Ruin Marks Its 35th Anniversary With A Game That Never Existed

The 35th anniversary of Ruin arrives with the confidence of a long-established classic, yet the game at the center of the celebration never had a past to begin with. The developer, Official Electric, leans into this contradiction through Ruin: Chapter 0, an interactive fiction project that mimics the look and rhythm of early home-computer adventures. The result positions the 35th anniversary of Ruin as an in-joke with unusual depth, one that uses nostalgia to create a world that never needed to exist to feel strangely familiar. The game is available through itch.io, where its presentation underlines the idea that an invented legacy can carry as much shape as a real one.

Ruin: Chapter 0 runs in the browser and opens with the grainy fantasy framing players might associate with ZX Spectrum software, though its art has more color and its transitions handle more action than the machines it imitates could support. The fiction places you as a knight ordered by a king to retrieve a sword and defeat an unmentioned evil. The structure encourages classic point-and-click logic, but the game sidesteps its own expectations. Battles tend to end with you on the ground and a blunt “get owned” message delivered without sympathy. The joke lands because it feels consistent with the invented legacy the project builds upon: a game old enough to have a reputation, sharp enough to undercut it.

The medieval frame gives way to a sci-fi detour across a set of planets that share no aesthetic link with the starting section. One scene pushes you through a forest where apples drift toward you at fixed intervals; another slows the pace to a smoke break that demands a series of deliberate clicks. The lighter needs a flick. The cigarette box needs to open. Each animation stretches a moment, pulling the player into a form of interaction that feels at odds with the surrounding simplicity.

Ruin’s transitions widen even further, moving from standard RPG windows to first-person sequences that resemble early CD-ROM adventures, then onward into segments that function more as animated shorts than game scenes. The through-line is opacity. The project holds its rules at a distance, much like a title from a bygone era whose design documents were never archived. That quality prompts a certain curiosity: a sense that you could research its history, track its influences, or chase down the mythical “35-year legacy” it references. Those avenues lead nowhere, which is part of the concept. Ruin does not preserve a forgotten IP; it fabricates the memory of one.

The 35th anniversary release frames this ambiguity as a feature. Official Electric packages the fiction as if the broader series once spanned several eras of hardware, complete with a mock claim that the special edition fits across four floppy disks. The detail is crafted to trigger an instinctive recognition in anyone who grew up around those systems, even though the software behind the claim belongs entirely to the present. That blend of specificity and misdirection strengthens the illusion that the project sets out to build.

Ruin: Chapter 0 is accessible now on itch.io, where its browser format keeps the experience immediate. Its fractured structure and shifting tone never settle into one genre, yet the work gains an odd coherence from its commitment to the invented occasion. The 35th anniversary of Ruin becomes less a milestone than a framing device, a way to explore how nostalgia can be conjured without the weight of history.