Museums of the Non-Existent: From Dune to MyHouse.wad

We no longer consume works: we inhabit gaps. Cancelled projects, fragments, hoaxes, mod-labyrinths, and fake books shift the center of gravity of the experience: there is no longer an object to finish, there is a hole to activate. This void, sometimes organized, sometimes endured, generates play: collective investigation, patient reconstruction, ritual that recomposes meaning from contradictory clues. It is an aesthetic of absence and an economy of the unfinished: a design by off-screen, where value lies not in what is shown but in what is suspected behind it.

Why the non-existent occupies us so much

It starts with a physical sensation: an anonymous .zip file, a crookedly scanned PDF, a screenshot too compressed to be clear but too precise to be a coincidence. You already know what’s going to happen. You’re going to click, scroll, search. And you’ll try to fill in the gaps. Because the void calls out to you. That’s its primary design function: to plant a splinter, leaving just enough material protruding for the hand to return.

The call of absence has been the underground driving force of video game culture for at least two decades. We love vast worlds, but we adore their blank spaces: condemned doors, abandoned assets, lines of dialogue that point to systems never implemented. We want the archive, the promise of completeness that never arrives. We want the adrenaline rush of the authoritative fragment: not because it’s true, but because it seems to come from a pile of dusty cardboard boxes. Rumor, in this regime, is no longer degraded information, it’s a format.

Look at how the promise has surpassed the object. The trailer is no longer a preview: it is an autonomous work that creates an emotional future. A prototype is no longer an internal milestone but a portable myth. P.T. does not need to exist as a finished product to be real. Its reality is outside the frame, its removal from the store, the PS4s that have become relics, the clones that catch only the scent and never the air. We play around P.T. as we circle a crater: not to find the meteorite, but to map the impact.

The corpus of this article functions like a museum of ghosts, with contradictory labels and overly cold lighting. Jodorowsky’s Dune: a film that never existed and yet has planted images in the minds of all contemporary science fiction. You open the storyboard bible as you would open a grimoire: Giger, Moebius, Foss, Pink Floyd. Not the film, but better: the idea of the film, infinitely duplicable. P.T./Silent Hills: a corridor, a loop, a deletion, the perfect minimalism for the community to inject excess meaning. MyHouse.wad: a WAD from Doom that refuses to be a level but prefers to be an impossible house, mourning folded into architecture, a messy manual of rituals. Petscop, Ben Drowned, Polybius: fake documentaries and creepypastas where the internet becomes a studio, where the pace of uploads replaces the narrative bible, where comments serve as a writing room. Vermis: a book about a game that doesn’t exist, but with the precision, grayness, and typography of an exhibition catalog.

You can see the common logic: the absent work recruits. It does not deliver, it delegates. It transforms us into archivists, detectives, restorers of a painting that we no longer know whether it burned or was never painted. The pleasure is not in “finishing” but in holding on: holding on to incompatible hypotheses, holding on to mental maps, holding on to cobbled-together timelines. The non-existent occupies us because it employs us. It is not only aesthetic, it is structural. Cultural industries saturated with final deliverables present a smooth surface, while the public looks for the seams. Rumor becomes a tool for external prototyping. The fragment becomes a breathing space. And sometimes, yes, manipulation, but even manipulation tells us something about our reflexes: at what point do we decide that a compressed JPEG deserves a wiki?

So let’s lay down the rules of the game. We will explore works that are not, or not quite, works of art: a monster movie that was never made but poisoned an entire imagination; a withdrawn demo that persists like a ritual; a house in WAD that bends space to the measure of a loss; “discovered” videos that write their own viewer; a book that pretends to archive absent objects, and succeeds. At each stage, we will look less at what is shown than at how it is missing. We will ask ourselves: what does this void make playable? Where is the archive, who owns it, who mimics it? And above all: how, from these ghosts, can we conceive of works that do not cheat, that embrace the unfinished as a method, not as an excuse.

You can close the tab if you want. But you know you’ll come back. Somewhere, a room has no door, and that’s precisely why you enter.

