Corrections: 1. At 16:04, this is meant to be Java applets. No idea how I got that mixed up, I may have written it while really tired then just not noticed while editing. 2. Alpha Denshi's Jump Bug (1981), as pointed out by a commenter, may be considered an earlier endless runner-style title and was indeed the first side-scrolling platformer, although it also shares similarities with side-scrolling shoot-em-ups from the time.
@@ewetwentythree lol yeah I wrote a "proposal" when I was 8 of a space invaders clone turning into a sci-fi tactics game after you passed however many levels
Dude… one of my oldest cell phone memories was when I was 13. My dad and I went into Bestbuy and saw the first dell phone with a 5” display. We laughed at it and thought who the hell would want to carry this dinner-plate sized brick in their pocket. Holding it up to our heads and laughing at how much of our face we could obscure with it…. I’m typing this comment on a 6.5 inch screen….
It's truly criminal how little recognition these amazing videos get. These go beyond a simple essay and feel like artistic statements that go above and beyond more than the vast majority of content creators. Love what you're doing man, please never stop.
i would not agree, you talking about free games, if you going to pay for premium mobile games you can get Sayonara wild hearts for example- and the game is wonderfull
It's really sad to see next to no engagement on a channel that makes legitimately historical content. I've always been interested in the concept of "game and internet history documentary" videos. I hope you get more views! Your other videos are very underrated compared to your subscriber count. I was only born in 2006, so this is mostly new to me! It's very interesting. And the commentary you made about causal games, I totally agree. I never downloaded them because in the ad they legitimately LOOKED boring. I'm not surprised the core experience isn't good. It's just sometimes depressing to see that the games companies make are terrible... Most popular games nowadays with genuine developers are the only ones that are legitimately popular with most generations. ÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷ This video was very fun to watch, looking forward to more documentaries like this.
Channel growth is not instantaneous, and requires significant time and effort. This is because the algorithm rewards the well-established so that the well-established keep making google more money. Until we abolish personal wealth, profit will always be the endgame.
I have very recently found your channel. I started with the wikipedia video and have been binging since. As a 20 something who has been addicted to youtube since 6th grade, you are the peak of content. Absolutely fantastic videos. I have nothing but praise. You scratch every itch I have for indepth analysis of obscure topics. Utterly fantastic every time. Thank you so much for your hard work. I saw in one video that you spend 40 hours creating a video, and the effort is not going unnoticed. Please continue, you deserve much more success than you have had so far.
This channel filled a niche I have been so desperately craving. I love the spirit of the old web, and old tech. The further we step towards a Google DRM dominated web environment the more I crave a huge "step backwards" to how everything used to be before multi-trillion and billion dollar companies took over and claimed it for themselves.
I so relate to this. Growing up thru the 90's i don't understand why certain things had to phase out..? In my opinion, i thought we would still have certain things around but just add some modern advanced capabilities to it.. i never would have guessed that so many aspects of thing's that were around while growing up.. would disappear/vanish/cease to exist and if anything does exist it's completely lost it's vibe/it's soul/it's genuine creativity.
hell even in our own generation there can be a vast skew in experiences. I had the chance to explore the internet before the big rush of the 2000s, the look of which my wife has never encountered, and she's a year older!
Man, I played a lot of endless runners as a kid when stuff like Temple Run, Jetpack Joyride, among other things were super popular. I kinda miss those days tbh
fr, used to play the shit out of jetpack joyride before class, on the car, waiting at appointments etc mobile games were never great but jesus christ they're awful today lmao
I loved playing shit like that on my jailbroken iPhone 4 back in 2013 or something. I'd have iApp+ something from Cydia that allowed me to offline accept in app purchases. On some games that made it insane lol
I think theyre intended for those google ads with playable demos. theyre more like elsa goes to dentist. once you click buy and boost it in the algorithm out of sheer curiosity, mission accomplished
You're missing the earlier webgame endless runners, like Helicopter Game. Which had incredibly similar gameplay to flappy bird and was released circa 2002
I notice that sometimes your videos have a very distinct atmosphere, like they're in their own dimension, separate from the rest of the world (especially when you have more foreboding music in the background of course), which is something I really don't get with any other TH-cam channel. Please, don't stop making videos. Like, ever.
