[Theme music]

ALEX GOLDMAN: From Gimlet, this is Reply All. I'm Alex Goldman.

PJ VOGT: And I'm PJ Vogt.

PJ: We are in the studio with Phia Bennin.

PHIA BENNIN: Hey guys!

ALEX: Hi.

PJ: Hi. What are you doing here?

PHIA: Well okay. So three months ago, I got an email from one of our listeners. And she was writing because she’d lost something on the internet and she really wanted help finding it. 

[ringing]

PHIA: Hello?

KRIS: Phia, can you hear me?

PHIA: Yes.

KRIS: Oh, that's great.

PHIA: Her name is Kris, she's 20 years old, and she lives in Serbia.

PJ: Mmhmm.

PHIA: And last year she graduated high school, and she moved to Belgrade to start college.

KRIS:  And I've kind of been lonely these few months, since I'm not from Belgrade. I'm from a small town called Valjevo. I live alone, and I'm just like removed from all my friends and family.

PHIA: So she's living alone in this big city. And there are these stretches, like days go by where she doesn’t have a conversation with anyone at all.

PJ: Yeah.

PHIA: And so she she started doing the thing you do when you’re lonely-- she started reminiscing about times she was really happy.

[MUSIC]

Specifically these summers she spent in her childhood with her best friend, this girl she was really really close with named Kaça. 

KRIS: Who lived like, across the street from me, and I would just climb over my fence, and just go into her yard. And then she like lived in this huge, like, it's the biggest house I was ever inside of. We used to play inside the house like hide and seek and stuff like that.

PHIA: So this would happen every summer, like when Kris was nine and Kris was 10 and 11. And then, one of those years, during one of those summers, they discovered computer games.  

KRIS: She had this old PC, and we would just spend just the entire day just playing Flash games.

PJ: Flash games. Like the cheap, the dumb, cheap games that were free. And had a million ads around them. It was always like shoot a celebrity or play pinball.

[MUSIC]

PHIA: Right. And there's this one flash game that Kris remembers playing that she says was the best game that they played. It's called, "Bunni: How We First Met."

PJ: Bunni: How We First Met?

PHIA: Yeah, that's what it's called. And this is what Kris wants my help with. She desperately wants help finding this game. Let me tell you how she remembers it. It's a world-building game. Super cute graphics. You're the bunny king on this island and you hop around the island, popping bubbles and finding ghosts that'll help you out.

AG: Mhmm.

PHIA: But you are trying to gain as many gems and coins as you possibly can, and to do that, you're enslaving other bunnies.

AG: What?

PHIA: You put them to work either in lumber mills or like mining for gold.

ALEX: This, uh, this... (laughs)

PHIA: And I haven’t mentioned this yet. In the game you’re a bunny, and all you want is to find someone who will love you. But the way you think you can find that is by acquiring lots of money. 

KRIS: And you had your girlfriend—or she wasn't a girlfriend, she was more like a person you were trying to marry.

PHIA: Like Mario and Princess Peach.

KRIS: Not really.

PHIA: Oh!

KRIS: She was more like a gold digger.

PHIA: Oh!

KRIS: You just--you had to provide for her so she would marry you in the end. Uh, so.

PHIA: Oh, weird! Like you had to earn a certain amount of money in order for her to be your wife.

KRIS: Yes, you need to buy her dress and buy her rings and you need to buy her love.

[MUSIC]

PHIA: But then, in the middle of the game, this very grown-up, complicated drama starts to unfold, where you meet this other female bunny who you really like. Kris remembers her like a stripper. And for some reason, you know you're supposed to end up with the gold digger, but you really want to be with the stripper.

PJ: It just sounds like the person who made this game had a lot in their head, you know what I mean? Like they were going through something.

PHIA: Yeah! Right. Right. Kris was totally curious about this. She was like, "What kind of person would make a game like this?" But she also loved it, and she found herself in her apartment in Belgrade really missing that time she played with Kaça playing Bunni: How We First Met.

KRIS: I'm missing that feeling of hanging out with someone who is like, that close to you. That friend who I had at that time doesn't exist anymore. Like, she grew up, she's another person.

