Hyperfixed - Phoebe's Origin Story

Episode Date: October 23, 2025

Phoebe is in search of a video game from her past that had an outsized impact on her, and she needs our help.Please become a premium member! We can't exist without your support! https://www.hyperfixedpod.com/joinLINKS:Books by Phoebe WahlClay RoutledgeMcGeeKatie’s Farm (McGee 2)McGee at the Fun Fair (McGee 3) Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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Hey, this is Alex. Very quickly, before we get started, this show cannot exist without your problems. So please head on over to hyperfixpod.com to submit your problems for us to solve. That's it. Here's the show. Hi, I'm Alex Goldman, and this is hyper-fixed. Each week on our show, listeners write in with their problems, big and small, and I self them. Or at least I try. And if I don't, I at least give a good reason why I can't.

This week, Phoebe's origin story. I get really, like, obsessed by nostalgia from my own childhood. This is Phoebe. When I jump on the call with her, I can immediately tell that the world she lives. in is not an ordinary one. Behind her, there's a blue flower hand-painted on the wall and framed illustrations of anthropomorphic animals. And on a table, a giant mousehead and two bags of cotton balls for costumes and puppets that she's working on. So when she tells me that she's a children's book author and illustrator in Bellingham, Washington, it all kind of makes

sense. It looks like Phoebe lives in one of her storybooks. And unlike you and I, who might be wistful, and reminisce about memories that defined our childhood. For Phoebe, nostalgia is a necessary portal to access for her job. I think it's part of why I got into making children's books in the first place. I have these, like, really vivid, real relationships with so many illustrations and stories from books from when I was a kid, and I've kind of made a hobby of, like, tracking some of them down. Phoebe is fascinated by the physical objects that provoke a sort of deja vu nostalgic feeling. Is this real? Is it a dream? Is it something I made up? Is it something I like saw in a movie?

Like I just had an experience like this the other day seeing a Rafi, the like children's musician, like one of his album covers. And I was playing it for my daughter. And there was a drawing on the cover that I was like, oh, this is the one we had when I was a kid. and I remember this little baby that was being held by this person in the picture, and I remember everything about the style of the drawing and the way that it fascinated me. But it's like I didn't know that I remembered those details until I saw them. The DNA of those books that Phoebe grew up with naturally makes an appearance in her own work,

which are these pages of bold color expressed through watercolors and colored pencil. Her drawings and her stories are often celebrations of finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. A little girl looking for fairies in her backyard. A boy who has to move because his house was sold and learns to make a strange new place feel like home. A tiny witch that helps her neighbors in the woods solve problems. That's kind of like me. After getting to know Phoebe, it was hardly a surprise when I learned that she came to us

to help her do what she's always been doing. Identify a piece of lost media from her childhood. This time, a video game she remembers playing in preschool. It was very pixelated. Not like large pixels, but small pixels. And it was kind of like a more realistic style. Like visually, it wasn't super, super cartoony. But I remember there was like a little blonde boy who was like a baby or a toddler. It involved like walking around his house and seeing different things that were going on. And then you could walk out into the backyard. there might have been a tree house or like I think there was a swing like a rope swing and I remember there was a fence and you could look through a hole in the fence at something and I remember there being like something slightly scandalous about the game which is like what helps it stick my brain but like I think it was just that like maybe there was something to do with like going to the bathroom like the kid like peed or something or like you saw his butt or something or something or something. something happened that was like so four-year-old level scandal that I remember it was kind of like, whoa, like this game is a little risque. So that's what Phoebe's looking for, this little digital slice of life, a boy exploring

his house and inviting you along with him. Deeply mundane to describe, but deeply affecting for Phoebe. And Phoebe's hope is that this game from her childhood will help her capture just a little bit more of that wide-eyed wonder endemic to little kids. But she has no idea how to start. So Hyperfix producer of Moore Yates reaches out to a childhood friend of Phoebe's who also attended her preschool 30 years ago and possibly played the same game.

