Anachronox turns 25 and Tom Hall is opening the vault on his cult sci-fi RPG

Tom Hall is marking the 25th anniversary of Anachronox by digging through his personal archives and sharing old design documents, story outlines, and behind-the-scenes material via his newsletter. The cult sci-fi RPG launched in 2001 and has spent the decades since quietly building a devoted following.

Anachronox cast players as Sly Bucelli — a debt-ridden, barely-literate private eye living above a space bar — and sent him chasing techno relics across a solar system full of dangerous criminals. On the surface it looked like a standard late-90s Eidos PC RPG, but underneath was something far stranger: an absurdist comedy in the Douglas Adams mould, where your mouse cursor is a character, one party member is a literal planet with a satellite-relay face, and the Canadian dollar is somehow the galactic reserve currency. The combat system owed more to Chrono Trigger than to anything Western, which made it an odd fit for the market it launched into.

Anachronox had the misfortune of sharing a studio with Daikatana. Ion Storm Dallas burned through resources and goodwill on John Romero's infamously troubled shooter, leaving Hall's RPG to ship quietly just before the studio collapsed. Critics liked the humor but the game never found a wide audience at launch — Eidos had already written it off as a tough sell, much like Earthbound before it. It eventually resurfaced on GOG and Steam, where its cult reputation has slowly grown.

The game ended on a cliffhanger — Hall felt the 40-plus-hour runtime still wasn't enough to tell the full story, and a sequel never happened. In a Bluesky video, Hall summed up the anniversary plan simply: "Let's do some spelunkin'." Fans are hoping the vault material sheds some light on where Sly Bucelli's story was supposed to go.