I adore Bloodborne, don’t you?

Not many people know this, but I made a game once.

Well, not just me. It’s important to note that games require an insane amount of work to get done in under 80 million years. I had only a semester, and I had to do it with a team of five. It was a class I took out of Cornell in ’02 with a few others. Though I did take up the expected job of writer, I was also the sole artist for the entire game. The result…

Yeah, this was a special kind of something.

It was a turn-based RPG about a bad-ass monkey named Monk Funk (yep) whose barber is kidnapped (yep). It was a notably simpler game than what I originally pitched, which featured a blind samurai who uses sound to illuminate each level and travels with a baby named Meatshield (yeah). But I wasn’t the programmer, and I can only imagine how hard it must have been to code a game on a Mac in 2002. So my samurai yielded the floor to Monk Funk.

I’m not sure if the thing can be shared or played anymore. If I could, I would. I totally would. I can’t say it would be “good” or “worth your time”, but it certainly exists (UPDATE: I found where it was originally posted. Not only is the link dead, but only the Cornell students are listed as having made it. THANKS GUYS!!!). Quality aside, the art was a huge strain to take on alone, especially for someone who isn’t an art major, ESPECIALLY especially for someone who was also trying to turn his passion project into a webcomic (a previous incarnation of Fenix Gear that we don’t discuss ever).

Not to mention, you know, the usual college course work.

I bring this up because it was during this project that I fell down a flight of stair and twisted my leg.

No, I didn’t mistype that. I missed one step and ended up the hospital the night I planned to work on the final boss.

I was leaving the cafeteria and I missed the last step, causing me to plummet to the floor.  Literally, just one step off and my leg twisted all the way around and remained incapacitated for the rest of the semester. I dropped my dinner tray, and my friend Spunky laughed her ass off at me before realizing it wasn’t a joke. Once she realized the situation was more dramatic than a comical pratfall, she laughed even harder. I was wheeled out on the stretcher past my friends making their way to the upcoming dinner rush. I was later told there was no fracture, but I wouldn’t be able to put weight on it for a few months – a pretty tricky ask on the icy hills of Ithaca in winter. The timing couldn’t have been worse. But somehow I found an insane balance between the painkillers from the hospital and the energy drinks from the Rite Aid. I came home on crutches, sat down, and got to work.

What I created was an abomination of insanity. Fueled by my homemade not-quite-jet fuel, I concocted a final boss: my professor, with an Afro. His name was Fro-do. Yes.

YES! I turned this in for a final grade!!

And I got an A.

Sometimes you get hurt. You fall down. You can’t do a thing to stop it or fight it. But you keep fighting. And who knows how – but somehow, you get to the finish line. Maybe it’s limping on crutches. Maybe it’s fueled by quantities of caffeine and high fructose corn syrup that should be illegal. But as long as you keep fighting, pushing through the hurt, the pain, the damage, refusing to give in, you’ll make it. The result may not be pretty…

But at least you got through it.