I have a long history with BYOND (short for Build Your Own Net Dream, a name and acronym that betrays its age.) A really, really long history. About half of my entire life, all the way back to, from what I can remember, December of 2009. A brief explanation of what BYOND is: it's a multiplayer game engine; games are written in a programming language called Dream Maker, which is somewhat similar to C.
Like the vast majority of the people using it, I downloaded the platform for Space Station 13. I remember the exact framing, too: it was Christmas Eve or Christmas and my mom pulled me away from the computer for a family photo. I was pretty excited to get back to the game, because a scientist was busy ripping the brain out of my body to put inside of a robot.
The map that happened on doesn’t exist anymore and, as far as I’m aware, there aren’t any pictures of it, so my introduction to this game exists only in my memory, dreamlike, the 32x32 sprites rendered far more impactful and lifelike thanks to a mixture of time and a kid’s imagination.
Basically, before we can get to BYOND’s insane, seemingly undocumented and mostly unloved hoard of weird, borderline not-games, we need to talk about SS13. I’ll keep it brief, since this post/article/essay/whatever isn’t about it.
To get to the point: Space Station 13 has a Wikipedia page and the engine it’s built on doesn’t, even though it’s been around since, from what I can tell, the late 90s. ‘96 if you’re counting precursors, ‘99 in its more-or-less current state. It’s been accused of looking like spyware. It isn’t, but it looks like it.
SS13 usually has about a thousand simultaneous players during peak hours. The spot for number two is contested between Eternia and Sigrogana Legends 2, both JRPG influenced roleplaying games that, honestly, occupy that weird space between a video game and a late 2000s freeform roleplaying ProBoards forum. I played Eternia in middle and high school and it’s okay if you’re into that sort of stuff. I assume the other one is fine, too.
You boot up Murder Mansion. A social sort of murder mystery game: one player’s the killer, the others aren’t. Stop him-her. It inexplicably has a single player option (complete with bots) and the soundtrack is a handful of (presumably stolen) MIDI renditions of horror movie themes.
A friend of mine on IRC hosted the game every day for about a month in, I think, summer of 2012… aside from SS13, this’ll be one of the only games showcased that I have an actual, personal connection to.
What gets me about Murder Mansion is that it’s so obviously a labor of love. Almost all indie games are. There are seven large maps and, with the player’s slow speed (there’s a run option but there’s a 50/50 chance you’ll trip or slip on something and, quite literally, die instantly) they feel a lot larger. And the maps aren’t re-skins, either, all of them have tons of unique assets, items, etc.
Dead MMOs are sad; thousands of hours of development work over what may be a decade or more, an entire community, and what amounts to someone’s vision of a living, breathing world are strangled by the invisible hand of the free market.
Dead indie games - the multiplayer type you find on BYOND - are sadder. In Murder Mansion’s case, the developer updated it consistently for ten years, from 2003 to 2013. What we’re left with is something that feels empty, but not completely lifeless. Someone loved this game! They loved it enough to update it for years and years.
Wandering around in this game is wistful.
Mitadake High is more or less the same genre of game as Murder Mansion, except it’s set in an… anime high school.
The main difference is that, from my memories of playing Mitadake High, people got super into it. It is absolutely amazing when someone is trying their best to get into the character of a blue-haired anime boy who just killed eight people and explains to you that their motivation for murdering a pile of people is that they have tuberculosis.
Probably the only BYOND game, aside from SS13, to have a TVTropes page. Which, by the way, is extremely expansive.
Games like these are fantastic: someone saw Higurashi or something and decided to make a video game out of it. The main menu music is ear-piercingly loud and ripped directly from the show. I was once murdered for knowing someone’s name because the gamemode was literally Death Note. I saw the guy who made Tails Gets Trolled on here once and played a round with him, because of course he played this game, it’s practically made for him.
Years ago, when people still played this game, I saw someone say “Oh my Kami!” as a substitute for saying “Oh my God!” multiple times in complete seriousness.
Your middle school id laid bare to up to dozens of people, all of whom are competing for the non-award of being told after the game that your character’s improvised backstory was compelling, tragic, and deep.
In Freeside, two glowing orbs appear and compel you to commit a mass shooting in an almost entirely colorless (there’s some grass) and empty city. The roads lead nowhere: to the same grey concrete walls that make up the city’s buildings, almost completely empty except for crates and guns.
This is the Platonic ideal of a shooter. Very little explanation other than, explicitly, go forth and kill. You can’t win, but there’s a score. As far as I can tell, it isn’t uploaded to a leaderboard anywhere. This more or less illustrates the crux of what a lot of BYOND games are: hyperindividual and disconnected minigames, whether it’s competing for the title of most tragic anime mass murderer amidst an honestly hostile and combative ‘community’ of roleplayers, a sperm-based maze game where you’re racing to fertilize an egg, or a mass shooting with a score that never mattered to anyone except you.
