Link: The Faces of Evil
The Administered Cartoon: Notes on Link: The Faces of Evil
There is a particular kind of cultural object that flatters the critic by laying its mechanisms entirely bare. Link: The Faces of Evil, released for the Philips CD-i in 1993, is such an object. One does not need to excavate its ideological substrate; the substrate is the surface. A licensing deal between Nintendo and Philips, struck and abandoned, left a Dutch consumer-electronics conglomerate holding the rights to a beloved Japanese fantasy franchise. What it produced—outsourced to an American animation studio, scored on the cheap, animated in stuttering loops, voice-acted with the resigned enthusiasm of people aware they are not being paid enough to care—is less a game than a balance sheet rendered visible.
The standard line on the game, polished by three decades of repetition, is that it is "bad." This is true and uninteresting. What is interesting is the specific shape of its badness, because that shape is the diagram of an industry. Every element that should, in the official self-presentation of entertainment, conceal the conditions of its manufacture instead announces them. The cutscenes are not animated so much as gestured at: a mouth opens, a mouth closes, a background does not move. Link's lines—the "Gee, it sure is boring around here," the "My boy, this peace is what all true warriors strive for"—have become the signature of the artifact precisely because they are inadvertent confessions. The script is filler. The performance is filler. The gameplay loop is filler. What the work transmits, beneath any putative content, is the brute fact of a contractual obligation being discharged.
This is the culture industry not in its triumphant mode but in its embarrassed one. The standardization that ordinarily hides behind production values, brand affect, and the carefully managed illusion of novelty here stands naked because the budget for cosmetics ran out. The game is "individuated" only by its licensed iconography—Link, Zelda, Ganon, the Triforce—a thin layer of recognizable difference applied to mechanical and narrative templates that any number of other side-scrollers of the period also bore. One sees with unusual clarity how the proper name of the franchise functions as a brand commodity detachable from any particular craft tradition; it can be photocopied onto a CD-i and shipped, and the photocopying is itself the product. Pseudo-individuation has rarely been so candid about being pseudo.
There is something almost instructive about the moment, then, in the way the work's failures map onto the structural conditions of its manufacture. The animation studio, Animation Magic, was based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and St. Petersburg, Russia—a transnational arrangement made possible by the post-Soviet collapse of the ruble, which rendered skilled labor extraordinarily cheap to Western purchasers. The cutscenes one mocks were drawn by trained animators working under conditions of extreme cost compression for a market they would likely never see. The aesthetic of cut corners is also the aesthetic of geopolitical arbitrage. To laugh at the picture is to laugh, without quite knowing it, at a particular joint in the early-1990s reorganization of global production. The work's apparent provincialism—its weirdly off-register voices, its toy-like backgrounds—is in fact the look of an early experiment in the offshoring of cultural labor, one of countless rehearsals for what would become the standard production model of the next thirty years.
The richer question concerns the work's afterlife, because this is where the analysis must turn from the object to its audience. By the mid-2000s, the cutscenes had migrated to YouTube and become the raw material of "YouTube Poop"—remix videos that sliced, looped, and pitch-shifted the dialogue into surrealist collages. The game was reborn as a meme, which is to say reborn as content. Here one might be tempted to find a redemptive moment: the masses reclaiming a failed commodity, transmuting corporate refuse into folk art, exercising a small revenge upon the apparatus. The temptation should be resisted. The remix culture that absorbed Faces of Evil did not recover the work from the culture industry; it extended the culture industry's reach by giving it a second pass through consciousness. The viewer who quotes "Mah boi" is participating in a recognition ritual indistinguishable in its psychic mechanics from the recognition ritual of any other branded catchphrase. The fact that the original product was cheap and the secondary engagement is ironic does not alter the ritual; it only equips it with a self-protective layer of knowingness.
This is, in its way, the more dispiriting development. A defective commodity, having failed at sincerity, succeeds at irony, and thereby succeeds commercially after all—generating views, merchandise, animated reanimations, and an entire economy of nostalgic recall. The audience pays in attention rather than dollars, but the structure of payment is unchanged. Worse, the ironic mode trains the spectator in a posture of pre-emptive disavowal that is perfectly compatible with continued consumption: I know this is junk, and yet. The "and yet" is where the apparatus lives. One could argue that a population that learns to enjoy administered entertainment ironically is more securely bound to it than a population that enjoys it earnestly, since irony immunizes against the disappointment that might otherwise prompt a turn elsewhere.
What, finally, does Faces of Evil promise? Every entertainment commodity makes some implicit pledge—of escape, of pleasure, of mastery, of communion with a story. This one's pledge is so faint, so manifestly underfunded, that one can almost see the promise itself as a printed form, signed by no one, filed in a cabinet in Eindhoven. The game proposes that the player will save a kingdom; what it delivers is the experience of pressing buttons while a license expires. And yet (there is that "and yet" again) it has been remembered, catalogued, reissued in emulation, lovingly mocked, and granted a cultural longevity that more competent works of its year do not enjoy. One should be careful about reading this longevity as the triumph of any popular impulse. It is, more plausibly, the triumph of the archive: the demonstration that under present conditions nothing is permitted to disappear, since anything that can be circulated can be monetized, and the failed object, properly framed, circulates as efficiently as the successful one. The administered world has no outside, not even at its margins, not even in its mistakes. Link: The Faces of Evil is a small, ugly proof of this—worth attending to not because it is interesting in itself, which it is not, but because it shows, with the unembarrassed clarity of a thing too poor to dissemble, what the machine looks like when it forgets to put its makeup on.
