alt Hacker NewsWhen stick figures fought
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Way back, before the year 2000, I desperately wanted to make my own stick figure death animations, but I was too lazy, and being in South Africa, we couldn't get any useful software.
I did however manage to get Delphi Personal Edition off a cover CD from a magazine grey-imported from up-north.
I proceeded to create "TISFAT" (This is Stick Figure Animation Theatre) in Delphi, inventing my own "inverse kinematics" algorithm, quotation marks not only because I had no idea what that was at the time, but I also had no way to look it up, and it was ghastly (the day I found out what atan2 did unlocked everything!).
Being a cocky teenager, I thought, "this is great!" and sent it to the local version of "PC Format" magazine and got it on the local coverdisc.
That's when I first learnt several very important things about having users! Always -always- version your file formats!
Anyway, it somehow made its way onto "the world wide web", and someone set up a forum about it, and a small community built around my bug-ridden app. Then the religious wars of "Pivot vs. TISFAT" started, so I reached out to the author of Pivot just to say I wasn't any part of it, and I'd be keen to add support for the Pivot file format.
Later on I learnt about verlet particle physics, made better "IK", made a Pascal wrapper for the Chipmunk physics library, allowing me to add physically-driven animation creation.
I look back with awe at younger me, because I wouldn't have the energy to power on like I did, and I'd think more-than-twice about showing anyone my work nowadays (I have the physical Winamp part 2 video basically done, but the fear of showing it in public is holding me back).
You can still find videos created with TISFAT on YouTube, and I've still got a complete rewrite sitting on a HDD somewhere, where I planned a "no UI" way of animating, targeting all the "new" multi-touchscreens back then...
Ah, good times.
I owe my technology career to Flash.
Still find it incredibly sad that Adobe and Steve Jobs were able to destroy it together.
This tool was able to draw in creative, previously non-technical people and provide a gradual ramp of complexity that we could navigate.
Nothing has come close since.
I used to make animations with https://pivotanimator.net/ a lot as a kid, trying to make fight scenes like these. A sort of related thing is ToriBash, which is kind of a multiplayer 3D animation game where you fight each other by making decisions on which muscles to contract at each time interval.
Loved this stuff so much. I miss my summers off from school, where I would never think of a day gone as time "spent".
This unlocked memories I forgot I had. Not only playing these games, but Flash introduced me to gamedev. I can clearly remember struggling in Actionscript, trying to get collision detection and resolution working. I never got it to work properly lol.
By the way, if anyone wants to relive some old flash games/movies, there is https://ruffle.rs/, an open source Flash implementation. It's great!
Ah, XiaoXiao. Under the amazingly named `E:\Storage\Old\Fun\old\XiaoXiao` I have fight (xiaoxiao1).avi, XiaoXiao_City_Plaza.swf, and xiaoxiao2.swf - xiaoxiao9.swf
I assumed this was going to be about Stick Death but I was mistaken! I had never heard of XiaoXiao before this article...
Stick Death was online when I first starting used the WWW, I was obsessed with it! It was just incredibly to me that someone could easily make these animations and get them online for everyone to see! I believe this around the same time as 2advanced and the "Flash intro" craze...
I remembered Alan Becker (https://youtube.com/@alanbecker) who creates stories with an array of his stick figure characters.
Sometimes, they interact with real world too!
I was knee-deep in the flash animation scene through the late 90s early 00s, and I don't remember anyone calling anyone 'Flashers'. China-only I suppose.
I did think Stick Death came out before Xiao Xiao?
Is there anywhere you can watch these old flash creations like Xiao Xiao and Homestar Runner with the original vector graphics? The reproductions I’ve seen on YouTube are terrible, in part because of the obvious video artifacts that don’t preserve the edges, but also because it loses all interactivity.
Stick figures live on! Hyun's Dojo is the new place where stick animations are. Recently the winners of a stick figure tournament have been announced https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KO5hiRV5MTk
There is even a timeline if you want to know the full history; https://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/timeline3/latest/embed/index....
SFDT was the first online community I was a part of. It was a special time on the early internet. I feel so lucky to have been a very small part of it.
> Zhu initially won in court. Then the appeals process ran until 2006, when he finally lost. The stick figures were too different, according to the judges, and the imagery was too simple to copyright. Nike was in the clear.
