The year was 2007. HELLYEAH was stinking up the radio waves with “Alcohaulin’ Ass”. The democrats had regained the house and the senate, effectively turning George W. Bush into a lame duck president. And, most importantly of all, YouTube had become the most popular place to waste your time on-line.
YouTube was seriously such a different place in 2007 compared to now. Sure, videos could only be ten minutes and fifty-nine seconds long, every homophobic and ablist slur you could think of was thrown around so casually that your average Gen-Z would probably faint at the lack of accountability on display, and the site itself was held together with duct tape and Elmer’s Glue… But that was honestly what made it fun. There were parody dubs full of needless profanity and insider jokes that normies weren’t in on, there were speedruns of popular video games, there were people talking about twenty-year-old video games like they were war crimes, there were dudes making silly animatics featuring toy army men (yo! [raises hand]) or G.I. Joe or those Ultimate Muscle figurines or whatever… Hell, there were even dudes just sitting in front of their webcams of varying quality, rambling about things they want to talk about on that occasion… It was such a simpler time. Compared to today, where most of the content consists of every single fucking thing being put in a tier list like some OCD shit, or some hour-long video essay on how this random character from this random cartoon is offensive and you should hate them because of it, all while being forbidden from saying words like “kill” and “gun” and “murder”, and having to hide behind childish-sounding newspeak like “unalive”, “pew pew”, or even just bleeping out the words outright… Seriously, I don’t even recognize this place anymore. But on the positive side, it doesn’t crash NEARLY as often.
I never really stopped going to Youtube. Largely because right now, the only alternative is Rumble, and… Yeah, I refuse to dignify any website willing to host OAN, or any of that Q shit with my viewership.
But back in the day, I loved YouTube. And one of my favorite things to watch was playthroughs of various games. And a game I became very fascinated with thanks to YouTube playthroughs was I Wanna Be The Guy.
I Wanna Be The Guy is the stuff of legends. It’s the kind of game that you don’t really PLAY so much as you ENDURE. If you’re somehow able to make ANY progress in this experiment in agony, you’ve truly accomplished something. Or, more likely, you’ve wasted hours of your life that you could’ve definitely used to do something more fun and/or relaxing, but hey, you do you.
IWBTG is about a character simply known as The Kid. He wants to be The Guy. Why? Fuck if I know. I guess being The Guy means you get all The Bitches. Or maybe it’s a right of passage sort of thing? Well, whatever the case may be, you have to traverse through seven different levels of unimaginable, rage-inducing madness in order to accomplish this goal.
To be honest, I never actually sat down and played this game. In large part because it falls into the trap a lot of game developers, independent or otherwise, always fall into, and make things super fucking tiny. Maybe it was my own fault for not getting a flat screen monitor until around the time Windows7: the appology for Windows Vista was making its rounds. All I know is I had to strain to see the main character of the game, regardless of who was playing it. Lord knows I wouldn’t stand a chance.
“HA! LOSER! shut up and git gud, you filthy fucking casual!”
Ugh, don’t even get me started on THAT bullshit. At least not right now.
Since my crap eye sight would make it impossible to get anywhere in the game, I instead decided to check out other people’s playthroughs, or “Let’s Plays” of the game. And… Wow.
For starters, I will say that this game is definitely a product of its time. Primarily in the fact that it’s practically nothing but a handful of references to other video games held together by that classic millennial cliche of “lol random.” For example, Mike Tyson from Punch Out is the first boss. Why? Because lol random. Yip, definitely a game made in the 2000s.
But if you can see your way past the references for the sake of references style of comedy, then you’ll quickly discover its other, significantly more memorable gimmick: the hard as fuck difficulty.
This is not a game that rewards you for intelligence. Rather, this is a game that punishes you for having the audacity to play it. Apples fall from trees at ridiculous, or even impossible angles. Laser traps can lock you in a room and kill you before you even have a chance to gain your bearings. Literally EVERYTHING kills you in one hit, and you get no weapon upgrades that I’m aware of. Puzzles punish you for trying to solve them the logical way, and you only make progress by figuring out how to intentionally glitch or bullshit your way through.
Basically, what I’m trying to say is that this game is obscenely difficult to the point where it’s literally designed to piss you off. Because fuck you, I guess.
I’ve heard multiple descriptors get put on this game in an attempt at fitting it into a genre of some sort. “Massacre game” seemed to be the popular one at the time. “Meat Grinder” is another one I’ve heard in more recent years, though that tends to apply to games like the first Darkest Dungeon these days. However, I think the descriptor I like to use for this game is “Troll game.” Because this game is clearly designed by a troll, and it frequently trolls the gamer with all of what we’d nowadays refer to as “rage bate.”
I feel like you don’t believe me when I tell you about the frustration I watched other people endure. Trust me, dear reader, I’m not just taking the piss to try and sell you on this game. I still remember watching a couple of Let’s Plays that suddenly stopped in the middle, and the LP’er in question announcing that they had to stop playing. Why? Because this game was pissing them off so much that it literally sent them to the ER. I am so not kidding. This game was so anger inducing, it literally sent at least two LP’ers I knew at the time to the hospital!
“You know, they could’ve been lying about that to help the developer sell the game, right?”
I mean it’s not impossible, I guess. But why would you lie about that? You yourself gain nothing from it. If anything, THE GAME gains a reputation that only encourages the “fuck you, git gud” crowd to ride your ass for not living on your PlayStation or Xbox like they do.
Almost twenty years later, the game has since been entered into the public domain. The developer made the source code available to the public, and has given permission to let people make their own versions of it. I hear through the grapevine there’s a Mario Maker esque level editor you can download that lets you make your own levels! Great for the guy who wants to join in on the fun, but doesn’t want to learn Game Maker code to do it.
Between then and now, the developer has attempted sequels, and even a prequel. Unfortunately, outside of a playable demo of the first level for one or two attempts, nothing else really came of it. I’ve never really heard a legit reason for why these projects were discontinued, or even just abandoned, but it is what it is.
If you have nothing better to do with your life, if you love games with punishing difficulty, and if you’re brave enough, I recommend giving it a try. I have no idea where you’d find it nowadays, but if it’s in the public domain, it can’t be TOO hard to find it.
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