PHIA: Yeah.

KRIS: And it's not fair of me to like, compare her to her like, 12-year-old self. But I'm missing the 12-year-old.

PHIA: She wants to go back to that feeling of just being with a really good friend. So she googles Bunni: How We First Met, finds it, she clicks on the link. It looks it's loading, and then nothing appears. It's just, it's dead. And she goes to a couple of other links on other sites, they're dead, too. The whole thing’s missing.

[MUSIC]

KRIS: It was just like, weirded out. I couldn't understand what was happening,

PHIA: Huh.

KRIS: And so I got really frustrated.

PHIA: Kris has spent the last six months, trying to find this game. She’s gone on forums, she’s searched through comments on videos, she’s found this whole community of people who are like, “I’m looking for Bunni: How We First Met too! Do you know where it is?” In all her searching, she hasn’t found the game, she hasn’t found the creator. She hit a wall, and that’s when she came to me.

So this is how I started. Um, let me just show you this thing really quickly.

ALEX: Ok.

PHIA: This is a different video game. It’s called Triple Town. And Kris saw this when she was searching, and she noticed like this art, like the cute little characters, the little animals, look so much like the animals in Bunni. Kris wrote the company-- no luck. I wrote the company and, for some reason, I get an email back that says “Hey! I wrote Bunni: How We First Met.”

[MUSIC]

PJ: That’s awesome!

PHIA: I know!

PJ: Did he have a copy of the game for Kris?

PHIA: He said “I can tell you where Bunni is, but it’s complicated. And in order to explain it, I have to tell you the story of how I created Bunni.”

PJ: Ok. 

DAN: Hello.

PHIA: Hello.

DAN: Can you hear me ok?

PHIA: Oh my gosh, you sound beautiful.

DAN: Oh, wonderful!

PHIA: This is Dan Cook, the creator of Bunni: How We First Met.

PHIA: Where am I talking to you?

DAN: Oh uh, so I'm just uh, out of my home, so uh, I'm in Seattle. [cat meows] Yeah, there's a cat here who meows at me periodically.

PHIA: Dan is sweet and patient and gentle. Like, talking to Dan is kind of like talking to a kindergarten teacher.

AG: That doesn't sound like that's really the, uh, effect that you'd get from playing the game that he designed.

PHIA: Right. I know. But talking to Dan, what really surprised me actually was what the game meant to him. He was trying to express an idea that he’d been thinking a lot about, which was that our culture is so obsessed with money that it poisons our ability to find love.

PHIA: Is there a reason that was on your brain at that time?

DAN: Um. At that point, I had just gotten married and I was thinking about this a lot. Um yeah.

PHIA: I guess I don’t really understand what you were contemplating about relationships at that point.

DAN: Have you ever planned a wedding?

PHIA: No, I don’t want to.

DAN: It is one of the more crass commercial projects that is foisted upon people. The culture-- the shallow culture is always present.

PHIA: You know, like weddings where people spend $10,000 on flowers or like diamond rings or even smaller things like having to buy somebody else’s ticket to the movie theater. The idea that all of those things could prove that you actually love another person. Dan was like, “I have a message I have to tell the world, and it’s that that stuff is bullshit.”

PJ: So the way he decides to tell the world that message is like-- It doesn’t feel like this game is that. Like that doesn’t feel like the game that Kris fell in love with.

PHIA: I know. Like her game was like strippers, and vodka-drinking foxes, and monsters that you had to explode.

PJ: So what what’d why did he-- Was, was he just like, “She was a kid and she just misunderstood?”

PHIA: No. So the thing was that Dan didn’t know how to make video games. He could do the art, but he didn’t know how to code. So, he would just pour like all of his hopes and ideas into a blog that he had.

DAN: And then um, one evening this email comes in. And it is obviously written by someone who is intoxicated.

PHIA: Oh.

Dan: Like the-- the words are not quite connecting they way words should in a sentence. And uh, he says, “I'm in Australia and I've been drinking and I would love to make a game with you.” And um, and I'm like… at this point I'm like you know what? I have nothing to lose by saying yes to pretty much anyone.

