Happy Wheels

In the 2010s, the gaming site was hugely popular with British teenagers and was a notorious part of their childhood and school life.

The site, which was launched in 2001 with a £40,000 budget, hosted hundreds of free online minigames and was valued at more than £275 million in 2008.

If you were born in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, you may recall covertly playing minigames like Fireboy and Watergirl, and Skywire in your IT classes.

Yes, Miniclip is no longer available. It's been down for a while, but many people are only now becoming aware of it.

MINICLIP IS NOW CLOSED.

The Miniclip website still exists, but there are only two games available when you visit it: 8 Ball Pool and Agar.io.

Miniclip announced plans to alter the site in March 2022, and the games were removed shortly after.

"In March, we announced the metamorphosis of Miniclip.com, marking an incredible milestone in our journey and mission to build games that millions of people across the world love to play," the company states in a blog post.

"We're excited to announce that Miniclip.com is now our principal domain, where visitors can find our latest news, corporate information, job openings, and games," reads the post titled "Miniclip.com has changed."

Miniclip chose to modify the site because many of their users want to play their favorite games on mobile devices rather than the online.

They also stated that their loyal fans can continue to enjoy two legendary titles, 8 Ball Pool and Agar.io, and that they will continue to produce and add new games in the future.

ONLINE PEOPLE ARE DEVASTATED

You probably forgot the site existed until now and haven't visited it in years, but the fact that it's gone fills you with sadness.

Don't be concerned; you're not alone. Everyone is feeling melancholy now that Miniclip is no longer available, and sorrowful tweets are flooding Twitter.

"Dude, this is sad," one person wrote. Miniclip was a significant part of my childhood. "An era has come to an end."

"Nooo, I recall playing a lot of Miniclip games after school." "What a good time," said another.

"You played your last game on Miniclip without knowing it was your last game on Miniclip," a third individual commented.

"End of an era guy, first Cartoon Network, now Miniclip, our childhoods are being wiped right before our eyes," another user tweeted.

YOU CAN STILL PLAY SOME GAMES ON YOUR MOBILE DEVICE.

Miniclip claims that "there are no plans to bring back additional games online," although many people are unaware that you can still play many of the old games on your phone!

Although not every Miniclip game is available, many of the more sophisticated ones have an app that can be downloaded from the App Store.

I believe the time has come for me to accept that I am no longer in touch with today's young. On a daily basis, I check TikTok. I enjoy playing Fortnite. I can use terms like 'No Cap' and 'Deadass' in everyday conversation without embarrassing myself. On the surface, I'm all for kids, but when it comes to Minecraft YouTubers, that all changes.

Dream, a Minecraft YouTuber, exposed his face on video yesterday night, and it has now garnered tens of millions of views and online dialogues that are generating more interest than most worldwide news items. This is a monumental occasion, yet I have no idea who this individual is.

It appears that I am not alone in my perplexity, and my understanding illustrates a generational divide between those who grew up with Let's Play characters rather than more traditional superstars and others who were entering adulthood when this kind of entertainment was just getting started. When creators like PewdiePie and Markiplier were rising in prominence, playing games like Slender and Happy Wheels to millions of viewers, I was graduating secondary school. Overzealous reactions were all the rage, and I just didn't get it.

I could see the appeal, but I didn't want to watch whole playthroughs of popular games when I could play them myself. It felt like a waste, and I didn't develop the same parasocial bonds that so many others did. Instead, I remained with older websites like Giant Bomb and GameTrailers, which were ahead of their time in terms of video content that YouTubers would extensively use in the coming years. Times were changing, and I realized I wasn't at the right age to see that change properly.

Creators like JackSepticEye weren't just making games for people to watch; they were conversing with them and treating them as equals, inviting them into a small portion of their lives for a limited period of time each day. It may have only been to watch them play a game, but it was a small bit of levity that subscribers grew to appreciate. An entire generation fell in love with these artists not because they were good at video games, but because of their personality. I once sat next to JackSepticEye at an event, and he was quite nice. We even split a bag of gourmet popcorn. But we're not here to talk about our friendship; we're here to talk about whoever this Dream man is. Maybe I'm becoming old, out of touch, or don't hang out in those circles anymore, but his celebrity astounds me. In terms of sheer numbers, he dwarfs the world's biggest popstars and actors.