I'm helping her trying to find a video game and I was hoping to pick your brain about said video game to see if you remembered anything about it. Is it okay? This is Clinton and I don't know. know if I've ever heard anyone as confused about a phone call before. No. No, I'm trying to. I haven't thought about preschool in a while. I don't remember, like, doing anything with computers really until probably, oh, man,

first grade, first to second grade. Clinton is obviously no help, but I mean, who can blame him, you know? From my conversations with Phoebe, it feels like her memories are rendered in the same vivid color as the illustrations in her books. Like, she feels a connection to physical objects and games in a four-dimensional way. Like, she has lived them. And not everyone is lucky enough to experience life like that. We reach out to a couple other people she went to school with and to the preschool itself,

which still exists, but we just run into wall after wall. We are unable to get anywhere. And even though I keep doing what I do best, you know, plugging phrases like peeing kid and hole in fence into Google, no luck finding an answer but I did probably land myself on an FBI watch list and at this point we consider just giving up like just going back to Phoebe and saying

hey you can't find the game we can't find it either but then at a team meeting producer Sarisoffer Sukkenik suggests a slightly different tack we do this thing sometimes on the hyperfix premium feed where we put out stories that

just don't have an ending problems without a solution and the logic is that the people who listen to the show are very smart and have a wide range of expertise and perhaps someone in the audience will help us find a solution. So, if you have any idea what Phoebe is talking about, this pixelated children's computer game from somewhere around 1993 or 1994, with a toddler, a treehouse, a rope swing, maybe a dandelion, let us know. But while we wait to see what our audience digs up for us,

I can't shake this feeling that I don't quite understand, baby's attachment to the past. And I think that's because I'm not a particularly nostalgic person. Outside of musical equipment and records, I don't really have things that I care to hang on to. I don't have any toys from when I was a kid. I don't have old drawings of mine. I don't really even have a lot of photo albums. If you look into the background of my video calls, all you'll see is a creepy basement, an overhead light, and wires. You'll see a lot of wires. But I am itching to understand what makes the past feel so immediate to her. So I decide to talk to someone who studies these attachments.

Yeah, I'm in my home office, which I've populated with all sorts of nostalgic artifacts that are symbolic to me. This is Clay Routledge. He is a psychologist and the executive director of a think tank called the Archbridge Institute. And he also happens to be one of the world's experts on the psychology of nostalgia. So I've got an arcade machine in the background, and I don't know Robotron. If we're judging people solely by their video backgrounds, as it seems like we're doing in this story, he's surrounded by nostalgia. As he said, he was talking to us from his home, and I can see him flanked by a stand-up arcade cabinet of the 1982 video game Robotron, 2084, and a poster of 1933's King Kong. Like Phoebe, Clay doesn't just study. nostalgia. He lives it. And he tells me that the serious scientific study of nostalgia is actually

a very new discipline. In fact, when the term was coined, it wasn't being used to describe harmless reminiscences about the past, but to describe a mental disorder. So, you know, the term nostalgia was actually coined in 1688 by a Swiss physician to represent what he thought of was as a brain disease suffered by Swiss mercenaries who had come down from their alpine homes to fight wars in the plains of Europe. The Swiss physician that Clay is talking about is Johannes Hofer. When Hofer was documenting these soldiers, they were singing songs, telling stories of where they grew up, and Hofer thought that waxing nostalgic, or thinking about the past this

way, was causing distress and led to all of these physical and psychological health problems. In other words, what he saw as the cause of their suffering, might have been their way of dealing with the suffering. Maybe they were singing those songs and telling those tales to help cope with it. But this view of nostalgia as a pathology, either of the brain or of the mind, persisted well into the late 20th century. Clay says that nostalgia only started being re-evaluated about 40 years ago, like within my lifetime, which is bonkers. And nostalgia's rebranding wasn't just fueled by psychologists. it was fueled by advertisers, people who wanted to use nostalgia to make money.

Advertisers recognized a connection between nostalgia and people's spending habits and realized that nostalgia isn't necessarily just a maudlin, regressive lionizing of the past. And since then, Clay and his colleagues have created systems to understand it. We started systematically doing experiments when we said, well, let's induce nostalgia. Let's have some people do an activity that makes them feel nostalgic, and we'll have some people do another activity that's equally stimulating but doesn't involve like revisiting memories from the past and then let's measure outcomes like is it making them miserable or stressed and turns out no it wasn't it was doing the opposite when people engaged in

nostalgic activities they feel happier they feel more meaningful they feel more socially connected I've already said that I'm not the most nostalgic person in the world but the more that I talk to Clay I'm wondering should I be and weirdly Clay's love of the past began with him studying the future. Humans don't just live in the present. We have this ability to run all sorts of simulations about the future, right? And this turns out to be very useful to the success of our species because you and I can sit here and think about,

