Had a strange dream where I was hanging out at the home of an esteemed indie game dev, and he told me, "one moment" and left briefly. When he came back, he dropped several magazines and sealed letters in front of me - sent to his address, but with my name on them, postmarked 2006.
All of them had to do with a "fake" Classic Mac OS "digital athletics" game called NOTAS, purported to be from 1991. Page ads, letters, making-of features, about an Olympics game that resembled a Virtual Boy game.
All of the page ads focused on the "athletes": crudely 3D rendered humanoid shapes, Gouraud-shaded but also heavily dithered, as if displayed on a monitor that only has one shade of red to work with. No screenshots. Just the tag line, "NOTAS: Digital athletics simulation for the new world."
Most were dated from the early 2000s, letters meant for another magazine, asking if anybody knew anything about a "forgotten retro computer game I played in school." Oddly, the replies were in the envelope, too; the magazines largely denying knowledge of the game, until one reply read "You know it was fake, right?"
I could not figure out why The Dev had all of this stuff, why _my_ name was on the mail, or why he showed it to me like he was accusing me of something.
The magazines featured a making-of feature about the fake page-ads themselves, that served as a tutorial for an old Mac 3D sculpting/rendering program, and some PageMaker-like print layout editor.
The letters were more interesting, as they were more contemporary.