If I remember this correctly, the movie American Graffiti starts with a close-up of a car radio frequency display. American Graffiti is about a group of young people wandering around on a special night. George Lucas' next film would be the one to take us out to a galaxy far, far away, but, even back in the day, on a crackly fourteen-inch TV screen, that radio shot in American Graffiti looked absolutely gigantic. It's just numbers and lines, and yet here was a panorama, lightyears wide, filled with deep mystery, somehow grown-up and somehow incomprehensible. Turn the dial. The needle scrolls, static twists into high notes and descends into a low fuzzy grumble before suddenly - implausibly - erupting into song.
Radio has always seemed the most shadowed and unlikely of technologies. Analogue radio: you dialed in, you tuned and tweaked and pretty much dowsed for what you were after. Where's Radio 1 gotten to today? And there was all this little stuff in between the big stuff, the actual stations, that as a kid I found even more interesting. I can still reel off the numbers of certain stations - long after my mum has forgotten the names of her children she will still understand what 94.5 means - but I can also recall long bored nights turning the dial through the darkness and enjoying the backwash tidal sounds of the gaps between. The gaps! Dead air. Almost empty space. Nebulas spinning. Moon dust. Black bubbles turning on the surface of fresh coffee. All images conjured because the gaps were mere sound. I wish we still had technology like this, technology that was spatial yet invisible, the very opposite of user-friendly. Something that whistled and sparked. Something murky, spooky, irascible, and filled with all that cursed analogue potential.
The Oxenfree games are all about radios, and they're also very good with the idea of gaps. The first Oxenfree dumped a bunch of kids on an abandoned island and saw them wandering and chatting and uncovering a supernatural mystery. It was a game about walking between points on the map and learning more about your companions through conversation choices. But it was also about that radio you carried, with a dial you could scroll through whenever you fancied, and which, in the right circumstances, could reveal a secret world and tear open holes in space and time.