on the 15th of august 2020 the underground indie developer known only as splat released a game that would leave critics baffled and the gaming scene changed forever in a medium that many felt had overstayed its welcome this game came out of nowhere to bring it back to life one critic went so far as to suggest it quote singlehandedly saved gaming as an art form and this tuber would like to suggest that the game that saved gaming destroyed its developer this is the story of the game that killed its creator [Music] but before we can get into all of that you'll need a bit of context splat had started releasing games on his own website splat.com only 5 years earlier his debut museum of toilets was a sly commentary on modern art in this game the player walks through a maze of harshly lit hallways containing only toilets his second game was moonlanding a seen from earth it's rather self-explanatory really as you might expect the player watches the moon landing from earth and sees nothing just a moon like any other after these two splat's streak of highly unique indie games continued each one garnering more attention than the last as stated these games are odd and every game was stranger more singular than its predecessor choosing to issue what is normally referred to as game play splat's games from this period instead focus on experience and self-reflection they aren't so much about what you do as about what you don't there are no grand adventures you're lucky if you get any kind of narrative at all you don't get to impact the game world sometimes you don't even get to control your character but you do get something splat's games have this almost otherworldly quality to them somehow they can transport you to a far away place calm as a calm stream that's not moving very fast or something else equally calm the greeks called it and i'm going to butcher this kataris an an involuntary cleansing the game which best demonstrates the sort of feeling i'm getting at here happens also to be the culmination of splat's 5-year game development streak released on the 9th of june 2014 it is simply titled durbell you click on a doorbell and it rings yep that's the entire game but somehow it's so much more than that i sat for hours trying to come up with something meaningful to say about durbell until it hit me there isn't really anything meaningful to say about durbell that's kind of the point i scrapped what little i had written and stared in awe at the screen splat had played me and i laughed in much the same way i imagine splat must have laughed constructing this game following the release of derbell the excitement among splatlanders the newly self-adopted moniker used by his burgeoning fan base was immediate and overwhelming but now too a more general public and particularly critics were starting to take notice of his the internet lit up with discussions people shared stories of how his work had affected them speculation about his games what it all meant exactly and most of all theories about the identity of the elusive splat but soon these same forums would be a buzz instead with worrying rumors and anxious complaints because splat went radio silent for 4 years at first people thought he was perhaps taking a long overdue break after all the man did release 14 genredefying masterpieces only in the span of two years but why now why leave just on the cusp of critical and even mainstream acclaim as the second year of no updates came and went splatlanders were slowly accepting the possibility that splat had given up died or resolved to end from a high point then on the 9th of june 2019 exactly 4 years since the release of derbell with the splattopia forums at this point almost totally dead a single file was stealthily uploaded to splat.com [Music] [Music] upon having downloaded and launched the file players were met with a countdown to midnight on the 18th of june the forums that had before been totally dead now sprung back to life more active than they had ever been splat was back baby both early adopters and those who had found splat during his hiatus couldn't wait to see what was in store thousands of users dissected every potential clue more rumors circulated and pranksters posted fake exploits to bypass the countdown one even going as far as to upload a cracked .exe which in actuality instantly bricked most pcs at the heart of all this hubup was the beating question just what was it that splat had been working on all these years what was going to happen on the 18th of june well hundreds and thousands of predictions and no one guessed right i doubt you would have either i know dang well i didn't so if you had launched the game on that day what would you have been met with well this nobody loves you nobody loves you nobody loves you nobody loves you nobody loves you uh nobody loves you well that's strange nobody loves you no this video aptly titled wtf splat new game and uploaded on the 19th of june by the channel rburnt 1992 pretty much perfectly captures my own experience i was completely baffled this was what he had been working on was this some sort of a joke where are all the qualities that i'd come to love to expect and i thought almost everyone would share this reaction but the more forum posts i read the more reviews i saw the more people i asked the more i heard the exact opposite sentiment of course some folks