The Coral Line

Sometimes living at the centrepoint of an Eternal War is remarkably mundane. I was in the charity shop in the village last weekend and found a box for an old game which my daughter is certain doesn't exist, well at least not in this reality. The cartridge in the box was for something called Mechanic Master 2 (apparently not very good) so who knows if the game itself is out there anywhere. At least you all can take a look at the manual, though it seems like even that's experienced some kind of printing error.

–Regards, S.J.

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When I was like eight I remember being on an U-Bahn train in Berlin and in the darkness of the subway tunnel there was suddenly bright light and strange images emerged of a girl and a button and a logo. My initial startlement faded as I realised it was an advertisement for the movie Coraline. There's footage of it on YouTube (note that it has flashing lights!)

Sixteen years later, I watched the movie Coraline for the first time in a lecture theatre at my university. Of course, anyone else who never saw Coraline has built up an imaginary version of the movie in their mind, and the real thing could only be disappointing. I never watched it as a child because I was known for being sensitive and the film looked very scary. Watching it as an adult, it didn't feel that scary, and I wondered if it would've made much more of an impact on me if I had seen it when I was younger. After all, it has a lot of elements that are extremely up my Straße, and the first half has some interesting ideas (what if there was a world where you got everything you wanted) before it kinda devolves into generic hollywood action plot (what if that world was bad and scary actually but we didn't really justify why and anyway go find some macguffins so we can show off our cool-as-fuck animation). There's also the problem that it's impossible to watch this movie as an adult in 2025 and not be thinking the whole time about the real-life author of Coraline: how you can see his own childhood distorted through the story, what he must have meant for it to convey, and how nothing in the movie is as frightening as what he really grew up to be.

Naturally I wanted to make the version of the movie that existed in my head. So here it is: Coral Nulla's Coraline. For the Nintendo DS, naturally. Since the Game Manual Jam is about making paratexts for games that never really existed, and the story is also about an imaginary world that suits your desires and dreams until it suddenly becomes horrifying and dangerous, these two seemed to belong together. I avoided referencing the original beyond my memories of the movie, so this is not so much an adaptation as an artefact from a dream world where things just aren't quite the same.

Written and designed by me with original art by a normal creature!! Other elements were made by unknown designers and copywriters at Nintendo; this is a parody and they are used without permission. Special thanks to Michael the Technician who let me use the staple machine afterhours. Content warning: allusion to abuse, unreality.