@ephraimmm9618 6 years ago
Terry Davis : “Forgive me, I have to try and figure out why I remember...that I love you.”
Damn. Schizophrenia's a bitch.

P and 6oy first met in 2023, at the ground-floor entrance of Seendosi, Seoul.
That night they we were both DJing for [Shin Megami City], a JRPG-themed party organized by James, and 6oy thought P looked darker than she'd imagined. Our next encounter was a tattoo trade session.
In 2025 we teamed up as PEN:KEY, becoming a game maker and worldbuilder duo.
KAIRO is the world we imagined, talking almost every day for months. After releasing a short animated video last summer, we started building the demo. Over the past few months, people who've run into us at venues around Seoul have said things like:

CBS: (after PEN:KEY's first b2b session)
"You talked like you were getting your life together, and now you're back as a DJ duo hyping up the room."
Kisewa: "Wait, where'd you go? What is this pairing?"
(orders two more shots of tequila and waves for the two of us to drink.)
SM: (at the bar on Seendosi's 5th floor) "You two are being pretty cocky right now, huh?"

And plenty of others: "So when's the game coming out?"

...What does the world we wanted to see actually look like?
KAIRO started from memories of feeling something strongly inside game worlds, and from the time we got through because we had those game-lives to live. We adventured in different worlds, but something in us, some adventurer's instinct, resonated with each other… Now we're bringing the blurred shape of a village, and our characters' faces, into focus. Turning RPG-coded themes into a narrative-driven, first-person point-and-click game hasn't been easy — there have been hard parts along the way. Still, we keep shaping the world and its systems, looking for the sight we wanted to see, one we may have already seen before.

Thank you to Avalanche Death, our producer and collaborator, for the beautiful music; to Seungtaek, who helped with the in-game text and the clock mechanism at the city's center; and to Sider, for helping build the website. Thanks to Akari, who worked with us as project manager, and to gori2lla, the developer who joined thanks to her hard documenting work. Thank you, all of you.

Into the endless story…

From P

A hill structure I saw in a park in Milan reminded me of Vortex Hill on Dugald Isle. In the game, there was a hill in the corner of the map with no real function. Climbing it and hovering the cursor over the sign at the top would bring up a text box: <You've worked hard climbing all the way up here. Please head back safely.> That game is still running, but I don't know if the sign is still there. Remembering the times I'd sat there, I walked through that park in Milan, day and night. It made me feel like I was standing on Vortex Hill itself. Fiction and reality swapping places like that — it felt like fate. It's beautiful.

Right before we started planning KAIRO, I contributed a manga called 〈Palace〉 to the indie manga zine 《Printer House Vol.1》 — an amateur manga about a girl climbing a tutorial castle, dark but hopeful. I still hadn't written the ending when I went to play a show in Busan, at a venue called 'Ovantgarde,' with my band Penguin apt. After the show, walking the beach with friends, a castle-shaped structure suddenly appeared. I took a photo of my friends' backs with it, and thought — I could use this as the manga's ending. Sometimes what I feel in reality goes into fictional world. Sometimes what I build in fiction shows up in reality. I think of that as something like fate.

Each character in KAIRO has a different fate. I once read an interview with a manga artist who said that even as the creator of that world, her characters sometimes acted on their own and said things she couldn't predict. Same for me — I'm still figuring out why I put these characters in these particular fates, still looking forward to how they'll think and move, what fates they'll turn into. I like that we get to say [World] so much.

Recently, through the Instagram of heatcrimes — a record label built around religious themes — I learned about Terry Davis's TempleOS. Terry designed the OS to become the "Third Temple" prophesied in the Bible, and after receiving a revelation, spent ten years building it. God, he said, commanded the OS run at 640x480 resolution, 16-color display, single audio voice. He insisted on that resolution and color range, apparently, because the constraints made it impossible to depict anything too violent or explicit. So he believed children's games had to be made this way, no exceptions. Asked, "What about adults, then?" his answer was reportedly: "Adults shouldn't be playing games at all." At the center of TempleOS was the "Oracle" — a program generating pseudo-random words and phrases, which Davis used to communicate with God. Words appeared at random, sometimes with lines drawn between them; to him, it was a space where a message from God could appear. It's an operating system, but also religious art, a programming experiment, a fragment of a huge outsider digital culture. Crude 3D landscapes, biblical imagery, games, hymns, diagrams, and strange things completely disconnected from where mainstream computing went. (Go check it out…) He was an enormously talented programmer, but lived with serious mental illness, including schizophrenia, and his religious beliefs became inseparable from it over time. His public life grew more unstable in his later years, but TempleOS remains a remarkably consistent, obsessive body of work.

"Forgive me, I have to try and figure out why I remember...that I love you."

—

G, a friend I spent a lot of time with in my early twenties, sent me a photo out of nowhere — him on a mountain summit in Slovakia with some white guy in a Taegeukgi t-shirt. I asked him how DMT or psychedelics change the way you sense the world, and how that connects to spiritual experience; he asked me how I feel my relationship to the world, to life, to God.

Jesus Christ is a rockstar. So is a pastor. Rockstar Games — Coming in November 19.
—

From 6oy

I've come to think often about memory and forgetting, and less than I used to about fate. Seven years ago I stood alone on a windswept cliff in Hyrule; now I'm walking toward Baldur's Gate with three companions.