I won't lie, watching a video about endless runners but the first 3/4 chapters are about videos games in general was interesting. Entertaining lol but chapters 4 onwards definitely was what I was looking for. That Ketchapp jumpscare got me though lmao
@@robofistsrevenge3288 a good one, sure. A great one will provide more details about what it's supposed to be about. You don't watch a documentary on kangaroo to learn about all of Australia's wildlife, you're there for kangaroos. Same with this video essay, I was here for the discussion on the endless runne genre but half of it wasn't even about that lol. Good video still, just a little miss leading. Call it the history of mobile games and how Endless Runners fit into that, not a title just centered around the one genre
@@avec5883 when you watch a documentary it obviously will tell you the evolution of a kangaroo, normally starting from what it originally evolved from, onwards. That’s basically what this video essay did. That’s also why the time stamp feature exists
Regarding the 2048 on mobile thing, I will say that Ketchapp's one decent addition to the game was the sound design. Hearing the blooping of the merges and the noises as you slide the tiles really added a lot to the experience. Just a shame they were so shitty about it in every other way :T
Those 4 developers just make the same game over and over now with a slightly different skin and insert like 2 ads per level which in some games is like an ad every 30 seconds
I think a huge huge issue with the mobile game industry right now is the danger it poses to kids (and others but especially kids). It is so addictive, drawing kids who SHOULD NOT be on screens that much, and flashing "pay to win" or "reward packs" or "loot boxes" in their faces. They spend their money or their parent/guardian(s)' money, on literally nothing at all. They don't learn anything and just mindlessly tap or swipe or slam their hand on the screen. I worked with kids for 9 years. Not in education, but in swim lessons/swim coaching, lifeguarding, and as a camp counselor and camp specialist. It was HORRIFYING to see how more and more kids were obsessed with ipads, or their parent(s)/guardian(s)/sibling(s) devices. I would pull my phone out to CHECK THE TIME (i hate watches) and instantly id have half my campers surrounding me asking to play a game or what games i had. At least one family every single day when i taught lessons (usually 3-5 groups per day) would have their kid get out of the pool at the end of class and run over to their parent, their parent would wrap them up in a towel, hand them their crusty ipad in one of those chunky cases, and immediately cocomelon or some cheap mobile game would play. My own brother had incidents where he would literally take our parents' credit cards or gift cards to spend on mobile games or roblox or fortnite (i know its not a mobile game. But honestly i cant stand it anyways). Because he wanted to win or get some loot boxes or new skins or something. And these apps and games pushed these things in the faces of kids who have zero financial knowledge or experience and little to no concept of money or its value. Not only that but the ads these stupid games have are so misleading. They are absurd. Both the ads for the games itself and the ones slapped all over between levels and on pause screens and stuff. Its misleading customers and its disgusting.
I think that's honestly the main thing this video didn't address. Those games are specifically made to prey exclusively on children. Children's digital media has just become an absolutely disgusting and immoral goldmine. It's a total advertisement inferno and no one seems to have any any moral qualms about exploiting the attention of a bunch of kids. At least kids TV tries to give some sort of educational value. These mass produced mobile games offer nothing, not even at the very least competent puzzles, if they did that MAYBE you could make an argument that they're "mentally stimulating" but that is not the case. It's literally drug marketing mentality: make someone addicted to a product so that they can't live without it. I'd recommend you to watch this vid by Savantics, where she talks about how cocomelon videos literally have more frenetic cuts than an action film. She does a whole semi-scientifc investigation and it's truly fascinating! th-cam.com/video/3S15QTEW59I/w-d-xo.html
Your videos are always an event to me, this video was awesome! I never really considered that the "mobile game cash grab" stereotype that I have in my head applies to a lot of modern endless runners. Extremely entertaining and educational as always. You make it a lot easier for us to learn about things that most don't touch on.
You presented this story in a way that is as entertaining visually as it is compellingly told. What an achievement, my good man. If there is such a thing as “Outsider History”, this is it.
Really well produced, this was very entertaining! One point of criticism, though: I think leaving the monetization aspect of endless runners unaddressed does hurt your argument a little. I think you did a good job of arguing the distinction between the “endless runner” and “hyper casual” genres. But if you’re using predatory monetization as a criticism against the latter, you may want to discuss its prevalence in the former.
Honestly monetization in modern hyper casual games is way more prevalent and predatory than in those older endless runners. I recently played through jetpack joyride again, and of course you would get an annoying ad like every 2 runs, but that was about it. There was never a big incentive to buy in game currency, since the progression is pretty natural and you can easily get all the upgrades without spending a penny. Compare that to a modern hypercasual game, where ad are prevalent like every 10 seconds, and at every opportunity the game will give you an incentive to buy "gems" using real money. It's gotten to the point that they will literally HIDE certain gameplay options behind a jetpack, forcing you to pick the objectively bad option and guilt tripping you into buying the better one. Older mobile games NEVER did stuff like that, and that is the main difference. Ads were simply an annoying neccesity to keep the game free, but above all else the developers still cared about delivering a quality product. Modern hyper casuals literally only exists to be vehicles for ads.
Hyper-casual is what I refer to as “Ad-cest” or “Ad-kake”, nothing more that generic assets pumped out by what could almost be an AI with how similar some of them are purely to push product in your face.
One of the things I've noticed about the modern shovelware-freemium games is that, in their advertising, they often show the game being played incorrectly despite being obviously easy to figure out. It's like a strange mix of those as-seen-on-tv commercials were someone struggles with something basic like how a recliner works, and an implicit dare to see if YOU could play the game better. It plays on a very innate compulsion in a lot of people to be correct - even better if you can show some wrong schmuck how it's done correctly. It reminds me of a joke I heard a stand-up comedian tell years ago (that I'm probably going to butcher). Two friends are packing supplies into their bags to go camping. One friend noticed the other putting a deck of cards in their bag, and curious about it, they asked why. The friend answered that they took it in case they got lost in the woods. The first friend said they didn't understand how that would solve anything. The second friend explained that they would start playing solitaire. Eventually a stranger would come along and show them a move that they were missing.
