Games By Bennett Foddy

Zipper

2026-02-02T00:00:00Z

Zipper is one of the games that shipped with 'season 1' of the games for Panic's handheld Playdate console. It's a love letter to the ZX Spectrum games I grew up on, especially The Last Ninja 2;

It's an evolution of a very old prototype I made in Flash, which you can find under the title 'A Straw Hat' in the Flashpoint Archive if you are curious.

Get it with a Playdate console

Baby Steps

2026-02-01T00:00:00Z

I worked on Baby Steps, with Gabe Cuzzillo and Maxi Boch, from late 2019 to 2025. I don't really have enough distance from it to explain what it is or why you should play it.

Here's some press if you're curious to know more:

Buy it on Steam.

or Buy it on Playstation 5.

Getting Over It+ for Apple Arcade

2023-05-04T19:00:13Z

Getting Over It is now available on Apple Arcade! Now including cloud saves and controller support.

You can get it here.

Get On Top (Sportsfriends Version)

2020-01-30T01:29:40Z

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while – it’s the other secret game hidden in Sportsfriends, a version of Get On Top that uses twin-analog controllers for input. One stick controls your legs, the other controls your arms – it’s designed to sit with one other person and play for hours.

Just like the Flash version, it’s heavily inspired by Tuomas’ Korppi’s old DOS classic, Fight of the Sumo Hoppers. But it throws a lot more CPU cycles at the design problem!

You may encounter some issues – particularly, if your monitor has vsync turned off, or is running at a refresh rate higher than 60Hz. Unfortunately, I can’t compile it anymore so those bugs are probably not gonna get fixed!

You can download it here for Windows.

The original web version is still online here.

FLOP

2018-06-12T19:34:07Z

It’s been my view for a while that it’s a worthwhile exercise for any game designer to make a chess variant, a dice variant and a Pong variant. Speed Chess is my take on Chess, and this is my take on Pong. I originally built it as a secret mode for Sportsfriends, but people keep asking to show it at events, so I decided to put out a standalone build.

FLOP was designed to work with two gamepads, using both analog sticks, but I’ve rigged this up so it can also use two or four arcade spinners, which is more fun if you have them.

Hooked up FLOP to work using spinners on the NYU cabs pic.twitter.com/RTXtgP42mV

— Bennett (@bfod) May 10, 2017

Let me know if you have problems with it. I can still modify and compile it now but that is not likely to be the case forever.

You can download it here for Windows.

Hidden Homework (updated 2021)

2018-02-22T03:11:05Z

When I was teaching at NYU, every year I ran a prototyping class where students make a new game every week, starting with a prompt or constraint that I give them. It became a tradition for me to hide one of their prompts inside a small, prototype-scaled game. Ostensibly it was to give them some inspiration and benchmark the right amount of work for a 1-week prototype, but really it was just fun for me to design a game which people will be forced to play to the end. It’s an unusual reward structure to work with: if you beat the game, your reward is homework!

For me, a good prototype expresses a single idea or tests a single hypothesis, so a prototype is actually a great container for a creative prompt, which typically takes the form of a single encapsulated concept or provocation.

I did that for seven years in the end, so this is a little time capsule of some of the games I made.

2015: Ice

2015 was the first year I made one of these prompts, at Doug Wilson’s suggestion. The game is a simple physics game, a reinterpretation of the speed-skating from Epyx’s C64 classic Winter Games. Downward pressure from the skates on the ice is converted into forward momentum, which would be easy enough were it not for the hazards of the ice rink.

Made in the old version of Ruby Bergstrom’s Luxe, which used to be a rather lovely Haxe library and is now on the way to becoming a rather lovely Wren library. I don’t mind either way; I’m not a good enough programmer to have opinions about languages. Whatever library or language I use, it seems to lend its own flavor to the work you make with it. I don’t want a single tool that I can use for any game… I want a digital toolshed that looks like Depeche Mode’s synth collection.

Play it online.

2016: Zebra

In 2016 I got interested in optical illusions and op-art, and I made Zebra, an optical maze. Mazes are not the most interesting gameplay element if you’re relying on intrinsic motivation — they’re just not very entertaining — but if there’s some sufficiently compelling extrinsic motivator I think their irritating properties become quite interesting. Made in Unity, which is pretty great for making 3D prototypes.

Play it online.

2017: Last Word

For 2017 I made Last Word, a little action word game where the difficulty increases as your words get longer. There’s a proper videogame version (with no prompt hidden inside it) here. Made in Terry’s Haxegon engine, a nice ultra-minimal Haxe library which is perfect for small prototypes. I love using engines that build to the web as well as native targets – makes it very easy to share prototypes without asking the player to do anything more annoying than play the actual game (which might already be quite annoying, honestly).