Jodorowsky’s Dune: the monster movie that never was

It’s called a “monster movie” because everything about its pre-production reeks of hyperbole: a massive book of storyboards by Moebius, illustrations by Chris Foss where each ship is a doctrine, essays by Giger for a Harkonnen dynasty in permanent necrosis, a dream soundtrack invoking Pink Floyd and Magma, a totemic cast featuring names like Dalí, Welles, and Jagger. Nothing was ever filmed, and yet everything was created: the iconography, the logic of the universe, the rhythm of an odyssey that was meant to be epic. This is the first material singularity of Jodorowsky’s version of Dune: the work does not exist, but its infrastructure does, linked by a storyboard bible that brings together storyboards, costumes, sets, vehicles, spiritual trajectories, and reveals a pipeline on the verge of going into overdrive. You can open this “book” as you would open an organ: each page displays a system waiting for a body it will never receive.

This materiality has a simple consequence: it has made Dune consultable without ever being visible. The pitchbook circulated, sometimes in offices, sometimes in the media flow revived by the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune. As the object passed from hand to hand, it became less of a production plan and more of a manual of influence. Moebius’s photograph of a storyboard was transformed into a mood board for another project; Giger’s cutaway of the Harkonnen palace reemerged, metabolized, as vocabulary for biotechnical architectures elsewhere (hello, Alien). At some point, the book ceased to be a promise of a film and became cultural raw material.

The direct influence is well documented: O’Bannon, repatriated from the aborted adventure, wrote Alien and brought Giger into the loop; the “biomechanical” left the planet Arrakis, which never came to fruition, and crystallized into a xenomorph. Moebius, meanwhile, continued to influence science fiction cinema and illustration worldwide: space suits, interfaces, vehicle silhouettes, and layouts that prioritized graphic clarity over technical realism. Chris Foss, prophet of colorful hulls, leaves a lasting mark on the imagination with his monumental ships, painted masses resembling baroque supertankers. In turn, the nascent concept art ecosystem appropriates both the method and the style: exhaustive bible, serial storyboard.

We recognize these traces in heterogeneous objects. In desert-based games where silhouettes take precedence over engineering plausibility, we hear Foss; in the cathedrals of bone, tubes, and fluids of Scorn, we hear Giger, and behind Giger, the shadow of what could have been Harkonnen palaces filmed with a mystical literalism, in projects that claim a clear metaphysical line (Shedworks’ Sable, from a different lineage, certainly, but where Moebius-esque legibility is assumed), we perceive the core of the method: the idea that the world must carry before it rolls. Even where the influence is not linear, it is structural: the practice of the “worldbook” as an artifact that precedes and frames everything, even in studios that defy it, is the child of an era that Dune crystallized.

This persistence is also due to the economics of myth. The pitchbook has become a relic. There have been jealously guarded private copies, appearances at auction houses, media hype, and clumsy appropriations. A community has formed around the object, not in the sense of a classic fandom but as a circle of exegetes: designers, directors, film historians, studio and indie artists who describe, compare, and highlight. The very vocabulary of the project—total film, mystical ecstasy, vision—has fueled a rhetoric of thwarted greatness: this film never happened, but its non-occurrence is narrated as a foundational wound. However, this scenography of “could have been” is not just folklore; it produces very concrete value. It maintains the book’s rarity, accredits its copies as evidence, authorizes extensions (exhibitions, books, essays), and establishes, in the collective imagination of the professions, a canon where failure becomes a source.

What makes Dune so precious is that it both conjures and betrays these forces. It proves the fertility of a world thought out in detail, the proof being that it has spread elsewhere, and it exhibits the abyss that a world without substance opens up. For game design, the conclusion is not to abandon the bible, but to fold it into playable loops and realistic pipelines. A worldbook must be a matrix of actions, not a self-sufficient cathedral. Its iconography is only valuable if it prescribes productive constraints. This is the fine line between the art of the possible and the theater of promise.

