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.