Play it online.

2018: Monastery

This is 2018’s assignment, a diabolical puzzle. You’re a monk who has forgotten where his cell is in the monastery, and who must walk the labyrinth in order to remember it. If you can find his room, you’ll find out what the assignment prompt is. I was a bit worried the students would be unable to find the prompt hidden in this one, but about half of them got there eventually. (The rest were expelled from the university.)

2018’s class was 100% Pico-8 so it seemed appropriate that the prompt game should be in Pico-8 too. Pico-8 is so great for prototyping — as a case in point, it builds to a single JS and HTML file which loads quite happily in the browser from a local file, so you don’t get annoying permissions or crossdomain problems.

Play it online.

2019: AlleyRat

2019: AlleyStrat

For 2019 I ran two prototyping classes – one in Pico-8 for the undergraduates and a graduate version with no platform constraint (which generally means they work in Unity). So this year I hid the same prompt in two different interpretations of the same idea. I tuned the Pico-8 game for the youthful reflexes of the undergraduate class, but I did not count on the fact that none of them would have ever played a bullet-hell game, and as a result, only one of them was able to reach the end and find out what the assignment was. I instructed that person that they could keep it a secret if they wanted to.

Play AlleyRat | Play AlleyStrat

2020: Maze of Wires

For 2020 I started the semester with a prompt in the form of a multiplayer jigsaw puzzle game – the students had to reconstruct an image with the prompt hidden in it, with no clues, working simultaneously. Unfortunately, as I presume you’re reading this alone, it doesn’t really make sense to share that one – but it looked like this:

Untitled sixteen-player jigsaw puzzle.

The second hidden-homework prompt for this year is this 3D Maze game, similar to the ‘Zebra’ game below. Visually speaking, it’s an homage to Paul Woakes’ Commodore 64 classic, Mercenary.

Play Maze of Wires

2021: Fortune

In 2021, the last time I taught the class, I didn’t want to hide the homework in the games. Instead I used the games as ways of presenting ideas. I made several, but I like this one, a reinterpretation of the fortune-telling minigame from Ultima IV.

Play The Fortune Teller Game

For my very final prompt, I wanted to leave the students with one lasting idea: that I make games for enjoyment and want to do it as much as I can, even when I’m limited to a day or two’s work and 8192 Pico8 tokens. I hope that came across in this little game.

Play the Last Prompt

Getting Over It Support

2017-12-04T18:39:03Z

If you run into problems playing Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy and need help, you can contact me here:

Steam Forums

Twitter

Email:
support {at} foddy (dot) net

Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy

2017-09-27T18:07:23Z

I created this game

for a certain kind of person

To hurt them.

A few things that have happened since I released the game in 2017

It really caught fire with streamers and has been played by nearly all of the biggest ones.

It's in the permanent collection in New York's Museum of Modern Art.

There's now a genre of games that is sometimes called 'Foddian'.

The speedrun scene embraced it.

Clayton Purdom did a nice interview with me for Vulture if you want to read more.

You can buy it on Steam here for Windows and MacOS.

You can buy it on the App Store here.

Or on Apple Arcade here.

Or get it on the Google Play Store here

Plan Bee

2017-09-06T01:03:07Z

This is a little experiment I made in Pico-8 a while ago on a flight. It uses a control method I haven’t seen before, where the movement is damped according to the rate of change in the acceleration (the ‘jerk’) which creates a strange oscillating movement.

Play it online for free.

Last Word

2017-01-31T01:41:24Z

I made this little game as a way of learning Terry Cavanagh’s work-in-progress game engine, Haxegon. It’s a bullet-hell game where you are always trying to eat a particular bullet… you try to build unique words to gain points, but it’s game over if you form a series of letters that cannot be a word. I think this is a new idea? But I’m not totally sure.

Play it in your browser for free (HTML5).

Eleven Flavors of Frustration

2017-01-16T01:53:21Z

Game designers take it as axiomatic that if the player feels frustrated, something has gone wrong with the design. Yet frustration is an essential ingredient in many (all?) of the most famous and influential designs. What would Space Invaders be like if you never had to start again? What would Myst be like if you were never stumped? A game that is completely devoid of frustration is likely to be a game without friction, without disobedience. Games that are perfectly obedient are mere software.

