DAMOCLES INTERACTIVE — CUSTOMER SUPPORT DIVISION
HINT LINE '95
Pick up the phone.
A fully voiced narrative workplace simulation
The Game NEW!
It's the autumn of 1995. You're the new night-shift hire on a videogame hint line that won't exist next year. Pick up. Look it up. Choose what to say.
It’s 1995. You’re the new evening hire at Damocles Interactive, a games studio best known for the S.W.O.R.D. console and a customer support hotline that kids whisper into past midnight. Six pm to six am, four nights a week. $7.25 an hour. Meal voucher for the diner next door.
The phone rings. You pick up. You flip through The Compendium, the company’s sprawling three-ring binder of game guides, scribbled notes, decoder wheels, and corporate memos. You find the answer. Or you don’t. You choose what to say. Then the phone rings again.
The day shift hasn’t worked it out yet. Your callers haven’t worked it out. But the lights stay on later than they should, the lobby mail isn’t being collected, and the regular who rings every Thursday at eleven hasn’t asked for a hint in months. The night shift is where you can hear the building being emptied around you, one missing thing at a time.
You consult The Compendium — a sprawling reference binder full of game guides, scribbled notes, decoder wheels, and corporate memos.
You find the answer. Or you don’t. You choose what to say. The caller reacts. Call ends. Phone rings again.
No two playthroughs are the same. Built on Yarn Spinner’s saliency engine, every call sequence is shaped by what’s happened before. Callers remember you.
Before walkthroughs lived on the internet, they lived in binders. Real people sat at real desks and answered real phones, and the work was strange, intimate, and often quite lonely. Hint Line ‘95 is a game about that job, and the people who did it.
The work disappeared between 1994 and 1999, as GameFAQs and the early internet swallowed the question of how to beat the boss. Almost nobody documented the people who used to answer that question for a living. We’re trying to.
📖 Read “The Brass Key”, a short story from the night shift, 1994 ›
Hint Line ‘95 is a single-sitting narrative game about working a 1-900 number on its way out. Before the internet ate the secret, there were phone hint lines. You worked the last one.
Every page in The Compendium is in someone’s handwriting. Yours will be too. Riff and the caller remembers. Stick to the script and so does the binder. Keep working long enough and the binder becomes you.
A cosy game with the floor pulled out from under it. No combat. No inventory. A phone, a binder, and the people on the other end of the line. Roughly three to four hours, ten shifts, one ending you choose by who you decide to be when nobody’s listening.
The Prototype: Hint Line '93
Hint Line ‘95 began life as Hint Line ‘93, a museum installation commissioned by ACMI (the Australian Centre for the Moving Image) for the Game Worlds exhibition in Melbourne. Selected from an open call for Australian developers to create microgames for museum context.
The ACMI version is a 5-10 minute experience played at a recreated 1990s office desk. A CRT monitor. A mechanical keyboard. And next to it, a real physical binder called The Compendium — hand-assembled with decoder wheels, red cellophane anaglyph decoders, sticky notes in three different handwriting styles, fan letters from kids, corporate memos about known bugs, and a fake pizza menu for wrong-number callers.
Four copies of The Compendium were made by hand. They are currently falling apart at the museum, which was always kind of the point.
The research for the project included interviews with Brian Costelloe and Tim Gadler, who worked Sega’s Australian hint line from 1992 to 1995. Their stories about the job, the callers, and the handmade binders they kept at their desks shaped everything about how we built this game.
Read the full story of how Hint Line ‘93 was made in our blog post. Explore a digital version of The Compendium at compendium.hintline93.com.
From Prototype to Full Game NEW!
Hint Line ‘93 proved the concept works. Visitors queue to play it. The Compendium is falling apart from use. The characters are memorable. The phone calls feel real.
Hint Line ‘95 is the full commercial version. Everything that worked at ACMI, expanded and polished:
🏆 In The Company OfShort, narrative-led indies built around reading, listening, and choosing. A proven aisle, with shipped sales and award traction.
The Team
Hint Line ‘95 is made by Yarn Spinner, the team behind the narrative dialogue tool used in Night in the Woods, DREDGE, A Short Hike, NORCO, and dozens of other shipped games.
Oliver Potter · PJ Madam · Mick Davies · emi doi · Scott Lleonart · Bryce Tollard-Williams · Emesha Rudolf · Harris Sari
All Tasmanian performers. Photographed in our Hobart studio.
Press and Coverage
- Museum Exhibits a Simulated 1993 Game Hint Phone LineBoing Boing
- Game Worlds Review: Pure Playable FunScreenHub
- ACMI Game Worlds Exhibition LineupVariety
- Melbourne's Major New ExhibitionBeat
- Hint Line '93 discussionMetaFilter
- Hint Line '93Dan Q
- We pitched a museum a 1993 game hint line32bit.cafe
- Installation photosFlickr
Built With Yarn Spinner
Hint Line ‘95 is also the production testbed for the upcoming Yarn Spinner Visual Novel Kit. Every feature this game needs becomes a feature the kit ships with.