NAMACO’s 16 bit video game, Mega Dreoilín, unravels the Land Question – the ‘mystery’ of land ownership and distribution in Ireland that has prevailed since the 19th Century. Adhamh O’Caoimh speaks with its creators Han Hog and Donal Fullam.
I am in a space that seems familiar enough to make myself at home in. I brew a cup of coffee. I step by a linen draped clothes horse in the middle of a room. I move someone’s book to sit on a mismatched sofa beneath a crooked sketch of a boat set in a thin and flimsy wooden frame. Plasticky glass. Hand-rolled cigarettes piled over burn marks staining black to tar brown across the surface of a ceramic ashtray from some St. Vincent De Paul shop. Chipped and gaudy paintings of a flower. The kind that a stranger’s grandmother bought for herself, once.
I have been here before. I will be here again.
And you will as well.
The country is in bits. Recent elections have seen some communities adding a few backward idiots to their local council, alongside some truly deplorable people. We are at the apex of a manufactured housing crisis that has broken generations of people, and the typical response of those elected to government seems to be ignoring obvious solutions.
Instead, they use tax money to pay private companies to remove tents, or whatever baffling decision they’ve made this week. Bedsits and shared accommodation seem certain to be our collective normality for some time to come.
As the possibility of owning a home of one’s own shrinks further and further into the distance, it seems that rooms many of us thought we’d leave behind when we left our college shares are the very same we will occupy in the future, if we are lucky enough to afford them.
One response to this has been a little more… involved than others.
‘Mega-Dreoilín’ is a video game inspired by side-scrolling platformers of yore, like ‘The Revenge of Shinobi’ and ‘Golden Axe’ ‘Mega Dreoilín’ is an educational trip through the root causes of our current, unprecedented housing crisis.
Boasting appearances from ‘Gaffs’ author and academic Rory Hearne, author and documentarian Manchán Magan, and composer and folklorist, Ian Lynch, of Lankum/One Leg One Eye notoriety, the game highlights the long history of land dominance in Ireland through the lens of a non temporal, Celtic Tiger era Dublin, and lays out the history of housing alongside a history of landlordism and resistance in Ireland in an intriguing, accessible new way. It’s also fun.
After a tour of the space that leaves one feeling slightly uncanny, they lead me to the small room, lit by a boxy old TV displaying a title screen that kicks me right back to my childhood. 16-bit graphics scroll by detailed Dublin landmarks, Fibber’s and Guiney’s, that ghastly purple and cream Dr. Quirkeys and more recent losses to the city like the Shopfronts space That Social Centre ran in Phibsborough.
There are seagulls.
Music from Dublin experimentalist Rising Damp plays through the speakers of the rear projection television set and I am standing by Han Hog and Donal Fullam, the creators of NAMACO, the duo behind this incredible exhibition at Pallas Projects.
Donal: “We were thinking early noughties rental. Shout out to Santry Eoin for bringing the bag of ashes.”
Nailed it. I swear you’ve taken me back to a house in 2012 Maynooth.
Han: The game takes place over the course of one day, and this space is representative of that first level. Over the four levels, the idea is to represent the things we feel have contributed to current conditions. The first level starts in one of those rental homes, and talks about the expansion of lending credit during the Celtic Tiger, a lot of people being provided with mortgages and the expansion of the renting class.
There’s hints that it’s one of those mom and pop type of properties. The second level is the Otherworld, which represents colonization, Christianisation and dominant hierarchies, and you’re fighting Christian missionaries. Level Three takes you through the city, looking at investment funds and the guards facilitating illegal evictions against the backdrop of corporate plazas right by derelict historic buildings, and then the final level is fighting those investment funds, but together, and not as individuals.
It’s such a complete concept. From the exhibition, the game, the details, everything is so… realized. How did you start the process?
Donal: We came up with it over about a year, with six months of really hardcore work. So both of us would be working full time jobs, then we’d go to my house.
