Games, writing, and experiments by Bennett Foddy
Zipper is one of the games that shipped with 'season 1' of the games for Panic 's handheld Playdate console. It's a love letter to the ZX Spectrum games I grew up on, especially The Last Ninja 2 ; It's an evolution of a very old prototype I made in Flash, which you can find under the title 'A Straw Hat' in the Flashpoint Archive if you are curious. Get it with a Playdate console
I worked on Baby Steps, with Gabe Cuzzillo and Maxi Boch, from late 2019 to 2025. I don't really have enough distance from it to explain what it is or why you should play it. Here's some press if you're curious to know more: Keza McDonald's piece in the Guardian Rollo Romig's profile of me in the New York times Giovanni Colantonio's review for Polygon Kyle Orland's review for Ars Technica Megan…
Getting Over It is now available on Apple Arcade! Now including cloud saves and controller support. You can get it here.
I’ve been meaning to post this for a while – it’s the other secret game hidden in Sportsfriends , a version of Get On Top that uses twin-analog controllers for input. One stick controls your legs, the other controls your arms – it’s designed to sit with one other person and play for hours. Just like the Flash version , it’s heavily inspired by Tuomas’ Korppi’s old DOS classic, Fight of the Sumo…
It’s been my view for a while that it’s a worthwhile exercise for any game designer to make a chess variant, a dice variant and a Pong variant. Speed Chess is my take on Chess, and this is my take on Pong . I originally built it as a secret mode for Sportsfriends, but people keep asking to show it at events, so I decided to put out a standalone build. FLOP was designed to work with two gamepads,…
When I was teaching at NYU, every year I ran a prototyping class where students make a new game every week, starting with a prompt or constraint that I give them. It became a tradition for me to hide one of their prompts inside a small, prototype-scaled game. Ostensibly it was to give them some inspiration and benchmark the right amount of work for a 1-week prototype, but really it was just fun…
If you run into problems playing Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy and need help, you can contact me here: Steam Forums Twitter Email: support {at} foddy (dot) net
I created this game for a certain kind of person To hurt them. A few things that have happened since I released the game in 2017 It really caught fire with streamers and has been played by nearly all of the biggest ones. It's in the permanent collection in New York's Museum of Modern Art . There's now a genre of games that is sometimes called 'Foddian'. The speedrun scene embraced it . Clayton…
This is a little experiment I made in Pico-8 a while ago on a flight. It uses a control method I haven’t seen before, where the movement is damped according to the rate of change in the acceleration (the ‘jerk’) which creates a strange oscillating movement. Play it online for free.
I made this little game as a way of learning Terry Cavanagh’s work-in-progress game engine, Haxegon . It’s a bullet-hell game where you are always trying to eat a particular bullet… you try to build unique words to gain points, but it’s game over if you form a series of letters that cannot be a word. I think this is a new idea? But I’m not totally sure. Play it in your browser for free (HTML5).
Game designers take it as axiomatic that if the player feels frustrated, something has gone wrong with the design. Yet frustration is an essential ingredient in many (all?) of the most famous and influential designs. What would Space Invaders be like if you never had to start again? What would Myst be like if you were never stumped? A game that is completely devoid of frustration is likely to be a…
In 2015 I gave a short talk on the best ways to use game physics engines at the Game Developer’s conference, and it’s now online for free. The idea is: nearly everyone who makes games has to deal with a physics engine these days, but hardly anyone I talk to knows the basics of how they work. It’s not super hard to get a handle on it, but it’s counterintuitive so I thought a short tutorial talk…
In developing the repertoire of games for Multibowl , I played about 1000 games made from 1975 through to about 2000. I found a few gems that are worth playing in their own right, and which I think aren’t all that well known. Of course you’ve played Windjammers, and Street Fighter, and Warlords. But have you played these? Arcade Volleyball – Rhett Anderson 1988 Commodore 64, Amiga 500, MS-DOS…
When Stephen Clark made this game for my prototyping class, I liked it so much I ported it to HTML. It’s very simple – just click the flies. Stephen is a wonderful designer – check out Rooftop Cop and Witchball . Play it online (HTML/JS)
Part of a series of disobedient toys, which I started when I made Bennett Foddy’s Ball-in-a-Cup for Hide & Seek’s Tiny Games collection.
Stair is an infinite action-puzzle game I made for iOS with the brilliant AP Thomson (author of Beglitched and Swap Sword ). A gymnast who is in an extreme hurry is trying to climb upward. To help her, you can slide the colored blocks around to clear her way and provide platforms. It’s a game about helping someone other than yourself. AP was responsible for the design and programming, and I made…
I hid an assignment for my NYU prototyping class in this game. Use the arrow keys to pump your legs rhythmically and jump over obstacles. Made in HTML5/Luxe. Play it online.
