#greg beato

"Developed in 1994 and published the following year, Chop Suey was a cunning piece of multimedia edutainment, suited just as well to grown-ups — smirking hipsters and punk rockers, probably — as it was to the prescribed “girls 7 to 12” crowd. But it wasn’t a computer game. It was something else: a loosely-strung system of vignettes; a psychedelic exercise in “let’s-pretend”; a daydream in which the mundanity of small-town Ohio collides with the interior lives of its two young protagonists.

Every moment in the game, however connected, is also suspended in time. But the game’s perpetual loop of story is deliberate: 'It works the same way that Alice in Wonderland does, where she leaves home and then she has adventures,' designer Theresa Duncan explained in 1998, “but if you took everything in between the beginning and the end of Alice in Wonderland and scrambled up every chapter, it would make no difference to the development of the story.” Every moment in the game, however connected, is also suspended in time."

~Jenn Frank, Motherboard.

 “With its sly whimsy and tactile, folk-art imagery, Chop Suey brings a whole new sensibility — quirky, poetic, almost bittersweet — to a medium that’s often lacking in such nuance."