I WANNA BE THE GUY
MANY YEARS AGO "THE GUY"
LEFT WORLD AND RETREAT
TO "DUNGEON OF DOOM"
NOW "YOUNG BOY" GOES TO
DEFEAT "THE GUY" AND
BECOME "THE GUY" WITH HIS
GUN PASS HANDED DOWN BY
FORMER "GRANDFATHER THE GUY"
GO FIND THE "8" UNITS
NOW BECOME "THE GUY"
- the introduction screen for IWBTG
In 1942, the Algerian philosopher Albert Camus stated that
"there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is
suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering
the fundamental question of philosophy." Ultimately, he found in favour of
life. Now I offer you evidence to the contrary.
I Wanna Be The Guy: The Movie: The Game (IWBTG), taken at its
most benign and superficial, is a platformer video game developed in
Multimedia Fusion 2 by Mike "Kayin" O'Reilly. It has, since its
freeware PC release in October 2007, become infamous throughout the indie
gaming community, noted for its sadistic difficulty and its surreal callbacks
to classic 8-bit games.
Our hero is, of course, The Wanna Be The Guy (aka the Kid), a modern,
spiritual heir to Candide, whose smile serves to allay our fears, assuring us
that "blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called sons of
God." His armament is bare: the "Cape of Hero"
and a "Very Small Gun" (the former serving no discernable purpose,
the latter, very little).
There is no Halo-esque shield regeneration, no super mushrooms, no lives, no
hit points—well, there is one hit point. Lose it and watch as the Kid lights
up, as if his insides were made of C-4. And after the little guy bursts like a
raw blood sausage in a cape, a rock riff taken from Guilty Gear Isuka plays over
the words "GAME OVER" and "PRESS 'R' TO TRY AGAIN".
"R", actually, is the permanent "quick reload" button.
"Q" is for suicide.
The game's save boxes are its only mercy; shooting one will start you in
that location after you reload. Incidentally, the game's difficulty functions
solely off save box placement. The default difficulty is "hard".
Selecting "medium" will add additional save boxes, but they say
"WUSS" on them instead of "SAVE". Also, the Kid is made to
wear a little pink bow on his head. Selecting "very hard" actually
removes some save boxes, which in my mind is right up there with "stabbing
a fountain pen into your thigh". The aptly named "impossible"
difficulty has no save boxes; any death will take you to the start menu.
And his enemy? Perhaps it is nothing less than the game itself, if not the
entire history of console gaming. First, I speak without irony when I say
that only the rare player will ever make it to the first in-game enemy. The Kid
must first learn to distrust the landscape. He will learn, for instance, of the
delicious fruit, that should he touch it as it falls down, he will die; more
so, that he will die should he touch it as it falls up. The game is not
concerned with throwing obstacles in your path; the game is the
obstacle, and it hates you. Likewise, there is no unique world for IWBTG
outside of generic Multimedia Fusion 2 stock sprites, such as the fruit and the
spikes. The world of IWBTG is video games. The Kid is merely navigating
a sequence of game boards, hoping to and fro between a pastiche of nostalgia
flavoured death traps. At one point in the game, having jumped into a pit, you
find yourself standing at the bottom of a Tetris playing field. Of course, in
any other game, one could reasonably predict where the pieces will go based on
logical predictions. In IWBTG, the "Tetris player" really blows, with
tetronimos sliding back and forth frantically. The Kid explodes if one touches him while
moving, and if you don't escape in time, you're greeted with an easter egg. And
of course, it kills you.
Although it may not appear so at first glance, IWBTG actually
does allow the player to take a number of different routes, which in turn take
you through different screens, to different bosses, and different horrific
deaths. Through one path, the Kid finds himself in the bowels of the planet
Zebes, where he's forced to confront Mother Brain, then escape ala Metroid. Had
the Kid gone a different route, he could have instead found himself up against
Kraidgief, an enormous green Zangief (Street Fighter 2), with the attack
pattern of Super Metroid's Kraid. In his second attack phase, rather than fire
spikes from his chest, he fires fucking Blankas. Is one path really better
than the other? Who's to say? It's like that Frost poem, "The Road Not
Taken", except more like that one where he wants to stop in the middle of
the snowstorm so he and his horse can freeze to death.
One slogan that's made its way onto IWBTG t-shirts is the phrase
"The game where everything kills you. Even the moon." The moon does
kill you, but it doesn't just fall on you. If it just fell on you, it would
only be unexpected and frustrating. No, see, in IWBTG you finish
fighting a gigantic Mike Tyson from Mike Tyson's Punch Out!!, and after he's
dead, you have to leap from the ledge of a sky palace. As the Kid experiences
reentry, his body begins to burn up; he dies if you don't know to double jump
off the ledge so as to get as far to the left as possible in order that you
might land in a size 2 x 2 tile hole filled with water. Then, after you've
dodged the obstacles, including the cherry (carefully hidden behind a spike)
that flies up when you jump over it, and the hidden lightening bolt that falls from
one of the background clouds, only then does the gigantic moon fall.
From a screen above you. You saw it as you jumped off that ledge. And then the
moon begins to roll to the left, in an attempt to kill you. And then, as if an
ignoble, sentient being capable of experiencing wrath, it falls up toward you.
With nowhere but a one tile hole to hide, you cower as the moon drops one last
time, before rolling away. And then, on the next screen, you find yourself in a
twisted 2d platforming facsimile of the first screen from the Legend of Zelda,
complete with gigantic Link and a floor lined with spikes.
What I'm trying to say is, this shit is fucking Duck Amuck. In Super Mario World, when you reach Bowser's Klown Kopter, you're prepared; the
programmers have set the bar as a challenge for players, and challenges are
meant to be overcome. In IWBTG, if a boss appears to be Bowser's Klown
Kopter, well, now you're fucked. There's no challenge, just a punch line, and
it's you. I spent hours trying to beat the Klown Kopter, hours. When I'd
finally done it, I walked, nay, I fucking strolled into the next screen,
and there was no save box. There were ceiling mounted spikes plummeting toward
the ground, and a the Kid sized vertical gap between two spikes. So, I was back
trying to beat the goddamn Klown Kopter some more, and on the off chance I'd
win, I'd get another hand at the room of death. You can't just jump through
that gap, you have to fucking double jump. It makes you look like you're
floating if you do it right. Long before I had, I'd realized that the spikes
were dropping too fast, that I needed to make for a small the Kid sized hole in
the ground, just perfect sized to miss the spikes. I felt like a fucking champ
when I'd finally made it, my safe haven from this vile motherfucker of a game.
And then the spike above me abruptly doubled in size.
Well, I suppose, I should leave it at that. Nearly every screen has a story
responsible for another scar on my soul, and I can't even tell you the worst
the game has to offer, because I haven't seen it yet. Now, Camus is calling
Sisyphus the absurdist hero, says he continues pushing his boulder for
eternity, suicide boo, et cetera. Well, good for him. Last I heard, the boulder
had the consideration to roll back down on the side opposite him. And it wasn't
the fucking moon.
Title: I Wanna Be The Guy: The Movie: The Game
Developer: Mike "Kayin" O'Reilly
Genre: Platformer/Platformer Hell
Platform: Windows
Date Published: October 2007
Link: http://kayin.pyoko.org/iwbtg/index.php