A World Inside an Old PC: A Look at mobOS
Phantom Interviews #2
Rarely have I felt lucky to be scrolling through Reddit.
This week, however, that’s exactly what happened as I bumped into mobOS, an upcoming game whose entire world exists inside a virtual computer.
mobOS is a love letter to the chaotic charm of the early 2000s computers and internet: virus-laden downloads, flash games, and hand-coded websites. But it’s not just nostalgia. It’s deep, interactive, experiential; I’d call it ‘experimental digital archaeology’.
The game features a fully functional operating system, its own markup and programming languages, and real-time progression. It looks like a game, but also like you’re booting up your old PC after school, the soft hum of the tower, the flicker of a CRT screen, and the thrill of exploring a weird, young, wonderful internet.
In this interview, I speak with its creator, mob, about building systems from scratch, embracing creative chaos, and why they believe the internet of the past still matters today.
👻 What inspired you to build mobOS, and why focus on this very specific early 2000s digital era?
It was mostly playing through Hypnospace Outlaw that I got inspired to make my own operating system game.
When looking through the game's files, I noticed that everything was exposed and the websites were all actual external files! The downloads folder you get in-game were also all real files, and that inspired me to add a fully fledged file explorer to mobOS.
That game, as immersive as it was, always left me yearning for a fuller immersive operating system experience and that's how mobOS started.
As for why I focused on the early 2000s digital era, it generally just lines up with my art style and is actually the time period I personally grew up in on the internet. It was a time period of creativity on the internet that I remember very fondly.
👻 I was amazed when I saw one of your videos showcasing the game’s operational system. This is such a smart way to create an immersive ‘computer experience’. It also seems really challenging, though, especially since it was created using GameMaker only! How did you approach creating your own markup and programming languages for the game, and what do they enable players to do?
Thank you! I get people telling me that it must've been difficult using GameMaker to do all this a lot, but I wouldn't have it any other way.
I started using GameMaker when I was just 9 years old and spent a lot of my childhood on the YoYoGames Sandbox, which was basically a website for sharing and playing GameMaker games back in the drag-and-drop era. I want to at least vouch for GameMaker here and say over the years, its updates to its programming language have been very worthwhile.
With every feature that I added to mobOS, I felt like I was outdoing myself again and again. I was achieving things I never knew were possible for myself every week!
When I first started, I would've no clue how to make a markup language and I didn't even know that much HTML...
When I decided my game needed a markup language, I studied HTML and CSS for about 3 days, and then got to work on my own. It's basically just a parser that changes a text file into a collection of structs parented to each other with unique variables calculating where they should show up on screen.
As for the programming language, it was actually done by my friend Cy. It's incredible what they've been cooking up; it has put mobOS months in the future in its development. I am eternally grateful for their help and contributions to my game!
Now, I can't speak for Cy on how they approached making the programming language, but my directions were basically to keep it as simple as possible in syntax compared to GML.
The programming language and the markup language combined are an insanely powerful duo. Anything you can do on a normal website should be entirely possible in mobOS, and probably even more than that too because it's a game.
The programming language allows you to make games (standalone or browser-based), website scripts, desktop buddies, content expansions, and an infinite amount more, all without modding the game itself. It's very cool!
👻 It seems mobOS is as much a tool as it is a game. How do you see players interacting with its systems — in a more constrained way or more creatively?
At this point, it has kind of become a tool. In a way it's kind of an engine in itself...? The goal development-wise is to make all content using the markup language and programming language with the operating system, so the entire game would actually... be made in itself!
Now just because mobOS has a code editor and all these features, that doesn't mean that's what the game is about.
I imagine for most players, they probably won't touch those tools at all, and it is not necessary to learn or use them to play the game.
First and foremost they are created as a tool for me to be able to create the content in the game, and will be accessible to anybody who wants to make their own stuff for the game (whether we use the Steam Workshop or some other means).
This way nobody would even need to "mod" the game in a traditional sense and would still be able to double the game's content.
Anyways, the way the player can interact with these systems is very creative and free, and I imagine anyone who likes that kind of stuff will have an amazing time using it.
👻 Looking ahead, what kind of community or culture do you hope mobOS will inspire once it’s out in the world?
While it's not necessary to create anything in mobOS, I genuinely do hope that it inspires a community of creatives who find joy in creating anything they want and sharing it in mobOS.
The internet used to feel so creative… even if it was just a bunch of kids uploading games where a non-transparent image of Mario runs into a wall and explodes and then the game crashes.
I really do hope I can bring back that feeling! Other than creatives, I hope it does a good job in helping people remember how fun the internet was back then, and for anyone who wasn't old enough to be on the internet at the time, I hope they'll be able to get an immersive experience of how it used to be/feel!
Follow the development of mobOS by joining its Discord server or following the developer on BlueSky or X!
— The ghost navigating through shady early internet websites,
almoghost.exe (or André Almo if you’re feeling serious) 👻
wait... it's a game, but also an OS... does it mean i could theoretically use an txt file to make DOOM run inside the txt inside mobOS?
if that's a possibilty, I'M IN
Does it have actual websites from the 2000s in the game or made up ones?