Oneway.exe Is More Than Just Scary, It’s A Love Letter To Horror and the Internet – Interview With the Devs

Note: Since Publication, the name of the game has changed from “>one way” to “oneway.exe”. this article has been adjusted to reflect that change.

oneway.exe was one of the surprise hits at PAX West 2024. A horror game with a unique blend of different art styles, horror genres, and aesthetics, Disordered Media’s oneway.exe drew crowds the entire weekend. Many people were drawn to the booth’s excellent display of oneway.exe’s characters, and then stayed to play through one (or more) of its demo-ready “paths.” Many people who attended PAX spoke about oneway.exe as one of the biggest surprises.

As for myself, I couldn’t be happier to see it. I’d had my eye on the game and new studio for several weeks prior, and made sure to make a plan to meet up with Bugs Ray and Spider Ray — the husband and wife duo at the head of Disordered Media — during PAX West. What followed was one of the most pleasant interviews I’ve had the pleasure of conducting (captured below), as well as plenty of conversation afterward.

And not only was it pleasant, but it also reaffirmed what I suspected about oneway.exe, which is that it is being made by people who aren’t just good at horror, but who have a deep knowledge of and respect for the genre. But, enough of me telling you how it went. You want to see it.

And so, I’m excited to present my exclusive interview with Bugs and Spider of Disordered Media, who are creating oneway.exe, an incredibly exciting project that will be launching its Kickstarter soon:

Graves: “Hello! Spider, Bugs, so good to meet you in person. Thank you for agreeing to this interview.”

Spider Ray: “Yeah, thank you as well!”

Bugs Ray: “We’re excited to be here.”

Graves: So, let’s get right into it. oneway.exe is your first title, and it is still pretty early on, but I’ve loved everything I’ve seen so far. But, for the uninitiated, can you tell us a bit about it. What is oneway.exe?

Spider: Well, it’s a first-person horror game where you explore an abandoned video game made by 3 developers. During the game, your goal is to figure out what happened to those developers, and why you’re stuck in the middle of it.

Graves: Starting very meta! But that’s not the thing that’s drawing people to your booth. That would be your eight different characters, all of whom have such cool designs.”

Spider: Yeah! There’s eight different characters, and seven paths in the game representing different ones of them. Each character is based on a different era of the internet, and a different genre of horror.

Bugs: From the beginning of the internet to today. We wanted to explore a wide range of people’s experience online, and peoples experiences with storytelling online. From a spam email you’d get, to podcasts where people do horror, or forums for slasher movies, or the cool things people are doing through YouTube with analog horror.

Graves: I picked up on that! You’ve got an ARG yourself [which you can find here], great trailers, and you are really embracing the internet culture, and its many different eras and genres of horror. You’ve got 7 different paths, which means 7 different genres of horror and eras of the internet. So, I wonder, could you give us an example of what one of these paths looks like? Maybe your favorite?

Spider: Well, I refuse to ever pick a favorite character, but I will slay that I grew up on and really love the slasher genre. The blood and gore is my favorite. And it was very fun to work on that stuff with one of the characters, where we are also tying in horror movie forums, and the subcultures there. There is a huge subculture of slasher fans.

Bugs: And for myself, I will change depending on the day. Right now, I always really love the seedy horror, the kind that makes you deeply uncomfortable. Deeply uncomfortable with yourself even. Kind of relatable, like a feeling that you can’t put words to, but you get. Maybe more like a reverse of relatable, but pulling from the same ideas.

Specifically for that, the one I’ve liked the most recently is Fiona — the one you played. I really love the narrative in that one, and I love the way the story is told visually, and thematically.

Graves: And audibly! You really seem to understand that part of great horror is great sound.

Spider: Definitely, and Fiona is a great example for that because her sounds were tricky to get right, but perfectly represent her. But it’s different for every path. Like how the visuals, genre, and horror are different for each character, the sound is very specific to each character, and what they represent. But each character has their own feelings. Their own style.

Graves: And speaking of art style, it really is fascinating. While you are sending up so much of horror with oneway.exe, the character designs are entirely your own. The closest I can think of in the horror space is maybe Spooky’s Jumpscare Mansion, and even that is very different. While they are all very distinct, they all have a visual style that is different, more present, than most horror designs. How do you go about designing these characters in this way?

