Can I track down the author of a walkthrough for the 1994 MS-DOS and Amiga game DreamWeb?

Six days ago, I'd never heard of DreamWeb. It's a point-and-click adventure game released in 1994 by Creative Reality, originally released on MS-DOS and Amiga, later on CD-ROM, and even later than that as freeware through ScummVM.

The game follows a man named Ryan, apparently chosen by a cabal of hooded immortals to protect the universe by killing seven great evils. DreamWeb's narrative is a confusing cyberpunk journey which may or may not be a hallucination, and involves solving puzzles, a little detective work, and seeing the invisible red threads connecting a vast conspiracy.

This isn't really about DreamWeb.

My descent into madness began, as it always does, with a video essay. Dungeon Chill is a Youtuber who makes videos about games; mostly weird ones, or old ones, or weird, old ones. Recently they released a review of DreamWeb.

Five or so minutes into this video on Blade Runner by way of Jacob's Ladder, I was hooked. I hit the pause button to avoid spoilers, and went to ScummVM to download a copy. 215.6 MiB¹ later, I was booting it up.

Then I got stuck. Because this is an adventure game from 1994.

Like a milquetoast cyberpunk barman haunted by dreams about the end of the world, I needed help. Unlike Ryan, however, I lived in a functioning society, where helpful souls have been taking the pain out of 90s point-and-clicks for many, many decades. Not the stoic, workmanlike video walkthroughs of the 2020s, mind you; like all the best guides, these would be simple text on a screen, written by the sort of people who would quote Monty Python at a party and be completely at peace with themselves.

For some of the adventure, I was content with a classic GameFAQs guide, last updated in November 2001 and sporting nostalgic ASCII art. It was serviceable, and genial, as guides used to be, offering me a friendly hand on my journey while telling me little fun things to do along the way. It reminds me of being a kid, when I bankrupted my parents by printing someone's 100+ page TXT walkthrough for Final Fantasy VIII, and sat up late at night with the CRT irradiating my face and the stapled guide on the floor next to me.

These guides are bulky, though, and often written with a sort of run-on excitement that leads to paragraphs bigger than some novels. They're hard to read, basically.

And then I found The Walkthrough King. Also a high result when searching for DreamWeb, and with a website that screamed early 2000s. The walkthrough itself was excellent: succinct, full of subheadings, important information displayed without delay. You can see a picture of the site here.

Look at that. No links to take me to other pages or sites, not a phone in sight. Just a bunch of nicely formatted text and a fun background. This was websites, before capitalism ruined them.

With the King's help, I swiftly completed DreamWeb, absorbing all its modestly-unhinged political and philosophical messages and helping Ryan to murder half a dozen people because a dream man told him to do that. It was over. But the DreamWeb taught me there's always something happening behind the scenes. Always more to uncover.

A little digging around on The Walkthrough King website happened, and I was being very normal about it. It's curious to see such a pristine example of the web from decades ago. The About page is delightfully sincere:

Welcome to the website of The Walkthrough King, and thanks for visiting!

This website has been a labor of love over the past 24 years or so, during which time I have completed 943 games and documented the steps needed to complete them.

943 games! As the owner of an embarrassingly-bloated backlog, the idea of completing even one full game routinely frightens me straight to sleep. Each walkthrough has a small informational section at the top, telling readers the year of release, the genre of the game, links to more details, and even a 'suggested listening' heading, which I discovered linked to a kind of musical accompaniment. Labor of love rings true.

Then the little pixel art detective in my skull started scratching the walls.

The DreamWeb walkthrough links me to a song called Give Up Now by an artist named Ash 25. It's an energetic tune which has a lot of synthesizer and my friend (who was watching me play DreamWeb and also go slowly mad crawling over a random website) described the vocals as "if Bo Burnham wasn't doing comedy." We're not music critics. It fit the game's vibe nicely, but there was something far more interesting about the song: it came out in 2023.

Finding the King

If The Walkthrough King is linking to songs that came out last year, that means this review is much newer than I thought. It means the King is still updating.

A strange notion crosses my mind, and the little detective grabs it. Could I figure out who The Walkthrough King really is? It seemed very important at the time, but right now I would struggle to explain why this seemed like not just a good idea, but an essential idea. At the very least, I could thank them.

It seems logical that anyone who writes close to a thousand video game guides would leave some sort of digital footprint. The website notes that updates happened as soon as the beginning of February this year, and casually drops an overall word count for all guides of 2,588,019, which is an astounding total. No contact email, however. No social media either, keeping up the mystique of an early-2000s internet user. I'm honestly surprised not to see a webring at the bottom of every page.

