This game is a homage to a free game that came out in 2002, titled "Sexy Hiking".
 
The author of that game was Jazzuo, a mysterious Czech designer who was known at the time as the father of B-games.
 
B-Games are rough assemblages of found objects. Designers slap them together very quickly and freely, and they're often too rough and unfriendly to gain much of a following.
 
They're built more of the joy of building them than as polished products.
 
In a certain way Sexy Hiking is the perfect embodiment of a B-game. It's built almost entirely out of found and recycled parts, and it's one of the most unsual and unfriendly games of its time.
 
In it, your task is simply to drag yourself up a mountain with a hammer.
 
The act of climbing, in the digital world or in real life, has certain essential properties that give the game it's flavor.
 
No amount of foward progress is guaranteed; some cliffs are too sheer or too slippery.
 
And the player is constantly, unremittingly in danger of falling and losing everything.
 
Anyway when you start Sexy Hiking, you're standing next to a tree, which blocks the way to the entire rest of the game. It might take you an hour to get through that tree. A lot of people never got past it. You prod and poke at it, exploring the limits of your reach and strength, trying to find a way up.
 
There's a sense of truth in that lack of compromise.
 
Most obstacles in video games are fake - you can be completely confident in your ability to get through them, once you have the correct method of the correct equipment, or just by spending enough time.
 
In that sense, every pixellated obstacle in Sexy Hiking is real.
 
The obstacles in Sexy Hiking are unyielding, and that makes the game uniqely frustrating.
 
But I'm not sure Jazzuo intended to make a frustrating game - the frustration is just essential to the act of climbing and it's authentic to the process of building a game about climbing.
 
 
A funny thing happened to me as I was building this mountain: I'd have an idea for an obstacle, and I'd build it, test it, and... it would usually turn out to be unreasonably hard. But I couln't bring myself to make it easier.
 
It already felt like my inability to get past the new obstacle was my fault as a player, rather than as a builder. Imaginary mountains build themselves from our efforts to climb them, and it's our repeated attempts to reach the summit that turns those mountains into something real.
 
When you're building a videogame world you're building with ideas,
 
And that can be like working with quick-set cement. You mold your ideas into a certain shape that can be played with, and in the process of playing with them they begin to harden and set until they are immutable, like rock. At that point you can't change the world - not withour breaking it into pieces and starting fresh with new ideas.
 
For years now people have been predicting that games would soon be made of prefabricated objects, bought in a store and assembled into a world.
 
For the most part, that hasn't happened, because the objects in the store are trash. I don't mean they look bad or they're badly made, although a lot of them are. I mean they're trash in the way that food becomes trash as soon as you put it in the sink.
 
Things are made to be consumed in a certain context, and once the moment is gone they transform into garbage. In the context of technology those moments pass by in seconds.
 
Over time we've poured more and more refuse into this vast digital landfill we call the internet. It now vastly outnumbers the things that are fresh and untainted and unused.
 
When everything around us is cultural trash, trash becomes the new medium, the lingua franca of the digital age.
 
You can build culture out of trash, but only trash culture: B-games, B-movies, B-music, B-philosophy.
 
Maybe this is what this digital culture is. A monstrous mountain of trash, the ash-heap of creativity's fountain. A landfill with everything we ever thought of in it. Grand, infinite, and unsorted.
 
There's 3D models of breakfast, gen-xers' fanfic novels, scanned magazines, green-screen Shia leBoeuf, banned stuff scenes on liveleak, facebook's got lifelike bots with unbranded adverts, and candid shots of Kanye and Taylor Swift mashups, car crash epic fail gifs, Russian dash cam vids, discussions of McRibs, discarded, forgotten, unrecycled.
 
Everything's fresh for about six seconds until some newer thing beckons and we hit refresh. And there's years of persevering, disappearing into the pile. Out of style, out of sight.