About

Bennet Foddy is an Australian indie video game creator. He’s famous for creating overly difficult games that are based on direct player-controlled movement. Many of his games have gained popularity due to being played by popular YouTubers and streamers.^[1]

History

Bennett Foddy was born in Australia in 1978 to a family of academics. He studied philosophy in college and enrolled in a doctoral degree in philosophy in late 2003 at the University of Melbourne.^[2] His interest in indie games started in 2006, where he would teach himself how to program and design games with online tutorials. His first game would be the flash game Too Many Ninjas. A simple game where players defended an immobile ninja avatar against oncoming ninjas. The game mainly relies on reflexes and a small set of buttons. Its positive press encouraged Foddy to continue the pursuit in indie game development. Still, Foddy hid this hobby from his colleagues to avoid the philosophy field's stigma against philosophers who do not wholly dedicate themselves to their philosophy work.^[3] He would eventually move to the United States; there, in 2008, he would eventually develop and release his next game, QWOP, where the player uses the four keyboard keys of the game's title to control the muscles of an Olympic sprinter. The game would enjoy great success after being played by popular YouTubers like PewDiePie and others. ^[4] in the later year more games would be realised to a similar reaction with GRIP, CLOP and Getting Over its.

Reception

Despite the critical reception of his games, Bennet Foddy has developed a decent negative following that considers his games to be "popular bait games" with minimal effort because their sole reason is to appeal to content creators and then fall into obscurity. But other netizens consider his games to actually be very well put together. Foddy's games are often categorized as "rage games" due to their simplicity and difficult nature. Foddy is also often cited as the one who popularized the concept of rage games, although he's not the one to conceptualize the idea.

Games list

Too Many Ninjas (2007)
Little Master Cricket (2008)
QWOP (2008)
VVVVVV (collaboration with Terry Cavanagh) (2010)
GIRP (2011)
Poleriders (2011)
CLOP (2012)
Get On Top (2012)
Bennett Foddy's Speed Chess (2013)
Cheque Please (2013, with Pendleton Ward; unreleased)
Zebra (2016)
Multibowl (2016)
Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy (2017)
Universal Paperclips (2017, with Frank Lantz)
Ape Out (2019, with Gabe Cuzzillo)
Zipper (2022, included with the Playdate)
Baby Steps (TBD, with Gabe Cuzzillo and Maxi Boch)

Sources

Wikipedia ^[1]
Wikipedia ^[2]
Wikipedia ^[3]
Wikipedia ^[4]