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Doki Doki Literature Club is a free PC and mobile game made by Team Salvato which was released nine years ago this month, in September 2017. In it, you play a high schooler talked into joining the Literature Club by his childhood friend Sayori, where he meets Natsuki — a prickly girl obsessed with baking; Yuri, a quiet member with a passion for horror novels; and Monika, the club’s poised, seemingly perfectly normal president.

Content warning: this piece mentions depression and self-harm as depicted in the game.

Team Salvato

Monika is not perfectly normal. As the game progresses — you’re discussing books, you’re writing poetry, you’re getting ready for various school festivals — she becomes aware that she is a character in a game. She decides to do something about that fact, including but not limited to deleting other characters’ files outright, rewriting scenes to remove people who stand between her and you, and corrupting the game’s code to keep your nascent love story running exactly how she wants it. (Romantic!) She’ll use the actual system name of your PC when talking to you. She’ll notice, and mention, if you’re streaming while you play. At one particularly low point of the game, to make progress, you’ll need to find and delete a specific file on your own hard drive.

This meta-nightmare would be scary enough (how can you escape a bad date if the date keeps crawling out of the game code? Asking for a friend) without the extremely heavy subject matter within the content itself. The girls Monika pushes aside to get to you are not doing well. Sayori’s story is seeded with small, easy-to-miss clues about her profound depression. Natsuki’s tough home life is implied through the kind of details you first need to actively notice and then actively cannot miss; and Yuri’s fixation on the protagonist curdles into self-harm…something troublingly foreshadowed in the poems she writes and shares with the group.

Team Salvato

Over time, you come to realize that as the player character, you’re responsible for a significant share of these young women’s misery. They are playthings for you to pursue or reject at will. This is true for most dating sims, but what makes Doki Doki unique is that all the girls seem to be aware of this dynamic to varying degrees — and it’s torture to them. While the story tackles serious topics, they’re not played for mere shock value — the game comes with content warnings — and a later edition added stories that flesh out each girl’s arc beyond the horror game structure. Or, if you’re so inclined, years after the game’s 2017 release, a fan-made mod called Monika After Story lets players extend their time with her indefinitely, past the game’s canon ending.

That balance — the game’s mission to traumatize you while giving the girls’ struggles gravity — is one of the reasons the game’s still sparking Reddit debates today. Some longtime visual novel readers argue that the genre-savvy horror elements overshadow what could have been a more grounded story about mental health. Others, especially newcomers to dating sims or text-heavy games, cite the same structure as the reason the game hit as hard as it did. You can’t easily separate the horror from the humanity when both are baked into the same experience.

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Doki Doki Literature Club runs about four hours, most of which doesn’t feel like a horror game at all. It’s adorable. It’s charming. The credits song, “Your Reality,” a deceptively bubbly tune, plays as one of gaming’s more devastating final scenes rolls onscreen. This game accomplished something most horror games don’t even manage: It made an entire genre feel suspicious by association. Never will I ever be able to play a dating sim again without a tiny fear in the back of my mind, wondering if Monika is lurking in the background of a shot, nulling out my dialogue options or reducing a love interest to a pile of glitched-out pixels. And, fair warning, once you’ve played Doki Doki Literature Club, you’ll have a hard time fully trusting your next dating sim, too. %!s()

Over the past few years, Alex Van Halen has worked hard to avoid speaking about Sammy Hagar, not even mentioning him by name a single time in his 240-page memoir Brothers: An Intimate Account of Brotherhood and Rock Music. But earlier this month, in an interview with the Brazilian magazine Roadie Crew, he fired back when asked about Hagar’s 2011 book Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock.

“I don’t know what he wrote, and I don’t want to know,” said Van Halen. “In my opinion, Sammy Hagar is a complete idiot.” 

Unsurprisingly, Hagar had much to say about that characterization of himself in a new interview with Eddie Trunk on SiriusXM. “Guilty as charged, first of all,” he said. “I’m probably the most successful idiot on the planet…I want to call Alex out and say dude, we all know, you act like there was never a Sammy Hagar. You act like there was never a ‘Van Hagar.’ We sold 40 some million records, [had] four Number One albums and you just scratch that off of your brother’s legacy, saying no, that never happened. You don’t even want to acknowledge it. That’s deep. That’s weird. That’s not right, for Eddie, for me, for Mikey [Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony], for anybody.” 

“I’m asking Alex, like why?” he continued. “Come clean, what’s your problem? Just come out and say it. Is it the book? Say it. Cabo Wabo? Say it. Maybe if I knew what your problem was, I could fix it. But right now he just acts like there’s not a problem, it just never happened.” 

In 2025, Hagar told Rolling Stone that he heard Alex Van Halen’s anger towards him stemmed from his successful Cabo Wabo tequila brand. “I’ve had this conversation with a few people, including [former Van Halen manager] Irving Azoff,” he said. “I’ve asked him, ‘What’s the problem?’ And some people have said to me, ‘Oh, Cabo Wabo. At one time, Van Halen, when you built it, you guys were all partners in that. And then they didn’t want it anymore when it was losing money, and they gave it to you, and you turned it around and made hundreds of millions of dollars on it. And they’re angry. Alex is angry about that.'”