Han: Neither of us were interested in any sort of compromise, so it was just an insane amount of work. Initially we had three levels but we needed a fourth that we didn’t plan, and it ended up being the most simplistic, but also ended up being one of the nicest levels because it’s so straightforward. The first level was kind of nice because it was also pretty simple, but with the city and the Otherworld levels, we were very ambitious.
Donal: In the Otherworld you go to all these different spaces. There’s an outside space and cave system that we had to cut out, and then you’re off to the Burren. It was chaotic, but the level was about imagination and creativity so it made sense to have everything in there.
Han: “Everything we wanted in there, we got in there. The one thing we had to cut down was the text, which was difficult . The whole point of the game is that you learn from it.
Donal: Edutainment.
Han: “Edutainment! It’s supposed to be fun as well. We wanted to take revenge, in a way, on these people by mocking them. We wanted to repackage it so it would be funny. We wanted people to learn about things like the fact that if you look up any given vulture fund, the director will be the director of any number of other companies, they’ll have a sister company, a mother company, a company based in Canada, accounts in the Cayman Islands.
We wanted to make it this silly, pathetic thing that you can easily defeat. It seems too much otherwise. To have it in your head that these are things we can’t overcome.
It’s so detailed and so inspired. You clearly have a deep knowledge of the history and background of what’s happening, and what has been happening.
Han: It’s also the experiences we’ve had renting. For example, Donal’s old rental property has a serious mould problem, and mine does as well. I have been renting for fourteen years, and Donal much longer.
Donal: My political education began in the punk scene in Dublin, but also through living in squats.
You certainly pulled no punches when it came to holding people accountable in the presentation.
Han: We were quite specific. Like, when it comes to IRES REIT, that’s Ireland’s largest private landlord, We decided to name them. Originally we were worried about naming companies, but then we thought fuck it. Why shouldn’t we? We had seen another game, which was good, but they were slagging off Amazon but never mentioning the company. It was only hints. We thought about making it less veiled, getting to the point of it.
And what do you hope people will take away from it?
Han: We’re told that the housing crisis is caused by market, supply and demand, bureaucracy and the instability of the global supply chain, and that , as opposed to it being a very specific policy driven decision.
It discusses the real cause of the current crisis, from successive waves of colonization to 80’s housing policy, NAMA, Celtic Tiger Era mom and pop landlordism to investment fund mediated houses.
It’s not complicated. It’s not this organic thing that politicians can’t fix even though they want to. It’s because of a very corporate government. You can pinpoint it down, the root of it, and that’s what we’ve tried to do here.
When it came to people like Manchán Magan, or Ian Lynch, or Rory Hearne, how did those their involvement come about, and what made you decide to contact them?
Han: Ian is a mutual friend, and we really wanted Manchán to be involved, and for Rory it was a matter of finding the time. I interviewed him on Zoom, and he was happy to contribute. His three books are incredible, a lot of the quotes were very much oversimplified for this. I’d encourage people to seek them out.
Donal: With Rory, for example, we just had conversations around who knows about housing and who understands these things, who’s cool and also knows their shit.
Han: We just contacted him. I was like, “I read your book.”
Donal: You’ll find people are very agreeable to talking with you if you open with “Hey, I like your work.”
Is there anything else you’d encourage our readers to look into?
Han: I’ve been very inspired by the RHL. There’s an article you can read by a member of the Revolutionary Housing League in the ‘Mega-Dreoilín’ ‘zine’.
They housed 70 refugees, in this building that lay derelict for years that was owned by Cabhrú. They were a charity called the Catholic Housing Aid Society, but they changed their name because of corruption. A person was evicting older people, moving students in and charging extortionate rent. Multiple illegal evictions of elderly residents, even though they were a charity set up for the elderly. A CEO that was never on a bankroll and lived in a unit that was supposed to be for the charity was paid almost €250,000 over a couple of years. If you go to their page there’s a lot of information there about what they do, why they do it and how it all works.
Words: Adhamh O’Caoimh
The exhibition ran at Pallas Studios in May 2024.
