For games like Silksong and Undertale Yellow, the greatest struggle is being able to wait comfortably. Most developers know a certain amount of time to wait is needed to get a playerbase excited. Right now, I am eagerly waiting for Katana Zero's DLC expansion (Ammerman), and I am SO excited. But so often, an audience can grow stale. Half Life 3 has been so long in not even development, opinions on it have polarized between "please please please" (Xendance) or "it's not worth my time anymore" (Hultner). And if a game has too many releases too close together, customer engagement also goes down ("Franchise Pacing is Stupidly Important in Video Games."). It seems as though games need to line into a sweet spot to get people anxious for the game to come out (no annual releases GAME FREAK), but short enough that people don’t exit the hype train, and that line is difficult to balance; however, Undertale Yellow (and other games) are able to make their audiences wait indefinitely. How? By creating a demo.
In the times when a game is announced near the beginning of a development cycle (rather than near the end), it always results in fans waiting a long time. This is a good thing. Waiting is its own form of joy. It gives fans time to speculate, prepare, hone their skills on similar entries, and connect with others in the same community. In fact, while I love Christmas, I prefer the season building up to it for this reason. That’s where family first comes, and eggnog is had around a piano. Unfortunately, video games aren’t as constant as Christmas. They can get pushed and even delayed indefinitely. This is where waiting begins to sour.
As Razbuten said in his video, The Pain of Waiting for Games (linked above):
Waiting for stuff when you have no idea how long you'll have to keep waiting kind of sucks. When everything is out of your control, it can be hard to temper your expectations and excitement. When looking at these long, unknown waits, there seems to be a pattern with how folks generally respond. It starts off with earnest excitement, but as the wait gets longer and longer, that excitement slowly shifts into either resentment or indifference. (2:45)
Expectations are inherently untrustworthy. When I heard Pokemon Diamond and Pearl were getting remakes, I became excited. When I learned it would be made by a company other than Game Freak I bounced between ecstatic and cautious. It was only after seeing the trailer that my expectations leveled out. But the more I hear about the game, the more my expectations swing. The Holy Grail of stabilizing those expectations and keeping them grounded is by going one step further; by letting people play the game.
When I was young, I played a small demo of Lego Star Wars. We could play the Tatooine level, riding the ship, fighting stormtroopers, collecting all ten pods, and of course, escaping on the Millenium Falcon. And as a child, that demo means more to me than any expectation. I first played it when I was around six, and I didn’t play the full game until I was fourteen, but every day, I wanted to play the game. Not because I had expectations of what it could be, but because I remembered what it was like. Eight years is a record-breaking time to wait and still earnestly desire to play it, and the reason I didn’t lose my love was because I had memories, not expectations. I wanted the game for MORE of something I already liked. By the time I actually got the game, I was nostalgic for it. I was fond of a game I had never fully played! And what’s crazy is that the game didn’t even live up to my hype, but I still loved it! The beauty of the demo is how you can stall on every set piece and laugh all day long over just that. A full game demands to be played quickly, so it wasn’t the same, but I still loved it! Even if it wasn’t everything I wanted it to be, it was what I remembered, so I could accept it.
On October of 2018, my sister deleted her Undertale Pinterest board. We had moved past that, and while we loved the game, there were new games to play, new fandoms to cherish. And then Deltarune Chapter 1 dropped. There was no announcement, no fanfare, no preparation, but Chapter 1 WAS the announcement. It’s been three years, and now that chapter 2 has come out, I’ve been keeping my eye out for any of that characteristic sourness that comes from leaving a game with no news for so long, and I can’t find it! Deltarune somehow kept people’s expectations and excitement for three years! It may be because Toby is known to take a long time, or because of the annual concerts and celebrations restoring interests, but I also think it’s because Toby chose to release Deltarune as a demo, not a trailer. The person who believes Deltarune will never come out has to remember that it already has. That refreshes our expectations. Deltarune isn't a pie in the sky; it's our precious memory.
Game announcements are IOUs for players. They tell us we are promised a game. That doesn't mean those promises will be kept. Games can be cancelled, and audiences will drop a game the promise takes too long to be fulfilled. But demos are collateral. They give us something to own to prove the game will come out. Undertale Yellow was a fan game announced in 2016, and it released with a demo. Since then, half a decade has passed, a length of time that should prove to anyone the game will never come out. Except I played the demo. I know what the game looks like. Feels like. And there are constant updates on the blog. For Undertale Yellow, my expectations are precious memories, and when Undertale Yellow comes out, I’ll play it. You can count on that.
Works Cited:
Ammerman, Jonathan. "Free Katana Zero DLC Still in the Works, Six Times Bigger than Originally Planned." Game Rant, 26 Mar 2021, https://gamerant.com/katana-zero-free-dlc-bigger-than-planned
Askiisoft. Katana Zero. Steam, Devolver Digital, 2019. https://katanazero.com
Fox, Toby. Deltarune. Steam, 2021. deltarune.com
"Franchise Pacing is Stupidly Important in Video Games." Game Rant, 11 Jan 2016, gamerant.com/video-game-franchise-pacing-problems
Hultner, Kaile. "If Half-Life 3 ever arrives, you will find yourself underwhelmed." No Escape, 27 July 2019, noescapevg.com/if-half-life-3-ever-arrives-you-will-find-yourself-underwhelmed/
Team Cherry. Hollow Knight: Silksong. Steam. hollowknightsilksong.com
Team Undertale Yellow. Undertale Yellow. GameJolt, 2016. gamejolt.com/games/UndertaleYellow/136925
"The Pain of Waiting For Games" Youtube, uploaded by Razbuten, 22 October, 2021, youtube.com/watch?v=6ZUtuRPZyGU.
Xendance. "Could This Really Be Half-Life 3? Everything We Know So Far About the Steam Holiday Sale ARG." Lambda Generation, 1 Jan 2016, lambdageneration.com/news/half-life/could-this-really-be-half-life-3-everything-we-know-so-far-about-the-steam-holiday-sale-arg