ViralWorld

Line Rider

You might remember it as fšk Line Rider, sledder line drawing game

The archive has not found a surviving copy.

2006·Early YouTube·skill

A browser toy with no goal that turned its players into animators.

At a glanceThe facts

Remembered as
fšk Line Rider
Spread in
2006
Began as
Something you played
Where it started
deviantart
Era
Early YouTube
Origin
Not an upload originally
Available
Not held by ViralWorld

What this wasThe story

You draw a line with the mouse and a small figure on a sledge rides down it. There is no score, no objective and no failure state — the sledder either makes it or falls off, and either way you can redraw. Boštjan Čadež, a Slovenian student posting as fšk, built it in September 2006 and put it on deviantART.

Line Rider is the clearest early example of a toy becoming a medium. Within weeks people were spending days building elaborate tracks synchronised to music and posting the playthroughs to YouTube, and the game's real cultural output was those videos rather than the game. It was one of the first things to demonstrate that a browser toy plus a video site was a creative pipeline.

It was named webtoy of the year for 2006, appeared in McDonald's advertising, and was licensed into commercial console versions in 2008 that reviewers largely disliked — the constraint of the free browser original was what made it good. Fan-built successors are still running today.

Why it is here: it got out of its own corner of the internet fast · still being watched and quoted years later

This began as something you played rather than watched. Originally published on deviantart.

Where it came fromWhat we know

There is no original upload to identify: this did not begin as one. There is no copy of it here either — what it was, when it appeared and what people called it is what this page can tell you.

Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This began as something you played rather than watched. Originally published on deviantart.

Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.

More from 2006You were there

More from early YouTubeMore of the archive

Keep browsingElsewhere on ViralWorld