I.T. Kid

Line Rider is the toy that ate a winter of the mid-2000s. There is no score and no enemy: you are given a pencil and an empty page, you draw ramps, hills and jumps, and then you press play and watch a boy on a sled try to survive what you drew. Its publisher's own description is one line and a paragraph: 'Boy grabs sled. Boy rides sled. A simple concept yields endless fun and the latest Internet Phenomenon is born!' and then 'In Line Rider the player draws their own landscape with a simple pencil tool creating as many ramps, hills, and jumps as they can imagine. Then they send a virtual sledder careening down the course until he wipes out. The possibilities in Line Rider are only limited by the player's imagination.' Created in September 2006 by Bostjan Cadez, it spread from a forum post to a game with a console deal inside a year. The in-game help is the archive's own proof of what the movie is: it documents the Editor and the Simulator, the pencil, line, eraser, swatches, zoom and hand tools, the flag 'that saves the riders current position and speed', and the start point that 'marks the place where the rider will start'. The archive held its movie in its own upload tree without ever making a page of it.