The game itself isn't subjective. Your taste in it is. A game where controls quite literally don't work would be considered bad, right? Sorry, I just kinda growing tired every time someone makes an an objective statement and than follow up by saying it is subjective. It is just a very easy way out of the discussion by saying "It's subjective so whatever, am I right?" It is also lazy. If you spend almost an hour to explain where you are coming from and why you think the things you think I am expecting you to actually hold your postion instead of opting out for "It's just subjective, am I right?" I get it. It is much easier and less time consuming but I would encourage you to think through your postions instead of just pushing it to "It's subjective" side.
Gen exer who grew up in the 70s and 80s, so I really appreciate your research and presentation on that portion of the video ‼️ Dig the rest of it too , love the way you think.
Canabalt is still one of the best - others never put nearly enough effort into visual and audio feedback. Smashing through a window or watching a building be violently demolished in Canabalt is still satisfying.
So the current glut of mobile endless runner games is basically operating in the same corporate model as the pre-1983 crash video game market, but without a foreseeable risk of a crash?
Very good breakdown, but I will say it's a little incorrect to say that the genre was completely gone in the time after arcades but before web gaming The genre has a short run in handheld gaming on the Gameboy and stuff
I have no idea why I thought that this was just gonna be another video where another random 20-something bitches and moans about how mobile games used to be so much better back then and all those tired talking points, all put under the veneer of a video essay just so they can frame their opinions as facts. I have no clue why I expected that type of content, I’ve seen a handful of your videos before and are even subscribed to the channel. But damn, this video was (dare I say) a masterpiece. It really got the point across in a clear and concise way that didn’t veer off into unnecessary side tangents, that kept me interested in the history of this genre of game that I rarely think about. Truly excellent work, your sub count is criminally low.
Honestly; I just see Hyper Casual games as a way to milk money from the non-gamer crowd, honestly I wish I knew about this earlier, I would've been making horrible small games instead of trying to be ambitious.
I will say, I've got one of these hypercasual games on my phone mostly as a kind of thing to do with my hands when I want to listen to an audiobook or podcast or something. I've had it for years and have developed my own internal ruleset for how to play it simply because otherwise it would be too boring--but it's also an experience I don't need to actually pay any attention. I think Threes is an excellent example; I played it again for the first time in years and that game is fun to control, gives me a pretty interesting puzzle to solve, and is full of charm. But because of that, I actually need to give it my full attention. If I want to just zone out, I need something with a lot less... artistic merit. ..Of course I also turn airplane mode on when I use my hypercasual game of choice, so the awful, constant ads don't actually interfere with the experience. If they ever make it so ads play even on airplane mode I'll be doomed lol
As someone who has been playing games since the early 90's it's curious that I never noticed that endless runners had gone downhill simply because I never paid much attention to the genre, I remember loving Canabalt back when it was a browser game and playing a lot of Doodle Jump because it was one of the few titles that made use of gyro controls on the flip phone I had at the time, since then I have played a few of the more polished runners that made it to Steam but since the only things I really played on mobile for the last few years are puzzle, adventure games, and old console titles through emulation this video felt like discovering a whole world that has been going on just outside of my view. Maybe if the experience of trying to find new games worth a try on mobile wasn't so dreadful I'd pay more attention, but as it stands every time I have to deal with Google Play I realize that it's eons behind Steam or GOG in terms of usability, so I just go back to PC out of instinct.
I own a Telstar! It's pretty fun, there's even one where you basically just play tennis by yourself. I also have an Atari VCS and it's pretty fun too! Later stuff like the NES I also own and that's when you really get something pretty close to the modern video game experience
Sybway Surfers has always been a favorite of mine. I've stopped playing it multiple times, at first enjoying single plays that lasted hours, before eventually growing tired of them and uninstalling the game, only to re-upload it months later & starting the cycle all over again.
42:46 Can we just accept finally that quality and popularity is a bell curve and if your game is _too_ good it'll fail just like if it sucks too hard, but if it's mid-tier, an absolute frankenstein of things that exist, as soulless as a tech bro, it'll be the _biggest_ success?
@@Josuh To a degree, but it's mutually causal. Something too good needs to be explained and described, which makes publicity a lot harder. Something that's absolute mid meanwhile can just say "X meets Y!", like "PUBG meets Minecraft" for Fortnite. It can just drop a string of popular hashtags and the job is done for it. You actually have to explain and pitch something that's really good, and with something really bad it gets word of mouth loathing. With something mid, it can easily be advertised and publicized with "you like thing?! this thing is like thing you like!" And the problem is, consumers really embody that word. "You should like this thing because you like that thing" works more often than not. Most people don't want something, find it, and get it. Most people are told they should want something, obey, and buy it.
I know someone else complained about the pacing in regards to scripting, but I really don't think that's the issue. You're one of the creators I watch at 1.25 or 1.5 speed. The writing is on-point, it's just the actual human speech speed is at that speed where I'm like "I can read faster than this, I wish it was in text" until I speed it up. 1.5 is probably a little too fast for some people, but 1.25 feels closer to "standard video pace".