Ultimately, Jodorowsky’s Dune functions as a paradoxical machine: a film that does not exist and yet existed in everything it set in motion. It changed careers, aesthetics, and production methods; it legitimized the idea that a book could serve as the core of a project; it showed the beauty and peril of a world so powerful that it survives even in the absence of the work itself. In this sense, it is a borderline case, almost a warning: one can build an industrial myth without delivering the product; one can change the way the visible is manufactured without ever going through the editing room. Up close, the storyboard bible is a splendid object; from a distance, it is a mirror held up to contemporary practices. How many universes stand outside the pipeline that should give them a foothold? Dune does not answer this question, but it does remind us that the answer involves both production ethics and aesthetics.

P.T. / Silent Hills: a playable relic of a canceled future

P.T. is not a demo in the promotional sense of the term: it is an artifact. An L-shaped corridor, a door handle, an implicit inventory made up of glances, breaths, and blind spots. The device proceeds by minute variations: a radio that contradicts itself, a torn photograph whose fragments migrate. The loop promises nothing more than its own repetition, and yet it conjures up a massive outside world: the final revelation, Playable Teaser for Silent Hills, converts the tiny space into the vestibule of a work to come. Then the removal of the store seals the transformation: the object becomes a sacred rarity, preserved on consoles that are never updated, discussed as one would talk about a lost film of which only a burnt reel remains. The myth does not come “after” P.T. It is inscribed in its cycle, then ratified by its cancellation.

The aftermath of P.T. tells another story: that of an influence that spreads better through scarcity than abundance. Deprived of official access, the community fills the void. On the one hand, there is a PSX horror revival, aggregating low-poly practices, chalky textures, and rough collisions; on the other, there is a line of “PT-likes” that copy the photorealistic corridor, the overly clean optics, and chromatic aberration as proof of seriousness. The former capture the spirit, constraint as dramaturgy, ellipsis as mechanics, by returning fear to materiality: animation jitter (editor’s note: delay in the transmission of data packets), silhouettes that “break,” audio that crackles for real. The latter borrow the surface: slow walking, predictable jump scares, radio hissing as a shortcut. Between the two, more interesting works exploit the idea of a single space as a score. We think of those experiments that twist the plan of a single location to the point of absurdity, or those games that exhaust an apartment by layers of time rather than by adding rooms. The “corridor” is no longer a backdrop, it is an instrument.

This legacy extends beyond the strictly visual realm. P.T. legitimizes a production economy in which the prototype accomplishes something without any guarantee of a product. Jams and demos adopt the loop as a distribution format, collectives (particularly those focused on low-spec and the “Haunted PS1” aesthetic) exhibit fragments that are accepted as such, and studios introduce playable teasers as autonomous forms. This is the paradoxical lesson of withdrawal: cancellation has opened up a wider field of experimentation than a lukewarm launch ever could have. A mediocre game that had been delivered would have closed the conversation, but a withdrawn fragment has, on the contrary, created an obligation to continue it elsewhere.

However, there is a darker side to this, which concerns preservation and industrial ethics. Delisting transforms a design artifact into speculative currency, confirms the dependence of works on storefronts, and weakens the memory of the medium. The industry unwittingly exploits a rarity that was not the author’s choice: P.T. becomes a relic because it is being removed, not because it was designed to disappear. The ensuing cult, with advertisements for consoles “with P.T. installed” and archaeological videos, speaks less to the aura of a masterpiece than to the state of an ecosystem that has no museum. The question is not whether the removal was “fair,” but to measure what this economy does to forms: it values objects that are unmanageable by design, it places works in clandestine circulation regimes, it entrusts private copying with a conservation role that the institution does not assume.

One might think that a decent Silent Hills would be enough to neutralize the myth. Nothing could be less certain. The power of P.T. lies in the rare alignment between a tiny device and a dramaturgy of disappearance. Even a good game would not have canceled this spectral pact: the loop, the suspicion, the X-ray of an apartment would have continued to radiate elsewhere, simply, they would have done so in the midst of a saturated release. In cancellation, P.T. forced the reception to dwell on the how rather than the what. It shifted the center of gravity of video game horror toward the mechanics of clues and the liturgy of return, away from ambushes and anxious inventories. In short, it transformed a waiting room into a work of art.

