The dream of the ’90s is alive in this Windows 95 screensaver indie game

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Twenty-two years ago, Microsoft Windows took a big leap forward with Windows 95. Most would say that Windows 95 was significant for its addition of the Start button, or the merging of MS-DOS and Windows, or plug and play. Maybe they were wrong; maybe it was the screensavers that mattered the most. That’s what Screensaver Subterfuge, an indie game made by Cahoots Malone, posits.

The game is freely available on itch.io for Windows, macOS, and Linux, and it was previously reported on by Motherboard. It takes the assets (they were extracted directly from ssmaze.scr) from Windows 95’s iconic 3D Maze screensaver—the one that endlessly wanders a maze of brick walls in first-person perspective—and turns it into a very goofy cyberpunk hacking game.

The conceit is that the mazes are actually the tunnels through which truly valuable corporate data travels. You’re a young hacker on a mission to stop your dystopian world from turning into a slightly different kind of dystopian world—this is according to the game’s hilariously bad narration that includes ’90s hype lines such as, “Cyberspace has never looked so three dimensional! The geniuses at Microsoft have done it again!”