There is a particular kind of cultural object that flatters the critic by laying its mechanisms entirely bare. Link: The Faces of Evil, released for the Philips CD-i in 1993, is such an object. One does not need to excavate its ideological substrate; the substrate is the surface. A licensing deal between Nintendo and Philips, struck and abandoned, left a Dutch consumer-electronics conglomerate holding the rights to a beloved Japanese fantasy franchise. What it produced—outsourced to an American animation studio, scored on the cheap, animated in stuttering loops, voice-acted with the resigned enthusiasm of people aware they are not being paid enough to care—is less a game than a balance sheet rendered visible.
The standard line on the game, polished by three decades of repetition, is that it is "bad." This is true and uninteresting. What is interesting is the specific shape of its badness, because that shape is the diagram of an industry. Every element that should, in the official self-presentation of entertainment, conceal the conditions of its manufacture instead announces them. The cutscenes are not animated so much as gestured at: a mouth opens, a mouth closes, a background does not move. Link's lines—the "Gee, it sure is boring around here," the "My boy, this peace is what all true warriors strive for"—have become the signature of the artifact precisely because they are inadvertent confessions. The script is filler. The performance is filler. The gameplay loop is filler. What the work transmits, beneath any putative content, is the brute fact of a contractual obligation being discharged.
This is the culture industry not in its triumphant mode but in its embarrassed one. The standardization that ordinarily hides behind production values, brand affect, and the carefully managed illusion of novelty here stands naked because the budget for cosmetics ran out. The game is "individuated" only by its licensed iconography—Link, Zelda, Ganon, the Triforce—a thin layer of recognizable difference applied to mechanical and narrative templates that any number of other side-scrollers of the period also bore. One sees with unusual clarity how the proper name of the franchise functions as a brand commodity detachable from any particular craft tradition; it can be photocopied onto a CD-i and shipped, and the photocopying is itself the product. Pseudo-individuation has rarely been so candid about being pseudo.
There is something almost instructive about the moment, then, in the way the work's failures map onto the structural conditions of its manufacture. The animation studio, Animation Magic, was based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and St. Petersburg, Russia—a transnational arrangement made possible by the post-Soviet collapse of the ruble, which rendered skilled labor extraordinarily cheap to Western purchasers. The cutscenes one mocks were drawn by trained animators working under conditions of extreme cost compression for a market they would likely never see. The aesthetic of cut corners is also the aesthetic of geopolitical arbitrage. To laugh at the picture is to laugh, without quite knowing it, at a particular joint in the early-1990s reorganization of global production. The work's apparent provincialism—its weirdly off-register voices, its toy-like backgrounds—is in fact the look of an early experiment in the offshoring of cultural labor, one of countless rehearsals for what would become the standard production model of the next thirty years.
The richer question concerns the work's afterlife, because this is where the analysis must turn from the object to its audience. By the mid-2000s, the cutscenes had migrated to YouTube and become the raw material of "YouTube Poop"—remix videos that sliced, looped, and pitch-shifted the dialogue into surrealist collages. The game was reborn as a meme, which is to say reborn as content. Here one might be tempted to find a redemptive moment: the masses reclaiming a failed commodity, transmuting corporate refuse into folk art, exercising a small revenge upon the apparatus. The temptation should be resisted. The remix culture that absorbed Faces of Evil did not recover the work from the culture industry; it extended the culture industry's reach by giving it a second pass through consciousness. The viewer who quotes "Mah boi" is participating in a recognition ritual indistinguishable in its psychic mechanics from the recognition ritual of any other branded catchphrase. The fact that the original product was cheap and the secondary engagement is ironic does not alter the ritual; it only equips it with a self-protective layer of knowingness.
This is, in its way, the more dispiriting development. A defective commodity, having failed at sincerity, succeeds at irony, and thereby succeeds commercially after all—generating views, merchandise, animated reanimations, and an entire economy of nostalgic recall. The audience pays in attention rather than dollars, but the structure of payment is unchanged. Worse, the ironic mode trains the spectator in a posture of pre-emptive disavowal that is perfectly compatible with continued consumption: I know this is junk, and yet. The "and yet" is where the apparatus lives. One could argue that a population that learns to enjoy administered entertainment ironically is more securely bound to it than a population that enjoys it earnestly, since irony immunizes against the disappointment that might otherwise prompt a turn elsewhere.
What, finally, does Faces of Evil promise? Every entertainment commodity makes some implicit pledge—of escape, of pleasure, of mastery, of communion with a story. This one's pledge is so faint, so manifestly underfunded, that one can almost see the promise itself as a printed form, signed by no one, filed in a cabinet in Eindhoven. The game proposes that the player will save a kingdom; what it delivers is the experience of pressing buttons while a license expires. And yet (there is that "and yet" again) it has been remembered, catalogued, reissued in emulation, lovingly mocked, and granted a cultural longevity that more competent works of its year do not enjoy. One should be careful about reading this longevity as the triumph of any popular impulse. It is, more plausibly, the triumph of the archive: the demonstration that under present conditions nothing is permitted to disappear, since anything that can be circulated can be monetized, and the failed object, properly framed, circulates as efficiently as the successful one. The administered world has no outside, not even at its margins, not even in its mistakes. Link: The Faces of Evil is a small, ugly proof of this—worth attending to not because it is interesting in itself, which it is not, but because it shows, with the unembarrassed clarity of a thing too poor to dissemble, what the machine looks like when it forgets to put its makeup on.
Mini Review: Link: The Faces of Evil is less a game than a balance sheet rendered visible. Stripped of the polish that obscures the culture industry’s standardized nature, it reveals the naked mechanics of IP licensing and geopolitical arbitrage. Crucially, its afterlife as an ironically consumed meme is no populist triumph. Irony merely equips us with a cynical knowingness that sustains the apparatus. In the administered world, there is no outside; even corporate mistakes are endlessly monetized.