What remains is the ambivalence inherent in this case: a work conceived as an introduction that, by force of circumstance, became a definitive conclusion. Between artifact and relic, the shift is not only legal, it is aesthetic. P.T. shows how a canceled future can inform a creative present: through an obsession with thresholds, through the expressiveness of micro-states, through the way the player is inscribed in the archive. But it also shows what an industry does with its ghosts: it scatters them, fetishizes them, and makes barely living copies of them. If we are looking for a criterion to distinguish between fruitful influence and dead duplication, we will find it in the treatment of absence: where lack organizes playable consequences, rules, rhythms, and costs, the legacy remains alive; where it merely paints walls and adds a breath behind a door, it dissolves into pastiche.

In the end, P.T. is not the shadow of Silent Hills but an autonomous form whose story has confirmed the intuition: you can turn a single space into a world, a cycle into a narrative, a withdrawal into an event. And, contrary to all commercial logic, we can nurture more creativity by canceling a promise than by delivering it half-heartedly. The hallway is empty, and that is precisely why it continues to work on the memory of the medium.

MyHouse.wad: the impossible house

We enter MyHouse.wad as we would enter the home of someone who is no longer there. At first glance, it is a modern WAD for Doom: an ordinary house, clean textures, credible layout, the reassuring promise of a “domestic” level: kitchen, living room, hallway, garden. Then the evidence cracks. Some rooms do not connect. Doors no longer lead to places but to states of mind. Suddenly, the architecture observes you and remembers what you have done. As the loops progress, the house becomes a labyrinth of mourning: not the setting for a story “about” loss, but the precise instrument through which loss alters the space, and then the way you move through it.

The principle of WAD lies in this shift. MyHouse.wad first presents itself as a map of a memory, “a friend’s house,” says the paratext, then sets about undoing any cartographic stability. Where a classic Doom level gives the player a map, keys, a path. Here, each loop replays the house by varying the correspondences. A bathroom extends into a hallway that does not exist on the next floor. A door leading to the garage later opens onto a patio that has no place in the plan. The keys exist, but their function is no longer to open: they attest to a moment, what you dared to look at, where you chose to return, what you left behind. The object “house” thus becomes a memory system, and it is this memory that decides whether the world will let you pass.

This architecture of the unreal is not a tour de force for modders, it is a form of drama. The doors are logical, not geometric. They open on condition that you have completed the sequence required by the architecture: a sustained gaze through a window, a pointless detour repeated to the point of obsession, the abandonment of an obvious route in favor of another, longer one, for which there is no justification. The spaces bend according to non-Euclidean rules, but non-Euclideanity is not a special effect: it is the consequence of a world that is recomposing itself to avoid, circumvent, or delay an event that it cannot express. The house leaks, as if each perfect alignment of its walls triggers a pain that it refuses to accept. The cycles—day/night, return to the starting point, reappearance of the same rooms in a different order—then align with the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Not in slogans, but in micro-spatial consequences. Denial is the house repeating itself identically. Anger is the house contradicting itself. Bargaining is the house “granting” passage in exchange for an absurd detour. Depression is the house collapsing into empty corridors. Acceptance, if it comes, does not lead to a triumphant finale, but to a different way of living with incompleteness.

What anchors this reading is the collection of paratexts. MyHouse.wad is accompanied by a readme file, a few “private” images, photographs supposedly of the original house, brief notes, and technical details on the recommended port. Taken individually, these elements are nothing exceptional. Together, they constitute a novel-archive: a fiction that mimics the material chain of a memory. The device does not tell an overarching story, but it frames your posture: you are in the presence of a fragile document. You are not invited to “believe” it, but rather to behave as if you were dealing with an archive. This is precisely where MyHouse.wad connects to hauntology: veracity matters less than plausible provenance and the care taken to simulate a conservation process.

The reception extended this concept into the very act of playing. Very quickly, the WAD generated mind maps, diagrams, and overlays that attempt to superimpose incompatible versions of the house. Speedrunners, for their part, have carved out routes that border on exorcism. On forums, exegesis proliferates: thematic lines of flight, theories about the optimal arrangement of rooms to force a rare occurrence, debates about how a particular corridor “rewrites” a neighboring room in memory. Mapping has thus extended beyond the file: the community has completed the work by producing its own instruments of understanding. This is not folklore, but the logical continuation of a design that makes architecture a text to be annotated. In the end, MyHouse.wad will have fewer “fans” than co-authors, not because they modify the WAD, but because they co-sign the reading method.

