A canceled video game sequel to George Orwell’s 1984 surfaces online

At one point in the late 1990s, now-defunct studio MediaX was developing an inexplicable video game sequel to 1984, George Orwell’s celebrated text about the dangers of authoritarianism. The game, titled Big Brother after the symbolic leader of the novel’s dystopian society, was canceled in 1999 and considered lost media until a demo appeared online over the weekend.

An alpha build of Big Brother dated Jan. 4, 1999 was uploaded to Internet Archive on March 1, along with instructions on how to get the game working on modern operating systems, by an account seemingly created just for that purpose. The upload in question amounts to a limited demo, but its description says the files also include content like levels and logic from the full game.

If you’re wary of downloading random stuff from the internet, the Lost Media Wiki has done a great job of compiling gameplay footage and screenshots alongside the known history of its development.

Big Brother would have put players in control of a new character named Eric Blair — a reference to Orwell’s real name — as he attempted to rescue his fiancée from the Thought Police following the events of 1984. An interview with MediaX president Nancy Poertner published in a 1999 issue of GameWeek described the game as an “interactive adventure game with role-playing elements” that combined “the detail of Riven” and “the real-time world of Quake.” The story also said Big Brother was around 70% complete at the time and scheduled for a fall 1998 launch.

Before its cancellation, Big Brother was shown off at E3 1998 and even won Best Interactive Product / CD-ROM Educational Game at the Satellite Awards the following year. The last time the game appeared in the media came via a preview in the December 1999 issue of Next Generation, which listed an updated Q1 1999 release window. Big Brother was abandoned later that year when MediaX lost the 1984 license and rights holder Newspeak failed to find another publisher.

Attempts were made throughout the 2020s to get in contact with former MediaX developers and learn more about the game to no avail, making its random manifestation not only surprising but also pretty timely considering motions to everything happening in the United States.