I think to better appreciate the feeling of frustration, and the things we can do with that feeling, it might be useful to talk about some of the different tastes it can have. Not all frustrations are alike; they taste different. Some of the flavors are overused, and some are used only by accident. Some are rare: flavors for the frustration aficionado. We don’t even have language for the different flavors of frustration, which is strange when you consider that contemporary society is essentially a colossal industrial machine that aims to reduce frustration everywhere, but frequently manufactures it from nothing.

Anyway, here are a few of the flavors that I like.

1. Nearly There, But Not Quite

In this level of Zip Zap you try to swing the arm around to hit the upper pylon, by rotating the tiny orange piece. You’ll spend most of your time just barely missing the target.

I feel this type of frustration at the top of my stomach, like heartburn. Your heart leaps a little the first time you get close to finishing a task; there is a moment of anticipation and then relief. When you repeatedly get close and then fail, the flavor is like a tourniquet being wound tighter and tighter around your esophagus. It is a rare, pure type of frustration, one of the best.

2. Start Over

In Sexy Hiking, one false move (or a glitch of the mouse) can make you fall all the way to the bottom of the cliff.

This one tastes quite different. You’ve gone all the way to your goal, only to have your hard work completely erased as you are sent back to square one. It’s a sickening feeling in the pit of your stomach, like you are cresting the top of a hill in a roller coaster. Like you lost the thumbdrive with your homework on it. We sometimes experience this when a game breaks due to a bug. Roguelike games are the only ones that routinely impose this feeling on purpose, and these days the sickness is often sweetened with a little irrevocable progress, like the levels you gain in the Souls series, or the characters you unlock in Spelunky.

3. There And Back Again

In Dragon Quest 8, you can walk as far as you can see. But if there’s nothing there, you’ll need to grind your way back through interminable random encounters.

This is a more intense frustration than simply starting over. In these frustrations you are forced to effortfully undo all of your progress, brick by brick. You don’t feel it in your stomach, you feel it in your head, like a sour pressure just behind your nose or at the roof of your mouth. It is the frustration of an unwelcome lesson, hard experience telling you to stay inside your box.

4. Are We There Yet?

Everyone’s Gone To The Rapture asks you to circumnavigate a country town at a very relaxed stroll, even though a catastrophe has just taken place.

This one can feel like a cramp in the lower bowel, that builds gradually as it takes longer and longer to achieve your aims. The feeling builds gradually until it kind of crests, and your resistance to it is broken and you no longer feel it. This one depends a lot on framing: how long the player expects a task to take versus how long it actually takes. It depends on whether the slowness is seen as necessary or gratuitous or even malicious. It depends on whether it is temporary like the mud in Dark Souls‘ Blighttown, or a permanent condition.

5. Going Nowhere

Increpare’s Grave has the player buried alive, in a coffin underground. You can feebly knock on the coffin’s lid but nobody will ever hear you.

The frustration of futile, symbolic effort has been celebrated by a number of free games. Even just watching someone attempt a fruitless task induces a sense of sympathetic frustration, something that I think is best captured by artist Liza May Post’s short film and photo series Trying, in which a woman tries to swing her leg over a saddle on an elephant. I feel it in my stomach, like anxiety.

6. Going There Is Not Allowed

In Super Mario Sunshine there is a mysterious book hidden inside an underwater ruin. There’s no way to get to the book, but you can clip the camera through the wall to get a glimpse.

This is the frustration felt by children, especially babies, when they are held back from the thing they most want to do (usually to put their hand in a fire or to eat a bar of soap). A humbling sense of disempowerment, a re-establishing of hierarchical power arrangements, where the player realizes they are the bottom rung of the game’s hierarchy. The computer’s dominion over the player is absolute in a world of unfeeling, DRM-protected binary data.

8. Others Can Get There, But I Can’t

The special challenge in The Witness asks you to finish a number of puzzles before a record finishes playing. Many players will never be able to complete it, even though they can finish each of the component parts.

There are certain skillful or cognitive tasks that are not impossible; they are just impossible for me. When I attempt those tasks there is often this slowly-dawning realization that my rate of improvement is going to flatline long before I reach the level of ability required. We have all felt this – when we practiced dunking a basketball, or when we tried to get to competitive level in Counter-Strike or Street Fighter. It is a sense of confidence and optimism giving way to humiliated, morbid realism; the energy draining out of the activity. A moment when we mentally rope something off forever, resolving not to try it again.

9. I Don’t Know What The First Step Is

Zach Barth’s TIS-100 dumps you into an interface for assembly-language programming, with very little ceremony. If you never wrote any assembly before, it can be daunting.

