If there's anything we miss most about the bygone era of gaming, it's demo discs. Whether it was PlayStation's Jampack series or PC Gamer's series of discs, these collections were a highlight of my juvenile gaming life.
They disappeared as costs got too high and these collections of demos, trailers, and more were lost to time.
Super Rare Games are doing god's work, bringing back these celebratory packs of games with their Super Rare Mixtape series and the upcoming release of Super Rare Mixtape Vol. 4!
Super Rare Mixtape Vol. 4 is a "super rare" physical release of 30 indie games and 10 indie demos, all from grassroots indie developers that are deserving of a bigger spotlight and getting the attention and prestige they deserve with the help of the fine folks at Super Rare Games.
With only 1500 copies printed and waiting to be sold, the latest mixtape sells for $32.84 exclusively on the Super Rare website at 10 AM PDT. There will be no further copies ever made, so if you want in, this is your one shot!
Beyond the games, what you'll get in hand is a nice slim case with a handful of the bundle's games laid out on the cover, a full-color manual with dedicated full pages for each of the games in the pack, and the bundle itself represented in a special cassette tape form-factor, with a USB drive built into the bottom.
That USB drive holds all the power, with the aforementioned 30 games, 10 demos, and a batch of special features: soundtracks (with a built-in music player), audio dev diaries, trailers, and full art galleries from various indie devs, all loaded into a bespoke launcher built by Super Rare Games themselves.
We were given the opportunity to preview the package ahead of time and were so impressed with what Super Rare Games have done here as curators. The launcher itself has great style and hands over some fun tools, including a "random" button that'll toss you into any one of the 40 playable experiences with a click.
I can already tell that I'll be spending any free time possible shuffling through the experiences in the pack using this button!
But the most important thing here of course is the indies. The developers and their games. At an average value of $1.09 per full game (decreased to .82 cents if you include the demos), this package of games offers up an incredible value for a varied batch of games, genres, and styles.
You've got platformers, shooters, arcade games, puzzle games, horror, pixel art, 3D games, and more. Super Rare's curation is on point and there's a little bit of something for everyone here.
Super Rare Games have an incredible thing going on here and we support their mission wholeheartedly. There are so many indie developers out there who fall through the cracks and if this package points someone in the direction of their next favorite developer, the team at Super Rare has done their job.
If any part of this sounds interesting to you and you want to be a part of a "super rare" experience, don't forget to check it out when it goes on sale!
These six screenshots represent just 15% of what's on offer in the package. From top to bottom: Drifting Hearts, CONFLICT/RESOLUTION, My Friend is a Raven, Grandpa's Minigun, Monstrous, and LCD Dream Escalator.
List of games in the package: 0SPACE, A Knife Made of Whispers, A Raven Monologue, Abyssal Plains, AnoMalice, Cats on Mars, City33, CONFLICT/RESOLUTION, Death Strike, Devil Catcher, Drifting Hearts, Fishie Fishie, From Primordial Egg, Grandpa's Minigun, Ignis Universia: Eternal Sisters DX, Khimera: Destroy All Monster Girls, LCD DREAM ESCALATOR, Machine Gun Gardener, Monstruous, My Friend is a Raven, Olive's Art-Venture, Punch Guy, Reed the Robotanist: Plus, SELF, Swallow the Sea, The Frightening Nightmare of Little Eddy, The Giraffe World, The Power, Veinless Property, Yolkspire
Also includes demos for Astra and the New Constellation, Bullion: Curse of the Cut-Throat Cattle, Harmony's Odyssey, Minishoot' Adventure, Potion Prodigy, Pry into the Void, Schrodinger's Catgirl, Snap the Sentinel, the machine that BREATHES, The Wreck.