Reply All - #105 At World's End

Episode Date: September 21, 2017

Phia helps a listener track down a mythical, vanished video game.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From Gimlet, this is Reply All. I'm Alex Goldman. And I'm PJ Vote. We are in the studio with Fia Benin. Hey, guys. Hey. What are you doing here? Well, okay, so three months ago, I got an email from one of our listeners,

and she was writing because she'd lost something on the internet, and she really wanted help finding it. Hello? Thia, can you hear me? Yes. Oh, that's great. Her name is Chris. She's 20 years old, and she lives in Serbia.

Mm-hmm. And last year, she graduated high school and she moved to Belgrade to start college. And I've kind of been lonely this few months since I'm not from Belgrade. I'm from a small town called Vallewa. I live alone and I'm just like removed from all my friends and family. So she's living alone in this big city. And there are these stretches like. Days go by where she doesn't have a conversation with anyone at all.

Yeah. And so she started doing the thing you do when you're lonely. She started reminiscing about times when she was really happy. Specifically, these summers she spent in her childhood with her best friend, this girl she was really, really close with named Kacha. Who lived, like, across the street from me? Mm-hmm. And I would just, like, climb over my fence and just go into her yard.

I mean, she, like, lived in this huge, like, it's, like, the biggest. house I was ever inside of. And we used to play inside the house, like hide and sick and stuff like that. So this would happen every summer, like when Chris was nine and Chris was ten, and eleven. And then

one of those years, during one of those summers, they discovered computer games. She had this old PC and we would just spend the entire day just playing flash games. Flash games, like the cheap, dumb cheap.

games that were free and had a million ads around them. It was always like shoot a celebrity or play pinball. Right. And there's this one flash game that Chris remembers playing that she says was the best game that they played. It's called Bunny How We First Met. Bunny How We First Met? Yeah, that's what it's called.

And this is what Chris wants my help with. She desperately wants help finding this game. Let me tell you how she remembers it. It's a world-building game, super cute graphics. You're the bunny king on this island, and you hop around the island popping bubbles and finding ghosts that'll help you out. But you are trying to gain as many gems and coins as you possibly can. And to do that, you're enslaving other bunnies. You put them to work either in lumber mills or, like, mining for gold.

There's, there's, I... And I haven't mentioned this yet. In the game, you're a bunny. and all you want is to find someone who will love you. But the way you think you can get that is by acquiring lots of money. And you had your girlfriend, or she wasn't a girlfriend, she was more like a person you were trying to marry. Like Mario and Princess Peach.

Not really. She was more like a gold digger. And you just, you had to provide for her, so she would marry you in the end. So... Oh, weird. Like you had to earn a certain amount of money in order for her to be your wife. Yes, you need to buy her dress and buy her rings and you need to buy her love. But then in the middle of the game, this like very grown-up, complicated drama starts to unfold

where you meet this other female bunny who you really like. Chris remembers her like a stripper. and for some reason you know you're supposed to end up with the gold digger, but you really want to be with the stripper. It just sounds like the person who made this game had a lot in their head. Do you know what I mean? Like they were going through something? Right, right.

Chris was totally curious about this. She was like, what kind of person would make a game like this? But she also loved it. And she found herself in her apartment in Belgrade just really missing that time she had with Kachia. playing Bunny how we first met. I'm missing that feeling of hanging out with someone who's like that close to you. The friend I had at that time doesn't exist anymore.

Like she grew up, she's another person. Yeah. And it's not fair of me to like compare her to her like 12 year old self. But I'm missing the 12 year old. She wants to go back to that feeling of just being with a really good friend. So she Googles, Bunny, how we first met, finds it, she clicks on a link, it looks like it's loading, and then nothing appears. It's just, it's dead. And she goes to a couple other links on other sites, they're dead too.

The whole thing's missing. It was just like, bearded out. I couldn't understand what was happening. And I got really frustrated. Chris has spent the last six months trying to find this game. She's gone on forums. She's searched through comments on videos. She's found this whole community of people who are like,

I'm looking for Bunny how we first met too. Do you know where it is? In all her searching, she hasn't found the game. She hasn't found the creator. She hit a wall, and that's when she came to me. So this is how I started. Let me just show you this thing really quickly. Okay.