I am sure if I add an extra couple of pixels to the end of the Nike Swoosh, I can use it for my own branding everywhere, because it is not the same and a rounded tick is just too simple to copyright in any case ... /sarcasm
I could even cite the original ruling against Zhu as a precedent for extra kharma points.
> It was the era when a major company could brush off the bad PR that comes with copying a major online artist. Is it believable that no one involved in the Nike ads had seen Xiao Xiao? Not really — it was popular with young people worldwide. Yet Zhu was new media at a time when old media ruled. What could he do?
This doesn't make any sense. From earlier in the same article:
> Zhu didn’t invent violent stickman animations. In the ‘90s, the Western site Stick Figure Death Theatre hosted exactly what its name implied. But Xiao Xiao, and its mix of Jackie Chan with Jet Li with The Matrix, perfected the idea.
> Either way, it was Xiao Xiao that made “stick fights” massive online. Clones were rampant — even Stick Figure Death Theatre had them. As one paper reported in 2002:
>> The Web’s legions of part-time Flash animators have begun producing their own copies of Xiao Xiao — so many, in fact, that there’s a whole portal dedicated to them. Stick Figure Death Theatre ... has so many stick man knockoffs, you have to wonder why Zhu doesn’t just give up.
If we assume that people at Nike were familiar with Xiao Xiao... and that they were also familiar with the mountains of similar material, what are we saying they did wrong?
These animations got me into Flash and soon after into programming thanks to ActionScript, one copycat music video that maybe made even stronger impression in teenage me was a sad adult-themed music video from 2004, I just found ii after looking online for a bit: I love death - Lodger (Finnish band) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BoFQV4jXun4
Macromedia Flash had probably the best UX of all the programs ever created. It all goes downhill from there.
Ah man, these are some awesome memories! Hot damn I liked these when I was a kid! I was first introduced to them on a LAN party. We would pass these kinds of things to eachother between CS 1.5 matches (VLC can play any file format!)
I remember towards the end of my lan party going days, these sick fights were finally outdone by the much more advanced Killer Bean.
Just a bean, trying to get some sleep.
Those were the days
Stick figures run through a lot of amateur digital animation, for probably obvious reasons. Pivot reigned on a lot of early YouTube and the stubby stick figure style ran through a lot of Flipnote Hatena. I'm not sure if it's simply that standards for amateur digital content have evolved, or if we have lost the character of small platforms like SFDT and Flipnote, but I do find stick figures absent today on the large platforms we've all herded towards. A lot of what I see is definitely buoyed by Flipnote diehards.
Fascinating. My friends and I were obsessed with stickpage.com in the early to mid 2000s, where Xiao Xiao and a bunch of imitators and derivatives were hosted.
I kind of miss that era of the internet where there were random, niche sites you would fall in love with and it wasn’t all just a post on YouTube or Facebook or Reddit or something.
Was not expecting to read about Xiao Xiao today! I loved Xiao Xiao as a preteen, and spent many hours playing Xiao Xiao 4 [1], or re-watching the other Xiao Xiaos over and over again.
Flash animation isn't dead, it's just called source filmmaker now. Whether 'skibidi toilet' is an upgrade from stick death is an argument that i'm sure lives on either side of the generation gap, but amateur internet filmmaking is unquestionably alive and well.
That's spooky, we were literally just talking about stickdeath in the office and then this shows up.
Since nobody mentioned it: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2085540/Stick_It_to_the_S...
Woah, this brought back memories. Like that one flash game where you played a stickman hitman.
I was going to mention MTV's Liquid Television animation showcase as a potential inspiration for this.
That link seems partly confirmed since they mention an online predecessor called Stick Figure Death Theatre and the Liquid Television segment (which re-enacted famous movie scenes with stick figure animations) was called Stick Figure Theatre.
Pretty much each individual segment of that show was mind blowing (it launched Beavid and Butthead) but the stick figure interpretation of Night of he Living Dead stuck with me for years.
YouTube has a compilation: https://youtu.be/-M7-Sew5aU8
Some of these stick figure fight videos inspired me to make copies which lead to me learning flash which lead to my first dev job working in flash. Cool to see this throwback.