Spider: Most of the designs just started with a sketch, and then we take it to the team. Most of our team is “the art team”, and they are all very talented. We started as friends, and as friends, we used to take each others art and perfect it. And so it starts with a sketch, and then we take it to the rest of the team, and say “oh, this should be like this” or “oh, what about this?” It’s very collaborative.

Graves: It’s very cool to see that, and I’ve seen it a lot at PAX: you have a group of friends that have this great collaborative idea, one they want to see. And nowadays, they can come together, and just do it.

Bugs: Of course, it takes a lot of work, but yeah, you can just do it! You can make the choice to take it for yourselves and make what you want from it.

It’s funny, when we started this, when we were coming up with the character sketches, we didn’t have an art team. We would just approach our friends, as a favor, and ask “what do you think of this,” and it just morphed from there until they were part of the team. It just grew from there!

Spider: It was very natural, very organic. And some of these designs came very naturally. Like Meaty, who I designed in like 30 minutes. I’m very proud of her, but that wasn’t the end of the process. There was a lot of more going on after. But her design came in 30 minutes, and after that, it was all perfecting it with others.

Bugs: You did that while I was walking the dogs! When I made it back, you were done! And this was while I was getting into fights with everyone about designing Mikey Van Lee, who is this representative of classic rock and metal, a real diva. Like shock rock and stuff. Which is so close to horror. And it all comes back to that collaboration, working together to make these characters, and also to horror, and all its different types.

Graves: And that’s what great about you. You’re developers who aren’t just passionate about scaring people, you’re passionate about horror. And oneway.exe really does feel like a love letter to horror. You clearly have this love, this admiration for horror — and for the internet cultures that have created so much of it — and it shows.

Bugs: I’m glad! Yeah, we really do love horror, all of it. The history and the internet and all of it.

Graves: So, I guess that makes you both the people to ask: for those who are chickens, and afraid to play horror titles, help explain it to them: what do people like us love horror?

Spider: To feel. It’s the emotion. Fear is strong, but it can give you nostalgia, and bittersweetness. It can give you a sense of relief, or a sense of hope. Or it can just scare the crap out of you, which is just what you need.

Bugs: It’s something I’ve really tried to go over. Like with haunted houses, I get very, very frightened. I’ll use Spider here as a human shield in front of me! But, still, I chase that high. I chase that feeling. I try to figure out what, even though it scares me, I keep wanting to do it. I just love it.

Spider: And I love scaring her! That’s part of it, too.

Graves: It’s either one or the other, you either love being scared, or scaring others. The emotions are all there, but whether you want to make something to feel those emotions, or make something to scare others into feeling them, there is a difference there. But I want to go back: you said that one of the feelings that horror can evoke is nostalgia, and I think we can really see that in oneway.exe. Do you want to elaborate on that?

Spider: It’s all internet horror. The kind of stuff I grew up with. And that’s what makes it nostalgic; for people our age, internet horror is almost comfortable. It’s part of who we are.

Graves: I get that. Marble Hornets, Ben Drowned, creepypastas. A dozen more I could mention, and probably a hundred more you could mention.

Spider: All the ones you listed, and a lot more obscure things. The kind of stuff you can find on forums, which I grew up using, that you had to really look for. Those things had some of the scariest stuff. Or flash games, the old-school kind. There is an uncanniness to those old games, and to a lot of the old internet. And so it really all comes together, and it gives us both those scares, and also that nostalgia, and that uncanniness. A lot of it just came from the technology of the time, and so there is something really unique about it.

Graves: And I can really see that. You’re clearly not only excited to work with horror, but also excited to work with these little technological hiccups that were once limitations, but which you’ve turned into features and story elements.

Spider: That is very much the case. The technology inspires the horror, as much as it makes it possible. And, you know, we have a small team, so we are still working with a lot of limitations. And those limitations have caused the game to change a lot, and change for the better, because limitation makes creativity. When I was first writing the game, I was looking at other games, and I wanted to make games like those games. But not only do those games already exist, but they are doing something different than what I can do. I like Silent Hill, but I can’t make Silent Hill; that’s just not what I can do. That’s a limitation we have, we are working with what we have. Or we like these other games, but we can’t make things how they made it, because of our small size, and because we have different skills.