This is a different video game. It's called Triple Town. And Chris saw this when she was searching. and she noticed that this art, like the cute little characters, the little animals, look so much like the animals and bunny. Chris wrote the company, no luck. I wrote the company, and for some reason, I get an email back that says, hey, I wrote Bunny how we first met.

That's awesome. I know. Did you have a copy of the game for Chris? He said, I can tell you where Bunny is, but it's complicated. And in order to explain it, I have to tell you the story of, of how I created Bunny. Okay. Hello.

Hello. Can you hear me okay? Oh my gosh, you sound beautiful. Oh, wonderful. This is Dan Cook, the creator of Bunny How we first met. Where am I talking to you? Oh, so I'm just out of my home. So I'm in Seattle.

Yeah, there's a cat here who meows at me periodically. Dan is sweet and patient and gentle. like talking to Dan is kind of like talking to a kindergarten teacher. That doesn't sound like that's really the effect you get from playing the game that he designed. Right, I know. But talking to Dan, what really surprised me actually was what the game meant to him. He was trying to express an idea that he'd been thinking a lot about, which is that our culture is so obsessed with money that it poisons our ability to find love.

Is there a reason that that was on your? brain at that time? At that point, I had just gotten married and I was thinking about this a lot. Yeah. I guess I don't really understand what you were contemplating about relationships at that point. Have you ever planned a wedding? No, I don't want to. It is one of the more crass commercial projects that is foisted upon people.

The culture, the shallow culture is always. always present. You know, like, weddings where people spend $10,000 on flowers or, like, diamond rings or even smaller things, like having to buy somebody else's ticket to the movie theater, the idea that all of those things could prove that you actually love another person. Dan was like, I have a message I need to tell the world, and it's that that stuff is bullshit. So then the way he decides to tell the world that message is like, it doesn't feel like this game is that. Like, that doesn't feel like the game that Chris fell in love with. I know. Like, her game was, like, strippers and vodka drinking foxes and monsters that you had to explode.

So what did he, was he like, oh, she was just a kid and she misunderstood? No. So the thing was that Dan didn't know how to make video games. He could do the art, but he didn't know how to code. So he would just pour, like, all of his hopes and ideas into a blog that he had. And then one evening, this email comes in, and it is obviously written by someone who is intoxicated. Like the words are not quite connecting the way words should in a sentence. And he says, I'm in Australia and I've been drinking, and I would love to make a game with you. And I'm like, at this point, I'm like, you know what, I have nothing to lose by saying yes to pretty much. anyone. So Dan and the Australian, they start to figure out how this will work. Dan, he does the

art, he sends it over, and the Australian, he'll code it, bring it to life. And sometimes we would not talk for a long time, months on end. And I would ask him what had happened. And he had just disappeared into the Australian outback to, he had a cabin out there. And he sent some pictures. And it wasn't really a cabin so much as like some wood that was sort of in a structure that might provide shelter. It was a great mystery to me. All that I really knew is that sometimes he would appear online and we would make things together. So I called Dan's partner. And you got a hold of him?

And I got a hold of him. Are you in Melbourne? Are you? Or? I'm in the country. So I'm in country, New South Wales. the moment, which is, um, it's just a little town of 30 people, sort of in the outback. This is the Australian. He has a name. It's Andre Spearing. And Andre, he wasn't on board

because of any big ideas about materialism and love. He just thought it'd be fun to make a little game about bunnies. For me, I don't think anyone was going to get any huge, deep meaning out of the game bunny we first met. I mean, it was an island with two girls on a who probably weren't the best females in the world to be on the dating scene. So they start building this world. Like they create the island and they design the bunny king. And, you know, those little bunnies that Chris thought of as slaves, those were actually Dan said, just supposed to be worker bunnies.

And eventually they get to the main characters of the game. This is where Dan is, like, mapping out his whole grand vision. And they create two characters. One is this gold digger who represents all things materialism. And then he makes the other love interest. She's the soulmate. She's the cool pirate bunny. And then, just as we're releasing the game,

Andre, who is a free spirit, says, I was up late last night, and I've made the most amazing thing ever. And I'm like, what did you make? He's like, I animated the pirate girl doing a dance. Why did you put that in the game? I don't know. I think I just thought it'd be funny to have this stupid bunny doing a strip taste. So that's why Chris remembers a stripper.

