Demon Driver

PRINCESS LUMINAL HAS BEEN KIDNAPPED BY THE DEMON BADHOMESS! RIDE! GO! SAVE HER!- Arcade Flyer for Demon Driver
The game Demon Driver is one of those oddities of the internet. Playable on MAME and easily obtainable via the same sites so many obscure old arcade ROMs have been found on, it is a game that by all accounts should not exist.
It was most likely released some time in the early 90s, given the strange melange of “edgy” and “whimsical” in its aesthetics and its use of psudo-3D to facilitate its gameplay. In gameplay it is similar to games like Road Rash and Mach Rider, but with much more emphasis on verticality and a major twist. Instead of the usual dashing straight to the finish line, you wander around a map; rendered in a similar manner to the original Doom, completing various missions on a timer, with your ability to progress and your choices on where to go determined by how many and which ones you completed.
The plot, as you can see at the top quote, is dead simple, but made up for in the sheer decadence of its visuals, somewhere in-between the edge of the American aesthetic in the 90s and the weird whimsy of Japanese arcade games of the era, with bizarre biomechanical enemies seemingly designed by several wildly different artists and levels including ruined cities, bizarre and baroque ruins, the innards of a giant monster, a mega-cathedral, and that was only the main series of levels, with the game having loads of “secret” missions that would lead one to secret levels that even most hackers are unsure if they’ve truly fully discovered due to how tangled the code is.
It also had a “Lucky Numbers” feature that it gave the user at the end of the play session, either upon the user’s exhaustion of lives or their beating the game, as sort of a “Password Save” section in lieu of continues, with some indications that it was meant to be printed out of the machine as well, and entered in on subsequent playthroughs, which actually had subtle effects on the game that hackers are still working out to this day.
While, again, the plot is nothing to speak of, the one major twist was the revelation that the Force Rider was female in the end, upon rescuing the Princess from the Demon Badhomess. The Princess grants the Rider’s one wish, to become human again (Hinted at in one of the most obscure secret levels), and the design is unambiguously female. Though, strangely enough, most Rule 34 still uses her skull-faced form.
But, again, the strangest part of this is that it should not exist. The company that made it has almost no records in mainstream outlets, and while advertising survives, the sales data referred to seem to not exist or have shockingly conspicuous blank spots where their data should go. Pictures of multiple arcade cabinets have been found, in a unique construction that would make it almost impossible to fake with off-the-shelf parts, but no physical copies.
And, what newspaper articles do survive seem to refer to relations with other companies that never happened, and other games that are similarly anomalous, with one title known as Trips The Salamander that continually pops up, almost as if somebody tried to scrub every trace of this company from existence…
This would be weird, but normal, if it weren’t for the other games floating around the internet from this company with further anomalies…
== Actual Author Stuff ==
Yep, it’s videogame-based weird-histories metafiction time, based on stuff I DeepStyled! It’s relatively setting-neutral, tho for my work it’d probably fit in best with TITLEWave and the continuity of Cybernetic Queen, but any way you choose to use it, you are free to use it however you see fit, as long as I, Thomas F. Johnson, am credited as creator.
And if you’d like to support me in making this stuff, check out my Patreon or my Ko-Fi! Every dollar counts!
Shoutout especially to @witnesstheabsurd/@witnessthesurreal, whose Slypher the Sky Dragon pic I used for the Force Rider and which I think came out amazing. They seem like they’d dig this sorta weird anyway…
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