Steam’s Summer Sale is over for another year, but this year’s sale was marked with some amazing games that no amount of Steam credits will ever be able to buy. That’s because they were totally fake games made for the Summer Sale’s scavenger hunt.
If you happened across a banner with "free fun this way," you’d have been presented with a series of clues about "the ten best games from the far future" from a mysterious character named Clothrax. These clues would point to fake games listed in Steam’s storefront, and most of them looked better than any of the real games Steam’s actually selling.
Take Guitar Billionaire, for example. Is it a trivia game for rock music enthusiasts? Is it a Guitar Hero spinoff where everyone already starts out as the world’s biggest rock star and the story follows your fall from the heights of celebrity after destroying one too many hotel rooms? We’ll never know because the game doesn’t exist.
Or how about Dead Seagull Zoo Magnate? A game that’s clearly a theme park simulator, but how does one create a theme park about dead seagulls? Do you have a dead seagull roller coaster? A dead seagull mascot? Do the dead seagulls eventually attract packs of seals, also turning your theme park into an actual zoo? These quests will remain perpetually unanswered because the game isn’t real.
We have Valve artist Claire Hummel (whose previous works include Half-Life: Alyx and Westworld VR) to thank for these incredible fake covers for games that should exist but don’t. Claire shared all ten fake key arts on Twitter, explaining the idea was to create "relatively convincing key art to hide in the Steam storefront, all of which were a little weird on second glance." Or first glance, for that matter.
"Erik Wolpaw and Jay Pinkerton came up with the names/descriptions for Clorthax's fake games, and then I just tried to match their energy in the final art," Claire added. "Super fun trying to make plausibly polished logos in a whole bunch of different styles/genres."
We can only hope that Valve will eventually sell these ideas to some enterprising indie studios that will eventually develop them into real games.