You seem to have missed out a reference to Kenta Cho, who pioneered abstract games back in the 90s. His games were (and still are) really amazing, totally abstract shooters & endless scrollers. Many of the modern abstract games are influenced by his simplistic but beautiful style.
I am honestly guilty of not just playing these things, but actually seeking them out. And it's all for one simple reason in my experience: because I can play them while doing something else in the background. They are so mindless that they require little to no concentration, just enough to receive some more stimuli while I'm watching a YT video or listening to music. They are timewasters, and if you have ADHD, you're gonna waste a hell of a lot of time on these things. They are fidget toys mascarading as endless runners.
This was a great video, thank you :) Overall, this reminded me very strongly about the opinion of animators/movie experts and such going around a while ago - that animated movies like "Minions" are effectively the shovelware of the movie industry, cheap and not high-concept... I don't remember the details to be honest. But yeah, Shovelware will always be profitable in some capacity - maybe that's not inherently a bad thing, but can for people passionate and invested in a hobby be very demoralizing and unpleasant overall I like to compare those shovelware-endless-runner games to "experiences". One doesn't have to be a gamer of any capacity to have fun with it. It's like a rollercoaster, you play it for a bit, and then move on. That's exactly how they are designed to be. There's only so many times you can go onto the same rollercoaster and still be excited for it, to ride it again. But hey, there's other coasters popping up everywhere, so that's... Good?
My theory with the new breed of endlessly cloned 3D runners or "crowd games" or just "THOSE games" is that each one exists only to disappoint the player, then serve ads for games that make the same promises to entice the player to download more. It's a big cycle of disappointment designed to inflate download numbers on app stores.
Recently I got back into mobile gaming and heard a term I have not heard before, the Idle game. Almost every game title had it. I thought, what the heck is an Idle game?
Most "fun" part about these endlessly copy-pasted garbage hyper-casual "games" is they're borderline ad/spy/malware. At the very least I'm sure they're harvesting my data, I tried to download one once and the permissions it asked for made me never want to look at one ever again.
Weird that "BC's Quest for Tires" is what's being focused on here for the start of endless runners. Alpha Denshi's "Jump Bug" was not only considered the first platformer to have horizontal scrolling, but, was also released 2 years earlier. No less, an even closer comparison might be Taito's "Cycle Mabou" from 1984
Currently the only mobile game endless runner I play is crossy road, it's a nice thing to play when bored, I've got plenty of other games on my phone but I just never have a want to play em.
Corrections:
1. At 16:04, this is meant to be Java applets. No idea how I got that mixed up, I may have written it while really tired then just not noticed while editing.
2. Alpha Denshi's Jump Bug (1981), as pointed out by a commenter, may be considered an earlier endless runner-style title and was indeed the first side-scrolling platformer, although it also shares similarities with side-scrolling shoot-em-ups from the time.
Wow
Correct yourself on 46:00 SS makes
16:30 "game makers the world over"
35:00 on rare occursions
time to rerecord the entire video :glee:
Actually, when you pass level 4095 of helix tower, the game becomes a RPG with heavy elements of meta narrative.
I've unironically wanted a game like this to do that for a long time
@@ewetwentythreeI know it's a faux-pas to say stuff like this, but...
I'm working on it...
Helix tower or helix jump? I’ve searched on all of my known search engines and can’t find helix tower
@@Ectoplasm9 the other one
@@ewetwentythree lol yeah I wrote a "proposal" when I was 8 of a space invaders clone turning into a sci-fi tactics game after you passed however many levels
the original iphone screen being 2.5 by 4.5 inches made me feel like my current phone was more akin to a small tv
it really is chico man
Hell on DSi XL, you can see the grid of the pixels with the naked eye
I LOVE LOVE big phones they are so nice
Most modern tablets screen size compete with or even outpace mobile tvs from even the late 2000's
Dude… one of my oldest cell phone memories was when I was 13. My dad and I went into Bestbuy and saw the first dell phone with a 5” display. We laughed at it and thought who the hell would want to carry this dinner-plate sized brick in their pocket. Holding it up to our heads and laughing at how much of our face we could obscure with it…. I’m typing this comment on a 6.5 inch screen….
It's truly criminal how little recognition these amazing videos get. These go beyond a simple essay and feel like artistic statements that go above and beyond more than the vast majority of content creators. Love what you're doing man, please never stop.
Another underrated essay channel is Internet Pitstop. Their editing truly is unique
Yeah man, this guys whole style is incredible
The current state of endless runners is a perfect example of success not equaling quality.
i would not agree, you talking about free games, if you going to pay for premium mobile games you can get Sayonara wild hearts for example- and the game is wonderfull
I feel Garten of Banban is a better example of that tbh
just wanted to say the sound design of this video (specifically regarding text/images appearing on screen sounding "tactile) is on point!
It's really sad to see next to no engagement on a channel that makes legitimately historical content. I've always been interested in the concept of "game and internet history documentary" videos. I hope you get more views! Your other videos are very underrated compared to your subscriber count.
I was only born in 2006, so this is mostly new to me! It's very interesting.
And the commentary you made about causal games, I totally agree. I never downloaded them because in the ad they legitimately LOOKED boring. I'm not surprised the core experience isn't good. It's just sometimes depressing to see that the games companies make are terrible... Most popular games nowadays with genuine developers are the only ones that are legitimately popular with most generations.
÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷
This video was very fun to watch, looking forward to more documentaries like this.
Channel growth is not instantaneous, and requires significant time and effort. This is because the algorithm rewards the well-established so that the well-established keep making google more money. Until we abolish personal wealth, profit will always be the endgame.
@b1ff if our guy here just keeps on making this content he'll get picked up I'm sure, but it may take a while.
I have very recently found your channel. I started with the wikipedia video and have been binging since. As a 20 something who has been addicted to youtube since 6th grade, you are the peak of content. Absolutely fantastic videos. I have nothing but praise. You scratch every itch I have for indepth analysis of obscure topics. Utterly fantastic every time. Thank you so much for your hard work. I saw in one video that you spend 40 hours creating a video, and the effort is not going unnoticed. Please continue, you deserve much more success than you have had so far.
One of the hidden gems of TH-cam. As always, amazing video
This channel filled a niche I have been so desperately craving. I love the spirit of the old web, and old tech. The further we step towards a Google DRM dominated web environment the more I crave a huge "step backwards" to how everything used to be before multi-trillion and billion dollar companies took over and claimed it for themselves.
I so relate to this. Growing up thru the 90's i don't understand why certain things had to phase out..? In my opinion, i thought we would still have certain things around but just add some modern advanced capabilities to it.. i never would have guessed that so many aspects of thing's that were around while growing up.. would disappear/vanish/cease to exist and if anything does exist it's completely lost it's vibe/it's soul/it's genuine creativity.
hell even in our own generation there can be a vast skew in experiences. I had the chance to explore the internet before the big rush of the 2000s, the look of which my wife has never encountered, and she's a year older!
Man, I played a lot of endless runners as a kid when stuff like Temple Run, Jetpack Joyride, among other things were super popular.
I kinda miss those days tbh
fr, used to play the shit out of jetpack joyride before class, on the car, waiting at appointments etc
mobile games were never great but jesus christ they're awful today lmao
@@smells109 temple run and jetpack joyride still play exactly the same though
I completely forgot about jet pack joyride until this video it’s like a blast from the past
I loved playing shit like that on my jailbroken iPhone 4 back in 2013 or something. I'd have iApp+ something from Cydia that allowed me to offline accept in app purchases. On some games that made it insane lol
There was a tiny market for runner games in the mid 90s on the TI calculators and Palm Pilots. SF Cave was a Flappy Bird predecessors
I think theyre intended for those google ads with playable demos.
theyre more like elsa goes to dentist. once you click buy and boost it in the algorithm out of sheer curiosity, mission accomplished
You're missing the earlier webgame endless runners, like Helicopter Game. Which had incredibly similar gameplay to flappy bird and was released circa 2002
4:11 A PERFECT CHANCE TO HAVE USED THE SONG *Hi-Score by Botnit*
Welcome back!
Yet another amazing and atmospheric video :] Thank you for all the work yall put in
Finally someone mentions the similarities between arcade and mobile games, great video
holy shit your content deserves more attention. incredible work
I notice that sometimes your videos have a very distinct atmosphere, like they're in their own dimension, separate from the rest of the world (especially when you have more foreboding music in the background of course), which is something I really don't get with any other TH-cam channel. Please, don't stop making videos. Like, ever.
I don't understand how you don't have a million subscribers. Unbelievable quality.
I won't lie, watching a video about endless runners but the first 3/4 chapters are about videos games in general was interesting. Entertaining lol but chapters 4 onwards definitely was what I was looking for.
That Ketchapp jumpscare got me though lmao
Basically every video essay...
A good video essay should be accessible and informative to everyone, not just those already familiar with the topic.
@@robofistsrevenge3288 a good one, sure. A great one will provide more details about what it's supposed to be about. You don't watch a documentary on kangaroo to learn about all of Australia's wildlife, you're there for kangaroos. Same with this video essay, I was here for the discussion on the endless runne genre but half of it wasn't even about that lol. Good video still, just a little miss leading. Call it the history of mobile games and how Endless Runners fit into that, not a title just centered around the one genre
@@avec5883I actually think understanding how things like early arcade and atari games worked made the end of the video better
@@avec5883
when you watch a documentary it obviously will tell you the evolution of a kangaroo,
normally starting from what it originally evolved from, onwards.
That’s basically what this video essay did.
That’s also why the time stamp feature exists
Regarding the 2048 on mobile thing, I will say that Ketchapp's one decent addition to the game was the sound design. Hearing the blooping of the merges and the noises as you slide the tiles really added a lot to the experience. Just a shame they were so shitty about it in every other way :T
>80 % of users play with sound
really glad the algo served me you, this is some amazingly well made content.
Those 4 developers just make the same game over and over now with a slightly different skin and insert like 2 ads per level which in some games is like an ad every 30 seconds
I think a huge huge issue with the mobile game industry right now is the danger it poses to kids (and others but especially kids). It is so addictive, drawing kids who SHOULD NOT be on screens that much, and flashing "pay to win" or "reward packs" or "loot boxes" in their faces. They spend their money or their parent/guardian(s)' money, on literally nothing at all. They don't learn anything and just mindlessly tap or swipe or slam their hand on the screen.
