Much like I Wanna Be the Guy, this game was a combination of overtly difficult platforming and unexpected traps that would be impossible to dodge without prior knowledge, but Kayin believed that this concept could be improved upon. While the game has many recognizable influences from the most notoriously-hard old-school titles of the time, the one particular game that inspired Kayin the most was a Japanese Flash game titled “ Jinsei Owata no Daibouken”, which translates to English as “ The Big Adventure of Owata’s Life”. Released for free in October 2007 by Michael “Kayin” O’Reilly, the hardest part of describing I Wanna Be the Guy– or to say its name in full, I Wanna Be the Guy: The Movie: The Game – is not just cribbing entirely from Kayin’s own webpage, which accurately describes it as “ a sardonic loveletter to the halcyon days of early American videogaming, packaged as a nail-rippingly difficult platform adventure”. And for indie games, I Wanna Be the Guy was one of the first titles to implement a challenge that was based not on conventional difficulty, but by predicting which paths a player would take, which patterns they would recognize, and how they would react to spur-of-the-moment threats, all so that they could be manipulated into losing in the most unexpectedly comedic fashion again, and again, and again. For mainstream games, it was a sadistic love letter to older consoles and franchises that a generation of programmers had been brought up on. But behind all of the jokes, the rage-filled videos of people falling for the game’s traps, and its memetic status as the intentionally unfairly difficult video game, it could be argued that I Wanna Be the Guy is legitimately one of the most influential games of the 21 st Century.įor freeware games, it brought attention and legitimacy to an entire subset of work that had previously been written off as unprofessional, or not worth the same level of recognition as ‘official’ games.

I Wanna Be the Guy may be known today mainly for the legions of fangames – of wildly varying quality – that it spawned, the Retsupurae memes regarding how clichéd it became as a subject of Let’s Plays, and for potentially popularizing the kind of trial-and-error – or more accurately, trial-and-death – gameplay that has impressed and infuriated players in equal measure (well, possibly just a tad more infuriated) for the last few decades. You might think that the best time to examine a trendsetting video game would be at the height of its relevance and popularity, but sometimes it’s just as interesting to look at works whose moment has, for the most part, passed.

I wanna be the guy sprites