I Think About This a Lot is a series dedicated to private memes: images, videos, and other random trivia we are doomed to play forever on loop in our minds.
From 2011 to 2015 and occasionally after, I worked for Rookie, an online magazine and book series for teenage girls. Rookie has a fairly straightforward mission: to speak honestly with teenagers and give them rad things to look at and think about. Near the end of my time there, I discovered Chop Suey, a 1995 point-and-click computer game created by the writer and multimedia artist Theresa Duncan. When I played it, I felt as though, 20 years before Rookie existed, Duncan had scrawled its predecessor onto a CD-ROM. Chop Suey was officially marketed to ages “8 to 15 to adult,” but as Theresa Duncan told an interviewer in 1998, “My stated goal in life is to make the most beautiful thing a 7-year-old has ever seen.”
Duncan decided that the most beautiful thing a young person could see was something possibly similar to her own life. In Chop Suey, the sisters Lily and June Bugg do nothing more than wander around their town with a takeout hangover, observing their neighbors. It’s more of a set of vignettes than an adventure, or a linear cartoon picture book. You can’t win or lose. What you can do is visit a candy store called Cupid’s Treats, an observatory, the home of ribald Aunt Vera and two of her three ex-husbands (all named Bob), and other screwball locales.
Duncan was an aesthete, and it’s maybe demographically off-key to call this a sensual game, but it is.