Okay, so let me just show you what this is. Oh, no. It's actually on YouTube. It's towards the end of the game. you can pay the pirate bunny a boatload of jewels. A literal boatload? No, just a ton of jewels. And...

No. It's like gone to like a pink and purple background. And it's like a close-up of the bunny sensually dancing and a bikini. With two other bunnies behind her, putting on lipstick. Oh, my God. She's wearing a thong. But, and a close up over putting on makeup.

And then a... She eats a rose. That's it? That's it? That's it? Is that you pay the bunny a bunch of money, and then it wears, like, a... Then it wears its underwear and dances? What more do you specifically want to see that you didn't get?

I don't want to see anything. Uh-huh. You see a close-up of her G-string. She's actually deep-throating that rose. Okay. I retract everything I said. Here's what I can say. Yeah.

Dan hated it. Well, yeah. Yeah, I'd imagine. So this, like, unholy marriage between these two guys managed to produce this incredibly bizarre game that just, like, perfectly captivated Chris's 12-year-old mind. When they released the game, it was actually an incredible hit. But Dan said the reason why Chris and so many other people can't find that game today, is because of what happened next. In 2014, the company that was hosting the game online

so people could play it, it went under. And with it, went the code for the game. The only person who still had the code was actually Andre. Dan didn't have a copy. And the timing was terrible. Right around that time, Andre went on a walkabout. He faded away into the Australian outback. Oh, wow.

So he just kind of went away. When he finally did get a message from Andre, it wasn't optimistic. It turned out that the source code for the game was on a hard drive that had been ripped out of the computer and was in some back corner of one of these huts that he lived in. And with that, Andre just like disappears back into the wilderness. until six months ago when Dan got an envelope in the mail. There was a thumb drive in there, and on that was the source code. So now I have the source code.

You do? I do. Here's the catch. The code was a mess. The game was unplayable. And maybe somebody could get the game to work again, but it would take an insane amount of time and effort. Hi, is this Chris? This is.

So I called up this guy Chris Griffith. He's an expert on Flash games, worked in Flash for 10 years. So I guess, like, the question is, would you be interested slash able to repair this game? Yeah. I would say it's probably either not very much work or a whole lot of work. It turns out it was a whole lot of work. Andre had coded it in like weird Andre-specific ways. When I checked him with Chris Griffith after a few days, he wrote me back.

He said, the work is like trying to repair a part of a huge tapestry. And pulling on one thread can break other parts of it unexpectedly. But after a month, he gave me the news. Bunny was back. Hello? Hi, Chris. Chris, can you hear me? Hi, Theo.

Hi. Yes, can you hear me? Yes, you sound great. A couple weeks ago, Chris and I, I jump back on Skype. This was almost three months after we first talked, and Chris was so excited. Yeah. So you can just send me the link.

Here we go. Did you get it? Yes. So the green looks familiar. Yes, that's exactly the same color. Oh my God. Oh my God, I hear it. I'm Susanna, the Ghost.

Have you been to Bani Island before? Oh, my God. Oh, my God. So I'm clicking it. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. This is like, oh, my God. Like, this is, I don't remember the music, but that's the sound.

Chris was actually screen sharing with me as she was playing the game. And it was really cool to watch because she was moving, around the island, hopping to these different parts, finding connections between islands, and just rediscovering all these places that she and Kacche used to go together. Oh, and here's a bunny house. Look at them. Dumb bunnies, you can eat of foods. Why would you owe? Because there's not enough food. So when there's not enough wood, they got down fruits. Purchase more woods. Oh my God, this is like turning into chaos. If you would like to play Bunny how we first met,

we will be hosting the game on our website for a little while at least. You can go check it out for now at replyall. com. It's b-u-n-n-I. Reply-all. dot limo slash bunny. You can go there and play it yourself. After the break, seals, assassins, and late 90s boy bands.

