Perfect Stride
More than a decade ago (2012? 2013?), I (as a child) saw the game Zineth as a part of a YouTube video Nerdcubed’s 3 free games Friday 1. Since it was free, I downloaded it and played it on my computer.
I would say that Zineth is an incredibly important game in my childhood. It, and the hundreds of other indie games I played during that time, expanded my view of what a game could be and who could make it.
It was a part of what inspired me to start making games all these years later and influences what games I want to make.
I am very nostalgic for it.
At the time, the group that made it (Arcane Kids) were working on another game, Perfect Stride. There was an alpha trailer, so I kept checking on it once and a while to see when it would come out. I was very excited for it, but as time matched on, I never got to play it.
I kept checking whenever I remembered it, but eventually I forgot about it…
More than a decade later (this year, 2024), I remembered it again and looked into it once again. Maybe I was bad at doing research or something, but the alpha trailer for the game clearly says that the alpha is available through “LA Game Space”, but at this point, LA Game Space had shut down quite a bit ago.
HOWEVER, someone had uploaded their Experimental Game Pack 01 to the Internet Archive (LONG LIVE PRESERVATION. People do care) sometime around the time of LA Game Space’s closing.
One of those games in the pack was the alpha to Perfect Stride.
To me, this was a fabled video game that I was never able to access. After around a decade of knowing about this game, I finally got to play it for myself.
It is still an alpha build, but…
It’s everything that I could have ever wanted out of it. It was such a joy to experience it after all this time.
Zineth is influential enough to me that I like to keep a backed up copy of it as a memento. Perfect Stride is right alongside it.