[MUSIC]

PHIA: So, Dan and the Australian, they start to figure out how this’ll work. Dan, he does the art. He sends it over. And the Australian, he’ll code it. Bring it to life.

DAN: And um, sometimes we would not talk for a long time. Months on end, and I would ask him what had happened, and he had just disappeared into the Australian outback to he had a cabin out there. And he sent some pictures, and it wasn't really a cabin so much as like some wood that was sort of in a structure that might provide shelter. It was- it was- it was a great mystery to me. All that I really knew is that sometimes he would appear online and we would make things together.

PHIA: So I called Dan’s partner

PJ: And you got ahold of him?

PHIA: And I got ahold of him!

PHIA: are you in Melbourne? Are you… or…

ANDRE: I’m in the country. I’m in country New South Wales at the moment. Which is a little town of 30 people. Sort of in the outback.

PHIA: So this is the Australian. He has a name. It’s Andre Spiering. And Andre... he wasn’t on board because of any big ideas about materialism and love. He just thought it’d be fun to make a little game about bunnies. 

ANDRE: For me, I don’t think anyone was gonna get any huge deep meaning out of Bunni We First Met. I mean it was an Island with two girls on it who probably weren’t the best females in the world to be on the dating scene. But um… (laugh)

PHIA: So they start building this world, like they create the island, and they design the bunni king. And you know, those little bunnies that Kris thought of as slaves… Those were actually, Dan said just supposed to be worker bunnies. And eventually they get to the main characters of the game. This is where Dan is like mapping out his whole grand vision— and they create two characters. One is this like gold digger who represents all things materialism, and then he makes the other love interest, she’s the soul mate. She’s the cool pirate bunny.

DAN: And then, just as we’re releasing the game... Andre who is a free spirit.

PHIA: Uh huh.

DAN: Says, “I was up late last night and I’ve made the most amazing thing ever.”

PHIA: (gasps)

DAN: And I’m like “What did you make?” He’s like, “I animated the pirate girl doing a dance.”

PHIA: Why did you put that in the game?

ANDRE: Um… I don’t know. I think I just thought it would be funny to have this stupid bunny doing a strip tease.

PHIA: So this is why Kris remembers a stripper.

ALEX: Mmmm.

PHIA: Okay, so let me just show you what this is.

PJ: Oh no. 

PHIA: It’s actually on Youtube. It’s towards the end of the game. You can pay the pirate bunny a boatload of jewels.

PJ: A literal boatload?

PHIA: No just a ton of jewels. And… 

[VIDEO]

PJ: No. It's like gone to like a pink and purple background. It's like a close up of the bunny sensually dancing in a bikini

ALEX: With other bunnies behind her... She's putting on lipstick.

PJ: Oh my god. Close up of her butt, and a closeup of her putting on makeup. And then...

ALEX: She eats a rose? That’s it?

PHIA: That’s it.

ALEX: That’s it? Is that you pay the bunny a bunch of money, and then it wears its underwear and dances?

PJ: What more do you specifically want to see that you didn't get?

ALEX: I don’t want to see anything!

PHIA: (laughs) You see a close up of her in a G-string. She’s actually deep throating that rose. 

ALEX: Ok, ok. I retract everything I said.

PHIA: Here’s what I can say: Dan hated it.

PJ: Well yeah!

ALEX: Yeah. I’d imagine.

PHIA: So, this like unholy marriage between these two guys managed to produce this incredibly bizarre game that just like perfectly captivated Kris’s 12-year-old mind. When they released the game, it was actually an incredible hit. But Dan said the reason why Kris and so many other people can’t find that game today is because of what happened next.

In 2014, the company that was hosting the game online so people could play it, it went under. And with it, went the code for the game. The only person who still had the code was actually Andre. Dan didn’t have a copy. And the timing was terrible.

[MUSIC]

DAN: Right around that time Andre went on a walkabout. He faded away into the into the Australian outback.

PHIA: Oh wow.

DAN: So he just kind of went away.