Welcome back to the show. Okay, so, Alex, Fia. Yes. So the whole time you were talking about Bunny, I was thinking about how, like, so like my memory of flash games is not that they were like weird like my memory of flash games is they were all really messed up

like they were like violent and weird and kind of bad and I remember sort of avoiding them for that reason and when we were when like Fia was working on the story I started to wonder about that like did I just play weird flash games was my experience universal

and so I looked into it and turns out like the games I was playing were super popular they were as bad as I remember them and they all basically came from in mind of this one kid, a kid who grew up 20 minutes away from me in a different Philly suburb. The kid's name is Tom Fulp. Oh, he runs Newgrounds. How do you know that? When I was like a young punk, I used to hang out with this kid. I can't even remember his name, but he was like the only one of us that had like a real job. And it was at Newgrounds.

Really? We called him normal guy because he was the normal guy. He was like a normal guy compared to the rest of us. So, Fia, just for the record, Newgrounds was like... Not a place where normal guy worked. Newgrounds was basically in the year of like 1999, if you went into any junior high computer lab, some kid would be playing a pop-up flash game that they should not have been playing at school, which he was like quickly tab away from.

And that game was hosted on Newgrounds. And it was where people would go and they'd play these games, they'd like hang out and talk about these games. It was a huge place that had like millions and millions of visitors. Cool. Yeah. So, hello? Yes, hey.

I called Tom. I wanted to know why all of a sudden his games had been so popular and also like why they'd seemingly just disappeared. How do you explain what that era was to somebody who wasn't there for it? I'd say there was like definitely like a punk rock aspect to it where it just felt very experimental and very unpredictable. You would literally like show up to Newgrounds every day not knowing what to expect because someone could upload something and it could just push boundaries in terms of like the themes that you've never seen before because there was no censorship going on. And Flash was the language that made all this possible because Flash was simple, it was cheap, and it let you start from a picture. Like if you knew how to draw, you can make

an animation and then with Flash, you could take that animation and like turn it into a game. And so Tom got excited about a world where it was almost like the dumb cartoons he would have drawn in the back of the classroom to crack his friends up. he could put those online and let people play them. I guess 1996 was when I was senior in high school. The first popular webpage I made was called Club Aseal, where you'd click on a picture of a seal to club it, and it's just get all like bloody.

I remember Clubbaciel. Like I really do. And then I made Assassin, which kind of became like a real cornerstone of the site in those early years where I would make games where you assassinate annoying celebrities. So it was like sort of the same thing where you see them and you click on.

I mean, you shoot them or make their head explode or whatever. So who was your first annoying celebrity? I know I did, like, Hansen and Bob Sagitt and Leonardo DiCaprio. This is, like, a very specific era of, like, if you were a teen boy, which celebrities were annoying to you. Yeah, yeah. The reason Newgrounds got so huge is that it wasn't just Tom's games. He decided to let strangers submit their flash games and then have people vote on their favorites. So club a seal, that was Tom's fault.

But then somebody else came up with the idea for clubby the seal, which was this game where you disguised yourself as a seal and then go out and skin human beings in retaliation. It's really gross. And that was the sort of thing that was happening all the time. Like you had a bunch of smart, weird people who were trying to top each other when it came to creating the darkest, most disturbing kinds of games. Things that were like super, super edgy and violent and like things that you couldn't play. on your home video game console or see on TV. Did you have moments where you felt, because you know, you were like,

like when you're that age, you do provocative stuff. And then later sometimes like, you're like, I wouldn't have done that one or whatever. Like, did you have moments though during that time where you had second thoughts about anything that you'd made? I made the game Pico's School,

if you're familiar with that one. I'm not familiar with that one. What was that? That was, it was, so this is, some things you just have to, own up to you can't escape in life. So it was after Columbine and I made a game where you

you kind of rescued the school. So you weren't the shooter. It was a bunch of goth kids shot up the school and Pico basically saves the day even though it was still pretty tasteless. It was interesting because Columbine's like an interesting thing to me because like you see so many reflections of yourself in that group of kids like you know you didn't like there's like a lot of kids in your school you didn't like

there was bullies and there's you felt misunderstood or whatever And, you know, I never felt like I wanted to go shoot everybody, but I still, you know, Columbine was like an interesting study in, you know, our generation and what different kids were going through. Because what you're saying is like these were, because I remember having that feeling, too, where the kids who had done this stuff, they'd done something really evil. And a lot of what they cared about and thought about were things that I cared about and thought about. Like, I liked violent video games. I didn't want to, like, hurt somebody in real life.

