Scrolling through Miles Buckle’s Instagram feed is not merely an exercise in social media consumption; it is an act of wandering through a liminal space where the history of 20th-century cinema collides with the glitchy, endearing aesthetic of 1990s and early 2000s computing. For Buckle, a graphic communication design graduate from Central Saint Martins, the feed serves as a digital gallery for "impossible" video games—reimagined classics like The Shining, Twin Peaks, and Network rendered in the low-poly, orthographic, and pixelated visual languages of our collective digital past. These short, looping clips are more than just internet curiosities. They are sophisticated meditations on memory, the evolution of graphical fidelity, and the unspoken boundaries of copyright that stifle creative expression in the modern gaming landscape. The Intersection of Memory and Medium Buckle’s fascination with 3D art began in his childhood, a period defined by the "holy trinity" of creative expression: LEGO, Minecraft, and Blender. "I remember a family friend showed me Blender… I quite quickly got obsessed with the idea of being able to make something genuinely without limits," Buckle recalls. While LEGO and Minecraft offered building blocks, they were inherently constrained by their own physical or systemic boundaries. Blender, however, offered a canvas that was entirely malleable. This early obsession evolved during his time at university. For his final project, Nights Bridge, Buckle created an interactive narrative experience that demanded a physical presence as imposing as its conceptual weight. He sourced a 1990s PC from eBay, gutted its internal components, and replaced them with modern hardware, housing the project in a machine that looked and felt like a relic from the dawn of home computing. "When you remember something, especially from your childhood, you remember it in a really specific way," Buckle explains. "It’s not necessarily how it actually happened, and I was attaching that idea to graphical fidelity." Nights Bridge played with this concept by shifting visual styles based on the timeline of the memory: hyper-realistic for the present, PlayStation-era graphics for the recent past, and simplistic side-scrolling aesthetics for childhood recollections. It was a tangible experiment in how we romanticize the "low-fi" nature of our own histories. Chronology: From Minecraft Parodies to Digital Surrealism The trajectory of Buckle’s work follows a clear arc of increasing technical sophistication and thematic depth: Early Adolescence: Buckle cut his teeth on YouTube, creating Minecraft animations and parody songs, which served as his introduction to the world of digital animation. The itch.io Influence: A pivotal moment occurred when Buckle encountered a Twin Peaks fan-game demo on itch.io titled Into the Night. The project, which captured the eerie, localized aesthetic of a PlayStation 1 title, was eventually removed due to copyright enforcement—a loss that sparked Buckle’s interest in the "forbidden" nature of adapting cinema into interactive media. The Academic Phase: At Central Saint Martins, Buckle moved away from pure typography and print design to explore interactive narratives. Nights Bridge marked his transition into using game engines like Unreal to create atmospheric, memory-based experiences. The Instagram Era: Following his graduation, Buckle shifted his focus to bite-sized, high-concept reels. By condensing iconic cinematic moments—such as Peter Finch’s monologue from Network or the opening of Twin Peaks—into the visual style of SimCity 2000 or The Sims 2, he began to build a portfolio of "impossible games" that exist solely to evoke nostalgia and wonder. Technical Philosophy: Justifying the Aesthetic A core question often directed at retro-style indie games is whether their aesthetic is a genuine creative choice or a concession to limited resources. Buckle argues that the medium should dictate the style, not the other way around. "There’s a kind of understanding now of if I were to make a film in black-and-white tomorrow, you’re not going to think, oh, you couldn’t afford to do it in color. You’re going to think, you’ve chosen to do this in black-and-white," Buckle says. He seeks to apply this same logic to game design. By leveraging the specific visual quirks of older software—the isometric grid of a Maxis game, for instance—he creates a narrative space where the aesthetic is "justified by the narrative of the game." His recent experiments with the 2005 Pixel Chix toy—a handheld device featuring an LCD screen overlaid on a physical plastic house—showcase his interest in the hybridity of hardware. He is currently exploring how to replicate that "window into a room" aesthetic, where digital inhabitants interact with physical environments, a concept he recently tested using a scene from Billy Wilder’s The Apartment. The Implications of "Impossible" Media The allure of Buckle’s work lies in the tension between what we see and what we know to be true. His followers often comment with an intense, collective yearning to play these games, yet there is a silent understanding that they will never exist in a playable, commercial format. The Copyright Paradox The film industry and the gaming industry operate on fundamentally different intellectual property models. While film history is full of adaptations, gaming remains a high-risk, high-cost environment where even a hint of copyright infringement can trigger a "banhammer." Buckle’s work highlights the tragic irony that the most interesting, experimental games—those that would bridge the gap between high-art cinema and interactive play—are the ones most likely to be stifled by legal departments. The Myth of the "Mid" Adaptation There is a prevailing fear among fans of high-art cinema that a licensed video game adaptation would be, at best, a disappointment. History supports this cynicism. When major studios attempt to adapt intellectual properties—such as the lackluster Vertigo game—they often strip away the nuanced, tightly directed atmosphere of the original in favor of "gormless" corporate compromises. Buckle’s work succeeds precisely because it remains in the ether; it avoids the "explosive clown car of bad compromises" that defines much of modern, big-budget game development. The Future of Retrospective Design Buckle is currently looking toward the future, though it remains rooted in the past. He believes that many game genres and art styles were abandoned prematurely in the rush toward technological "progress." "There are these little periods of time that don’t get explored enough because a new console comes along or a new idea becomes really popular," he notes. His work serves as a reminder that "low-poly" or "8-bit" is not just a stepping stone to 4K resolution; it is a valid, expressive medium with its own potential for storytelling. For now, Miles Buckle remains the curator of a digital museum that only he can access. He is not just making content; he is preserving the feeling of a specific era of technology, forcing his audience to reconsider the boundaries of where cinema ends and gaming begins. In an industry obsessed with the next graphical leap, Buckle is proving that the most powerful experiences are those that reside in the gaps—the moments of boredom, the flickers of memory, and the aesthetic choices that, while technically obsolete, remain emotionally timeless. Whether or not he ever secures the rights to create an official Fellini or Hitchcock game is arguably irrelevant. The value of his work lies in its impossibility. By refusing to let these games exist in the real world, he keeps them alive in our minds, where they remain perfect, untarnished, and waiting to be played. Post navigation The Fall of Sanctuary: Blizzard Unveils Diablo 5 at BlizzCon 2026