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He also felt the drummer was upset that Hagar and Anthony have been touring together for years, playing sets packed with Van Halen classics, while health problems prevented him touring. “He’s not a singer,” said Hagar. “He’s not a guitar player. He is not really a band leader. And he seems like he doesn’t want to play drums or can’t play drums anymore, and he can’t go write a new record. Alex wasn’t the songwriter in the band. He was the drummer. Eddie and I wrote the songs. Dave and Eddie wrote the songs, and so we can go out and do them. And I think that really bothers him that Mike and I are still out there doing it. I would feel bad. If I put myself in his shoes, I would feel terrible if I couldn’t do it anymore.”

The flare-up in the tensions between the former bandmates comes as Hagar is about to resume his Best of All Words residency at the Park MGM in Las Vegas. He’ll once again by joined by Anthony, guitarist Joe Satriani, and drummer Kenny Aronoff. The set is generally heavy on Van Hagar hits like “Poundcake,” “Why Can’t This Be Love,” and “Right Now,” But they sprinkle in a couple of Roth-era songs like “Ain’t Talkin’ ’bout Love” and “Panama” along with Montrose’s “Bad Motor Scooter” and Hagar’s solo hit “I Can’t Drive 55.”

David Lee Roth, meanwhile, went on a solo tour earlier this year, but he called off the final dates, shortly before reuniting with Alex Van Halen at a Ted Talk, marking their first public appearance together since the final Van Halen concert in 2015. It’s hard to imagine anything like that happening with Alex Van Halen and Roth’s replacement in Van Halen, even though he jokingly suggested that Trunk might somehow negogitate a truce between them.

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“I want to know how much you charge an hour to see if you can mediate this thing,” he said. “I’m not trying to cause a conflict. I’m trying to fix something, you know. Whether Alex wants to play drums ever again is his business, you know. Whether he wants to, you know, just keep releasing all this old stuff for these photographs and all this stuff, and charging people for old pictures that you can find on the internet and stuff, even if they’re just his, it’s like he should be putting them out there for free. To me, he’s doing a lot of stuff wrong for the legacy of Van Halen. And the one that is my business is I just want to know why. Just come clean. Tell the people, tell me, make a public statement why, and then we can figure out whether you’re right or wrong, and whether we can fix it or not. And if we can’t fix it, then just go about my business. It’s all good.”

Despite everything, Hagar said he’d react warmly if Van Halen were to ever reach out to him. “Oh come in, oh 100%, I’ll grab him, I’ll kiss him right on the lips,” Hagar told Trunk. “I’d treat him like the person that I used to love and I could still love.”  %!s()

Earlier Friday, the Swiss sportswear company On said it reached an agreement with Mbappé, marking the brand's first signing in football. The company also announced it named retired French star Thierry Henry as director of football.

As Mbappé's contact ended in July, Nike felt it had benefitted from the prime years of his career and decided to use its endorsement money elsewhere, the source added. The 27-year-old will be 31 when the 2030 World Cup kicks off.

The move is another major change for Nike, which is trying to rebuild brand loyalty and product innovation under CEO Elliott Hill. The company's sluggish sales, particularly struggles in China, have contributed to its stock falling about 50% in the last year.

On Enters Football alongside Kylian Mbappé.

Juergen Teller | On

Meanwhile, it's a coup for On, which has branched more outside of its core running segment.

Mbappé joined the swoosh in 2006, when he was still a child, and has since emerged as one of the sport's highest profile stars. The Real Madrid star is the all-time leading scorer in the men's World Cup and for the French national team, and won the tournament with France in 2018.

In a statement, Mbappé said he was drawn to On by the opportunity to build something entirely new.

"I want to bring my experience and perspective into what we create, push what's possible through innovation, and always stay true to the joy of football. We have a shared dream, and this is only the beginning," he said.

On said it wants to bring a "fresh perspective" to the sport.

"Football doesn't need another sportswear brand to do more of the same," said David Allemann, founder and co-CEO of On, in a statement. "Football needs new ideas and a challenge to what is possible. 

For years, Nike has represented many of the top soccer stars in the world including Erling Haaland, Vinicius Junior, Alexia Putellas and Sam Kerr.

Nike wished Mbappé well in a statement.

"Over nearly two decades, we've shared moments that shaped the game and he has been an important part of Nike Football," the company said. "We are proud of what we achieved together on and off the pitch. As he moves into the next phase of his career, we wish him continued success for what comes next."

In an analyst note assessing On's ambitions in the sport, Jefferies warned that football is one of the most expensive categories to enter and that "performance credibility cannot simply be bought."

"We see parallels to [Under Armour's past partnership with Stephen Curry]: a star athlete who failed to establish the brand as a dominant player in the sport."

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