The friendly About page contains no personal information at all, unless their legal name is Walkthrough King.

An experimental prod at the rest of the World Wide Web does find a Walkthrough King that has a YouTube channel about video games. But it hasn't been updated since 2014, and, frankly, the vibes are off. All the content is about Hitman Absolution, of all things.

Another dead end.

What about the past, though? Nothing on the current Walkthrough King website identifies them, but perhaps older versions of the site were different. A trip to the Wayback Machine could give us something else to go on.

The earliest snapshot of WalkthroughKing.com is from 2013. It's nothing but text and links; specifically, links to Hitman Absolution content. Hold on a goddamn second... could the YouTube King and the Website King truly be the same person after all? Maybe their vibes just changed over time; 10 years can change a person. The About page of this version is also, sadly, uninformative, describing it as "a newly launched site dedicated to the best in videogame walkthroughs" rather than giving me a name, phone number and tax code.

Poring over the Wayback snapshots, there's a large gap between 2013 and 2016—also the point at which YouTube King stopped posting content. Checking a shot from 2016 confirms a suspicion: the domain lapsed, and was repurchased by a different person for a new purpose. The True Walkthrough King.

Earliest versions of the proper Walkthrough King website unfortunately also confirm that they have never disclosed anything personal about themselves, apart from their love of games. It's honestly making me a big fan of this King. Someone who writes over two million words designed to help people enjoy their chosen hobby, and doesn't even ask to be known for it, is a damn hero.

But we're stuck. Nothing else links back to the Walkthrough King, and the site itself is strictly business.

Then I remember the song. Ash 25's Give Up Now thumps away at the back of my brain. It's a bop, but I've never heard of it. Maybe we can learn something else about the King from their musical tastes. So I check a few other walkthroughs: Beavis and Butt-Head in Virtual Stupidity recommends a song called Help Me Out, also by Ash 25; Women's Murder Club 3 links to Where's the Smoke by Ash 25; Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2 has Caught Up in the Panic by... Ash 25.

Ash 25.

Does The Walkthrough King know Ash 25? Every walkthrough links to one of their songs, which is a little unusual. Maybe Ash 25 is a friend of the King, or a relative. My Watson suggests they could be a cousin.

Maybe Ash 25 is The Walkthrough King.

Unlike our King, Ash 25 tangibly exists. He has a Spotify profile, he posts his independent music on a variety of platforms. Ash 25 has an Instagram profile and a mostly-dead Twitter account. They have contact details. A quick browse tells us Ash 25 is from Perth, Western Australia. The Instagram hasn't been touched in the last six months, but maybe it's worth a try?

Feeling as if I've unlocked a new puzzle in the DreamWeb, I tentatively write a very strange introductory message to a stranger online, struggling to find a normal way to say "Hello sir, do you know The Walkthrough King?" without getting put on a block list.

I need to stress again: at the time, this seemed very important to me. The dreams seemed real. The world felt as if it was in peril and the voices said it was a smart way to spend my time. Ryan DreamWeb definitely had to kill all those people, and I had to try my best to find the King. That would make sense to a stranger in Perth, who was probably out at dinner with his wife when he got a phone notification from Instagram. Beep beep, a troubled lunatic in another country wants to ask you about point-and-click adventure game walkthroughs.

Then I woke up to a reply.

Holy shit, there it is. after all of this searching, we found The Walkthrough King. It seemed simple in retrospect, and now we had that little piece of information that felt so important. Puzzle solved, world saved.

This is a huge win for obsessives everywhere.

I had a short chat with Ash, and had my chance to tell him I appreciated the work he was doing on his walkthroughs. To continue seeming very normal, I also asked him if he'd be alright with me writing about this little adventure on Brain Worms, and he was very friendly and positive about that. Which is the only reason we're here at the end of this madman's diary. I don't necessarily recommend trying to uncover the identities of random people on the internet, under normal circumstances.

But it all felt good, to be honest. Getting to show my appreciation for an often overlooked aspect of gaming culture was nice, as was getting to feel like a genius detective for a few hours. And it reminded me of a time when the internet was just a bunch of passionate people making things to share with others. That's kind of what I'm trying to do with this newsletter, after all.

I hope the things that you create bring joy and understanding to curious freaks all over the world, too.

¹I downloaded the CD-ROM version of DreamWeb, which includes full voice acting. The original floppy disk version is only 9.7 MiB. Incidentally, today I learned that a mebibyte is a data storage unit that uses binary prefixes, as distinct from a megabyte which uses decimals. 1 MB ≈ 0.9537 MiB.

If you're also stuck on a 30-year-old MS-DOS game about schizophrenia, check out The Walkthrough King. And give his music a listen as well.