PHIA: When he finally did get a message from Andre, it wasn’t optimistic.

DAN: It turned out that source code was for the game was on a hard drive that had been ripped out of the computer and was in some back corner of one of these huts that he lived in.

PHIA. And with that, Andre just like disappears back into the wilderness. Until, six months ago, when Dan got an envelope in the mail.

DAN: There was a thumb drive in there. And on that was the source code. So now I have the source code.

PHIA: You do?

DAN: I do!

PHIA: Here’s the catch: The code was a mess. The game was unplayable. And maybe somebody could get the game to work again, but it would take an insane amount of time and effort.

[MUSIC]

[RING]

CHRIS: Hello?

PHIA: Hi, is this Chris?

CHRIS: This is.

PHIA: So I called up this guy Chris Griffith. He’s an expert on Flash games, worked in Flash for 10 years.

PHIA: So... I guess like the question is would you be interested in/able to repair this game?

CHRIS: Yeah, (laughs) I would say it’s probably either not very much work or a whole lot of work.

PHIA: It turns out it was a whole lot of work. Andre had coded it in like weird, Andre-specific ways. When I checked in with Chris Griffith after a few days, he wrote me back. He said: “The work is like trying to repair a part of a huge tapestry, and pulling on one thread can break other parts of it unexpectedly.” But after a month, he gave me the news: Bunni was back.

KRIS: Hello?

PHIA: Hi, Kris! Can you hear me?

KRIS: Hello, hi Phia. Yes, can you hear me?

PHIA: Yes, you sound great.

KRIS: Hi!

PHIA: Couple weeks ago, Kris and I jumped back on Skype. This was almost three months after we first talked, and Kris was so excited.

KRIS: Uh. Yeah so you can just send me the…

PHIA: Link.

KRIS: Link.

PHIA: Here we go! Did you get it?

KRIS: Yes (laughs)!

PHIA: So the green looks familiar.

KRIS: Yes, that's the exactly the same color. Oh my god! [game music plays] Oh my god, I hear it! (reading) “I'm Susanna the ghost, have you been to Bunni Island before?” Oh my god! Oh my god! So, I’m clicking it. Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god! This is like-- oh my god! Like this is, I don't remember the music... the sound.

[MUSIC]

PHIA: Kris was actually screensharing with me as she was playing the game. And, it was really cool to watch, because she was moving around the island hopping to these different parts, finding connections between islands, and just rediscovering all these places that she and Kaça used to go together.

KRIS: And here’s a bunni house! Look at them. Dumb bunnies. You can eat the fruits so why would you… Oh because there’s not enough foods so when there’s not enough food they cut down fruits. Purchase more woods. Purchase more woods. Oh my god. This is like turning into chaos. [fade]

PJ: If you would like to play Bunni: How We First Met, we will be hosting the game on our website for a little while at least. You can go check it out, for now, at http://replyall.limo/bunni. Go there to play it yourself.

After the break, seals, assassins and late 90s boy bands.

BREAK

PJ: Welcome back to the show. Okay so, Alex, Phia.

PHIA: Yes.

PJ: So the whole time you were talking about Bunni, I was thinking about how like… so like my memory of Flash games is not that they were, like my memory of flash games is that they were all really messed up. Like they were like violent, and weird, and kinda bad. And I remember sort of avoiding them for that reason. And when we were, like when Phia was working on this story, I started to wonder about that… Like did I just play weird Flash games? Was my experience universal? And so I looked into it, and it turns out that the games I was playing were super popular, they were as bad as I remember them, and they all basically came from the mind of this one kid. A kid who grew up 20 minutes from me in a different Philly suburb. This kid’s name is Tom Fulp.

ALEX: Oh he runs Newgrounds!

PJ: How do you know that?

ALEX: When I was like a young punk, I used to hang out with this kid. I can't even remember his name, but he was the only one of us that had like real job. And it was at Newgrounds.

PJ: Really?

ALEX: We called him Normal Guy because he was the normal guy. He was like a normal guy compared to the rest of us.

PJ: So Phia, just for the record, Newgrounds was like...

