by anymouse123456
0 subcomment
- I owe my technology career to Flash.
Still find it incredibly sad that Adobe and Steve Jobs were able to destroy it together.
This tool was able to draw in creative, previously non-technical people and provide a gradual ramp of complexity that we could navigate.
Nothing has come close since.
- I used to make animations with https://pivotanimator.net/ a lot as a kid, trying to make fight scenes like these. A sort of related thing is ToriBash, which is kind of a multiplayer 3D animation game where you fight each other by making decisions on which muscles to contract at each time interval.
Loved this stuff so much. I miss my summers off from school, where I would never think of a day gone as time "spent".
- This unlocked memories I forgot I had. Not only playing these games, but Flash introduced me to gamedev. I can clearly remember struggling in Actionscript, trying to get collision detection and resolution working. I never got it to work properly lol.
By the way, if anyone wants to relive some old flash games/movies, there is https://ruffle.rs/, an open source Flash implementation. It's great!
- Stick figures run through a lot of amateur digital animation, for probably obvious reasons. Pivot reigned on a lot of early YouTube and the stubby stick figure style ran through a lot of Flipnote Hatena. I'm not sure if it's simply that standards for amateur digital content have evolved, or if we have lost the character of small platforms like SFDT and Flipnote, but I do find stick figures absent today on the large platforms we've all herded towards. A lot of what I see is definitely buoyed by Flipnote diehards.
by ZeroGravitas
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- I was going to mention MTV's Liquid Television animation showcase as a potential inspiration for this.
That link seems partly confirmed since they mention an online predecessor called Stick Figure Death Theatre and the Liquid Television segment (which re-enacted famous movie scenes with stick figure animations) was called Stick Figure Theatre.
Pretty much each individual segment of that show was mind blowing (it launched Beavid and Butthead) but the stick figure interpretation of Night of he Living Dead stuck with me for years.
YouTube has a compilation: https://youtu.be/-M7-Sew5aU8
- Ah, XiaoXiao. Under the amazingly named `E:\Storage\Old\Fun\old\XiaoXiao` I have
fight (xiaoxiao1).avi, XiaoXiao_City_Plaza.swf, and xiaoxiao2.swf - xiaoxiao9.swf
by King-Aaron
3 subcomments
- I was knee-deep in the flash animation scene through the late 90s early 00s, and I don't remember anyone calling anyone 'Flashers'. China-only I suppose.
I did think Stick Death came out before Xiao Xiao?
by AmbroseBierce
2 subcomments
- These animations got me into Flash and soon after into programming thanks to ActionScript, one copycat music video that maybe made even stronger impression in teenage me was a sad adult-themed music video from 2004, I just found ii after looking online for a bit: I love death - Lodger (Finnish band) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BoFQV4jXun4
by me_vinayakakv
1 subcomments
- I remembered Alan Becker (https://youtube.com/@alanbecker) who creates stories with an array of his stick figure characters.
Sometimes, they interact with real world too!
- SFDT was the first online community I was a part of. It was a special time on the early internet. I feel so lucky to have been a very small part of it.
- I grew up learning Flash and started my love for programming due to ActionScript 2 then 3, is there anything like this today I am looking for something for my 10 year old daughter.
- I remember series of stick man fighting cartoons which starts from simple kung-fu/gun porno in big office tower of (presumably) evil corporation, but progressed to some infernal fights, with Jesus, ghosts, hell, etc.
I'm not sure it was XiaoXiao, I (don't) remember some other letter combination in the names of files.
- Macromedia Flash had probably the best UX of all the programs ever created. It all goes downhill from there.
by ChrisMarshallNY
0 subcomment
- I remember a “choose your own story” stick figure Flash app, called Time to Die (I believe), where the “protagonist” was a condemned convict, used as target practice by scientists.
You could pick weapons used by the scientists. In most, he’d just get blown away, but in one scenario, he grabs the gun, and kills everyone in the facility.
Not sure if it was this guy, or was just inspired by him.
- The first animation that made me love these was the old 'stickman vs door' gif,
Thanks for reminding me of that one
- Was not expecting to read about Xiao Xiao today! I loved Xiao Xiao as a preteen, and spent many hours playing Xiao Xiao 4 [1], or re-watching the other Xiao Xiaos over and over again.
[1] https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/25718
- Ah man, these are some awesome memories! Hot damn I liked these when I was a kid! I was first introduced to them on a LAN party. We would pass these kinds of things to eachother between CS 1.5 matches (VLC can play any file format!)
I remember towards the end of my lan party going days, these sick fights were finally outdone by the much more advanced Killer Bean.
Just a bean, trying to get some sleep.
Those were the days
- Woah, this brought back memories. Like that one flash game where you played a stickman hitman.
by nunodonato
0 subcomment
- the Xiao Xiao Flash series were amazing. I always wondered when someone would come up with a beat'em-up game with that style. Simple, fast-paced, lots of free movement and use of tools/weapons.
- i was OBSSESSSED with this growing up. i had no idea about the origin or real name or that it was chinese origin. incredible. thanks to whoever found and submitted this
- what a trip down memory lane.
for some extra nostalgia, check out "one finger death punch 2" game (and its prequel). i bet it's sort of an homage to those animations.
- I loved the xiao xiao series. They were amazing.
by reactordev
0 subcomment
- Dude completely forgets StickDeath.com which came before all of this…
by thaumasiotes
0 subcomment
- > It was the era when a major company could brush off the bad PR that comes with copying a major online artist. Is it believable that no one involved in the Nike ads had seen Xiao Xiao? Not really — it was popular with young people worldwide. Yet Zhu was new media at a time when old media ruled. What could he do?
This doesn't make any sense. From earlier in the same article:
> Zhu didn’t invent violent stickman animations. In the ‘90s, the Western site Stick Figure Death Theatre hosted exactly what its name implied. But Xiao Xiao, and its mix of Jackie Chan with Jet Li with The Matrix, perfected the idea.
> Either way, it was Xiao Xiao that made “stick fights” massive online. Clones were rampant — even Stick Figure Death Theatre had them. As one paper reported in 2002:
>> The Web’s legions of part-time Flash animators have begun producing their own copies of Xiao Xiao — so many, in fact, that there’s a whole portal dedicated to them. Stick Figure Death Theatre ... has so many stick man knockoffs, you have to wonder why Zhu doesn’t just give up.
If we assume that people at Nike were familiar with Xiao Xiao... and that they were also familiar with the mountains of similar material, what are we saying they did wrong?
- Xiao Xiao and Ninjai *chef's kiss*
- Stick figures still fight to this day! Go check out hyunsdojo
by qwertytyyuu
0 subcomment
- Hyun’s dojo was awesome
- I added ELIZA to shittalk for a statistical ML model to play bouts on 'stickfight' PVP game around 2000. :)
- That's spooky, we were literally just talking about stickdeath in the office and then this shows up.
by charcircuit
0 subcomment
- Youtube used Flash.
- Yep. StickDeath was the shit.
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