Instead, because of those limitations, I stopped looking at games for inspirations, and I started looking at things around me, and what our team could do with them. And that all ended up being things I grew up with that inspire me as a writer. Which ended up being from the internet, which brought it together so well. And so much internet horror is limited, so it was something we could really work with, as limited creators ourselves. It all worked out really well.

Graves: And so much of horror is that: it’s taking things we know and turning them on their head. And for you, you really have to work with things you know because you are a new developer with a small team, and you’re planning on independently publishing your game. So you’re entirely on your own, and all your inspirations get to show without interference. What is that like, working all by yourselves on this?

Spider: Well, one of the hardest things is managing. Because it’s difficult to manage people. Something that might be obvious to me might not be so obvious to my team, or they might know something that I hadn’t even thought of. Organizing all of that is hard, especially since we are so new at this.

Bugs: But mostly it’s really great working so independently. One of the cool things about it is that we can just talk among each other and make it work, without worrying about pleasing anyone else. It means that we can just sit down with a new idea, come together, and turn it into something full. Just the 9 of us, knowing we can make whatever we want. It’s very liberating, and it keeps communication easy.

Spider: Yeah, it does! As the main writer, I wrote the ideas for each of the paths of the game. And when I get the first version of a script, I take it to the team, and I ask them for opinions. And when they come back to me with their ideas, and with what they are working on, they just flow together. And the independence lets us do that. Like, for instance, an artist might come to me and say “look at this furnace I drew.” And that’s not something I’d ever think of, that would ever come to me, but then I see this furnace with its unique design, and I think “I can do something with this. I can write this into that section, add a bit more.” And then maybe someone else sees those elements and thinks of a new idea for gameplay. And it works that way in every direction. And I think that’s only possible when it is just us, a group of friends working together to make what we want. It’s very freeing.

Graves: It seems very freeing. And with that freedom, it seems like you are expressing that in the 7 different paths, as well as the meta elements.

Spider: For sure. There isn’t just one way you play oneway.exe, after all. Each segement is very different, and was created with that same method of all of us coming together and getting inspired by the internet, and by horror, and by each other. But it isn’t totally incoherent; there is an overarching story. It all comes back to these 3 different developers that created the game and abandoned it. That’s very important, that all of these different elements are just different parts to the whole.

Graves: Can you tell me a bit more about those larger elements? Those 3 different developers?

Bugs: Yeah! Well, I mean, a lot of it comes from my own struggles. I learned to code for this game, and while doing that, I just realized how frustrating the process can be. And so, with these 3 different developers, they start as blank slates, neutral. But you come to learn, through little snippets of each of the paths, that they are imperfect, and frustrated. And you start to see these little things that tell you about them: who they were, what they are thinking, and why the game ultimately remained unmade. What happened, essentially.

Graves: It reminds me a bit of The Beginner’s Guide, in that way.

Bugs: A little bit, yeah!

Graves: Oh, I could ask about this all day. But, we do have to find time to wrap up. So, I’ll wrap things up with this: what has it been like working on oneway.exe, and how has your fantastic reception here at PAX been?

Spider: It’s been wild. We’ve been working on it for only a few months, and to take those few months and go from just some character sketches all the way here has been crazy.

Bugs: There has been so much learning. But it’s been so rewarding, especially to hear and see people walk by and so “oh, that looks cool,” and then to come up and play it and love the new demo. We are going to release a Kickstarter for the game in a few weeks, and the response we’ve gotten here has been great, and so we are so happy to see people are interested in it. There is a lot to go, but this has proven to us that there are people who want this.

Graves: There certainly are. Your love of horror, your great art style, your unique approaches to storytelling and nostalgia, all of that shines through with the demo [which will be releasing on Steam very soon]. And, in general, I couldn’t be more excited to see oneway.exe when it is done, and to keep up with you, as new developers clearly so passionate about horror. It’s been great talking with you, thank you again for making time.

Spider: And it’s been great chatting with you!

Bugs: It has been! Thank you! We can’t wait for you to play it, either.

And there we have it. Spider, Bugs, and I continued to chat for a while after the mics were off, but the results of that conversation will be revealed later. For now: it was fantastic meeting with Spider and Bugs (and the other members of Disordered Media), and I know that I’ll be backing oneway.exe on day one when it launches on Kickstarter here, and will be putting the game on my wishlist and playing the demo (which will be out very soon) on Steam here.