Garage (video game)

Garage is a surreal and nightmarish point and click adventure inspired by the works of Carl Jung, set inside the mind of a man named Yang. Yang finds himself inside a therapy machine known as Garage, which creates within the user's mind a dystopian world similar to Kowloon Walled City. The city is inhabited by biomechanical entities trapped on a web of tracks, repeating their days in a dark society. The player takes control of a small bio-machine tasked with finding its "shadow" – a mysterious entity which seems to reflect another facet of the player character – and to escape the city in the process. Along the way, the player must meet other machines, solve puzzles, fish for frogs, and balance their ever-dwindling supplies of Ego and Fuel. The game's graphics are pre-rendered and digitized.

The game was written and designed by Japanese surrealist artist Tomomi Sakuba.^[1] It was also art-directed by Sakuba, produced by Masahiro Ikuta, co-produced by Akihiko Kawa, and programmed by Akiya Hayashi. Its 3D graphics were created by Gengo Ito and Hiroki Watanabe, with music composed by Tomonori Tanaka.^[2]

Sakuba began his interest in games with the Cyan, Inc. title Cosmic Osmo, which he had played around 1990. After learning that the game had been created in HyperCard, a software that was pre-installed for free on Mac computers at the time, he went to the library and began studying the software. He made a few experimental projects including Hobbit's Great Adventure and Talking before setting his sights on developing a full-fledged game.^[3]

When sketching out the design of the hero, Sakuba settled on a creature with an organic head on the body of a machine. He eventually decided to apply this design to all the characters.^[4] At least one poster was designed before the final poster was chosen for marketing.^[5] The official website for the game was published in August 1995, where the director maintained a diary of the game's progress.^[6]

The first release of this game was limited to 3,000 copies. The game's publisher, Toshiba-EMI, withdrew from CD-ROM publishing before further copies could be produced.^[7] Even in Japan, where the game was released, original copies of Garage are considered extremely rare, with only a few thousand in existence. When a used copy of the game appeared on the trading site Suruga-ya, it initially had an asking price of 300,000 yen.

Its first availability on the internet can be attributed to members of 4chan's retro gaming board, /vr/, who discovered it on an auction site, and pooled funds together in order to acquire and preserve it.^[1][8] The game's creator initially held resistance to republishing it, citing issues of "game balance", as well as his lack of rights to the property.^[9] A limited re-release, titled "Garage Private Edition", went on sale in mid-2007, and quickly sold out.^[7] With permission of Tomomi Sakuba, the game was a repackaging of the original release.^[7]

On March 31, 2020, LoneDev reverse engineered the game and implemented a patch to translate the videogame into English and permit game play on non-Japanese Windows 10 systems. The GarageDoor patch^[10] was announced on Discord and released on GitHub, greatly increasing interest^[11] in the video game in Western countries.

On December 10, 2021, an official remastered version of Garage, titled Garage: Complete Version, was released on iOS and Android devices, the first time the game would be officially playable in English – featuring UI and game balance improvements, new chapters, sidequests and multiple different endings.^[12] This version was later ported to Microsoft Windows, releasing on Steam as Garage: Bad Dream Adventure on July 7, 2022,^[13][14] and also Nintendo Switch under the same name on June 6, 2024.^[15]

Hardcore Gaming 101 deemed Garage a "profoundly uncomfortable game to look at", due to its unsettling nature.^[1]