“Best way to walk? Don’t think about it.”
That’s the nugget of wisdom I receive when I ask Bennett Foddy for his best walking pro tip. The two of us have met up in New York City’s Central Park on a beautiful Tuesday in August, and we’re about to set off on a leisurely morning stroll. Foddy has agreed to kick the traditional Zoom interview to the curb and instead walk with me IRL as we discuss his nearly two-decade long history of developing slapstick comedies about the human body, including his upcoming game, Baby Steps.
“Don’t think about it” is rich advice coming from Foddy. After all, this is the guy responsible for several games that force you to think very hard about how you move. His breakthrough game, 2008’s QWOP, turned the act of sprinting in a straight line into an impossible task as players had to keep a runner upright by controlling his leg muscles with four keys. It’s one of gaming’s great comedies, creating a slapstick routine out of something mundane. It’s only when Foddy veers into a tangent that I really see the developer behind that viral sensation.
“As a kid, I used to have to do Christmas service where you’re singing and you’re having to walk really, really slow,” Foddy tells Polygon. “But everybody’s watching you. All you have to do is walk. And you’ll see the kids just falling over. Thought about it a bit too much!”
That visual has powered Foddy’s games for nearly two decades now. What started as a casual Flash experiment has now ballooned into a catalog of games that riff on that simple pratfall, whether you’re controlling a unicorn or a man in a pot. It’s now coming to a head in Baby Steps, which takes the idea of QWOP and blows it up into a 3D open-world game.
It’s a poetic culmination of a long creative hike, and one that prompts a question: Why is Bennett Foddy so obsessed with walking anyway?
Born and raised in Australia, Foddy was interested in creating games from a young age. “As a little kid, I was in love with video games, like everybody that I know, but too dumb to be able to do anything about it,” he jokes. He attempted to turn his dream into a reality on several occasions, teaching himself Basic and other programming languages in the ‘90s, but nothing clicked.
He’d finally find a breakthrough with a key Flash update that Foddy found more approachable after reading tutorials on TIGSource, a blog centered around providing resources for independent game developers. After some casual experiments, he truly got the itch for development in 2005 after posting his debut game, Too Many Ninjas, to TIGSource. (The very first comment on it was from Derek Yu, the famed indie developer who would go on to release Spelunky three years later.)
Sometimes there’s a sense of life that comes out of amateurism.
Foddy’s trek to QWOP started in earnest once he moved to the United States. Now working at Princeton after studying philosophy in grad school, Foddy began noodling on a new video game experiment on the side.
“I had made a cricket game called Little Master Cricket, which was the first time I ever used a physics engine,” Foddy says. “The character is kind of a ragdoll who’s tethered to the ground, and his cricket bat is tethered to your mouse, and it’s all kind of very constrained. I wanted to do a fencing game in that format, and then I thought maybe track and field. If I could untether his feet from the ground, I could make something that was track and field, but it’s not so easy to do that in a way that looks like real running. Just immediately he’s falling over. I’m like, that’s the thing.”
After only one day of development and a week of polishing, Foddy had created a small game where players would have to guide a runner through a 100 meter dash. Easy enough, but the catch was that you had to control him using four keys: Q, W, O, and P, hence the title QWOP. He uploaded it to his personal website in 2008 not expecting much to come from it. Nothing did until two years later when content creator Cr1TiKaL uploaded a Let’s Play video to YouTube – a video that now has 11 million views. QWOP instantly became a viral hit.
At that moment in time, I was home from college catching up with my friends. We caught wind of QWOP and suddenly lost an entire night to it. We hovered around a laptop, trading off on attempts and laughing hysterically as our runner unceremoniously fell to the ground. Where did this game come from? Who made it? Was it meant to be a joke? Foddy believes that reaction was part of why it took off.
“You get to a weird website that’s got very bad web design and it doesn’t really function properly, and there’s this poorly embedded game,” Foddy says. “And I think people felt a little bit like, ah, I found something! Which was a dream that you could still have on the internet at the time: to find a weird website. I think people still had this kind of idea of, I’m going to really troll through and find some kind of deep internet shit. And so I started to feel like, oh, I should never update this website and I should never update this game … Sometimes there’s a sense of life that comes out of amateurism.”
As we talk history, Foddy and I leisurely walk down a lively Central Park pathway. But like QWOP, our stroll is harder than it should be. Because we’re also recording the interview for a video, we’re forced to walk at an agonizingly slow pace so that the cinematographer — who is shooting in front of us while blindly walking backwards — does not trip into a wood chipper.
It’s completely unnatural. I’m a historically fast walker who is not used to regulating my pace. Suddenly having to methodically drag one foot in front of the other goes against every instinct. During certain stretches of the conversation, my mind wanders down to my legs. Am I moving too fast? Have I gotten out too far ahead of him? I’m hyper-aware of every step, suddenly thinking about what a miracle it is that I’m able to pilot this amalgamation of bone and muscle at all.