ALEX: (laughs)

PJ: Not a place where Normal Guy worked. Newgrounds was... Basically in the year like 1999, if you went into any junior high computer lab, some kid would be playing a pop up Flash game that they should not have been playing at school, which they would quickly tab away from. And that game was hosted on Newgrounds, and it was where people would go, and they’d play these games, and like hang out and talk about these games. It was this huge place that had like millions and millions of visitors.

PHIA: Cool.

PJ: Yeah. So —

[MUSIC]

[Skype ringing]

PJ: One two three… Hello?

TOM: Yes, hey.

I called Tom Fulp up. I wanted to know why all of a sudden his games had been so popular, and also like why they’d seemingly disappeared.

PJ: How do you explain what that era was to someone who wasn't there for it?

TOM: Uh, I'd say there was definitely like a punk rock aspect to it, where it just felt very experimental and very unpredictable. You would literally show up to Newgrounds every day not knowing what to expect, because someone could upload something, and it could also just push boundaries in terms of like the themes that you've never seen before, because there was no censorship going on.

PJ: And Flash was the language that made all this possible. Because Flash was simple, it was cheap, and it let you start from a picture. Like if you knew how to draw, you could make an animation, and then with Flash you could take that animation and turn it into a game. And so and so, Tom got excited about a world where it was almost like the dumb cartoons he would’ve drawn in the back of the classroom to crack his friends up, he could put those online and let people play them.

TOM: I guess 1996 was when I was a senior in high school. The first popular web page I made was called Club A Seal. Where you'd just- you'd click on a picture of a seal to club it. You know, it'd just get all bloody.

PJ: I remember Club A Seal! Like I really do.

TOM: And then I made ummm. Then I made Assassin, which kind of became a real cornerstone of the site for those early years. Where I would make games where you assassinate annoying celebrities. So it was the sort of the same thing, where you seen them, and you click on them, and you shoot them, or make their head explode or whatever.

PJ: So who was your first annoying celebrity?

TOM: I know I did like Hansen. And, uh, Bob Saget and Leonardo DiCaprio.

PJ: This is like a very specific era of like, if you were a teen boy, which celebrities were annoying to you.

TOM: Yeah, yeah.

PJ: The reason Newgrounds got so huge is that it wasn’t just Tom’s games. He decided to let strangers submit their Flash games, and then have people vote on their favorites. So Club A Seal, that was Tom’s fault. But then somebody else came up with the idea for Clubby the Seal, which was this game where you disguise yourself as a seal, and then go out, and skin human beings in retaliation. It was really gross. And that was the sort of thing that was happening all the time. You had a bunch of smart weird people who were trying to top each other when it came to creating the darkest most disturbing kinds of games.

TOM: Things that were like super edgy and violent. And things that you couldn't play on your home video game console, or see on TV.

PJ: Did you have moments where you felt... Cuz you know you were like when you're that age, you do provocative stuff. And then then later, sometimes you’re like "Ah, I wouldn't have done that" or whatever. Did you have moments, though, during that time when you had second thoughts about anything you'd made?

TOM: I made the game Pico’s School if you're familiar with that one

PJ: I'm not familiar with that one, what was that?

TOM: That was, uh. This was... Some things you have to own up to, you can't escape in life. So it was after Columbine, and I made a game where you--

PJ: Oh no...

TOM: --You kind of rescue the school

PJ: Oh!

TOM: You weren't the shooter. It was a bunch of goth kids shot up the school and Pico basically saves the day, even though it was still pretty tasteless. It was interesting, because Columbine's like an interesting thing to me because like you see so many reflections of yourself in that group of kids. Like, you didn’t like-- you know, there's a lot of kids in your school you didn't like. There was bullies and you felt misunderstood or whatever. I never felt like I wanted to go shoot everybody, but I still... you know Columbine was like an interesting study in, you know, in our generation and what different kids were going through.

PJ: Because what you're saying is like these were... Because I remember having that feeling too, where the kids who had done this stuff, they'd done something really evil, and a lot of what they cared about and thought about were things that I cared about and thought about…. Like I liked violent video games, I didn't want to hurt someone in real life, but it was a weird feeling to be like... It was-- it was-- just a weird feeling that I remember just not knowing what to do with.