I worked with kids for 9 years. Not in education, but in swim lessons/swim coaching, lifeguarding, and as a camp counselor and camp specialist. It was HORRIFYING to see how more and more kids were obsessed with ipads, or their parent(s)/guardian(s)/sibling(s) devices. I would pull my phone out to CHECK THE TIME (i hate watches) and instantly id have half my campers surrounding me asking to play a game or what games i had. At least one family every single day when i taught lessons (usually 3-5 groups per day) would have their kid get out of the pool at the end of class and run over to their parent, their parent would wrap them up in a towel, hand them their crusty ipad in one of those chunky cases, and immediately cocomelon or some cheap mobile game would play.
My own brother had incidents where he would literally take our parents' credit cards or gift cards to spend on mobile games or roblox or fortnite (i know its not a mobile game. But honestly i cant stand it anyways). Because he wanted to win or get some loot boxes or new skins or something. And these apps and games pushed these things in the faces of kids who have zero financial knowledge or experience and little to no concept of money or its value.
Not only that but the ads these stupid games have are so misleading. They are absurd. Both the ads for the games itself and the ones slapped all over between levels and on pause screens and stuff. Its misleading customers and its disgusting.
I think that's honestly the main thing this video didn't address. Those games are specifically made to prey exclusively on children. Children's digital media has just become an absolutely disgusting and immoral goldmine. It's a total advertisement inferno and no one seems to have any any moral qualms about exploiting the attention of a bunch of kids.
At least kids TV tries to give some sort of educational value. These mass produced mobile games offer nothing, not even at the very least competent puzzles, if they did that MAYBE you could make an argument that they're "mentally stimulating" but that is not the case. It's literally drug marketing mentality: make someone addicted to a product so that they can't live without it.
I'd recommend you to watch this vid by Savantics, where she talks about how cocomelon videos literally have more frenetic cuts than an action film. She does a whole semi-scientifc investigation and it's truly fascinating!
th-cam.com/video/3S15QTEW59I/w-d-xo.html
Your videos are always an event to me, this video was awesome! I never really considered that the "mobile game cash grab" stereotype that I have in my head applies to a lot of modern endless runners. Extremely entertaining and educational as always. You make it a lot easier for us to learn about things that most don't touch on.
You presented this story in a way that is as entertaining visually as it is compellingly told. What an achievement, my good man.
If there is such a thing as “Outsider History”, this is it.
Really well produced, this was very entertaining!
One point of criticism, though: I think leaving the monetization aspect of endless runners unaddressed does hurt your argument a little.
I think you did a good job of arguing the distinction between the “endless runner” and “hyper casual” genres. But if you’re using predatory monetization as a criticism against the latter, you may want to discuss its prevalence in the former.
i thought that was odd too
Honestly monetization in modern hyper casual games is way more prevalent and predatory than in those older endless runners.
I recently played through jetpack joyride again, and of course you would get an annoying ad like every 2 runs, but that was about it. There was never a big incentive to buy in game currency, since the progression is pretty natural and you can easily get all the upgrades without spending a penny.
Compare that to a modern hypercasual game, where ad are prevalent like every 10 seconds, and at every opportunity the game will give you an incentive to buy "gems" using real money. It's gotten to the point that they will literally HIDE certain gameplay options behind a jetpack, forcing you to pick the objectively bad option and guilt tripping you into buying the better one.
Older mobile games NEVER did stuff like that, and that is the main difference. Ads were simply an annoying neccesity to keep the game free, but above all else the developers still cared about delivering a quality product. Modern hyper casuals literally only exists to be vehicles for ads.
Hyper-casual is what I refer to as “Ad-cest” or “Ad-kake”, nothing more that generic assets pumped out by what could almost be an AI with how similar some of them are purely to push product in your face.
Except Progressbar95, the one game that has "hypercasual" in it's sub title
One of the things I've noticed about the modern shovelware-freemium games is that, in their advertising, they often show the game being played incorrectly despite being obviously easy to figure out. It's like a strange mix of those as-seen-on-tv commercials were someone struggles with something basic like how a recliner works, and an implicit dare to see if YOU could play the game better. It plays on a very innate compulsion in a lot of people to be correct - even better if you can show some wrong schmuck how it's done correctly.
It reminds me of a joke I heard a stand-up comedian tell years ago (that I'm probably going to butcher). Two friends are packing supplies into their bags to go camping. One friend noticed the other putting a deck of cards in their bag, and curious about it, they asked why. The friend answered that they took it in case they got lost in the woods. The first friend said they didn't understand how that would solve anything. The second friend explained that they would start playing solitaire. Eventually a stranger would come along and show them a move that they were missing.
The game itself isn't subjective. Your taste in it is. A game where controls quite literally don't work would be considered bad, right? Sorry, I just kinda growing tired every time someone makes an an objective statement and than follow up by saying it is subjective. It is just a very easy way out of the discussion by saying "It's subjective so whatever, am I right?" It is also lazy. If you spend almost an hour to explain where you are coming from and why you think the things you think I am expecting you to actually hold your postion instead of opting out for "It's just subjective, am I right?" I get it. It is much easier and less time consuming but I would encourage you to think through your postions instead of just pushing it to "It's subjective" side.