well, not just how we're going to survive today and tomorrow, but what can we build that's going to help us address long-term endeavors and challenges? But thinking about the future also comes with a cost. It means we have the potential of our existential anxiety, because, of course, there's a future in which we're not going to be around anymore, and the future is unknown. All sorts of things can happen. As a person who feels like the world is on fire and the price of groceries keeps going up,

and I have two kids who are 10 and 7 and both think they're going to grow up to be social media influencers, the future to me feels like a hungry beast lurking in the shadows just beyond my field of vision, waiting to devour everything I care about. But I'm sure that's normal, and I don't need to talk to a therapist, about it. Anyhow, as grad school Clay was chewing on these questions, he started wondering, maybe we used that same capacity, that time travel capacity, to help address those anxieties by going back in time, by time traveling backwards. I can look backwards and say, well, I've been successful socially in the past. I've accomplished goals in the past. Those cherished

memories can help me in the present approach the future with a greater sense of confidence and motivation. So when we look at the past, we're not doing it necessarily to, like, hide in the past or to avoid the present and the future. We're actually using it to help us move forward. Throughout this entire conversation, I kept thinking about Phoebe and how her nostalgia relates to her creativity. And I was just about to ask Clay a question about it when he answered it before I

could even open my mouth. Take a filmmaker like Steven Spielberg or, you know, like a famous person that everyone will know, they'll tell you about that the, the, the, movies they watched growing up and how that made them fall in love with movie making and that nostalgia feels but they don't they wanted to do something different they wanted to push the art forward and so nostalgia it is one of the primary drivers of of creative inspiration this is feeby clay is talking about phoebe the way he described nostalgia snapped my understanding of phoebe's nostalgia into place and help me reflect on the ways that it touches my life how you know

the looping chip tune melodies of Nintendo games continue to inspire the way I think about music, how the successes of my past buoy my confidence to create going forward. And speaking of making things better going forward, thanks to an enterprising listener, we were fairly confident that we had finally located Phoebe's missing game.

After the break, we go back to Phoebe's to see if. we've actually found the right game. Welcome back to the show. So before the break, Phoebe wanted to find a long-lost video game that had an outsized impact on her as a toddler. And while we weren't able to find it through our normal means, one of our listeners managed to find what we thought was the game.

But I think when he wrote in, he never expected that I would actually call him for an interview. It's going to be pretty laid back and loose, obviously not live to tape. We keep it pretty chill, easy-peasy over here. Sounds good. This is Zach. He's a software developer working in aerospace and telecommunications in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. And he's a man of few words. But he is also a man of action.

because when he heard our bonus episode asking people to identify this mystery game, he leapt at the opportunity by basically doing what I did, searching Google. He just did it better than me. So anyone who uses Google for research these days knows that the search engine has started returning worse results. And there are a ton of reasons for this, and it's too complicated to get into in this episode. But people have discovered workarounds that often bring you to the right answer. And one of the ways to make Google useful is to use it to search Reddit. And that is where Zach found the answer.

It brought up a Reddit post on R-slash tip of my joystick, which is a subreddit I hadn't heard of before. For the uninitiated, tip of my joystick is a subreddit of over 200,000 people, dedicated to doing exactly what we're doing here today. Identifying old video games from hazy descriptions half remembered by the people who played them decades ago. There was a post on there that the person described basically very similar to what Phoebe had described. So it's like, this seems promising.

And then basically the top comment on there was this person said, it sounds like McGee or whatever. So I looked up that game, and yeah, it was pretty much exactly what Phoebe described. The game is called McGee. And it doesn't take a ton of searching to find a playable version of it on the Internet archive. And Phoebe's memory of this game is shocking. You play as the titular McGee, a cherubic toddler and butt-flat pajamas with one of the buttons undone. Hi, I'm McGee.

You start in McGee's room, and there's a few things you can click on. There's a tire swing in the backyard and a hole in the fence that McGee can peek through where he sees a dog run by. Phoebe was even right about the scandalous parts of the game. As I mentioned, McGee's butt is indeed partially exposed, and he can go pee in the game. He leaves you the player in the hallway while he closes a door, and all you can hear is the flushing of a toilet. Beyond that, he goes into his mom's room and bothers his sleeping mom. Morning, Mommy. Good morning, McGee.