There’s a difference between the feeling of being midway through a task and getting stumped, and being stumped before you take the first step. You can feel it in the bottom of your feet, if you’re the kind of person who feels it in the bottom of your feet when you look over the edge of a cliff. In my experience, adults have a particular terror of this kind of frustration, because it erodes the feeling of competence and experience that undergirds their self-worth. As a designer it is particularly tempting to stump adult players in this way, knowing that they can’t handle it. Like when someone reveals that they can’t handle being tickled.

10. I Am There, But So Is My Opponent (A Draw)

The Australian team reacts when the game against South Africa ends in a tie, toward the end of the 1999 World Cup

American designers often tell me that ties and draws are unsatisfying. I agree — that is why we should include them as a possible outcome in our games. Sometimes a tie can be exciting, if some other result was expected, but generally the feeling is a special kind of frustration, the anticlimax. You feel it in your body where the sense of resolution should have been. It leaves you feeling restless, agitated… maybe you’re ready to play again or maybe you just realized that playing games is a pointless exercise for idiots.

11. We’ve Been Here Before

In Messhof’s Punishment: The Punishing, every time you finish a level you have to beat every previous level again before you can attempt the next one.

Being forced to repeat the same task over and over is a special kind of frustration, one that is more or less fundamental to the human condition. Every day we wake up again, wash again, brush our teeth again, get on the train again. It’s a kind of zen frustration that becomes invisible in real life. But games have a different framing: they aspire to being the exception to the rule of repetition. If you turn the same corner six times, a game designer tries to give you six different experiences. When a game is willfully repetitive, it’s a little rebellion against the fantastical, utopian ideals of the form.

That’s all I have for now. It’s not an exhaustive recipe book or a taxonomy, it’s just a curation of a few of the best flavors. If you have something else to add, feel free to sound off in the comments!

Physics tips for game developers

2017-01-05T05:01:35Z

In 2015 I gave a short talk on the best ways to use game physics engines at the Game Developer’s conference, and it’s now online for free. The idea is: nearly everyone who makes games has to deal with a physics engine these days, but hardly anyone I talk to knows the basics of how they work. It’s not super hard to get a handle on it, but it’s counterintuitive so I thought a short tutorial talk would be useful. Maybe you’ll find it so.

You can watch the video here.

I also made a short cheat sheet in Google Docs for those of you who prefer to read. You can view it here.

Some local-multiplayer deep cuts

2017-01-04T07:01:25Z

In developing the repertoire of games for Multibowl, I played about 1000 games made from 1975 through to about 2000. I found a few gems that are worth playing in their own right, and which I think aren’t all that well known. Of course you’ve played Windjammers, and Street Fighter, and Warlords. But have you played these?

Arcade Volleyball – Rhett Anderson 1988

Commodore 64, Amiga 500, MS-DOS

Originally released as a type-in program listing for the C64, published in COMPUTE! magazine. This is the essence of a good party game: you can play with strategy within seconds of seeing it, but it supports quite a lot of depth, even though technically it’s not much more complex than Pong.

Be Bop Bout – MAR’Z Project 1994

MSX2

This freeware MSX2-DOS game isn’t easy to emulate, but it’s interesting enough to be worthwhile. It’s a freeware game where you play cards in order to drive a Streetfighter-style fighting game. There’s actually a reasonably long history of that style of game in Japan – such as Capcom’s excellent baseball game Dokaben. I like this one because it’s such a labor of intense freeware love.

Daisu Kiss – Konami 1996

Arcade (Konami GX)

This is a game about kissing your schoolyard crush, and it’s kind of amazing in two-player mode. You get to select your crush, and if there’s a conflict, you have to fight over who gets to romance the cutest kid. Reminds me of Nina Freeman’s recent commission for the No Quarter party, Bum Rush.

Musashi No Ken – Taito 1986

Nintendo Entertainment System

This is probably not a deep cut if you’re Japanese, but people in English-speaking countries might be surprised to know that there’s a two-player game that captures some of the magic of the tragically single-player fencing masterpiece Great Swordsman. Of course Blandia is literally a two-player sequel to Great Swordsman, but it doesn’t have the compact elegance of the original… something that Musashi No Ken has at least a little of.

Stone Ball – Art & Magic 1994

Arcade

This game is an amazing hot mess – the ‘humorous’ voice acting and caveman action recalls the multiplayer Midway games of the 80s, and it’s kind of hard to recommend on that front. But the way it looks! Just look at it. The French team who built it also built the Amiga classics Unreal and Agony, games that are also remembered more for their fantastic art design than their gameplay.

