Julian Grant

What Gets Remembered When Everything Else Burns

I’ve been thinking about the dead dog.

In the first cut of “Alphabet Burning,” the imaginary documentary my imaginary filmmaker Alex Chen made in my imaginary game about the real Lower East Side in 1978, there’s footage of a dead dog on Avenue B. The camera lingers on it for maybe eight seconds. No music, no narration. Just the dog and the garbage and the sound of the city. In the second cut, the one that got Alex a distribution deal and lost their reputation in the underground film scene, the dead dog is gone. Cut for being too rough, too real, too much.

I made a game where you have to decide whether to cut the dead dog.

This probably sounds strange if you’ve never played a solo journaling role-playing game, and maybe it still sounds strange if you have. Blank Generation asks you to play an artist trying to survive in New York City’s underground scene from 1977 to 1983. You roll dice to navigate crises. You track four numbers that measure your exhaustion, your visibility to threats, your money, and your reputation. Every session you create something and then choose whether to stay pure or compromise or sell out completely. The game asks a question it knows you can’t answer: was it worth it?

I didn’t set out to make a game about failure. I set out to make a game about documentation.

The mythology around CBGB and Max’s Kansas City and the Mudd Club always made it look so cool. The photographs are all dramatic angles and artful grunge. The documentaries cut together the best nights, the moments that mattered, the bands that made it. Even the oral histories tend toward the highlights, the war stories, the times someone famous showed up or something wild happened. What you don’t see in the mythology is the rent you couldn’t pay, the friend who overdosed, the choice between eating and buying film stock, the exhaustion that accumulated until you couldn’t tell if you were making art or just going through motions.

I grew up on those photographs. The Ramones at CBGB. Patti Smith at Max’s. Blondie before anyone knew who Blondie was. I thought it looked like freedom. Then I started reading the actual accounts, the zines and personal journals and less polished interviews, and I realized it wasn’t freedom at all. It was desperation documented well.

So I made a game where you track your desperation on a six-point scale and when you hit six you’re done.

The interesting thing about games, the thing I didn’t fully understand until I started designing them, is that they preserve procedural knowledge in a way other media can’t quite match. A documentary can show you what the scene looked like. A book can tell you what it felt like. But a game makes you navigate the same decision trees under the same constraints. When you’re playing Blank Generation and you’re at five out of six Burnout and you have zero Cash and someone offers you money to soften your work, you’re not reading about compromise. You’re making the compromise. You’re feeling the pressure of the numbers and the awareness that one more mark on Burnout ends your character and the knowledge that you need money to survive. The game forces you to understand not just that people made compromises, but why they made them and what it felt like in the moment of making them.

This is what I mean by games as documentation. Not documentation of what happened, exactly, but documentation of what it felt like to navigate what happened.

I’m planning eight books in the series. Four track New York from 1977 to 1999, watching the scene get commercialized and policed and gentrified until by the end there’s a Disney Store in Times Square and the whole thing is a museum. Then four city variants: London punk from the Sex Pistols to Thatcher, Berlin techno from the Wall falling to reunification killing the party, Seattle grunge from Sub Pop to Kurt’s death, Detroit from punk through techno through bankruptcy across thirty-six years. Each book asks the same question in a different accent. Each book documents a different way the city kills the scene. Each book tracks the same erosion, the same exhaustion, the same choice between integrity and survival that almost everyone eventually loses.

The more I work on this series, the more I realize I’m not making entertainment. I’m making an archive.

There’s a moment in the third session of my playthrough where Alex has to choose between going to Danny’s memorial or going to a career-making interview with a magazine. Danny was the friend who overdosed, the one Alex was supposed to check on but didn’t because Alex was too tired and too busy and too burned out. The memorial and the interview are scheduled for the same time. You can’t do both. Any choice that adds another point of Burnout ends the character completely.

I chose the memorial. I went drunk. I couldn’t handle the weight of it, so I walked out. I lost my last remaining reputation with the scene. Then I stopped making films because any choice that kept me making films would have pushed me past six Burnout and ended everything.

