A new video game that's all fake TV shows

A review of Blippo+, one of 2025's stranger new games for Switch and PC (previously on Playdate!)

Blippo+’s channel guide. Screenshot: Yacht/Telefantasy Studios/Noble Robot.

On the night of Sunday, November 22, 1987, viewers of Chicago’s WGN-TV (Channel 9 on the dial) were watching the 9 o’clock news. Fourteen minutes into the broadcast, during highlights of the Chicago Bears’ 30-10 trouncing of the Detroit Lions, the screen went blank.

A figure appeared, wearing a rubber mask of the satirical animated character Max Headroom, while the camera rocked hypnotically and the harsh sound of static came over the air. After 30 seconds, the news resumed. Anchor Dan Roan said he was just as confused by what happened as viewers were.

Two hours later, during local PBS affiliate WTTW’s late-night broadcast of Doctor Who, there was a 90-second interruption in which the same figure appeared, but this time spouting nonsense before bending over to have a woman, just off-screen, spank his bare ass with a flyswatter.

Collectively, these two incidents are known as the Max Headroom signal hijacking, perhaps the most famous broadcast signal interruption in TV history.

It’s virtually impossible for this kind of pirate broadcast to occur in the U.S. now, following the nation’s switch to a digital broadcast standard in 2009. In the analog era, signals came through static fields, which came with the potential to frustrate or surprise the viewer.

Static, the fuzz and hiss of an analog signal trying to break through, isn’t a common occurrence anymore. That’s a loss. Static pierces through our illusion of control, our well-ordered plans. It reminds us that there is space in between the signals humans broadcast, and a lot of it. It gives us just enough room to consider that we might not be able to account for everything that rides on the airwaves.

In spite of the rigid order of old TV programming guides found decades ago in print periodicals, a flicker of static was a reminder that it could all go haywire. That you could see all sorts of things on television, if you could somehow reach behind the static. And maybe that there were things you weren’t supposed to see.

What if something broke through?

Well, let me tell you about Blippo+, an excellent recent video game that has me dreaming about static, and what could be found beyond it.

Blippo+ is a video game about old-school channel surfing. Boot it up on a Nintendo Switch or PC—preferably one connected to a television—and it’s just TV. There is no gameplay. On one channel, a talk show host holds court with a guest across a low table in a barebones studio. On another, dancers gyrate to ‘80s-esque synth-pop grooves. There’s a strange Doctor Who/Star Trek mashup called Werf’s Tavern. Flipping between them, one experiences the heady delirium of turning on the television late at night instead of sleeping. But instead of the restlessness with which one might have channel surfed in real life, frustrated at a lack of options, channel surfing through Blippo+ feels meaningful.

Within minutes, the suspicion might cross your mind: There’s something going on here.