Sum: The Missile Human – Sum Soft 1989

MSX

It’s hard to find out anything about Sum Soft, who made several creative but technically simple games for the MSX computer in the 80s. Regardless, this game is hilarious and elegant. You’re a guy with a missile stuck to his head. If you launch the missile, you control both the guy and the missile at the same time, except the missile moves twice as fast as you do. That’s enough of a setup to generate deep tactical play and a constant sense of stress – both from being shot by your enemy’s missile and by your own!

Off The Wall – Bally/Sente 1984

Arcade

I’m going to keep recommending this until I finally meet someone who has heard of it. This simple tennis game was designed by Atari’s Nolan Bushnell for Bally/Sente, and it’s probably the earliest example of a game that is really a lot like my own work. Unlike every other tennis game, it’s viewed from the side. You have a joystick to walk back and forth and a dial that sets the angle of your arm… the rest is up to you and the very permissive set of tennis-like rules (which allows, for example, bouncing the ball on your racquet repeatedly). You really need an analogue controller to play it properly – a dial is best but a mouse will work at a stretch, and you can set up recent versions of MAME to work with multiple mice.

Fly Flicker

2017-01-04T02:25:46Z

When Stephen Clark made this game for my prototyping class, I liked it so much I ported it to HTML. It’s very simple – just click the flies.

Stephen is a wonderful designer – check out Rooftop Cop and Witchball.

Play it online (HTML/JS)

Disobedient Tangram

2017-01-04T02:20:08Z

Part of a series of disobedient toys, which I started when I made Bennett Foddy’s Ball-in-a-Cup for Hide & Seek’s Tiny Games collection.

Stair: Slide the Blocks to Ascend

2017-01-04T02:16:25Z

Stair is an infinite action-puzzle game I made for iOS with the brilliant AP Thomson (author of Beglitched and Swap Sword).

A gymnast who is in an extreme hurry is trying to climb upward. To help her, you can slide the colored blocks around to clear her way and provide platforms. It’s a game about helping someone other than yourself.

AP was responsible for the design and programming, and I made the art, animations and sounds.

Get it for free at the App Store

Ice

2017-01-04T01:29:44Z

I hid an assignment for my NYU prototyping class in this game. Use the arrow keys to pump your legs rhythmically and jump over obstacles.

Made in HTML5/Luxe.

Play it online.

Zebra

2017-01-04T00:25:30Z

This short maze game is inspired by Op-Art pioneers like Reginald Neal. It combines two ideas: first, your brain can easily segment areas of an image based on the direction of shading, without any color or tone information to help… making the game quite playable. Second, this kind of image causes conflict as your eyeball moves, making it really annoying to play.

I used it as a talking point in my microtalk on optical effects in games, from GDC 2016 – which you can watch for free here.

This is the second time I hid an assignment for my prototypes in a game. See if you can find the secret prompt.

Play it online (HTML5)

Sportsfriends

2016-12-30T08:13:00Z

Sportsfriends is something like a time capsule of the local multiplayer games that my friends and I were making and playing in and around New York in 2010-2012. It contains four games: Hokra by Ramiro Corbetta, Barabariball by Noah Sasso, and Johann Sebastian Joust by Doug Wilson. I contributed a sequel to Pole Riders, called Super Pole Riders.

And maybe a couple of secret bonus games crept in there as well.

Get the game for PC, or
Get it for Playstation 3 or 4.

Multibowl

2016-08-19T03:38:10Z

MULTIBOWL is a two-player challenge of skill and knowledge, across exciting moments in over 300 historical games across dozens of hardware platforms. It’s the first videogame collage, maybe.

I made it with the excellent AP Thomson, who designed Swap Sword, Beglitched and Stair: Slide the Blocks to Ascend. And it’s built out of a modified version of the incredible MAME emulator.

Because Multibowl is pieced together out of actual videogames, we can’t ever release it. But we have been showing it in event settings, where each game is only shown for a few seconds at a time, which is maybe more of a reasonable case of ‘fair use’. So far it has been at Fantastic Fest in Austin, XOXO in Portland, MOMA in San Francisco, Wild Rumpus in London, the Hand Eye Society Ball in Toronto, and various other places around the world. If you’re interested in showing it at a festival or in a museum or art gallery, let me know.

Bennett Foddy's Speed Chess

2014-09-16T04:35:52Z

Bennett Foddy's Speed Chess is the fastest game of chess in the world. Designed for sixteen players to play simultaneously, it lets players move their piece instantly, without waiting for their turn. They can change which piece they control at will. The game proceeds at the speed of thought.

This game was commissioned for NYU GameCenter‘s essential No Quarter event, and it is built for public festivals. It doesn’t have a UI and it definitely has bugs, and it might even fail to work on your computer. To enjoy it to the fullest, you’ll need 16 USB controllers and 16 friends, although you can play it with as few as 2.