TOM: It was interesting made you think about, like, if I’d-- like i was already through high school when that happened but it made me think like would I be, would I have gotten suspended from high school for drawing violent stuff and liking KMFDM and whatever? Like would that-- would that have-- Because I kinda felt like they were cracking down on kids after that.

PJ: Tom took a lot of criticism in the years after Columbine, because what would happen is people would publish school shooting games on Newgrounds, and Tom would very rarely do anything about it. Even if he thought, “I would not have made this game.”

TOM: When people would come to the site, and they’d be edgier than I was… there’s always that side of me that’s like I don’t want to kick them off the site because they’re like me... a lot of people do like reach out… Like lot of people, like when they're at a real low point, when you're in a dark place, you really do enjoy dark humor. I feel like a lot of people don't understand that. Like, some people that don't get dark humor don't realize it can be really therapeutic to other people that are having kind of dark feelings and stuff. Just feeling depressed or down or anxious. And um... So like there'd be people who reach out to me who like really considered it life saving like that this existed for them. They just enjoyed the site so much. They were so miserable in the rest of their life, then they would come to Newgrounds and it would be like their happy place. And you just like, you met a lot of people like that over the years and it makes you feel like this is sort of, like... As crazy as it might look to some people, it is like performing a public good in other ways. So it kind of made me feel... you know, yeah like, I like this stuff and there's other people that like this stuff too, and it's good that they can have a place instead of just feeling like you know outsiders and outcasts all the time.

PJ: So Tom kept protecting his website from the many people who wanted to shut it down. Until, in 2010, Flash games found an enemy that they could not defeat. One single person who decided that Flash itself is over now.

VOICE 1: Without further ado let’s bring out the Steve I think you all here to see.

VOICE 2: Steve Jobs

[MUSIC]

PJ: So here is Steve Jobs onstage explaining that the iPhone, the new mobile device that everyone is going to use to access the internet, will not support Flash at all.

STEVE: Umm.. It... different piece of technology kind of go in cycles they have their springs, and summers, and autumns and then they go to the graveyard of technology. And so we try to pick things that are in their springs… And if you choose wisely, you can save yourself an enormous amount of work versus trying to do everything

[MUSIC]

PJ: Essentially, the party’s over.

TOM: If you talk to anyone who uses Flash, like a lot of people have moved on from flash but they’ve never found someone they’ve loved as much as Flash. Because it was a really unique way that an artist and a programmer could work together in a development software. But yeah, I feel like that’s a shame that it got singled out like that.

PJ: Tom still makes video games, and so do a lot of the other people on Newgrounds. But they don’t make them in Flash anymore, that’s over. As we were getting off the phone, Tom mentioned that he’s actually a dad now, with kids of his own. I asked him if he’d shown them NewGrounds... he said, yeah, but not the dark parts. For now he’s keepings his kids a little sheltered, actually. He hopes they don’t look. He knows they probably will.

[MUSIC]

PJ: Reply All is hosted by me, PJ Vogt, and Alex Goldman. The show is produced this week by Sruthi Pinnamaneni, Phia Bennin, Damiano Marchetti, and Austin Mitchell. Our editor is Tim Howard. Our intern is Anna Foley. We were mixed by Kate Bilinski and Haley Shaw. Our theme song is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder.

Special thanks to everybody else who missed Bunni and spoke to Phia, and special thanks to Sherina Ong.

The guy who resurrected Bunni for us is Chris Griffith, his website is classextension.com. 

If you want to see other games designed by Dan Cook, you can check out Spry Fox. And if you want to see Tom Fulp’s other games, go to Newgrounds. People aren’t making Flash games, but they are making tons of weird games. 

Matt Lieber is the last softball game of summer. Our website, where you can sign up for our weekly newsletter, is replyall.limo. Our show is available on Spotify, so go check us out there. You can also listen to the show on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or wherever you listen. Thanks for listening, we’ll see you next week.