Agreed
your editing style i so unique that i can immediatly tell im watching a video of yours. i love your content!
Gen exer who grew up in the 70s and 80s, so I really appreciate your research and presentation on that portion of the video ‼️ Dig the rest of it too , love the way you think.
I really like your vibe. Based PRS appreciation
Your visual language, especially the selective glitching or silhouette replacements, is super strong!
Canabalt is still one of the best - others never put nearly enough effort into visual and audio feedback. Smashing through a window or watching a building be violently demolished in Canabalt is still satisfying.
The history of the endless runner genre becoming what it is today
so amazing and great video man :]
If you want them to cease serving gruel you must first stop eating it
Wonderfully beautiful visuals and editing
Was not expecting to hear that classic dnb tune at 45mins, loove me some Digital 🔥 Fantastic video as always Cap'n!
My guy you deserve all them subscribers
Some great music in this, and a very pleasant voice too.
As someone who often strives to break down the industry academically, I can say this is a very well thought out and presented thesis.
So the current glut of mobile endless runner games is basically operating in the same corporate model as the pre-1983 crash video game market, but without a foreseeable risk of a crash?
I remember playing canabalt, great game.
Someone wrote a short story for it in the Kongregate comments!
What a well made documentary, thoroughly enjoyable!
The editing on every one of your videos is amazing. Bingeworthy.
Also..... 👀 your voice is very uhm... nice. 😂
When I was a very young child person, I played on the V-Flash. Neat times. Good times.
Very good breakdown, but I will say it's a little incorrect to say that the genre was completely gone in the time after arcades but before web gaming
The genre has a short run in handheld gaming on the Gameboy and stuff
I dont know HOW I knew you would play Spamton's theme where you did, but I expected it and I was rewarded
how did I not find you earlier? This is awesome
I have no idea why I thought that this was just gonna be another video where another random 20-something bitches and moans about how mobile games used to be so much better back then and all those tired talking points, all put under the veneer of a video essay just so they can frame their opinions as facts. I have no clue why I expected that type of content, I’ve seen a handful of your videos before and are even subscribed to the channel. But damn, this video was (dare I say) a masterpiece. It really got the point across in a clear and concise way that didn’t veer off into unnecessary side tangents, that kept me interested in the history of this genre of game that I rarely think about. Truly excellent work, your sub count is criminally low.
the music and sound effect taste is insane
I love how Canabalt after all these years is still available but as a paid game with no ads
Honestly; I just see Hyper Casual games as a way to milk money from the non-gamer crowd, honestly I wish I knew about this earlier, I would've been making horrible small games instead of trying to be ambitious.
This is *entirely* a comment to show other people how good this video is, so I don't have anything to say.
It's good, though. Very good.
3:33 Those consoles look like they're straight livid.
I will say, I've got one of these hypercasual games on my phone mostly as a kind of thing to do with my hands when I want to listen to an audiobook or podcast or something. I've had it for years and have developed my own internal ruleset for how to play it simply because otherwise it would be too boring--but it's also an experience I don't need to actually pay any attention. I think Threes is an excellent example; I played it again for the first time in years and that game is fun to control, gives me a pretty interesting puzzle to solve, and is full of charm. But because of that, I actually need to give it my full attention. If I want to just zone out, I need something with a lot less... artistic merit.
..Of course I also turn airplane mode on when I use my hypercasual game of choice, so the awful, constant ads don't actually interfere with the experience. If they ever make it so ads play even on airplane mode I'll be doomed lol
Weird how this has so many views but so few likes. It's good.
The name Miniclip just gave such a nostalgia wave, wow
How does this not have millions of views?
You are so underrated!
As someone who has been playing games since the early 90's it's curious that I never noticed that endless runners had gone downhill simply because I never paid much attention to the genre, I remember loving Canabalt back when it was a browser game and playing a lot of Doodle Jump because it was one of the few titles that made use of gyro controls on the flip phone I had at the time, since then I have played a few of the more polished runners that made it to Steam but since the only things I really played on mobile for the last few years are puzzle, adventure games, and old console titles through emulation this video felt like discovering a whole world that has been going on just outside of my view. Maybe if the experience of trying to find new games worth a try on mobile wasn't so dreadful I'd pay more attention, but as it stands every time I have to deal with Google Play I realize that it's eons behind Steam or GOG in terms of usability, so I just go back to PC out of instinct.
Amazing video!
This guy went the whole video without even mentioning children and it was still a good video. Not a bad job fella.
All I want is to reach a level of infamy that Captain KRB makes a video of all the dumb things I say on videos
I own a Telstar! It's pretty fun, there's even one where you basically just play tennis by yourself. I also have an Atari VCS and it's pretty fun too! Later stuff like the NES I also own and that's when you really get something pretty close to the modern video game experience
My favorite "endless runners" from back in the day were the Hill Climber series and Jetpack Joyride. Both great, simple games
Sybway Surfers has always been a favorite of mine. I've stopped playing it multiple times, at first enjoying single plays that lasted hours, before eventually growing tired of them and uninstalling the game, only to re-upload it months later & starting the cycle all over again.