And a sleeping cat. Hi, Cubby. And he can go downstairs and watch TV and weirdly can crawl under the living room rug. And that's really about all you can do. The game takes, in total, about five to ten minutes to play. It's honestly less a game than an interactive storybook, which makes sense when you think about Phoebe's fixation.

on it. I mean, in most video games, even educational games, targeted toward little kids, you're usually angling for some achievement, you know, clicking the matching images, or spelling the word cat, or cleaning up a bedroom or something. But in this game, there's no motivator and there's no end. It's just a world to inhabit and explore and walk around it. Like it was tailor-made for Phoebe. And before I went back to her to share the game and everything I'd learned about it, I wanted to know everything there was to learn about it. I wanted to know who was behind it.

Fortunately, in addition to the game itself, some benevolent archivist also uploaded the instruction manual for the game to the Internet Archive. And it includes the following, quote, there are no words in McGee. If this program is used as lapware, which, if I can just cut in as Alex here, is a phrase I have never heard to describe a video game before. With the child sitting on the adult's lap, please let the child control the program and tell the story. Most objects will produce a sound or movement or both, and children will learn to anticipate what will happen with each choice. They may choose the same icon many times, in the same way a child chooses to hear the same story read over and over again, and they may tell a different story about McGee each time.

In addition to this explanation of how one should play the game, the instruction manual includes the names of developers. And let me tell you, I have never seen a collection of impossible to Google names quite like this one. Names like Gregory Scott, Frank Andrews, and James McCarthy were, as you might expect, impossible to find in a sea of Greg's Franks and Jameses. But fortunately, there was also a Susan Wiltsy. Hi, Susan. How you doing? I'm doing pretty good.

Where are you located in Michigan? Because I am a native Michigander. Well, we are outside of Kalamazoo. Okay. I grew up in Ann Arbor, and my dad worked in Flint when I was growing up. Have you ever heard of the Balkan Bakery? No. Well, the Balkan Bakery was a thing from the 30s.

There was a lot of immigrant businesses down there. They made Old World Bread. It was my aunt and uncle and cousin. Oh, wow. Susan grew up in Michigan. She graduated from college as a secondary education major, history and government. And when she had to choose between working 65 miles away as a teacher or taking a job that was closer but had nothing to do with her college degree,

she chose what I would have chosen, the shorter commute. And she spent around 18 years working a few, did not go to college for this job, jobs. And then one day she got a call, Someone she knew at a kids' educational software company called Lawrence Productions wanted to know if Susan wanted to work with her. And when I asked Susan what she remembers about those days, she immediately says, Oh, pal, this is so long ago.

I know, I know. I'm asking you questions from 35 years ago, but... Yeah, and I'm 77 now, so... Susan worked at Lawrence Productions on games like McGee for about eight years, long enough to see the team grow really tight. And that's where she met Gregory Scott. His first name was Greg, and I've been trying to think of his last name, and I can't remember. James McCarthy?

Jamie McCarthy. Until recently, he worked with K. College, Chelmsu College. And Frank Andrews. And even though Lawrence Productions made this special game that would become the center of Phoebe's fixation and a couple months of our lives as we reported on it, for Susan, the day-to-day office job wasn't particularly special. You know, it was an office job. Well, it was a small group. You know, there's probably maybe a dozen of us.

And we had a couple writers. We had a person that did programming. We had an artist. And then I did a lot of the testing. I put the pieces together and tested, hopefully to find all the bugs before it went out for the customers. Susan spent a lot of time in front of her computer back when everyone didn't spend their time in front of a computer. She wrote, edited, and entered information to,

was needed to build games like Nigel's World, the Lost Tribes, and also McGee and its two sequels. And when I asked Susan what it was like to work with such a close-knit mix of creative and technical minds, she tells me something that I've often felt myself. It was a time in her career where the details fade, but the feeling sticks. I can picture all of them, and I cannot think a name. But it really was, you know, as a work family, away from your personal family. And we had a lot of good times, a lot of laughs. Yeah, it was a good job. And maybe that was the key ingredient to McGee.

