you have to burn the rope (flashpoint retrospective #3)
we've got a short one for today's flashpoint archive! which is a bit of a breath of fresh air tbh, talking about the G+H games was exciting but also A LOT (both in terms of length and content).
one of my favourite tropes is when something is titled Exactly What It Says on the Tin. sometimes it's done for dramatic effect (see: They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera, a book i don't intend to read), but most of the times it's silly and/or endearing (such as Jonas Jonasson's The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, or this really good video about a crow finding a hidden nut and making a cool "woo" sound). for decades, games have been participants in this thrilling history, and i would like to submit to the court today's flash in the pan.
in YOU HAVE TO BURN THE ROPE by Mazapan, you play as a freaky hat-wearing kirby-esque guy tossing axes. you navigate a tunnel, with text above you telling you that you are in a tunnel and that there is a boss at the end of the tunnel. there is indeed a boss at the end of the tunnel, a hulking black blob called the Grinning Colossus. your axe attacks, as the tunnel text helpfully informs you, don't work on the Grinning Colossus. but there is a chandelier dangling above the boss, held only by a single rope, and there's several fiery torches dotted about. boss, fire, chandelier, rope, title. it quite literally could not be simpler.
YHTBTR entertained a lot of people at its 2009 release, so much so that it was a finalist for the Innovation Award at the 2009 Independent Games Festival, and was lauded as "By Far The Greatest Online Game I Have Ever Played" by Best Week Ever's Dan Hopper. apparently it's meant to be a parody of AAA games and their excessive player hand-holding, which i can't find specific proof on (granted, i've not looked that hard) but i will nevertheless heartily accept into my worldview. according to IGN, some people in the newgrounds and kongregate comments still didn't register that they were meant to burn the rope at the end, so, i mean, yeah i totally see it lmfao. it's not like human obliviousness has any upper limit.
the 2009 Independent Games Festival page describes YHTBTR thusly:
You Have To Burn The Rope is a game about interactivity and false choices. It is a completely predetermined experience, you might call it an anti-game. Most importantly it is a joke, a parody!
to be perfectly honest, i wasn't expecting to be reflecting on the nature of games and anti-games talking about YHTBTR, but here we are! in fact, YHTBTR is a shockingly apt introduction into free flash games' obsession with the idea of interactivity and permanent choices (an obsession that has been held by the entirety of the video game genre), which is fascinating for a medium so specifically, self-evidently ephemeral. even at their most accessible and simple state, game devs have always been occupied by the creation (and limitation) of agency forms1. we'll get into this more later down the track, but for right now, keep it in the back of your mind.
honestly, what really got me, both as a kid and replaying it now, was the ending credits song. readers, when i tell you this song had a chokehold on me. in the same way that certain smells may trigger ancient childhood memories once thought lost to the ravages of time, so too does the "incomparable"2 songwriting prowess of Henrik Nåmark catapult me back to my personal Mesozoic Era. i'm sure that my soft spot for sarcastic-slash-satirical songs stems from this single silly scene. Will Wood is to 20 years old what Bo Burnham is to 13 years old what Henrik Nåmark is to 7 years old.
at the end of the day, i have to come clean... the song isn't really that much of a banger. it's definitely fun! but it's laidback and leans into being silly and obviously not very high-effort, which i appreciate for the tonal consistency with the game itself. and even the game itself, though funny, is ultimately nothing to write home about. it's a joke that allows you to put inputs in. but both the song and the game of YHTBTR is an example of how even the dumbest, smallest things can stick with you for your entire life, and help shape lifelong passions. forget any nintendo title of the past 20 years! it's shit like this that has genuinely stuck with me, and will probably continue to stick with me ages and ages into the future.
-aries
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a lot of my personal game philosophy comes from C. Thi Nguyen's Games: Agency as Art, a seminal work that argues (among other excellent points) that, beyond the creation of new worlds or systems of thought, games are the medium that work in creating new modes of agency. i'd 100% recommend checking the book out if you're even sliiiightly interested in game theory, but if you don't want to shill out a bunch of cash/hit up your local university library/pirate it, then there's an excellent introductory Overthink episode on the subject.↩