But it was a weird feeling to be like, it was just a, it was a weird feeling that I didn't, I remember just not knowing what to do with. No, it was interesting. And it made you think about, like, if I had, like, I was already through high school when that happened, but it made me think, like, would I be, you know, would I have gotten suspended from high school for, for, like, for, like, drawing violent stuff and, you know, liking KMFDM and whatever. Like, would that have, because I kind of felt like they were, like, cracking down. then on kids after that.

Tom took a lot of criticism in the years after Columbine because what would happen is people would publish school shooting games on Newgrounds, and Tom would very rarely do anything about it, even if he thought, like, I would not have made this game. When people would come to the site and they'd be, they'd be like edgier than I was, there's always that side of me that's like,

I don't want to kick them off the site because I feel like they're like me. A lot of people do, like, reach out. Like, a lot of people, when they're, like at a real low point, you know, like when you're kind of in a dark place, you really do enjoy dark humor. And I feel like a lot of people don't understand that. Like some people that don't get dark humor, they don't realize that it can be really therapeutic to other people that are having kind of like dark feelings and stuff, like just feeling depressed or down or anxious. And so like there'd be people that reach out to me that, you know, really like considered

it like life-saving that this like existed for them. You know, they just enjoyed the site so much they were so miserable in the rest of their life. And then they would come. to Newgrounds and be like their happy place. And you just like, you meet a lot of people like that over the years. And it makes you feel like this is sort of like, you know, as crazy as it might look to some people, it is like performing like a public good in other ways. So it kind of made me feel, you know, yeah, it's like I like this stuff and there's other people that like this stuff too.

And it's good that they can have a place instead of just feeling like, you know, outsiders and outcasts all the time. So Tom kept protecting his website from the many people who wanted to shut it down. until in 2010, Flash games faced an enemy that they could not defeat. One single person who just decided, Flash is over now. Without further ado, let's bring out the Steve. I think you all are here to see. Steve Jobs. So here's Steve Jobs on stage explaining that the iPhone,

the new mobile device that everyone is going to use to access the internet, will not support Flash at all. different pieces of technology kind of go in cycles they have their springs and summers and autums and then they go to the graveyard of technology

and so we try to pick things that are in their springs and if you choose wisely you can save yourself an enormous amount of work versus trying to do everything essentially the party's over If you talk to anyone that uses Flash, like a lot of people have moved on from Flash,

but they've never found something they love as much as Flash, because it was a really unique way that an artist and a programmer could work together in the same development software. But, yeah, I feel like, you know, that's a shame that it got singled out like that. Tom still makes video games, and so do a lot of the other people on Newgrounds. But they don't make them in Flash anymore. That's over. As we were getting off the phone, Tom mentioned that he's actually a dad now, like with kids of his own.

I asked him if he'd shown them new grounds. He said, yeah, but not the dark parts. For now, he's keeping his kids a little sheltered, actually. He hopes they don't look. He knows they probably well. Reply all is hosted by me, PJ Vote, and Alex Goldman. The show is produced this week by Shruti Pinnaminani, Fia Bennon, Damiano Marquetti, and Austin Mitchell. Our editor is Tim Howard.

Our intern is Anna Foley. we were mixed by Kate Balinski and Haley Shaw. Our theme song is by the mysterious breakmaster cylinder. Special thanks to everybody else who missed Bunny and spoke to Fia, and special thanks to Sharina Ahn. The guy who resurrected Bunny for us is Chris Griffith. His website is Class Extension.com. If you want to see other games designed by Dan Cook,

you can check out Spry Fox. And if you want to see Tom Fulbs' other games, go to Newgrounds. People aren't making flash games, but they are making tons of weird games. Matt Lieber is one last softball game at the end of the summer. Our website where you can sign up

for our weekly newsletter is replyall.com. Our show is available on Spotify. You can check us out there. You can also listen on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, wherever you choose to. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.

Everywhere. Sometimes it feels like I can't do anything but work around them. Let's get out of here.