Besiege

About

Besiege is a 2015 indie physics-based building game developed and published by Spiderling Studios in which the player can construct a variety of custom-designed siege vehicles and weapons to destroy enemy forces and fortifications. Since its release in late January 2015, dozens of videos and animated GIFs showcasing user-generated weapons in the sandbox mode have surfaced on online gaming communities, most notably on 4chan and Reddit.

Gameplay

Besiege features a campaign mode with several scenarios in which the player must destroy buildings and enemies by building siege weapons from a limited selection of parts. In sandbox mode, the player can freely create weapons using any of the game's available parts.

History

On January 16th, 2015, an alpha version of the game was added to the Steam Greenlight video game developer community, where community members cast votes for Valve to determine if a game is worth carrying on the distribution platform. On January 28th, the full game was released on Steam.

Online Presence

On January 20th, the /r/besiege^[6] subreddit was launched for discussions about the game. On January 24th, YouTuber PewDiePie uploaded a "let's play" video featuring footage of the alpha version of Besiege (shown below). Within one month, the video gained over 4.2 million views.

On February 1st, a Besiege thread was created in the /v/^[9] (video games) board on 4chan in which users shared GIFs and webm videos of their in-game creations.^[9] On Februray 3rd, an additional thread was created.^[10] The same day, YouTuber BigBaka Gajin uploaded a compilation video containing many of the GIFs from /v/ (shown below).

On February 9th, Redditor lwlwlwlw posted an animated GIF to /r/funny^[7] featuring a Besiege weapon that traps enemies before erecting a swastika and setting them on fire (shown below, left). On the following day, Redditor pppoe submitted a Besiege GIF of a siege machine resembling a man with a large flame thrower penis on /r/funny^[8] (shown below, right). In the first week, the posts gathered more than 4,500 votes (92% upvoted) and 4,700 votes (92% upvoted).

Reception

As of February 2015, Besiege holds a rating of 10/10 on Steam with over 3,300 positive reviews.^[4]

Notable Examples

Search Interest

External References