The games we forget.

Before this video starts, I have something  to admit. I used to make PUBG videos. Not even like well made PUBG videos, I recorded  them on my low-end PC with my best fri end and they were unwatchable.

The game audio  was deafening, my friend’s mic would peak every couple of seconds, the bitrate  tanked every time I turned my character, they are truly miserable to watch. But… they’re  also the most fun I’ve ever had making videos. Sometimes I think about just how much footage  has been recorded but never watched.

There’s a website called Petittube that shows videos like  this, ones with only a couple or no views at all, and I’m always amazed at how mundane they  are. A lot of videos are just home movies or somewhat boring recordings of stage  performances or people dancing. Some are bland let's plays of video games with  long gaps of silence between commentary, some are surprisingly entertaining stuff  that just never saw the light of day.

The pieces of art that see wide exposure are  really the tip of the tip of the iceberg, with an inconceivably large ocean  of art below it, and both youtube and video games are no different. I’ve talked  about horror a few times on my channel, and when I do I always use footage of small  indie horror games. There’s a few channels on youtube that exclusively cover them, ones  like Stella Abassi and S.

H. C. H.

2. that play a near endless amount of indie horror and upload  the full playthroughs, without any commentary. It’s useful for me because I like using the  in-game sounds in my background footage, but it also serves the purpose of archiving these  works, a lot of which would have probably never been seen otherwise.

Indie horror games are a  special fascination of mine for another reason, that a lot of them are basically the exact  same game. You’re placed somewhere dark and isolated with a source of light and a  monster trying to kill you. The biggest differences are the place, the light  source, and how that monster works.

There’s something comforting to me about indie  horror, that despite mascot horror muddying the waters, a lot of these games are made more  for the sake of the developer than the player. I can’t imagine most of the people making  these are expecting or even trying to make some groundbreaking work, there’s an understanding  that your game will be one in a pool of hundreds of thousands, and that assurance makes it  so these games aren’t pandering to anyone. When I make youtube videos, I make them  for other people.

When I write this script, and record this voice over, I’m doing it for  the sake of you, the viewer. When I write, I’m writing things I already know and thought  about a long time ago, and I’m only doing it because I think my fanbase will enjoy my  thoughts. Since I want youtube to be my job, that’s how it is and how it’s going to be from now  on, and I truly don’t mind it.

I find youtube fun… but those PUBG videos were the  most fun I’ve had doing it. Getting Over It is a game about cultural trash.  Your goal is to climb a literal pile of garbage, reused assets that he bought from asset stores  stacked on top of eachother in a game editor.

If you took the time to play the game for  yourself and not just watch a youtuber lose their minds over it, you’d be given the time  to listen to the game’s creator, Bennet Foddy, and come to really understand the game. Bennet  Foddy, if you didn’t know, was the creator of QWOP, a rage game that took early youtube by  storm, but nowadays isn’t really talked about. In the game’s short script, Bennet never once  mentions it.

Instead, he chooses to talk about a different game, Getting Over Its direct  inspiration, Sexy Hiking. [The author of the game was Jazzuo, a mysterious Czech designer who  was known at the time as the father of B-games. B-Games are rough assemblages of found objects. 

Designers slap them together very quickly and freely, and they're often too rough and unfriendly  to gain much of a following. They're built more for the joy of building them than as polished  products. ] (Fade in then out Bennet Foddy.

) Getting Over It takes Sexy Hiking’s main  mechanic, dragging yourself up a mountain with a hammer and gives it enough polish to attract a  general audience. It’s hard but not impossible, good for youtubers who need reactions  and simple enough to be understood by everyone. And yet, despite the game  only existing because of Sexy Hiking, Getting Over It is and will be better  remembered than Sexy Hiking will ever be.

A topic I've always found fascinating are  the first video games to blank. The first arcade machine for example was a game called  Computer Space. It’s gameplay was… stunning, consisting of moving your ship around and  shooting at targets.

