Waaaay back in 2009, before the "endless runner" was even something we'd called a "genre", Finji's Adam Saltsman released a game called Canabalt. Set during an alien invasion of Earth, and putting the player in control of a guy running for his life, it came as close as any video game to being the perfect video game.
I don't recap like this because it's unknown; it was a big deal at the time, has been ported to countless platforms since and has even been enshrined in the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection of video games alongside Tetris, Pac-Man and Pong.
I recap it because, in spite of all that, I feel like nobody really talks about Canabalt anymore, and that's a damn shame. It's important mechanically because it birthed the "endless runner", without which we wouldn't have Temple Run, Subway Surfers or even Geometry Dash. But I like it even more because it's one of the greatest examples of minimalist story-telling in video game history.
This game has no intro, no lore, no introductory text and no cutscenes. It's just a greyscale, 2D video game about a guy running really fast through a pixelated cityscape, and sometimes in the background there are huge mechs, while at other times there are big spaceships roaring past. And that's it!
Because that's all you need to know. Canabalt doesn't paint you as some omnipotent outsider, armed with all the knowledge of the universe. You are just some guy, living their life, and suddenly aliens are attacking and you have no idea what's going on, who they are, where they came from, what their motives are, whether Earth's government is fighting back. You don't know anything except that you have to run, and that's all Canabalt asks you to do.
The restraint isn't just admirable (Saltsman has said there was originally supposed to be a brief intro, but it was "getting in the way of the main thing"), it's a design masterclass. I've lost count of the number of times I've played this game, looked at the bad guys and, in the absence of knowing anything "official" about them, simply let my mind wander. Maybe they're aliens. Maybe they're robots. Maybe they're robot aliens. Maybe it's us, from a ruined future, invading our own past!
I didn't just wake up this morning thinking about this randomly, there's a point to all this nostalgia: a HTML5 version of the original (not the modified later releases), ported by Cameron Taylor, has recently been released on Finji's itch.io site and is free to play. You can go and do it, right now. Instead of reading a video game blog you could be playing one of the best video games ever made! Why aren't you doing that?
