I just found out that Kimberly Kubus/Sparlatacus/Kim Okkerstrøm committed suicide last year. I heard it was December, but I also saw a comment saying it happened already in June, so I don't know what the truth is. (edit: Now I hear May) If you followed the early Game Maker scene at all where everyone was being drawn to the same few sites, you probably ran into Kubus' games at some point, the most popular being
Drink Tea and Die and the Johnny series. Most people would just diss on them super hard and move on because they do a lot of things that most people assume only bad artists and programmers are allowed to do, for literally no reason beyond their own inexperience. The guy who made
Revenge of the Sunfish (jinxtengu) had a good friendship going with Kimberly, so he created a retrospective/memorial. You should probably read it if you're into game designers making 1,000,000,000 games and every single one says "fuck you" to any expected aesthetics and mechanics but the author's own. The entire Johnny series (like thirty games, probably the longest GM series ever) is just phenomenal game making and the two fangames that cly5m made (the author of
seiklus - one of the biggest "early GM" games for its excellence in destroying the gm feel and creating its own, special sense of laidback exploration with collectables that serve no purpose or character beyond encouraging you to explore and ultimately access the final area pretty much at whatever pace or direction you feel like - good game design, and you'll notice that all the really important and good GM creators have an affinity for idiosyncratic art like Kubus's because they understand that what he does is
personal expression and alternate worlds instead of
attempt #15525 at recapturing feeling of wasting being eight) are also really, really good.
Here's a good retrospective that some netrando named Unwinder/captaintorvin wrote:
His persona is that of an androgynous Marilyn Manson-style provoceteur, but too bumbling and silly to actually create any controversy. He has (or feigns) a huge ego, and gives himself labels like "The King of Good Stuff," and "The combined DNA of four gods." His work comes across as humorous mostly based on its brazenly lazy craftsmanship, and the weirdness of his persona. I'm not sure if it's part of his act, or if he just gets embarrassed with the whole thing now and then, but his website generally goes down every couple of months, only to return with a new design and some new material.
All of his games are glitchy, and many of them are completely unplayable. The artwork is usually very lazy, but also very striking. Characters are generally just brightly colored squares or circles with manic faces. The games have titles like "Camel Breeder," "Drink Tea or Die," "Acupuncture Santa" and "Blank Screen 2." They typically execute the concepts in their titles as straightforwardly as possible. Kubus is very prolific, and has produced somewhere around a hundred and fifty games.
His music ranges from impossible to listen to, to very amusing, but difficult to listen to. Typical tracks are just noise, a single sample repeated over and over over a very simple instrumental, or him plunking away at the keyboard while a cheap-sounding automated accompaniment plays. The lyrics, when there are any, are usually inspired nonsense ("I can go how fast I want, because I am the inventor of the wheel!" "The cock-sniffer of St. Tropez; He loves the smell of penis in the morning, and so do I!"), and occasionally they are expanded into longer narratives. He has a funny voice, and a funny accent, and he's always trying to sing about provocative topics ("I'm raping you!" "It feels good to kill the police!" "Dead schoolteachers make me horny!"), but either due to cultural differences, difficulties with the English language, or deliberate humor, it always comes across as more pathetic and silly than offensive. He is almost as prolific with music as with games, regularly releasing multiple albums in one day.
His movies are usually about him and his friends walking around in the woods and just barely acting out an improvised story, which is usually abandoned for long sequences of the characters getting stoned and playing musical instruments.
If, for some reason, you want to appreciate his work (as I do), I'd recommend playing some of the games, as they're bite-sized, and a bit less difficult to take in than the other stuff.
And here's his unfinished but still immense collection of Kim's stuff:
https://www.mediafire.com/?aj5ly75pump32But, to my inner archivist's frothing displeasure, you can't bulk-download it without spending money on mediafire.
Anyway,
GO HERE >>>>
http://www.revengeofthesunfish.com/Kubus.html <<<<
Please be sure to read the first email where Kim is talking about the Kubus world.
It's fucking awful to hear, belatedly, that we lost such a singular person. Video games and the entire planet are only really interesting because of people like Kimberly.
The worst thing was that besides making about twenty jillion games, Kubus made like twenty grillion albums, and since his site vanished a while ago Kim fans now have a possibly impossible quest to find all of his shit and put it all in one place. He also wrote a "Kubus Manifesto" that I vaguely remember reading but now have no idea how to find. It was fucking awesome. It was about salty shit and that you should make games that challenge the player. Jinxtengu's words: "
The gist of the manifesto was about going against and/or breaking well established game design rules, exceeding/breaking player expectations, not respecting the player by designing games that where easy to follow, understand or even play. A theme of excess, and overkill. In essence breaking the rules that game players take for granted. Actually I might have missed the point of Kim’s actual manifesto but this is what I extrapolated from it anyhow." So basically, in my mind, it was an extremely important document in the history of game design that is probably AWOL forever. Such is Inter Net.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UV9MoIcIfD8
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