I Wanna Be The Guy

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This page contains spoilers — important plot secrets and/or conclusions may be revealed. For example,
HOLY SHIT THE GUY IS THE KID'S FATHER!!!1

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I Wanna Be The Guy: The Movie: The Game is you having a football shoved up your ass while having your teeth pulled out one by one in the form of a game. It was inspired by a 2chan flash game created by King75 called Otawa. Realising that Otawa was shit, Michael "Kayin" O'Reilly thought that he could make something better in a program called Multimedia Fusion 2. Only ever completed by basement dwellers, IWBTG is generally considered to be one of the hardest indie video games ever created, and gamers loved this, since it reminded them of their tiny dick, which was also hard, whenever it saw a young boy appearing. It also crashes whenever the fuck it feels like it.

	“	This game is the devil.	„
	—MaximusBlack

Conception

At least 100 years ago, some Japanese guy on 2chan by the name of King75 created a flash game known as Otawa. This POS game centered around a guy made of unicode characters jumping around and killing slightly bigger, unicode monsters. It was supposed to be a tribute to many old classic video games, as well as being fucking hard. While it certainly succeeded in the latter, the game was a complete fail when it came to artwork, design and not being in black and white. To add to this fail, the game was also unfinished and ghey. Then came Kayin, who made I Wanna Be The Guy in 2007, in an effort to outdo King75's abomination of a flash program. It had new, improved features, such as:

Being in fucking colour.
Not being as shitty.
Having music (~~none of it original~~ IT'S OKAY BECAUSE IT'S A TRIBUTE!!!!!111115)
Having a story line (sort of).
Having voice acting.
Having secret motherfucking items.

Reception

Shortly after its release, IWBTG was already being Let's Played by several basement dwelling nerds on YouTube, such as UltraJMan and Cloud8745, and Kayin himself even said on his blog that this was one of the main factors that helped the game initially to become popular. MaximusBlack did a notable playthrough later on.

Culture

Average person to have become The Guy.

If you have, for some ungodly reason ~~spent~~ wasted enough of your life playing this game to have beaten the final boss, 'The Guy' and completed it, then according to Kayin, you have become 'The Guy'. A surprisingly high number of nerds across the world strive for this title, as evident in this forum post.

The Game Itself

The Game Over screen...

...and the screen you see when the game crashed. The two most reoccurring screens in the game.

I Wanna Be The Guy centres around the story of The Kid (who you play as), who is trying to become The Guy by killing the current Guy. . . Yep, that's it. You need to explore an open world in which most things you touch is instant death (including a high abundance of spikes) and kill 6 bosses (~~all of them taken from other games~~ IT'S OKAY BECAUSE IT'S A TRIBUTE!!!!!111115) before going down a mine cart on crack and fighting some green dragon thing, and then finally entering The Guy's palace and pwning his ass. Your only weapon throughout the whole game is a gun ~~but you can get secret items~~ (nobody gets those). The opening sequence that narrates the first part of the story is a witty parody of Megaman 2. There is a running gag that the moon keeps falling down and killing you at different points in the game. IWBTG is a throwback to all the classic games from the 8-bit era (despite having an entire stage dedicated to a 64-bit game. . .). This means that Kayin was trying to emulate that feeling you got of wanting to kill your whole fucking family while dying over and over again when you were playing Super Mario Bros as a kid. In some ways, the retro style was replicated pretty effectively, but in others, it fails. These are the things that Kayin got right:

The platforming style resembles many retro games quite closely.
There is a nice diversity of music and atmosphere in reference to different games.
It's fucking hard.

These are the things that could have been improved upon:

It's not hard enough for the basement dwellers.
The save feature is too forgiving, especially in the easier difficulties. Most games from this era did not even have a save feature, in favor of a semi-functional password system.
The game was programmed in Multimedia Fusion 2 and crashes every two minutes. You think I'm joking, don't you?
The secret items are worthless and no one ever gets them.
Most of the music is nowhere near monotonous enough.

Shit Nobody Cares About

Fangames

When Kayin made a forum post releasing the source code for the original game, every asspie in the world rushed to produce their own fangame. The vast majority of them suck capitol ass, but a few notably less shitty ones include:

I Wanna Be The Fangame - One of the first fangames, and coincidentally one of the least ghey ones. Keeps with the style of IWBTG of paying tribute to various games with each stage.
I Wanna Be The Boshy - By far the highest production value of any fangame. Has vastly improved graphics and a shittonne of new features (including online play), although some consider it to be too 'luck based'. It's much harder and longer than the original, and the guy who created it named the final boss after himself.

The Sequel

Last Thursday, Kayin himself actually made a legitimate sequel called I Wanna Be The Guy: Gaiden. It loosely continues on the same storyline, this time parodying Castlevania 3 instead of Megaman 2. Despite being made with better technology and having far fewer glitches, it was never nearly as critically acclaimed as the original. TL;DR it sucks

On the YouTubes

As stated above, IWBTG has been played on YouTube. Here are some buttmad reactions to the game.

Previous Video | Next Video

Fanart

One of the most popular boards on the forums on Kayin's website is 'IWBTG Fanart'. In a nutshell, it is the collection of the artwork of butthurt 10 year olds who couldn't complete the game. We went through the painstaking process of picking out the absolute worst ones for your amusement!

Fanart About missing Pics