What is striking in this dialogue is the rigor with which MyHouse.wad translates literary and visual affiliations into level design. One thinks of House of Leaves: the house is also an entity that exceeds its geometry, an organism that refuses measurement, a set of rooms whose sum never adds up to a whole. There, claustrophobia is expressed through columns of text that shrink and footnotes that deviate. Here, it is created by segments that loop back, cuts that no longer align volumes, and staircases that reappear shifted by one step. It brings to mind P.T.: the quasi-liturgical repetition of a stable place, then the micro-variations that make each passage an investigation. But MyHouse.wad goes further in its spatial representation: where P.T. works on the depth of the same corridor, the WAD dislocates the topology, feigns to recompose a complete house, then denies this completeness. As for analog horror, it permeates the texture of the device: not in a superimposed VHS filter, but in the way images and notes that seem to have been salvaged from shoeboxes are circulated. The archive is played as an archive, not as an “effect.”

The power of MyHouse.wad comes from this pact, which is upheld to the very end. It does not tell the story of a house haunted by the past, but rather turns a house into a device that haunts your present as a player. It does not pile up mapping discoveries, but rather directs its virtuosity toward a single promise: to make grief palpable without naming it. It does not offer itself as a secret to be discovered once and for all, but rather as an archive to be explored, by many, over time. In doing so, it shows how a legacy can be translated into level design without references or nods: through a logic of rooms that negate each other, doors that judge, and plans that never close. The impossible is less of a feat than a rule: a rule that architecture dictates, that the player learns, and that the community continues to write in the margins.

Creepypastas & fake documentaries: when the internet becomes a studio

All it takes is a camera that shakes just a little too little, an upload published “by mistake” on a Sunday at 3:12 a.m., and an anti-SEO title in lowercase letters for the internet to switch sides to the film set. Petscop, Ben Drowned, Polybius: three regimes of plausibility, three ways of exploiting the technical seams of platforms to fabricate reality out of almost nothing. The fiction is not told directly, it is produced by protocols. A regular publication schedule that suddenly becomes irregular, durations that lengthen as the discovery progresses, missing thumbnails, deliberately poor descriptions, dead links to old versions: everything contributes to the idea that someone is documenting something they do not control. The glitches are performed evidence. A compression artifact that always appears at the same moment validates the thesis of a “rushed” recording. An audio desynchronization of a few frames is less strange than the signature of capricious equipment. Peripheral ARGs, mirror sites, secondary accounts, forgotten text files simulate the bureaucracy of an amateur archive: absurd folder names, inconsistent but repeatable metadata, timestamps that frame a plausible chronology.

Through discipline, these projects converge towards a common grammar. An unreliable narrator occupies the screen, either because he claims to understand nothing of what he is recording, or because he understands too much and keeps the essential details to himself. The camera is often held by a neutral hand: no facecam, no confessions, only a hesitant voice, breaths cut during editing, silences of precisely calculated length. The “evidence” remains blurred by necessity: overly compressed captures, poorly scanned documents, excessive cropping, truncated excerpts “to avoid giving ideas.” This blurring is not a cover-up: it puts you to work. The viewer stops watching and starts examining. The comments become footnotes, hypotheses, ASCII diagrams. Each episode enlists its own audience in an investigation that goes beyond the series itself. Here, the internet is not the place of distribution but the writing room, the post-production chain, the dressing room where editing choices are discussed.