It’s beautiful: even when there are others, there’s an audience of one.
Elora brings an issue to the fore: BYOND has games that I’m almost certain only a dozen or so people close to the developer have played longer than a minute.
The presence of a chat function insinuates that there’s something already missing; I tried, in vain, to find a monster, but the game’s selection of monsters seems limited to the cast of Back to the Barnyard, wolves, and deer. The sound your character makes when you move causes my eardrums to pulsate and throb. Elora is dozens of lakes, circular mounds of black rock, tracts of grass, dirt, and fruit trees. None of the animals, even the snarling wolves, try and hurt you. Elora is a depiction of paradise. Wolves will stand side by side with cows, boars with pigs, and so on. Jannah rendered in 32x32, just like God would’ve wanted.
Maybe you’re reading this and thinking that, outside of the top three titles, two of whom are borderline identical and one of which is probably among the most resilient and popular indie games ever made, BYOND is dead. It’s not. I’m not a mortician or an archaeologist. BYOND is very much alive: games are still being made. People still post on its antiquated forum and, more than anything else, this obscure engine for multiplayer games from the 90s is still up and running.
Certain games are dormant, sure, but they’re still full of life. Say they’re sleeping, not dead - say they’re dead and it’s for real. I already called Murder Mansion dead, probably thanks to sentimentality.
One of the most famous “dead games” isn’t even dead, for fuck’s sake.
Brief but relevant detour: when someone first posted about Worlds, a still-running 3D chatroom from the last century, on /x/ way back in 2010, 11, or 12, I can’t remember, it was marketed as a ‘dead game.’
It wasn’t: as it turned out, there was a still-active community of people playing the game. Geriatric? Sure, some of them have even passed on in the decade between then and now.
Sidenote, in case you’re the type of person to think there’s a cult in Worlds: there is no cult in Worlds, the locals are just fucking with you! Everyone used to do it. I know I did.
Still: there’s something off-putting about it all. Hundreds if not thousands of games, most of them ranging from bad to okay, all of them charming in their own way. How many hours of work, collectively, does BYOND’s catalog represent? Probably somewhere, not joking, past a million if you count SS13. Get rid of that, somewhere in the low hundred-thousands.
Most BYOND games wouldn’t be out of place on Glorious Trainwrecks - there’s an extreme earnestness behind them. Someone really wanted to make a video game, made it happen, and then moved on; orphaned games. Almost like a litter of, I don’t know, cats in a cardboard box outside of a supermarket.
According to BYOND’s hub, I am the first person to play Birdland since 2014. The menu helpfully states that the first five games are free: I have to pay for more.
As far as I know, this is the only BYOND game you have to pay for. A slow, borderline non-puzzle game with no sound aside from birds shrieking that came out in 2002. I genuinely wonder how many people bought a lifetime subscription. The link no longer works and another link, totally inert, leading nowhere, tells me that I can discuss the game on a “Birdland forum”, which no longer exists.
I am left picturing what Birdland aficionados discussed on their forum, because the game itself isn’t deep enough to answer that question.
CryptHead is less than a year old. There are four people online, just one short of the number required to start a game. I type “hello?” in chat - no response.
Hard to sum up my feelings on BYOND. If I were cynical, I’d probably use this quote...
“When I was eleven years old, my whole world was video games.
Just locked in my room playing Bart vs. the Space Mutants and
all this crap… man, I wasted all my time on this shit. I want
it back. It ruined my life.”
The Angry Video Game Nerd
I’m not, though, so I’ll say this: BYOND’s the reason I started doing sprite artwork, something I really, really enjoy but haven’t been able to do lately. Something felt wrong about making art for games that I didn’t have the skillset to actually give life.
After going through the plethora of games BYOND has to offer - some good, some bad, all of them real, tangible games made by, most of the time, a single person - I can’t say I can look at it that way anymore. Sometimes, making stuff is its own reward, even if you’re the only person who’ll ever see it.
ANCIENT LINK COVERED IN SLIME
There's, uh, actually not much of interest. Turns out the answer to the question of "what do people talk about on a forum dedicated to a game this simple" is "not a whole lot, actually." There's a surprising cameo by SS13 creator Exadv1 and a guy I sort-of knew five years ago, Nadrew, is mentioned, but aside from that, not much to talk about. It's as though it was a rhetorical question that I nevertheless felt compelled to answer. Rats!