That’s the genius of Foddy’s work. Whether it’s QWOP or its spiritual successor GIRP, a Flash game about rock climbing (poorly), every entry in his oeuvre makes you think about how we’re all just fragile ragdolls that are one misstep away from a pratfall at all times. But that wasn’t on Foddy’s mind when he first made QWOP, a game that he describes as an “advanced robotics project.” It was only once he began speaking to people who had interpreted his work that he began to consider that subtext himself. Now with the clarity that comes with self-analysis, Foddy believes that he wasn’t just making a game about walking. QWOP and its follow-ups are about failure.
“That kind of cycle is in all video games to some extent,” Foddy says. “It’s like when you’re playing Bloodborne and you go from being terrible to sucking a little bit less and getting a little better and a little better, and then you take a breath here and there to sort of see what’s changing in your behavior. And that lets you have a theory about how to get better. I think even from learning to walk for real as a baby, that’s so much of human experience.”
Nearly a decade after uploading QWOP to his website, Foddy would extrapolate on that idea in more explicit terms with Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. The 2018 indie would take away players’ legs entirely, instead putting them in control of a shirtless hunk in a black cauldron who can only move by using a sledgehammer to hook himself onto pieces of the 2D wasteland around him. It’s maddening. Any time you eke out even a bit of progress, one false move will send you tumbling back down to where you started. That frustration is offset by the sound of Foddy’s soothing voice, as he calmly tells players to find peace in their failures.
It sounds like a pain in the ass — and it is — but it created another viral moment for Foddy. As openly antagonistic as Getting Over It was, something was clearly resonating with players. Foddy recalls talking to one player after it came out who told him about how he was getting more and more frustrated while playing, until he eventually achieved a moment of Zen. That was the reaction he hoped for.
“One of the things that I think games, maybe art in general, can do that is important to me is you can take things that people are sure they don’t like, and through giving them an experience with that thing, you can kind of make an argument. No, maybe you do like it, or maybe you can like it if you just see it this way,” Foddy says. “And so it’s trying to do that with the feeling of losing. It’s not really about getting good. It’s about what it’s like to be trying and failing to get good.”
While it was far from the first physics comedy game, Getting Over It would inspire a wave of games that would spit in the face of friendly game design to intentionally frustrate players, like Pogostuck: Rage With Your Friends and A Difficult Game About Climbing. Foddy loves games like that, but notes that few of them hinge on complicated physics. Instead, he posits that they have movement systems that share more in common with golf games.
Golf, funny enough, comes up several times throughout the morning. It’s like he’s working a design dissection of the sport out in real time. When I ask him if he believes that viral hits like this year’s mega-hit Peak, a co-op climbing game built on physics humor, owe something to Getting Over It, he tees up a counterargument.
“I think Peak‘s success owes more to understanding Golf With Your Friends,” he says, referencing the popular multiplayer minigolf game. “The games that owe anything to my work, the sort of frustrating, unfriendly games – that’s a really good match for Golf With Your Friends style, social hangout games … Getting stuck with your friends is great. That’s gold dust, really. And Golf With Your Friends is maybe one of the first multiplayer golf games I’ve seen where everybody sits around and waits for you to get your ball in. You start to feel all this pressure. Golf already, just by its nature, has that frustrating feeling.”
After taking a breather on a park bench, we hit the trail again. We’re back to our torturously slow mock walk speed as it’s now a little closer to noon and the pathways are filling up with baby carriages and tourists. We’re now navigating an obstacle course on top of an already complicated multitasking feat.
It’s as we’re weaving around parkgoers that I note how walking is central to so many games, yet few require any thought from players beyond pressing a control stick forward. Why are there so few games like QWOP when walking is central to so many games?
“If you want to make a non-lifelike game about walking, you can do that really easily,” Foddy posits. “But now you have to give somebody something interesting to do that’s not simply, hey, just get over this rock. In QWOP, it’s just, hey, can you walk at all? That’s it. That’s the whole experience. Can you walk down a straight track with no obstacles? I think that’s maybe a testament to the reason why we don’t see a lot of detailed walking in games. As soon as you do that, you’re on the hook to make it possible to do something interesting with the walking.”
That thought naturally leads us to Baby Steps, Foddy’s latest game and his most ambitious to date. Following a collaboration with developer Gabe Cuzzillo on 2019’s Ape Out, a hyperviolent action game about a rampaging gorilla, the duo began brainstorming another project they could work on together. (Of course, a golf game was on the table). Cuzzillo would eventually go to Foddy with a bold pitch: “Imagine if QWOP but good.”
After creating a prototype in about a day – roughly the same amount of time it took Foddy to build QWOP – Cuzzillo convinced Foddy to collaborate on a true 3D open-world game that played with every theme that Foddy’s work had examined for over a decade. It would feature involved walking mechanics, ragdoll physics, and the potential for major progress loss, but on a “Morrowind-sized” map rather than a 100-meter straightaway.
“You can look at it and say, hey, this looks like Death Stranding if Death Stranding was really doing the thing that it’s kind of pretending to be doing,” Foddy says. “All of that sort of stumbling and tripping and falling, balancing your weight and stuff like that, is a bit abstracted and animation-driven in that game. I think we had been playing that and getting influenced by it, but also feeling frustrated that it wasn’t more like one of these full physics games.”