It was also the first videogame to have sound, if you count this as  video game sound. In 2001, 3 decades later, the game Red Faction made leaps and bounds  into destructible environments, being able to blast your way through rock and stone and  shatter the walls of the game around you. Urban Chaos, just 2 years before  in 1999, was far ahead of its time, being a modern open world 3D game focusing  around crime and violence, driving around a city and causing mayhem, a formula that’s still  popular and active to this day.

These games are fundamental building blocks of every single  modern video game we can pick up and play now, revolutionary in their field and trailblazing  for future games to come, and yet up until I researched for this video, I hadn’t  heard of a single one of these games. Some better known games have also  been revolutionary in some ways, but it’s never the reason they’re remembered,  just neat little tidbits about the development process. The issue with these grand advancements  is that while they’re novel in the moment, just a couple years or even months down the line, that’s  just… a thing that can be done now.

Oftentimes, better methods are discovered soon after or  they’re used by just overall better games, so while these have their place in history,  they become no more than just a name on a paper. Kary Mullis revolutionized molecular biology with  his invention of the polymerase chain reaction, Nils Ivar Bohlin was a Swedish mechanical  engineer and inventor who invented the three-point safety belt, Red Faction was  the first game with fully destructible environments. These people led full, entire  lives before and after these moments, but this is all we know them for.

A whole  world boiled down to a single achievement. Before I was a youtuber, I was a viewer. Youtube  is a site that revolves around fame, as simple as that sounds, but it can also come off as a mark  of quality.

While I’d like to think I’m above it, I’m a lot more assured that a video will be good  if it has 100 thousand views rather than 100. For youtubers trying to make art, it really twists  your feelings of how much value your art has. Video games are much of the same way.

There’s  a chance that the best video game of all time, the most life changing and beautiful  experience is just sitting somewhere on itch. io waiting to be played,  but why would I go around looking for that when millions of people  have played and loved Elden Ring? A video of mine recently went viral, called  “Games you can never play again.

” There’s a good chance that if you’re watching  this video shortly after I uploaded it, you found me from that one, but for the first  week it was released, the video wasn’t very popular. I got a couple of comments saying they  felt the same way and that the video was good, stuff I’ve seen a million times with no  success following it. I was convinced that it was just another drop in the bucket,  another failed attempt to throw something at the wall and make it stick, but after the  video blew up, it was like another universe.

Millions of people have watched it now, and  I’ve gotten thousands of comments spilling their heart out about the grief they feel  about those experiences they can’t relive, but I can’t fight the feeling that this  video didn’t deserve it any more than all of my failed attempts before.  I didn’t spend any longer on it, didn’t add some special sauce or something,  I wrote the script in a couple days max, and yet this video is probably one of the main  ones I’ll be remembered for, if I am at all. When I make youtube videos, I make them for  other people.

What that implies is that I also try to make it an easy experience,  and also an appealing one. Mine cover some abstract or even dark or sad topics, but  my choice to make them about video games is a very conscious one. If most people saw  a video in their sidebar about the absolute nature of death and how humans are unable to  truly comprehend that idea, not even I would want to click that.

But a video about the  out of bounds? That’s more appealing to me. Both video games and youtube videos are implied  to be made for people other than the artist, but while I make them accessible, that’s  not necessarily true for everyone.

In fact, entire genres focus around making it as  difficult to access as possible. I’ve already talked about horror games and rage  games, but this… what- what the fuck is this. This is a video game called Mech Punk, and  that’s really all I know for sure about it.

You pilot a spaceship going around and shooting  things, I think, and I have yet to figure out any sort of goal that’s set out before you. Screw  goals, I can’t even see what’s shooting at me most of the time. Mech Punk is one of the games  coming out in a new genre that I can really only call psychotic.

The most famous one is Cruelty  Squad, an expertly crafted game designed to be as ugly and abrasive as possible. The game is  flooded with different mechanics and tasks and ideas to where you feel completely  overwhelmed by the insanity of it all. I really don’t wanna talk about Undertale over  and over again, but Undertale even does this too.

