Kid A Mnesia Exhibition

Kid A Mnesia Exhibition is an exploration game based on the music and artwork of the Radiohead albums Kid A (2000) and Amnesiac (2001). Players move through a virtual museum, examining artwork and listening to music from the albums.[1] The New Yorker described the museum as "a brutalist cathedral full of byzantine corridors, majestic rooms, banks of buzzing cathode-ray-tube televisions, and carpets of fluttering sketchbook pages".[2] Players cannot die, there are no enemies, there is no score system, and there are no levels to complete.[1][2]

Kid A Mnesia Exhibition was conceived as a physical installation artwork to be constructed from shipping containers and exhibited in cities around the world.[3] It was first planned for the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, but would not fit; plans to build it into the side of the Royal Albert Hall were rejected by Westminster City Council.[3] Singer Thom Yorke and artist Stanley Donwood, who create the artwork for Radiohead albums, envisioned a building "constructed so that it looked as if a brutalist spacecraft had crash-landed into the classical architecture ... This astounding steel carapace would be inserted into the urban fabric of London like an ice pick into Trotsky."[3] The plans were ultimately cancelled by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the focus shifted towards creating a digital exhibition that "didn't have to conform to any normal rules of an exhibition. Or reality."[3]

The game was developed over two years by Namethemachine and Arbitrarily Good Productions with Yorke, Donwood and Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich.[4] They worked with artist and creative director Sean Evans, theatre set designer Christine Jones and producer Matthew Davis, head of Namethemachine.[5] The team had the guiding principle of exhibiting no new work; according to a blog post by Yorke and Donwood, everything in the exhibition came from material made while Radiohead were recording Kid A and Amnesiac.[3]

Kid A Mnesia Exhibition was announced on 9 September, 2021.[6] It was released as a free download for macOS, Windows, and PlayStation 5 on 18 November 2021.[4] Promotional Radiohead items were released for the multiplayer games Rocket League, Fall Guys and Fortnite.[7]

Jay Peters of The Verge wrote that Kid A Mnesia Exhibition was "full of strikingly beautiful rooms" and "worth checking out as a very literal expression of the idea that video games can be art".[8] NME wrote that it was a "deeply beautiful solo trip through what appears to be an apocalyptic wasteland, before little pockets of beauty show themselves in unexpected places, poking out of the darkness".[1] The New Yorker named Kid A Mnesia Exhibition one of the best games of the year, writing that it "provokes exploration, reflection, and a new way of listening".[2]