For Foddy, the goal was to invert the tropes in traditional open-world games. He didn’t want to make another game that starred a competent hunk who could scale rocks with ease; it’s an anti-hero’s journey. The story centers around a onesie-wearing manchild living in his parents basement. He’s a couch potato who gets sucked into his TV after a hard night of binge-watching and winds up in a dark and dreary world that he must traverse with his atrophied legs. That premise would allow Foddy to make a video game satire that brought QWOP’s subtext into broad daylight.
“One of the things that I think about sometimes is that there are things that we do in our lives that we barely think about, but maybe we have strong opinions about how good at them we are,” Foddy explains. “And if I asked you, are you good at walking? Yeah, I’m pretty good! If you’re trying to make a game that’s about failed or challenged masculinity in the shadow of this enormous corpus of games where somebody’s got superpowers and they’re incredibly competent and everybody respects them, then why not pick something that people expect to be good at?”
The game feels a bit like you’re controlling a toddler who is learning to walk. When I first tried Baby Steps earlier this year, I immediately fell over as soon as I clicked my mouse. I got up and successfully took a step before teetering off balance again. Then I could walk a few feet at a time. Then a few more. Soon enough, I was able to work my way up to a quick sprint and even walk up some stairs before inevitably falling over — and occasionally sliding all the way down a muddy cliff.
I assumed that the inspiration came from studying infant behavior, but that wasn’t the case. Foddy says that the system really came together by observing players during testing, who naturally modeled babylike behaviors when trying to understand the controls. It just so happens that those two examples of human development mirrored one another precisely.
As we start to dissect that detail, Foddy reveals the true unifying nature of his work. It’s not that his games are about walking or how awkward the human body can be. It’s not about finding fun in frustration. And it’s not even about failure, really, so long as you’re a glass-half-full kind of person.
“I think there’s pleasure in learning,” Foddy says. “And I think that’s one of the things that is so great about a video game in general, is that it lets you get to learning. And gets you to the kind of sense of learning the kind of higher levels of things to learn mastery. You get there so fast in a video game relative to in real life where you’re having to spend thousands and thousands of hours doing something. I think that, to me, is one of the core pleasures.”
Maybe that’s the reason that so many players have taken to games like QWOP and Getting Over It: because they’re great teachers. They aren’t afraid to let players screw up in spectacular fashion, but they always encourage you to try again. You learn a little something with each attempt.
I love that moment when you know you’re about to choke.
I go back to that one night in 2010 playing QWOP with my friends. I remember the immediate flops, but I also remember when a friend slowly pieced together how to move at a crawl by positioning the runner’s knees just right and delicately alternating quick keystrokes. What began as a hopeless task ended in celebration as that friend successfully inched across the finish line. (To my surprise, Foddy says he’s never actually beaten QWOP himself). That moment of elation still sticks with me 15 years later.
Learning is a fitting theme for Foddy’s interests considering he began his career as a kid who kept trying and failing to build a video game. Those early failures with Basic led him to steady success with Flash. And now he’s standing at the top of the mountain with a full open-world game under his belt that is a culmination of his career so far.
“I think making video games, especially indie video games, is a good career for people who always want to be learning,” Foddy says. “Because there’s always something new that you have to do. It’s not just the game-making parts. You’ve got to handle your website and your interviews. You’re doing accounting. And if you’re not a person who wants to learn new skills, you can’t really do it.”
“But I’m sure some people will hear that and be like, ‘That guy’s got undiagnosed ADD,’” he jokes.
As our walk winds down and we arrive at the edge of a reservoir, Foddy models his comedic instinct by returning to a running gag one last time. He jokes that after wrapping up Baby Steps, maybe it’s time for him to finally bite the bullet and make – you guessed it – a golf game.
With my brain no longer focused on my stride, I finally think to ask an obvious question: “Are you a golfer?” He’s not – the ultimate punchline to the day. But golf, even more so than walking, captures the human experience that he’s obsessed with.
“I was playing UFO 50 recently,” Foddy says. “It’s full of what I call choke machines, which are moments in games where a person is playing well and you just shake their confidence a little bit and then they choke and they mess up.”
“I love that moment when you know you’re about to choke. You haven’t choked yet, but you can feel your confidence starting to go. You feel yourself starting to look at how you’re walking around and you know you’re screwed, but it hasn’t happened yet. I’m fascinated by that. How can I both know I’m about to screw up and still screw up? That’s the essence of choking. So many games are good at setting that up and golf is kind of the ultimate of this. It’s just setting up choke after choke, after choke.”
Our long walk ends there, with the two of us looking out at a family in a rowboat spinning in circles around the reservoir. They keep moving back and forth without making any progress; it’s as if they’ve never rowed a boat before and are trying to learn how it works on the fly. After a few minutes spent going nowhere, they finally seem to get the hang of it and disappear from our view down a watery path.