agreed with me but i still had to listen to boatloads of agilatory comments so many people loved it a few folks hated it and pretty much nobody was on the fence in their first 10-star review in three years william mattel writing for gamers weekly had only this to say about the game here is my review what splatter has given us this time around is more than a game more than any game even it is first and foremost an experience and a wholly singular one at that play it while victoria freriedman of feminist gaming zen another castle penned a one-word reviewing simply transcendent and even the famously harsh critic philosopher andros mitch wrote this glowing appraisal you are set on a grassy null surrounded by the few sun rays that the clouds and cloudlets that get through when suddenly these litlings of light break out bloom into beams and convert right on the point where you are and you are saved by the sun like the ant beneath a magnifying glass and everything and all is right such a moment could never even hope to capture the pure most profoundity of splat's penultimate game this prompted game gunk's urban derselon to respond specifically to this review with "no it's not that it's actually terrible the game sucks it's just a screen telling you that nobody loves you over and over again i'm at a loss as to what's going on here." game gunk refused to publish a review for fear of backlash so she instead decided to publish it online it was taken down within days there are many more examples of the unexpected publicity and praise the game received but you get it reading all of these glowing texts i started to wonder was i in the wrong was i wrong was i wrong to dismiss the game as some joke taken too far i had loved his previous games after all i felt out of step with the world and unsure of myself i did what i felt i needed to i booted up the game again and i was greeted again of course again by the same thing that i had seen last time just that this time i didn't close it instead i really focused in on it asking myself what if it's true what if nobody really loves me staring at the screen i began to see a sort of underlying pattern to it kind of beyond words and for the first time in more than 2 years i cried i cried because yeah maybe nobody loves anyone and if that's true then doesn't that kind of free us i felt free at least freer than ever as i wept and screamed like a baby alone at 3:00 a.m the greeks called it katarsis a kind of involuntary cleansing after having concreted this critical darling splat returned to radio silence but this time pretty much everyone seemed [ __ ] sure that he was creating something and after 11 months he was back with a website link leading to another countdown mylife.net on the website was a joking manifesto of sorts it read and i quote "in 1989 kenneth lamar noid became convinced by a series of advertisements with the slogan avoid the no that the restaurant chain domino pizza was intentionally harassing him." and they were in 2014 you all became convinced by a series of [ __ ] games that everything was about you that they were meta whatever genius and around that same time i became convinced that you would all eat up whatever garbage i put out i've tested this too by making worse and worse games and this only made you love them more and more and more you ate them up which led me to conclude that you're not here for me or for my games you are here for yourself so i will give you a mirror to look into do with it what you will as long as you don't forget to enjoy the view since the manifesto was an obvious joke the community quickly discarded it but soon after they noticed that the word garbage contained a hidden hyperlink to another document outlining in precise detail just what my life was going to consist of to summarize splat would have a camera strapped around his forehead broadcasting his every move to the internet meanwhile the viewers would work together anonymously as a community voting to decide everything splat would do for a week straight yes no doubt inspired by projects such as twitch plays pokémon and abramovich's rhythm zero now for the first time after having been played by splat so many times his fans the loyal splatlanders were finally going to get to play him sadly today no recordings survive of the wonderful event and there would be no proof of it happening at all if not for three screenshots taken by someone named emil stap plus a much contested audio recording therefore using contemporaneous commentary as well as online discussions i've done my best to reconstruct the events of the stream in question to the best of my knowledge it happened like this the stream started up initially it was just a black screen then you could see something you could see someone's hands from the first person splat yes splat splat sat at his computer completely motionless this is when a prompt box appeared reading "what do you want splat to do next?" then you could send in suggestions then came the votes following this he did whatever had been requested of him after nine rather uneventful minutes the viewers first having splat brush his teeth then kick a game boy 11 times they instead voted for him to leap out of his window i don't believe anyone at this point expected splat to actually follow through with this it seemed like the option and the votes for it was really more