As mundane as it is, there's a specialness about it, that maybe was caught in the laughter while getting coughier, the banter during brainstorm sessions. The tightness that can't be described in the credits but can be felt in the game. Maybe McGee's joy and playful nature is truly based on the people who built it. Sometimes when you're making a thing, you're focused on just, just making the product. Like, even this podcast, like, we spend a lot of time just focusing on getting the stories done,

focused on our deadlines. And it's less about the end product than it is just about finishing it. You know what I mean? Did you ever think that the work that you did would have a big impact on people's lives? Well, I hope that, at the very least, that kids would enjoy it and take something away from it. Maybe a desire to travel to other places, maybe wish to explore, maybe just to create something of their own that they could share with people. Well, I'm very happy to report to you that that has at least happened for one person. her name is Phoebe

and she was just like I have such vivid memories of this game it feels so important to me I have such strong nostalgia for this game and she actually grew up to become a children's book illustrator and I was talking to her about it and she was like this game feels like

it's not like the only reason but it certainly like compliments and sets the stage for things that she ended up doing in later life that's amazing and certainly gratifying to know that we affected someone like that. And I've been an education person, you know, all my life and just really feel strongly about the importance of education.

And so that's really wonderful that somebody that thought that much of the game went on to be a children's author. So, Phoebe, way to go. And so, with all the information we'd collected about the game, we set up a video conference with Phoebe to share with her what we found. Do you see the chat on the right-hand side? Okay, I'm opening it. Oh my God, I'm nervous.

Oh my gosh, that's it. Totally it. Oh, my God, this is blowing my mind. So you can just start playing this game right now if you want. All you have to do is click that little. button in the middle. Oh. I just, his face is exactly how I remembered it. Didn't I say there was like wide eyes? Hi, I'm a geek. That voice. Go downstairs and go out, go out to the backyard. Oh my God, there's the dandelion and a knothole and the tire swing. There's everything.

Oh my God, I feel like my friends are never going to hear the end of how, like, smug and excited I feel about how good my memory was for this. When I remember it, I, like, I was really unsure whether I even saw the kid or whether I was the kid. And I, like, now seeing it and that you do see the kid, like, it's really interesting to me and kind of a testament to, like, how intensely I was transporting myself into this game that, like, But, like, I feel like I was, like, my perspective of it was, like, that I was the kid in the game. So it's really interesting that, like, that's not actually the perspective of the game, but that's, like, where my brain was at when I was playing this. I was, like, fully in it. Yeah. And really, all you were fully in was, like, the idea of exploring a foreign house.

Like, if you think about it, it's nothing. But, like, as a kid, when I got to go to my grandmas and run around in the basement, that was, like, magic to me. Oh, yeah. Totally. And I mean, I kind of love this game style. Now I'm like, I want to design a game like this where you just do like three things. As I watch Phoebe play this game that she pulled out of her memory, I look at all the whimsy being captured by the camera behind her. You know, the mousehead, the illustrations. And I realize what Phoebe already knows. She is playing a game that defined who she would become. A woman who creates worlds for kids and continues to be. a kid in her own world. And the thing that's extra special is she's not just trying to access her own toddler brain. She's trying to understand her daughters. Phoebe mentioned to me that her three-year-old daughter spends a lot of time drawing and imagining on her own, inhabiting those same worlds that

Phoebe did when she was a kid. So, a couple days after I play the game with Phoebe, she puts her daughter on her lap, just like the instruction manual said, and boots the game up. Okay, so this is the game I used to play when I was your age at preschool. Okay. It's called McGee. I remembered all these things about it, but I didn't know if it was a dream or not. But it turns out it's real. We're going to play the game.

Papa, we're going to play a game. Hi, I'm a game. What should I click? That one. Okay, what should we do next? Sink or a toilet? Toilet. Oh, he's saying, I need privacy.

What the heck was that noise? A tooth brush. We're a wacky tooth brush. Okay, that's the whole game. What do you think of that game? I did. Have you ever seen anything like it? No.

We'll include links to play McGee and its sequels in our show notes, as well as links to Phoebe's books. Hyperfixed is produced and edited by Emma Cortland, Amore Yates, and Sarisoffer Sukkenek. This episode was guest edited by Megan Tan. It's engineered by Tony Williams. The music is by The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder and me. You can get bonus episodes, access to our Discord, and much, much more, by becoming a premium hyperfixed member at hyperfixedpod.com slash join. It's the listeners who support the show that are really keeping us.

us afloat, so thank you so much for your support. Hyperfixed is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, creator-owned, listener-supported podcasts. Discover Audio with Vision at Radiotopia.fm. Thanks so much for listening. Radiotopia from PRX.