Necrofantasia
a window to the outside
Touhou has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. It started with the music, specifically Necrofantasia, Yukari's theme from Perfect Cherry Blossom, and grew from there alongside everything else I picked up on the forums and image boards I grew up on. Those communities were always more real to me than the shallow world outside.
From there I followed the music into the wider doujin scene. First it was circles arranging Touhou songs, then the same artists' original work, which is often the better half of what they make. I still trawl through the release lists every M3. These are people getting together to make things because they love them, mostly for free, and that is why I've stuck around as long as I have.
Touhou is also how I ended up at the PC-98, though I came to it backwards. The first five games were made for it, years before the Windows ones I grew up with, and Kojima's Policenauts was my other way in. I have never owned a PC-98, or anything else from that era for that matter. Everything I've played on it, I've played through RetroArch.
The PC-98 scene had everything I love about the modern one, at a time when the hobby was far more technically demanding and reached far fewer people. Making a game meant working with hardware that could show 16 colors at once, picked out of 4096, at 640x400. Those limits forced a set of styles you can still recognize at a glance thirty years later: heavy dithering, palettes chosen one color at a time, and the teal and navy of Possessioner that I borrowed for this site. Once you peel back the veneer, it's the same thing that makes punk compelling.
Most of what fills our day-to-day has had its rough edges sanded off. Anything with a soul gets turned into a mass-consumption product, a mockery of what it used to mean, and many people will live their entire lives inside that farce and die content, never having seen anything else. The forums were my first window to the outside. The PC-98 scene is the clearest one I've found, and very little of what I consume in a given week can hold a candle to it.