The Genocide run, outside of the 2 major boss  fights and ending is… really, really boring. Systematically murdering every single monster  in an area is not an enjoyable experience. Every single creature in the game you one shot, and  every battle only exists to waste time over and over again.

At almost every turn, you’re met with  no resistance, no challenge, and it forces you to reflect on yourself. You are subjecting yourself  and the underground to a miserable experience, to kill everything, just to see if anything cool  happens later. Undertale provides both an engaging and fun experience, as well as a truly  miserable one, made by your own actions.

I find Getting Over It fascinating because it also  seems to want to do both, be accessible and too difficult, but at the same time. “The obstacles  in Sexy Hiking are unyielding, and that makes the game uniquely frustrating. But I'm not sure  Jazzuo intended to make a frustrating game - the frustration is just essential to the act of  climbing and it's authentic to the process of building a game about climbing.

A funny thing that  happened to me as I was building this mountain: I'd have an idea for an obstacle, and I'd build  it, test it, and… it would usually turn out to be unreasonably hard. But I couldn't bring  myself to make it easier. It already felt like my inability to get past the new obstacle was my  fault as a player, rather than as the builder.

Imaginary mountains build themselves  from our efforts to climb them, and it's our repeated attempts to reach the summit  that turns those mountains into something real. ” Bennet refers to the thing you  climb as a mountain in the game, while it’s really only a mountain for a few  sections. Soon after the start, you’re climbing construction equipment and boxes and furniture,  but it remains a mountain in the metaphorical sense.

Not just being some large thing you need  to climb, but as this massive obstacle standing right in front of you. And more importantly,  like most Mountains in our modern world, it’s something completely optional to do. You  don’t need to climb this mountain.

Beating this game will require you to suffer, it’s a guarantee,  and yet many people still do and have done it. Just like a real mountain, there’s a few reasons  someone would do it. Games like Getting Over It are in some way a community experience.

Not  only are they mostly experienced literally in a community, by people watching instead  of playing, but the bragging rights you get by beating it yourself are compelling to  people. Not just you, but everyone knows that Getting over it is a hard game. But for Bennet  Foddy, he hopes for a different kind of player.

The main difference between the mountains  in our world and in this game is that Bennet built this one. If you’ve played through  the game and listened to what he says, it feels more and more personal as you climb  higher and higher. By choosing this game, a game he built, you’re engaging with Bennet  Foddy himself.

This mountain is his suffering, his time, his energy, his creativity, and  it’s not something fed to you. You fight and claw and fail over and over,  and each time you need to make the decision to get up and try again, climb  higher, see more of the game he made. You’re choosing to know Bennet.

While  Getting Over It’s script is a monologue, it’s really a conversation. At the end of  each sentence, of each clip, of each section, when he says anything, your refusal to quit  replies to him. It says, gently, “I agree”.

Are you enjoying this video? I truly  don’t know. But if you’re still watching, all I can hope for is that the answer is yes…  Those PUBG videos I made are not approachable.

The game audio was deafening, my friend’s  mic would peak every couple of seconds, the bitrate tanked constantly, they are truly  miserable to watch. However, they’re the most genuine I’ve ever been on youtube. After that  point, I stopped making videos for my sake, and started making them for yours.

Do you like this  video? Would you really want to see my old ones? Games, most of the time, are forgotten for  a reason.

They’re clunky, they’re glitchy, the ending sucks, the console’s been out  for 20 years, other games did it better, it’s too hard or not fun. But  once that community fades away, once there’s no incentive to play something,  the experience transforms into something else. Something personal.

You won’t be able to talk  to your friends about it, or leave a comment about it, it’ll be a silent conversation between  yourself and the ghost of the creator’s passion. At the time of writing this, I’ve hit over  100 thousand subscribers. You might be one of them.

If so, I dedicate this video, and the  rest of my time on this platform to you. That’s what I signed up for. And since you made  it to the end of this video, I have a gift, from me to you.

A playlist, of most of the videos  I have unlisted. It’s your choice whether or not to climb that mountain. I won’t judge you  either way.

Thank you, and have a nice day.