of a joke when the prompt was automatically read aloud splat seemed to hesitate he stood still for a few small seconds thinking before uttering one little phrase that would change the course of history video games and with that he simply stepped out of the window a 72 foot drop although everyone found themselves amused confused and aroused by the entire ordeal initially it was written off as little more than a hoax just another node in the tangling onentole that was splat's cannon of jest at least that was until two dedicated siberians who called themselves the anchorites were able to verify that no this stream the whole my life incident in fact was no jape it had been entirely real our splat was gone though gone in a way which meant that really he would live forever god in a way that would guarantee him eternal life with the revelation of splat's passing 15 faithful fans followed in his fall steps the fevered fingers of the rest of splattopia's hundred headed rabble took to typing and typing and typing the critics all came crawling out from their caverns and the most delightful discourse sprouted from every orifice of the internet for example inderling wrote this for video game magazine minotaurs in the maces of mist 6 hours after his death quote "the set of pretextual meter mechanics within which the post-modernist framework which gamers inhabit most clearly envisioned as a series of neopregary loki like points operates can be capturized as a game in and of its i.e the game of games leger dejour it is the framework of these rules so-called supra gistan that splat in this tot dirt spluren i.e his utter annihilation obliterated yes responded moutharn azerog of the nelethian gamer yes a thousand times yes through his comly crushing in his return to the second dimension at the glorious instant of impact splat's shining soul must have shattered and each and every shimmering shard of it set out unbounded to become like crumbs of air free to be breathed by the shackled choke blue beast of gaming it's our come round again at last cleos kadorn fuel catharsis you are so right aserog catharsis utter and complete release splat made us look upon the torturous slaughter of the medium of gaming itself he forced us to watch him rip it limb from limb fervently tearing its arms and legs off as it lay on the ground squealing wailing begging for mercy just so he could revivify these recombined parts just so he could bring it back to life and through this through this last act of self-sacri art itself he had constructed for us out of the tepid plaster of his life the utmost polymeriation of the viewer and the viewee their very relationship reaching a singularity as he hurdled headlong homeward from the seventh floor of his apartment building unleashing the ecstatic apotheiois of contemporary digital art the ultimate unification of victim and voyer the fusion of concrete and cartilage the synthesis of game developer and the ground splat and now we are back again at the beating question who exactly was splat well about a month after his splat it was announced through a splattopia forum post that our avid splatlanders had finally been able to dig up the details of the man behind the masterful work splat was or more precisely had been frank enstein a 29-year-old first generation immigrant from plymouth minnesota who until his death had worked at the speedway gas station on pe lane while spending a large chunk of his free time making online games he is survived by a father mother and sister that forum members have been told repeatedly to stop contacting [Music] so all this to say wasn't splat just some god no he was more than that he was more than any of us he must have been what do we have if he wasn't it is just a splat's dear and personal friend wrote on her web blog gamers paradise in her text entitled goodbye to a splat she wrote and i quote "the big secret's out anyway and everyone's seen who you are at least that's what they think but they have no idea being frank there were days i felt like i never really knew you but at this point i think i may be the only one who ever did i would watch you code for hours and see that light in your eyes when you knew you had something how you'd then throw your head back and laugh thinking you were alone and how i'd look at you sleeping and how you'd grope in the night and how i'd almost let you touch me then yes at night the nights when you truly lived up to your numb plume and i'd smell your walls to get just one sniff of your renowned aroma i miss you terribly i miss you endlessly i look at your pictures and weep from both ends i should have caught you as you fell my splut but i merely watched it happen we all watched in a way if you're reading this in hell with every other victim of tell me now do you remember when mother took us down to lost lake when we stood skipping stones on that fragrant last day we were allowed to be in each other's company we ate pancakes wow beautiful text alisa stein truly beautiful but what you and all of those filthy critics don't understand about splat's work is that i am splat i am splat and i am not [ __ ] dead get ready for durando get ready for junjo's quest 2 janjo's revenge get ready for the same meteorite kills another school child get ready for sun landing a scene from earth get ready for video essay simulator i get real they're killing me