Ben Drowned formalizes this pact by infecting the interface: the idea of a “haunted” Majora’s Mask cartridge quickly shifts to an exploration of the machine itself, with altered memory states, displaced dialogue loops, and tortured music signaling corruption at specific addresses. Petscop takes the device to the opposite extreme: a fake PlayStation game documented as a film restoration, with long static shots, sparse menus, and dry notes on mechanics that don’t exist elsewhere. In both cases, the narrator remains an operator, not a hero. You find yourself pausing, advancing frame by frame, taking screenshots of the scroll bar to estimate the density of events, gestures that are less about entertainment than technical reading. Polybius condenses the method into an urban legend: a ghost arcade game, headaches, men in black. What persists are not so much images as narrative circuits, copied rumors, articles that cite sources that are never primary, synchronous testimonies that vary in detail. Here again, the Internet operates like a scattered studio: everyone contributes a fragment, no one owns the original, everyone creates the aura.

This shift has a clear aesthetic consequence: playing = investigating. The narrative form is no longer linear progression, but hypothesis. You don’t wait for the solution, but consolidate a set of clues. The metaphor of debugging then becomes central. In development, debugging consists of isolating conditions, reproducing a bug, tracing its causal chain, and documenting a regression. In these fictions, the narrative is written exactly like this: repeating a sequence to force the appearance of a phenomenon, changing a variable (console language, system time, order of interactions), identifying a “fix” that doesn’t correct anything but opens up another anomaly. It is an algorithmic dramaturgy that reverses the classic relationship between player and system: it is not the plot that advances, it is your mental model of the engine that becomes clearer. The climax is then a behavior that becomes predictable, and therefore terrifying.

This is not about establishing a dogma of concealment or reducing these works to sleight of hand. But putting them in perspective with the previous cases sheds light on the continuity: P.T. orchestrated uncertainty on the scale of an apartment; MyHouse.wad encodes it in a topology that negates itself; Petscop, Ben Drowned, and Polybius shift it to the transmission chain. Here, the fear stems neither from monsters nor jump scares, but from meticulously maintained doubt about the nature of the document you are watching. Is it a faithful recording, a reconstruction, a performance? The answer remains unclear, and it is this uncertainty that makes the work what it is. The internet becomes a studio not because it hosts videos, but because it stages the conditions of their appearance: algorithms, timestamps, formats, comments, everything serves as a backdrop. What Petscop, Ben Drowned, and Polybius leave behind is not a universe to be expanded, but a method to be adopted: documenting absence, punctuating appearance, entrusting the audience with part of the editing process. At that moment, the boundary between player, spectator, and author ceases to be a line; it becomes a back-and-forth.

The non-existent as a driver of the future

P.T., Dune by Jodorowsky, Petscop, MyHouse.wad: four ways of accepting that a work can be just a fragment, or purely imaginary, and yet carry all its weight. Nothing is whole, everything is active. P.T. turned a corridor removed from the world into a relic that continues to write contemporary horror. Dune was never filmed, yet its images still circulate like a shared grammar. Petscop exists only in videos and notes, a game turned into a file, and that is enough to mobilize crowds of investigators. MyHouse.wad is content with an impossible house to convey grief better than many talkative stories.

Their contributions are not the result of a broken promise, but of a change in contract. You no longer consume a product, you inhabit a question. The missing ending of P.T. forces you to play with doubt. Jodorowsky’s absent film teaches you that a world can survive the work that dreamed it. Petscop proves that documentation can be enough to create fiction. MyHouse.wad reminds us that space alone can be a narrative if we accept that it contradicts itself. In any case, the imaginary is not an escape: it is a guide to seeing things differently.

There is also an ethical gesture. These works do not demand belief, they demand participation. You complete, you map, you collect. The object is not “finished,” but it employs you as archivist, detective, co-author. This redistribution of the public’s role is perhaps the most honest way to talk about a living medium, made up of versions, essays, and erasures. From this, one thing is clear: we don’t need more big launches to move forward, we need works that accept their status as working ghosts. The fact that fragments, models, and guides to an absent game can count as much as complete titles does not impoverish anything. It broadens the field, opens up paths where investigation, memory, and rumor become the playable core.

So yes: let’s make room for these forms. Not to collect relics, but to maintain museums of the unfinished: spaces where we display a deleted corridor, an overly vast storyboard, a guide to an imaginary game, an impossible map, and where we document what they still do to our ways of creating. If the future of video games is broader than its products, it is thanks to these works that do not quite exist and which, precisely for this reason, continue to shape the present.