Wow, blast from the past. There's a fairly recent game on Steam called "Stick it to the Stickman" which practically puts you in control of the character in these animations. In fact I think the game was directly inspired by them (There's a Devolver interview with someone working on the game mentioning it[1]).
That's so cool. I watched all of his work, and was in the animation scene, and I didn't even realize at the time, the creator is Chinese! I learned how to use Flash, dabbled into scripts, learned to do very basic stuff on 3DSMax, as a ~10 year old little shit, and all of that most likely wouldn't have happened, if it wasn't for his work -- it's safe to say that my life was dramatically impacted by him. Thanks for sharing this, OP!
i was OBSSESSSED with this growing up. i had no idea about the origin or real name or that it was chinese origin. incredible. thanks to whoever found and submitted this
newgrounds.com in its heyday was so fun.
Also anyone else remember when websites used to make Flash intros that you'd have to skip to get to the content?
Immediately when reading the „When stick figures fought“ title, I suspected that this piece would be about Xiao Xiao.
It was such an impressive piece of art for younger me (12 years old then and just getting started with this „internet“ thing) that apparently it made some lasting memories. Made my day to revisit these videos after such a very very long time. Thanks!
I remember a “choose your own story” stick figure Flash app, called Time to Die (I believe), where the “protagonist” was a condemned convict, used as target practice by scientists.
You could pick weapons used by the scientists. In most, he’d just get blown away, but in one scenario, he grabs the gun, and kills everyone in the facility.
Not sure if it was this guy, or was just inspired by him.
I added ELIZA to shittalk for a statistical ML model to play bouts on 'stickfight' PVP game around 2000. :)
Two games I'd strongly recommend in this style are Your Only Move is HUSTLE (YOMI Hustle for sort), moddable multiplayer turn-based stick fights; and One Finger Death Punch, fast-paced brawler with a really simple control scheme.
Many people use the former purely to make animations.
Vaguely related is Haxe, https://haxe.org/. Originally a way to do ActionScript, now it targets a lot more and is quite nice to work in.
Oh this is delightful! Such fond memories of the stick figure fighting craze, I even turned my first maths textbook of a few hundred pages into a flipbook stick figure fight, on both sides!
I grew up learning Flash and started my love for programming due to ActionScript 2 then 3, is there anything like this today I am looking for something for my 10 year old daughter.
what a trip down memory lane.
for some extra nostalgia, check out "one finger death punch 2" game (and its prequel). i bet it's sort of an homage to those animations.
This is what the world lost when Adobe Animate/Flash became impractical to pirate and switched to a monthly subscription fee for the Adobe suite.
I loved the xiao xiao series. They were amazing.
Dude completely forgets StickDeath.com which came before all of this…
I loved stickdeath.com as a kid, but it seemed to have evolved into something much darker over the years.
The first animation that made me love these was the old 'stickman vs door' gif,
Thanks for reminding me of that one
Xiao Xiao and Ninjai *chef's kiss*
This was one of the .swf animation saved in our disk, I also miss the demo scene.
the Xiao Xiao Flash series were amazing. I always wondered when someone would come up with a beat'em-up game with that style. Simple, fast-paced, lots of free movement and use of tools/weapons.
Stick figures still fight to this day! Go check out hyunsdojo
Hyun’s dojo was awesome
I remember series of stick man fighting cartoons which starts from simple kung-fu/gun porno in big office tower of (presumably) evil corporation, but progressed to some infernal fights, with Jesus, ghosts, hell, etc.
I'm not sure it was XiaoXiao, I (don't) remember some other letter combination in the names of files.
A couple of years ago, an archivist named Ben Latimore put out an ebook. Since Adobe began the retirement of Flash in 2017, he’s been preserving .SWF files and the history around them. His book is a chronicle of the Flash era, which he sees as a lost golden age. On the final page, he wrote this about that time:
>… intense creativity, easy-to-access software, notable but not crippling limitations, almost universal compatibility across the entire technological space of its time, widespread adoption by encouraging free consumption and sharing in an age where “going viral” actually meant something, all combining to influence the entire entertainment industry with one strike after another? That’s something that we’ll never be able to recreate, only remember fondly. All driven by a bunch of guys sitting in their bedrooms who watched too much Xiao Xiao.
https://archive.org/details/flashpoint-a-tribute-to-web-game...