Carrot Track (2010)
Creator(s): Ferry Halim
Type: Flash
Language: [EN]
Status: Available through emulation
Casanova (2012)
Creator(s): Ferry Halim
Type: Flash
Language: [EN]
Status: Available through emulation
One time when I was a kid I came across a website that had a collection of very aesthetically pleasant games. The music was amazing too. I was immediately enamoured with it. Thing is, I found it one afternoon while waiting for the summer fair to start, and my brain decided that that website was only available for as long as the fair was in town. I would wait a whole year until the fair was back and my brain decided that the website was accessible again. It felt almost magical, I was so so so excited every time. And every time I forgot its name.
Imagine the joy I felt when, years later, I found it again.
Thank you so much, Ferry Halim, for these games and the immense happiness I’ve always felt while playing them.
(I see the link doesn’t work on the phone app so here it is)
Feeling nostalgic for old internet going through the bookmarks on my laptop. Who remembers winter bells? I’m delighted its still available to play!
Cats (2003)
Creator(s): Ferry Halim
Type: Flash
Language: [EN]
Status: Available through emulation
i found the orisinal ost yt and im floating rn god i miss flash and pre-web 2.0 takeover internet
fixed! damn, i’m sad to see that one go. orisinal was one of the first sites i “frequented” as a kid just learning the internet. i highly recc seeking them out on flashpoint!
raining a lot in oakland so i made a little thing for my website inspired by an old ferry halim / orisinal page
rain has always been one of my favorite things in life as long as i can remember. something magic about water falling from the sky
020: Winterbells
CANON FIRE is made possible by the generous contributions of readers like you. Support more writing like this on Patreon. Thank you!
Footnotes for this entry can be found here:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/72377957
With a single mechanic focus, and soft, welcoming aesthetics, the Orisinal Collection stood out among other Flash games for how simple and soothing its titles were. As Macromedia Flash(1) began to overtake Shockwave as the de facto platform for web games, titles became more elaborate and, well, flashier. Orisinal games, by comparison, were more akin to a Game and Watch game. Each game had a single mechanic to master that was immediately compelling and understandable, with their own distinct characters, palette and mood, but presented with the soft lines and feathered colors of the collection’s aesthetic.
Winterbells was one of the collection’s most popular entries, and one of the few that managed to survive both the Adobe shutdown of Flash, and the system architecture changes of Apple iOS, leaving it as one of the three games still easily accessible(2), out of the 70 previously available.
[[MORE]]Winterbells itself is an endless climber, where you only control the horizontal movement of a bunny character, bouncing on bells suspended in the air to climb into the atmosphere, occasionally going for the more precariously placed birds in order to gain a multiplier to your score. There really isn’t more to it than that, but little nuances keep it interesting, and the small room for error ramps up the tension the higher you go.
Each successive bell hit increases the points a bell gives you, so you may be tempted to go for every bell, but because of the arc of the jumps off the bell, that’ll likely mean aiming for them while falling, giving you less time to correct your mistake if you miss, especially dangerous at higher levels where the distance between bells is increased. Hitting a bell from the below gives you more height and essentially extends the rising arc of your jump, but will naturally have you miss out on more bells. The birds that provide score bonuses are the only moving objects, often ending up way out of the way of your current trajectory, needing you to rapidly move horizontally, increasing the risk that you’ll miss the landing.
It’s a light balance of risk and reward, but it gives a pleasant tension. Eventually you will miss, and the higher you’ve climbed the longer you’ll fall, accelerating to max speed, falling all the way from the stratosphere and landing gently on earth.
With the iOS version and Flashpoint archive, Winterbells is one of the few Orisinal games that are still playable, but without the framing of the original website and the other games, it’s missing part of the experience. Like a piece designed alongside a specific exhibit, Orisinal titles lose a little divorced from the original context. They formed a cozy space that’s no longer available, as more and more of our digital history deteriorates.
