You can spend whole days lost in the salt mines of Portal 2. In bedrooms across the world, when the first-person platformer launched in the early 2010s, millions of gamers roamed mazes of destroyed office space, reverberating boiler rooms and chemical bunkers. They kicked past sodium-lit offices that had been quickly abandoned, coiling trees, half-used chambers and the rubble of an Al glitch. In lieu of end bosses and side characters, the baddie of the game – which today has a near-perfect score on Metacritic – was its eerie, undefinable menace, the strange feeling that disaster and insanity lurked somewhere nearby. It was a blockbuster environmental horror game with no actual horror in it – just endless corridors of nothingness.
When he wasn't learning how to ride a bike or trapped at kindergarten, a six-year-old called Kane Parsons would spend hours exploring these corridors. “It got me thinking about the feelings that spaces can evoke in a person,” the now 18-year-oid tells me one evening in December. “It took over my life.” Parsons was drawn to sliding between cracks in the walls, the areas of the game that served no obvious function. One evening, he placed his avatar's ear to a corner and registered a faint, pained voice. It wasn't just a moment of nagging terror for Parsons, but a kind of creative awakening, as if the wall he was pressed to was a blank canvas and it was up to his imagination to fill it with paint.
Today, Parsons has the cracked baritone, – which was successfully bid on by the film studio last year – is based on a short that Parsons made on his home computer in northern California. Parsons was just 16 when his nine-minute clip went from 1m to 7m views in one 48-hour stroke. Today, it has more than 55m views on YouTube, and Parsons has turned into a post-truth plaything for hype farms, with claiming that “little is known about the young director” and, even better, that A24 was “waiting for his summer holiday” to start shooting.
