I had two obsessions in my childhood: animation and video games. Always greater than the urge to consume was the urge to

create. Animation made sense: you draw one picture after another and then sequence them all together to create the illusion

of motion. Ralph Bakshi told me that I could even make my own in little notepads, but how on Earth were video

games made? It just seemed like sorcery, as far as I was concerned, until I happened upon a mysterious piece of

software called The Games Factory. And so began my first digital creative outlet as a maker of edgy and disgusting games.

Wait, hold on! Why aren't you subscribed to my channel? Come on! Long-time PC gamers may remember that before there

were Flash games, there were Click and Play games. Welcome to the wonderful world of Click and Play! With Click and

Play, full game development was finally accessible to non-coding simpletons like me. Before long, I'd worked out the basics of

the software and was making stupid little games to amuse my friends. Removing most of the complex programming

from game creation in favor of a simplified event editor, The Games Factory allowed me to get straight to

business: drawing sprites and backgrounds and not getting bogged down in syntax and complex mathematics. I would make

games about my friends, about murderers, and what I assumed taking drugs was like. There was absolutely no limit to what

depths of depravity my themes dared sink to. Join me as we take a journey through my teenhood. Edge Lord alert! Although

many of you will still declare me Lord of the Edge for my dirty Beetle nasties, Rocky Jackson parodies, and this Jerry

Jackson moment, that is nothing compared to what I was in my mid-teens, though. Subtlety hadn't quite been introduced to

My repertoire at the time, add to that my obsession with the then brand-new show, South Park,

and you have quite the recipe for a lot of utterly needless swearing. Sheep Wars: Do you like being insulted?

Do you like blood and poo? Then Sheep Wars is for you! My first serious game project, which I sneakily distributed via CDR,

when making entirely legal copies of PC games for friends at school. Pre-internet, you'd play any game you could get your

hands on. It was very normal to get a copy of Duke Nukem and find five or six

other games on the CD, in folders. I sometimes wonder how many people ended up installing my game, Abominations,

whilst trying to install Half-Life. Well, that's just rude! Even the menus weren't safe from this teenage vulgarian.

It was an all-out profanity assault. Perhaps Ole Gunnar Solskjær's side-scrolling platformer debut, Sheep

Wars, was repetitive, infuriating, vulgar, and, due to my ignorance regarding graphical limitations, ran horribly on the hardware at the time. Games just don't

throw in a random Egypt level like they used to. Home, of course, to the wito's professor.

[Music] And these smooth pyramids! Mel Gibson's Safari! Mel Gibson is the protagonist here, on safari it would seem, avoiding rocks,

fighting natives and killing elephants, as he typically does. There's a strong possibility my friend Christian provided

the concept for this one. It's hard to remember that far back, but it sounds like one of his. We would

occasionally think of ideas for hypothetical games with no intention of creating them, such as Overdraft '98, in

which you must manage your finances, and the Washing Machine Emulator. Washing machine? Yes. By today's standards, these are completely feasible, if trivial.

game concept, but 25 years ago it was laughable to imagine such games could ever exist. Mel Gibson's Safari 3

considers the possibility that one and two already exist, and so, just to be safe, jump straight to a third installment.

roughly aiming to look like a low-quality NES game. I really wanted people to think this was genuine. I even

credited it to the fictitious Mart Poom, who in reality was a goalkeeper for Derby County in 1997, and a fabricated

backstory about it originally being for the Scorpion 8 system, which, as far as I know, was simply a bootleg Nintendo

system that had no original games. Christian accurately provided the voice of Mel Gibson, who'd do his best to help

you avoid the enemies and guide you through the safari. This one made an appearance in Burnt Face Man 5, where he reviewed it, giving

it three puddles out of five. And my own personal hooray! [Music] Psycho [__] killer was me at my most

edgy; a game with no enemies, just one man and a chainsaw killing small children, a bleeding man hanging from a tree, and the

Duracell Bunny. This was directly inspired by a game I saw some kids playing at school on Acorn computers

one lunchtime when the teachers weren't looking, around 1993, right at the height of the hysteria surrounding video game

violence. Like the Grinch who stole Christmas, these violent video games threatened to rob this particular holiday season of its spirit of goodwill. I

had no idea what I was looking at, but it was incredibly gory and excited my 10-year-old brain. It's hard to describe why

I was so excited by video game violence, but I knew I needed to make some of my own messed-up stuff. Even at

the time I knew this was a bit much. I just wanted to make something shocking. I'm glad I grew out of that phase.

Every one of these boxes has a naughty word written on it; that's where I was. The mission seems to have been to murder

25 victims, but with only seven or eight killable NPCs.  To find that is where this game sadly ends; not to be confused with

my other games from the same period [ __ ] mobile and [ __ ] Slayer, which

includes this moment. Going through CDs of old creations is indeed a cringefest. There is a good

reason why my cartoons from this period aren't available to watch. John '64 was inspired by a friend from

school who'd kick you in the back, shouting out some nonsensical word in the process. A very young smoker, he was also the best

at flicking pens into the bin due to his long fingers. I am not making this up; he'd shout out words to accompany the

pen flicking too, like 'flippant helicopter'. And also, my friend Jimmy did the voice for this game with a flawless impersonation.

This is another game absolutely full of references from school. In fact, every single aspect of this game is based on

something that actually happened. [Music] Let's go! I skipped straight to the sequel on this one because nobody

remembers the original. Inspired again by asking my friend Christian for a title for a game and then attempting to make

it. He probably spent all of two seconds thinking of the title, and then I spent two months trying to make it. You play as

Hugh Laurie, actor turned firefighter in Northern Ireland, possibly based on a hypothetical movie we'd imagined in

which Hugh, deep in the Irish troubles, mostly extinguishes fires, collects BAFTAs, and gets into scrapes with the local

Irish natives. It lasts not a single level and contains many unignorable glitches, including these numbers, all

over the screen because I didn't fully understand how values were supposed to be stored, so I just put them where you

could see them. I didn't give up on this one; I just lost all the files in a hard

drive failure because I was a no-backup cowboy. [Music] Many developers and enthusiasts with short attention spans will agree that

starting new games is a lot more fun and easier than finishing existing projects. The majority of my games simply stop

sometimes in the middle of a level, but most often at the start of level two. Mel Gibson's Safari took the novel approach

of fabricating a fake crash partway through the first level, preventing any further progress. Most of my games were made before 2003,

the year I went to university. There, I found myself making cartoons and music in my free time rather than games. Then

unexpectedly, in 2004, animation became my full-time job following the release of Salad Fingers and has been ever since. I

never gave up completely, though. During lockdown, I dusted off the old Game Maker, which at this point had become Click

Team Fusion, and started making something new and as yet untitled: a somewhat ambient, moody adventure exploration game in

which you are lost in the moors amongst birds, ants, fire-spitting apes, and a lingering sense of doom.

Not only that, but also this Jerry Jackson game I've been working on, which began as a spiritual successor to John

64, but has since evolved into an action-adventure game and is quite deep in development. Currently, a whole four

levels long, it has bosses, story, dialogue, multiple modes, and plenty of unnecessary violence. I am the one true God. You have not seen

the last of me. This is not an advert, by the way. These are not coming soon. I have no intention of quitting, but who knows?

What's going to happen? I made the mistake once of announcing something; never again. But who knows, we'll see.

So that was a small look at the video games I made when I was younger. A couple of the games in this video are available

to play online. I wouldn't recommend it; you've seen enough here. However, I would recommend going over to

saladfingersstore.com and having a look at our selection of merchandise.

I used to make games

I used to make games

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