Download it for free here (Windows).

A list of still-good Amiga games

2012-09-18T04:13:23Z

A number of my favourite game developers, like Adam Saltsman and Tim Rogers and Phil Fish, missed out on the whole Amiga oeuvre because the system was unpopular in the United States. To me this is a pity – because the popularity of the Amiga was low outside of Europe and Australia, it was sheltered from a lot of the creative trends in the USA and Japan. And so there are a number of games on the system that are quite unlike anything you might play today, since Nintendo and Sony basically won and got to write videogame history.

So here’s a list of Amiga games I think are still relevant. The games that people usually bring up in a top-10 of Amiga games are not always the ones that I would recommend, mainly because they’ve aged badly for either technical or design reasons. Shadow of the Beast was ridiculously popular in its day, and was considered the jewel in the Amiga’s crown. But in a post-Playstation world it just seems like a busted platform adventure with bad combat and just-off-ugly art. So this is going to be a list of games that an Amiga virgin might enjoy today, not a nostalgia list.

You can play them all on a modern computer using a good emulator. The old clunky standby is WinUAE but the new hotness is FS-UAE, a beautiful preconfigured thing that runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. You can find links to download most games at the excellent Lemon Amiga.

The List

IK+ – Archer Maclean, 1988

I still consider this to be the best fighting game of all time. Once you get into a rhythm it is so fluid. It has an amazing sense of yomi. And I based my game Too Many Ninjas on the bouncing-ball bonus round. Never mind the programmer art, this is an all-time classic, and still Archer Maclean’s masterpiece. I would much rather play this than Street Fighter 4.

Gods – Bitmap Brothers, 1991

While the control feels slow and clunky by today’s standards, the level design, art and sound hold up well against current indie games. But it stands out for me because of the fiendish, almost baroque design of the game’s secrets.

Speedball 2 – Bitmap Brothers, 1991

There’s only one way to play Speedball 2, which is to play it against a friend. A ridiculously fast, fun game with good opportunities for griefing your opponent. Dan Malone’s art is beautiful and iconic, and thoroughly unlike any of its console game contemporaries.

Sensible World of Soccer 95/96 – Sensible Software, 1995

Since the Amiga was biggest in Europe, soccer games were a big deal, and this one is the best if you’re playing the computer. It involves a pretty complete player/manager mode and was the first football game to involve the idea of a ‘star’ player with special skills and moves. And it still plays like a dream. If you’re up for something harder but more fluid, and you have another human to play against, the best bet is Dino Dini’s Goal.

Wizkid – Sensible Software, 1992

Imagine you’re playing breakout but you are the ball rather than the bat, and you’re trying to kill monsters by headbutting bricks into them. And then in between times you grow legs and you’re trying to solve cryptic toilet puzzles to save kittens. That’s Wizkid.

Projectyle – Eldritch the Cat, 1990

It’s a three-player combination of air hockey and sumo wrestling. Holds up with two or three players, not with one. Almost as good as Hokra.

Another World/Out Of This World – Eric Chahi, 1991

Everyone knows and loves this action-adventure now, and Tim Rogers calls it the best game of all time even though he never owned an Amiga. But it belongs on an Amiga, where it was born.

Spindizzy Worlds – Paul Shirley, 1990

I know you like hard games, because you bought Dark Souls and Super Hexagon. And I know you like Marble Madness, because everyone does. Consider this game to be ‘difficult Marble Madness in a giant Fez-like hub world’.

Paradroid ’90 – Andrew Braybrook, 1990

The definitive version of the game that spawned a million clones, hold the fire button to attach your robo-brain to other robots and commandeer their abilities, while you explore and empty out a giant, hulking spaceship. Hard, spartan, and amazing.

Biplane Duel – Peter Mason, 1989

An amazing single-screen two-player freeware game that I once played for about twelve hours in a sitting. A lot of the games on this list are two-player single-screen e-sports, and this is one of the simplest and best among them.

E-Motion – The Assembly Line, 1990

The Assembly line worked out how to use the Amiga’s high-colour HAM video mode, and they also worked out how to raytrace spheres. And they built their games around these two pieces of knowledge. E-Motion is a wonderful physics-based puzzle game: bounce atoms into same-coloured atoms to annihilate them and clear the screen. Be prepared for a chain reaction if you make a mistake.