Minecraft was not something I became interested in. I had a server with friends in school where we developed a tiny community, but I never connected with professional content makers or had a desire to explore everything this game was capable of, and most people my age didn't either. People like Dream and TommyInnit attract a much younger demographic that grew up with emerging games like Minecraft and Fortnite, while content makers came to normalize the process of checking onto YouTube and viewing new uploads as we would the latest episode of our favorite television shows. The torch has been passed, and I don't mind being left behind as I desperately strive to understand a new generation of gamers who will transform the medium in the same manner that I did. Dream's unmasking is a defining moment in popular culture from a time I couldn't be further distant from, similar to the Red Wedding in Game of Thrones or The Inbetweeners sitting their final examinations.

I reimagined the five nights at freddy's (FNaF) franchise as a Muppets movie — skipping dinner to do so — and half of my friends are worried about me. Starving and spiraling after staring at Microsoft (MS) Paint for hours, all I had to show for my effort was a madman’s monstrous PNG. How did I get here?

It started as a typo and evolved into a tirade. On a Monday night in January meant for productivity, I sent a nonsensical series of images to one of my closest friends from high school. It was a series of parodying representations of Freddy Fazbear, the mascot of the Chuck E. Cheese-esque horror series, and he responded with a Spoonerism. “Fozzy fredbear,” the message said, and I felt a chill run down my spine. I pulled up Google Images, not for the last time that night, and grabbed an image of Fozzie Bear from The Muppets for my reply.

“FOZZY,” I announce. “fnaf muppets remake where fnaf is freddy,” I continue, not realizing my typo before I received his reply, which had a mistake of its own: “what if fnaf was freddt” (sic). “hold on,” I shoot back while pulling up MS Paint, “i need to set this up.” The crucial part of that message was “need.” Looking back, that chill was something I’d felt countless times over, some cold hand of Creation that would grip my psyche and not let go until I’d brought it into reality. Every creation I’ve ever conceived came from this same feeling.

That night I began cobbling together my connections board. The Living Tombstone blared in the background as I pulled up game models and character collages — cropping and cutting and pasting as needed, casting the beloved Muppets as the characters of children, animatronics and serial killers. When the work was finally done, it needed to be shared — distributed among some of my friends who I knew would appreciate the magnitude of what I’d made.

That’s not exactly how the night went, as much like the horror franchise I had created a fan retelling of, there’s quite a bit more beneath the surface. The Five Nights at Freddy’s series is infamous for a host of reasons: its noisy jump scares, its quietly horrifying premise and its deeply convoluted backstory, among others. This article is not meant to inform you about that backstory either, but the bare minimum of context might be needed. You could learn as I did, watching Markiplier play through the games and Game Theory’s MatPat theorize about them, but a saner option would be to find a summary. I was never actually able to play the games, as I was too broke to buy them in middle school, then too anxious in high school. However, there’s a certain entertainment factor to watching these content creators’ descents into insanity as the games and their lore twist themselves further and further.

The franchise is split into its original series and its succeeding storyline (and eventually an actual movie adaptation by Blumhouse?). The original series — containing “Five Nights at Freddy’s” one through five — was developed primarily by the creator Scott Cawthon, while the sequel series was developed by Cawthon and Steel Wool Studios. The original games follow the story of a pizzeria entertainment franchise being haunted by both its murderous possessed animatronics and the dark history of child serial killings that took place there. While being enraptured by such a dark premise might make my therapist worry, my real obsession is with how the story is uncovered. Certain details of the stories have taken years to discover: the timeline of the franchise’s events, the true identities of certain character sprites, the in-universe mechanics of how spirit possession and advanced technology can even function, even the relationships between the characters and their names. The instruments to uncover these mysteries are even more inane: from counting the toes of in-game models, to deciphering literal novels based on the game’s universe and even cryptography being used to decode a children’s activity book. The work done to traverse the game and its mysteries is done by its fervent fanbase.

That’s perhaps the most fascinating thing about this series: the fans. FNaF by itself is largely just a point-and-click horror series with some creepy Easter eggs, but its fanbase has transformed it into something so much more. The franchise’s purposeful vagueness and obfuscation create a work that is endlessly interpretable, and the fans eat it up. The sheer mass of fan content that spirals from this series borders on Lovecraftian — my friend even wondered if Cawthon sometimes feels like Steve Buscemi’s God in “Spy Kids 2.” The fan creations are endless: fanfiction, fanart, fan-films, fan music and of course — reflecting the original medium — fangames. A titular example of these fanworks is The Joy of Creation series, which tells the story of Cawthon himself besieged by his fictional monsters tearing their way into reality to wreak havoc on their creator and his family. Even though this fan-created series features horrors inflicted on himself and his loved ones, it amazingly has Cawthon’s full approval and funding under the Fazbear FanVerse project — an initiative to foster Five Nights at Freddy’s symbiotic relationship with the internet culture that launched it into the stratosphere, and to keep it soaring.