You just got a subscriber :]
Bit-trip runner will always be my favorite
42:46 Can we just accept finally that quality and popularity is a bell curve and if your game is _too_ good it'll fail just like if it sucks too hard, but if it's mid-tier, an absolute frankenstein of things that exist, as soulless as a tech bro, it'll be the _biggest_ success?
It's a matter of publicity i think
@@Josuh To a degree, but it's mutually causal. Something too good needs to be explained and described, which makes publicity a lot harder. Something that's absolute mid meanwhile can just say "X meets Y!", like "PUBG meets Minecraft" for Fortnite. It can just drop a string of popular hashtags and the job is done for it. You actually have to explain and pitch something that's really good, and with something really bad it gets word of mouth loathing. With something mid, it can easily be advertised and publicized with "you like thing?! this thing is like thing you like!"
And the problem is, consumers really embody that word. "You should like this thing because you like that thing" works more often than not. Most people don't want something, find it, and get it. Most people are told they should want something, obey, and buy it.
The endless toil of the endless content creator
the ENDLESS decay (RADIOACTIVELY,, with all the particles...) of the ENDLESS (just like the concept of OUROBOROS...) speed,runner
I miss playing running Fred when I didn’t have WiFi
I know someone else complained about the pacing in regards to scripting, but I really don't think that's the issue. You're one of the creators I watch at 1.25 or 1.5 speed. The writing is on-point, it's just the actual human speech speed is at that speed where I'm like "I can read faster than this, I wish it was in text" until I speed it up. 1.5 is probably a little too fast for some people, but 1.25 feels closer to "standard video pace".
Holy moley is that the flywheel design @9:57
Your pronunciation of "Coleco" tells me everything I need to know about your age.
8:35 sounds like there's a big shot in the distance.
I dug those chip tunes during the intro
Punchquest was my JAM back in the day. I only ever beat like one boss though lol.
You seem to have missed out a reference to Kenta Cho, who pioneered abstract games back in the 90s. His games were (and still are) really amazing, totally abstract shooters & endless scrollers. Many of the modern abstract games are influenced by his simplistic but beautiful style.
I love masters of the universe 80's style TVCG opening. That' is just awesome
I am honestly guilty of not just playing these things, but actually seeking them out. And it's all for one simple reason in my experience: because I can play them while doing something else in the background. They are so mindless that they require little to no concentration, just enough to receive some more stimuli while I'm watching a YT video or listening to music.
They are timewasters, and if you have ADHD, you're gonna waste a hell of a lot of time on these things. They are fidget toys mascarading as endless runners.
This was a great video, thank you :)
Overall, this reminded me very strongly about the opinion of animators/movie experts and such going around a while ago - that animated movies like "Minions" are effectively the shovelware of the movie industry, cheap and not high-concept... I don't remember the details to be honest. But yeah, Shovelware will always be profitable in some capacity - maybe that's not inherently a bad thing, but can for people passionate and invested in a hobby be very demoralizing and unpleasant overall
I like to compare those shovelware-endless-runner games to "experiences". One doesn't have to be a gamer of any capacity to have fun with it. It's like a rollercoaster, you play it for a bit, and then move on. That's exactly how they are designed to be. There's only so many times you can go onto the same rollercoaster and still be excited for it, to ride it again. But hey, there's other coasters popping up everywhere, so that's... Good?
My theory with the new breed of endlessly cloned 3D runners or "crowd games" or just "THOSE games" is that each one exists only to disappoint the player, then serve ads for games that make the same promises to entice the player to download more. It's a big cycle of disappointment designed to inflate download numbers on app stores.
33:53 ...he looks calm and ready
To drop bombs, but he keeps on forgetting
What he wrote down...
Recently I got back into mobile gaming and heard a term I have not heard before, the Idle game. Almost every game title had it. I thought, what the heck is an Idle game?
Canabalt still exists and I still play it. As far as I'm concerned the genre ended there because I never desired to have another endless runner
43:53 the game I’d play ALL the time
oh my godddd i haven't heard Ketchapp in years, felt crazy when it was mentioned
DIdn't watch the video but the title sounds like Death Grips
Chrome internet dino is peak gaming, I want to make an mmo tribute
i love that the creator of flappy bird was like "what the f*ck is wrong with you people?!" and rage deleted his own app
Most "fun" part about these endlessly copy-pasted garbage hyper-casual "games" is they're borderline ad/spy/malware. At the very least I'm sure they're harvesting my data, I tried to download one once and the permissions it asked for made me never want to look at one ever again.
Weird that "BC's Quest for Tires" is what's being focused on here for the start of endless runners. Alpha Denshi's "Jump Bug" was not only considered the first platformer to have horizontal scrolling, but, was also released 2 years earlier. No less, an even closer comparison might be Taito's "Cycle Mabou" from 1984
It's Zed X Spectrum. Not Zee X.
Currently the only mobile game endless runner I play is crossy road, it's a nice thing to play when bored, I've got plenty of other games on my phone but I just never have a want to play em.
great video
Commenting for the algorithm real quick