Addendum

Some curiosities haven’t aged as well. But they’re still worth investigating for the sake of interest

Damocles – Novagen, 1990

This game is an entire solar system on an 880kb disk. You have arrived to save a planet from being hit by a comet. There’s only a few days to do it, and if you try to visit other planets by flying there in spacecraft, you’ll never have time. How will you solve the puzzle? There are at least four ways. It’s too bad the PC version was never completed, because the Amiga is a bit of a dog for playing 3D games.

Ebonstar – Robert McNally

I love four-player competitive e-sports to bits, and this is the first one I ever really played. Four spaceships duke it out to either knock each other into a black hole, or to explode the black hole by accurately firing a shot down the space station’s narrow beam of light. It’s a good time, but I’d rather play Hokra if I had three friends and four joysticks.

Nebulus – John M. Phillips, 1988

So the guys who made the excellent Fez tell me they never played Nebulus. But Nebulus is like caveman Fez.

CLOP

2012-08-03T17:03:36Z

CLOP is a sequel to QWOP, but I guess you could also say it was inspired by Kikstart II. Your task is simply to run over a small hill.

This one hasn't been ported to HTML successfully, but you can play it on the free Flashpoint archive.

Sun God

2012-07-10T01:00:17Z

Sun God is a game that was commissioned for the ‘Soundplay’ event being run by Pitchfork, Kill Screen, and Intel for the Pitchfork festival.

I was asked to make something at the boundary of music and games, so I made this thing that is focused on experiencing the song. That song is ‘Sun God’ by Cut Copy, a band I used to play bass for. It was originally a browser game but you can use the downloadable festival version.

Play the game here (browser).

Download the game here. (Windows or Mac, requires Adobe AIR).

2QWOP

2012-02-16T06:11:28Z

Since I’ve been making a bunch of two-player games, I decided to adapt QWOP for a two player race.

Modern computer keyboards don’t do well with pressing a lot of keys at once. So I recommend you either use a gamer keyboard (NKRO) or else plug in a second USB keyboard for player 2.

This one hasn't been ported to HTML5 but you can get the original flash version in the free Flashpoint Archive.

Pole Riders

2011-11-08T08:34:18Z

Pole Riders is a pole-vaulting polo game for two players only. Vault up to kick the ball into the opposing player’s goal, or kick your opponent off their pole.

I made an updated, much better version of this game called Super Pole Riders, which is part of the Sportsfriends compilation for computers and Playstations. If you like this one, you should check that out – I feel like I fixed a lot of the design flaws in the original game.

It’s a bit silly, this game.

Play it online here. (Flash)

I'm in Wired

2011-07-27T00:17:11Z

Kickstarter’s Fred Benenson wrote a profile of me for this month’s Wired magazine. I think he did a nice job.

You can read it here.

GIRP

2011-03-28T16:01:18Z

GIRP is the sequel to QWOP. It’s a game about climbing a cliff using all the letter keys on your keyboard.

Press and hold the letter keys to reach for the rings, and use either SHIFT, CONTROL or the mouse button to haul yourself up. Your goal is a bird’s nest at the top of the cliff, that has an awesome, amazing treasure hidden inside. But you have to contend with a territorial bird and the slowly rising tide. It’s not as hard as QWOP but I think you will find it… hard enough.

Play it online (Flash)

or, since Adobe and Google couldn’t be bothered to keep Flash games alive:

Download a windows build here.

Big update for Evacuation

2011-02-03T17:10:29Z

It’s long overdue, but we just updated Evacuation for iPhone to version 2.0. Changes include:

27 new hand-crafted challenge levels. Try to get an A-rank in each one to progress.
Save-game support for iOS 3 and iOS 4. Now you can take a call and not lose your progress.
Better visual feedback for touches, makes the game feel more responsive.
Tested for iOS 4.
Various bugfixes.

New level select screen

Get it now for a dollar on the iPhone store, or upgrade your old version for free.

QWOP for iOS

2010-12-23T18:16:09Z

In 2010 I released a redesigned version of QWOP for smartphones. I guess it’s ok because Stott Stoddard, the designer of Robot Unicorn Attack, played it so much he wore down indentations in his iPad screen.

Amazingly, it still works fine in 2026. Knock on wood!

Buy it for iOS here.

Some unfinished designs

2010-10-28T03:47:44Z

Like everyone, I have made a lot of designs that never became finished games, usually because the prototype wasn’t fun or was too hard to make. Sometimes I come back to these designs and finish them (Winner vs. Loser is one example).

This one was going to be something like Tetris in reverse, where the computer would play tetris in an incompetent manner, and you would try to fill in the holes using the gun at the bottom so the computer could succeed. It works better in theory than reality. Plus, steampunk is over.