This short maze game is inspired by Op-Art pioneers like Reginald Neal. It combines two ideas: first, your brain can easily segment areas of an image based on the direction of shading, without any color or tone information to help… making the game quite playable. Second, this kind of image causes conflict as your eyeball moves, making it really annoying to play. I used it as a talking point in my…
Sportsfriends is something like a time capsule of the local multiplayer games that my friends and I were making and playing in and around New York in 2010-2012. It contains four games: Hokra by Ramiro Corbetta, Barabariball by Noah Sasso, and Johann Sebastian Joust by Doug Wilson. I contributed a sequel to Pole Riders , called Super Pole Riders . And maybe a couple of secret bonus games crept in…
MULTIBOWL is a two-player challenge of skill and knowledge, across exciting moments in over 300 historical games across dozens of hardware platforms. It’s the first videogame collage, maybe. I made it with the excellent AP Thomson , who designed Swap Sword , Beglitched and Stair: Slide the Blocks to Ascend . And it’s built out of a modified version of the incredible MAME emulator. Because…
Bennett Foddy's Speed Chess is the fastest game of chess in the world. Designed for sixteen players to play simultaneously, it lets players move their piece instantly, without waiting for their turn. They can change which piece they control at will. The game proceeds at the speed of thought. This game was commissioned for NYU GameCenter ‘s essential No Quarter event , and it is built for public…
A number of my favourite game developers, like Adam Saltsman and Tim Rogers and Phil Fish , missed out on the whole Amiga oeuvre because the system was unpopular in the United States. To me this is a pity – because the popularity of the Amiga was low outside of Europe and Australia, it was sheltered from a lot of the creative trends in the USA and Japan. And so there are a number of games on the…
CLOP is a sequel to QWOP, but I guess you could also say it was inspired by Kikstart II . Your task is simply to run over a small hill. This one hasn't been ported to HTML successfully, but you can play it on the free Flashpoint archive .
Sun God is a game that was commissioned for the ‘Soundplay’ event being run by Pitchfork , Kill Screen , and Intel for the Pitchfork festival. I was asked to make something at the boundary of music and games, so I made this thing that is focused on experiencing the song. That song is ‘Sun God’ by Cut Copy , a band I used to play bass for. It was originally a browser game but you can use the…
Since I’ve been making a bunch of two-player games, I decided to adapt QWOP for a two player race. Modern computer keyboards don’t do well with pressing a lot of keys at once. So I recommend you either use a gamer keyboard (NKRO) or else plug in a second USB keyboard for player 2. This one hasn't been ported to HTML5 but you can get the original flash version in the free Flashpoint Archive .
Pole Riders is a pole-vaulting polo game for two players only. Vault up to kick the ball into the opposing player’s goal, or kick your opponent off their pole. I made an updated, much better version of this game called Super Pole Riders , which is part of the Sportsfriends compilation for computers and Playstations. If you like this one, you should check that out – I feel like I fixed a lot of the…
Kickstarter’s Fred Benenson wrote a profile of me for this month’s Wired magazine. I think he did a nice job. You can read it here.
GIRP is the sequel to QWOP. It’s a game about climbing a cliff using all the letter keys on your keyboard. Press and hold the letter keys to reach for the rings, and use either SHIFT, CONTROL or the mouse button to haul yourself up. Your goal is a bird’s nest at the top of the cliff, that has an awesome, amazing treasure hidden inside. But you have to contend with a territorial bird and the slowly…
It’s long overdue, but we just updated Evacuation for iPhone to version 2.0. Changes include: 27 new hand-crafted challenge levels. Try to get an A-rank in each one to progress. Save-game support for iOS 3 and iOS 4. Now you can take a call and not lose your progress. Better visual feedback for touches, makes the game feel more responsive. Tested for iOS 4. Various bugfixes. New level select…
In 2010 I released a redesigned version of QWOP for smartphones. I guess it’s ok because Stott Stoddard, the designer of Robot Unicorn Attack , played it so much he wore down indentations in his iPad screen. Amazingly, it still works fine in 2026. Knock on wood! Buy it for iOS here.
Like everyone, I have made a lot of designs that never became finished games, usually because the prototype wasn’t fun or was too hard to make. Sometimes I come back to these designs and finish them ( Winner vs. Loser is one example). This one was going to be something like Tetris in reverse, where the computer would play tetris in an incompetent manner, and you would try to fill in the holes…
I converted Anna Anthropy ‘s Chicanery to iOS. The idea is to hold the corner of the screen and never let go, or your head gets cut off. There are some other nice games that came out afterwards that take the concept a lot further, like Adriaan’s Friendstrap , and Michael’s O , and the Copenhagen Collective’s BUTTON . When I bought an iPad, it immediately became clear that most developers weren’t…
Winner vs. Loser is a two-player, one-button athletics game in the mold of ‘Track ‘N Field’. Press your button rhythmically to build up speed, and hold it down to jump the hurdles. I wrote this for Kokoromi’s Gamma 4 event, which called for games that could be played with one button, but they didn’t go for it. Maybe if I had pressed my button more rhythmically… A training mode is included for…
QWOP is a simple game about running extremely fast down a 100 meter track. If you want to know what it's about, you could watch this ancient Cr1tikal video. Or if you wanted something more intellectual you could watch this amazing talk by Frank Lantz . In 2016 I updated it to work with HTML5, so you don’t need Flash to play it. Should work fine even on a smartphone, using the on-screen buttons.…
I have always found the gradient editors in packages like Photoshop unsatisfactory for making gentle colour gradients (such as skies). If you use two colours, you get a smooth gradient but usually a very ugly sky. If you use three or more colours, it is very hard to get a smooth gradient. You can do it, but it takes a lot of trial and error to find the right arrangement of colour swatches. So I’ve…
Too Many Ninjas was the first game I ever finished. It is a reinterpretation of the excellent and elegant bouncing ball minigame from Archer Maclean’s incredible IK+ . Swing your sword to defend yourself against the horde of ninjas and their flying shurikens. Play it online. (HTML5)
Evacuation is a simple puzzle-strategy game. Vent the aliens into space but try not to evacuate your spacemen or the captain! I designed Evacuation and made the artwork, but for the code I turned to the expertise of my friend Ryan , who is a lot better at programming, mathematics, and logic. You can Play it online in your browser
Little Master Cricket is my attempt to make a cricket game that focuses on compelling gameplay rather than realism or verisimilitude. The real pleasure of cricket is to swing a bat and hit a ball, something that’s missing from every commercial game and most free ones as well. Play it online. (HTML5) I made a nicer version for the iPhone but it didn't survive the 32-bit app purge.