This isn’t a story about success or even about meaningful failure. It’s a story about stopping. About choosing survival over art because the alternative is not existing at all. Most stories about underground scenes don’t end this way because most stories about underground scenes are told by the people who made it, or about the people who made it, or are constructed to build toward some kind of meaning. But most people in most scenes didn’t make it. They burned out or sold out or left or died. They did a few things, lost a few things, and then stopped.

The documentation they left behind is all we have to prove they were there at all.

I keep coming back to the dead dog. Such a small edit. Ninety seconds out of twenty minutes. Alex could tell themselves it wasn’t really compromising, just making the work accessible, letting more people see the documentation. And Alex would be right. More film students watched “Alphabet Burning” because of that edit than would have watched the uncut version. The work reached further because it was softer.

But the underground film scene still knew about the cut. Still knew Alex had compromised. Still marked Alex as someone who bent when pushed. And Alex still had to live with knowing that the most brutal truth got edited out to make the rest palatable.

That’s the thing about documentation. You can document the eviction, the poverty, the violence, the desperation. You can document everything except the cuts you made to the documentation itself.

I designed Blank Generation to force those cuts. To make you feel them. To track what they cost. Every playthrough generates a story about someone who tried to document something true and then had to decide how much truth they could afford. Sometimes they stay pure and burn out. Sometimes they compromise and survive. Sometimes they stop before the choice kills them. There’s no winning condition. There’s just the question asked over and over in different ways: was it worth it?

The game can’t answer that question. Neither can I. But the game can make you sit with it, session after session, watching your numbers climb and your options narrow and your character erode. It can make you understand that almost everyone who was there had to answer that question for themselves and most of them answered it by leaving.

And maybe that’s documentation enough.

Twenty years from now, someone will stumble across Blank Generation in some corner of the internet. They’ll read the rules about Burnout and Exposure and Cash and Reputation. They’ll roll dice to generate a crisis. They’ll track their character’s deterioration across three sessions or five sessions or however long they can stand it. They’ll write in their journal about what they created and what it cost and why they’re still there. And when their character hits six Burnout or loses all their Reputation or just can’t take another session, they’ll understand something about underground art scenes that no documentary or book quite captures.

They’ll understand what it felt like to choose between the work and yourself. They’ll understand why most people eventually choose themselves. They’ll understand that the work existing is sometimes the only victory anyone gets.

I built a game where you track your desperation until you can’t track it anymore. Where you document loss until you become the loss you’re documenting. Where the question isn’t whether you’ll burn out but when, and what you’ll leave behind, and whether anyone will remember that you tried.

The dead dog stayed out of the final cut. The film students watched anyway. Some of them wrote letters. One of them said the work mattered.

Alex left New York with two completed films, zero reputation, and just enough money to leave. The work existed. The person who made it was gone. That’s the real story.

I’m making eight games to document eight versions of that story. Eight cities, eight timelines, eight ways the scene ends. Not because it’s fun, exactly. Because someone needs to write down what it actually cost. Someone needs to preserve not just that it happened, but what it felt like to be there when it happened. Someone needs to make a game where you cut the dead dog or keep the dead dog and either way you lose something.

The mythology says it was cool and free and pure. The mythology is a lie. The truth is it was desperate and exhausting, and most people didn’t make it and the ones who did make it usually made it by becoming something else.

But people were there. They made things. They documented what the city was like before the city changed. They chose art over safety until they couldn’t choose it anymore.

That matters.

Even when the dead dog gets cut. Even when the filmmaker leaves. Even when the scene dies and gets turned into mythology and nobody remembers what it actually felt like.

The documentation exists. The game preserves the procedure. The archive grows.

Someone has to remember. Even if remembering means tracking the exhaustion, the compromise, the moment you couldn’t do it anymore.

I made a game where you have to decide whether to cut the dead dog.

I hope you keep it in. I hope you can’t. I hope either way you understand why the choice matters.

That’s what games can do that other media can’t. They make you live the choice. They make you feel the weight. They make you document your own documentation, track your own tracking, remember what it costs to remember.

The scene is dying. The scene is being born. You’re broke. You’re brilliant. You’re burning out. You’re making something real. The city doesn’t care. The work demands everything.

Make something that matters. Even if you have to stop before you’re done. Even if the dead dog gets cut. Even if nobody remembers your name.

Make something that matters. Someone will find it later. Someone will understand.

That’s the only win condition there is.