This was an attempt to remake Sente’s ‘Off The Wall‘, one of the best, least-known multiplayer games of all time. I still want to make it work sometime but my first prototype was a mess. If anyone wants to handle the code, drop me a line. Or if you just want to hang out and play Off The Wall.

An idea for a chess-like game where you strike your opponent by jumping two squares past him. I implemented it and it was… not quite right. It needs a fundamental rethink. Maybe it would work better as a content-oriented adventure game, but I don’t do content, not even in two colours. (2017 update: ok maybe this isn’t dead after all)

I’ve tried to implement this idea twice: It’s a game about using the wind and gravity to build up speed. The physics need to be just right, and so far I’ve been forced to put it in the ‘too hard’ basket. One day I’ll work out how to get it right, though.

Chicanery for iOS

2010-10-26T09:16:46Z

I converted Anna Anthropy‘s Chicanery to iOS. The idea is to hold the corner of the screen and never let go, or your head gets cut off.

There are some other nice games that came out afterwards that take the concept a lot further, like Adriaan’s Friendstrap, and Michael’s O, and the Copenhagen Collective’s BUTTON.

When I bought an iPad, it immediately became clear that most developers weren’t making the most of the social potential of the device. iPad games can be shared in a way that games haven’t really been since hotseat computer games died out in the 90s. Now when we play multiplayer games, everyone has their own controller and in fact everyone is probably using a separate console in a separate house. Something has been lost.

Anyway it’s free (without ads or any monetization) at the app store.

Winner vs. Loser

2010-10-26T08:21:55Z

Winner vs. Loser is a two-player, one-button athletics game in the mold of ‘Track ‘N Field’. Press your button rhythmically to build up speed, and hold it down to jump the hurdles.

I wrote this for Kokoromi’s Gamma 4 event, which called for games that could be played with one button, but they didn’t go for it. Maybe if I had pressed my button more rhythmically…

A training mode is included for people with no friends, but really it’s designed to be played with one or more people standing by.

Play it in your browser.

QWOP

2010-10-26T07:18:20Z

QWOP is a simple game about running extremely fast down a 100 meter track.

If you want to know what it's about, you could watch this ancient Cr1tikal video.

Or if you wanted something more intellectual you could watch this amazing talk by Frank Lantz.

In 2016 I updated it to work with HTML5, so you don’t need Flash to play it. Should work fine even on a smartphone, using the on-screen buttons. But if you want to play the original Flash version you can do that with the excellent, free Flashpoint archive.

Play it online for free. (HTML5 or Flash)

Gentle Gradient

2010-10-26T04:31:36Z

I have always found the gradient editors in packages like Photoshop unsatisfactory for making gentle colour gradients (such as skies). If you use two colours, you get a smooth gradient but usually a very ugly sky. If you use three or more colours, it is very hard to get a smooth gradient. You can do it, but it takes a lot of trial and error to find the right arrangement of colour swatches.

So I’ve made this tool, which is designed to plot a graceful bezier arc through RGB space. At this point you can only use three colours. The curve will not touch the middle colour – rather it is used as a control point.

This tool isn’t for everyone. If you need more of an explanation of why this is useful, you probably don’t need it. But I hope some people will find it to be a useful timesaver and a creative aid, or at least inspire them to implement something similar in their own tools.

Click here to download Gentle Gradient 0.1 for mac.

Mac OSX 10.5+ / Intel only.

Gentle Gradient is distributed as-is, with no documentation or support.If you want to make a clone or incorporate the idea into Photoshop, you are welcome to. Gentle Gradient is alpha software, and I am not responsible if your computer blows up.

Too Many Ninjas

2010-10-26T04:28:18Z

Too Many Ninjas was the first game I ever finished. It is a reinterpretation of the excellent and elegant bouncing ball minigame from Archer Maclean’s incredible IK+. Swing your sword to defend yourself against the horde of ninjas and their flying shurikens.

Play it online. (HTML5)

Evacuation

2010-10-26T04:24:46Z

Evacuation is a simple puzzle-strategy game. Vent the aliens into space but try not to evacuate your spacemen or the captain!

I designed Evacuation and made the artwork, but for the code I turned to the expertise of my friend Ryan, who is a lot better at programming, mathematics, and logic.

You can Play it online in your browser

Little Master Cricket

2010-10-26T02:49:09Z

Little Master Cricket is my attempt to make a cricket game that focuses on compelling gameplay rather than realism or verisimilitude. The real pleasure of cricket is to swing a bat and hit a ball, something that’s missing from every commercial game and most free ones as well.

Play it online. (HTML5)

I made a nicer version for the iPhone but it didn't survive the 32-bit app purge.