The Irate Gamer Game
(images taken by theirategamergame)
Early YouTube. I remember that era well. To me, it was a random hodgepodge of videos, never really being able to anticipate anything but always finding something new and awesome. YouTube has since changed now but I still remember the era fondly.
One thing I recall was the rise of the game reviews and birth of the ranting community. The AVGN was one of the first and one of the first to explode in popularity. People loved his vulgar style and his takedowns of old games few remembered. Then came a wave of people inspired by his work. The Irate Gamer was one of them.
I actually found the Irate Gamer first. Shoot, I remember exactly where I was. In my grandmothers old room on a Windows XP laptop browsing youtube. One of his reviews were on the front page, watched it, found it hilarious. I binged them all, enjoying it. Reading the comments I found a lot of people claiming he ripped off someone called the AVGN. Me, being the contrarian I was back then didn't believe it until a day later I literally just looked at the dates.
It mattered little to me. Plus I had another cool person to watch. Binged a bunch of the AVGN reviews, and although they were way more vulgar I still liked them. Never cared much about the whole AVGN vs Irate Gamer thing. There was twice the amount of stuff to watch!
Course now I don't watch either. Just not that interested in that kind of stuff anymore. Irate Gamer kind of retired at some point in the 2010s (before he came back as Chris NEO? I'm not sure). AVGN is cool but back then I found some reviews I massively disagreed with him on (Milon, SF2010, to name a few) and kind of stopped watching him. Just drifted away. These days if I want to know if a game is good I just watch gameplay.
Either way Chris Bore's videos hold a special place in my heart even if he is infamous. He and James Rolfe are still kicking around to dedicated fanbases so I wish them the best.
I do believe the Irate Gamer hate is way over the top though. There's some guy who runs an anti-Irate Gamer blog and has been at it for over 10 years. That's just pathetic and dude should find better uses for his time. Probably so starved for stuff to groan about he'll complain about this post.
In 2013, around the time I stopped caring I remember the AVGN announcing a video game based on his show. I also remember cynically thinking that it was only a matter of time until The Irate Gamer announced one too. And boy he did.
I have no idea if he was already making it beforehand or contacted a studio and have them make it at breakneck speed. I did want to try it though, out of pure morbid curiosity.
Unfortunately the game was only released for iOS devices and we never had iOS devices in my household. By that time I was still new to Android and even then barely played on it. Plus, back then I despised touchscreen controls. Even now I can hardly stand them. But even if I had n iOS device I don't think I would have played it.
It just...doesn't look good. In comparison the AVGN game actually looks nice this just looks like a cheap flash game. It's super jank too, making heavy use tweening in place of sprite-based animation. All about it feels cheap. The only thing to have any production quality is the comic panels at the start.
(slightly upscaled via waifu2x)
The plot is very simple. The Evil Gamer has taken all of Irate Gamer's games in order to take over the show. It is now up to the Irate Gamer to travel across the world, defeating the Evil Gamer's goons and getting his games back. From then on it's a bunch of levels of platforming and shooting, graphics and gameplay reminiscent of Mario Bros.
The game was developed by Mad Media Labs, a now defunct indie game company. According to their CEO's LinkedIn page. They are a...
a game development company specialising in developing corporate games for Flash, X-Box Live and Unity. As our client base grew we found more and more of our clients were looking for online solutions for e-commerce and content management. Responding to these needs we expanded, taking on new, talented designers and developers so that we could offer the very best solutions to our customers. Be it a game, affordable web development or corporate identy of e-commerce we can create cost effective, commercially successful solutions.
They kind of just do whatever. No idea when exactly they vanished by their website is down as of writing this post.
The game utilized the same engine as another iOS game called Commander Cool. The developers of that game offered an SDK called 'iOS 2D Platformer Starter Kit' which served as the basis for The Irate Gamer Game. Below I have linked a video to a tutorial for the software. It's very apparently how similar they are. They did change the assets, though not for the better. The base sprites for the SDK plus Commander Cool's sprites (even if stolen from Metal Slug) were far better than the flash/shockwave jank they added.
In 2013 to poor reviews and low sales the games was pulled, just months after it launched. Chris Bores deleted all mentions of the game off his channel and it was pulled from the app store. Bores stated in subsequent streams he had little control over the game and didn't consider it good either.
With knowledge of how a lot of these back-end deals go I'm assuming that it was Mad Labs who contacted Bores first with the idea, he approved it then it was themselves who took it down later, seeing how poorly received it was.
I could totally see Chris Bores doing a stream of the game in the future, laughing at how it was made and generally screwing around with it. He may not like it but it is a piece of his history. He may as well just play it off humerously.
When I first began my research the game was completely lost. This was in 2019. At that time I finally tried the AVGN game. I didn't like it at all, then recalled there was an Irate Gamer game. At the time I was also considering obtaining an old iOS device and using that to play some old exclusives. It was then I learned about the games subsequent failure and delisting.
At the time I was able to recover from comic panels from the games intro and a few media clippings proving the game existed. Upon my second attempt at recovery in 2022 I found that the game had actually been located and preserved.
Local Irate Gamer fan, 'Irategamerfan' had purchased the game back in 2013 and had it sitting on his iPhone 4 for all those years. With decryption ability and extraction tools he got it off his phone and dumped the IPA on Archive.org, where it currently remains. He even made a little trailer to celebrate the re-release.
With the IPA in my hands, can I now play it?
Being an iOS [32-Bit] game there aren't many options. iOS dropped support for 32-Bit apps back in 2017 so buying a new iPhone and installing it isn't a possibility. If you wanted to you would need an old iPhone, then possibly have to jailbreak it to install the games IPA. I'm sure don't need to repeat how locked down Apple devices are.
I actually have an old iPhone, though it's blacklisted by Apple. And as tempting as it is to break that and get the game onto it, I am not THAT interested in getting it running.
Plus, the number of 32-bit iOS games I want to play is literally just 2. This and the Doom II RPG (which I can already play on other platforms). Personally, i'd rather just wait for emulation to catch up, even if it takes years.
Had I written this article last year this paragraph would have been much different. In December of 2022 the first ever open source iOS emulator launched. Called touchHLE it is currently developed by one user programming the entire thing in Rust. While at its launch it was only stated to open one game, compatibility is slowly increasing. Being a small project I don't expect much to run off-the-bat but it is still amazing to see the progress made.
Of the games I have tried none of them launched, though that's to be expected. The software is hardly in alpha stage. There is plenty not yet implemented.
I have no complaints but wish the developer best of luck, especially when you have braindead android users forking it, compiling for android and then complaining to the original creator that the software is broken. Point is, having to deal with the 'fans' is actually a much larger hurdle than most think.
But alas, that is the curse of mobile users. I could write an entire article complaining about that but I won't.
touchHLE currently only supports up to iOS2 programs. As this game requires iOS6 it is not currently compatible. Maybe one day, but it's not like I am in any rush to play this.
Of the searchlight posts we finally have one where the game has been recovered! Of course this isn't our 'diamond in the rough' game but at least we have it. Should this game have stayed lost? Absolutely not. It's hilarious for what it is. Even if it's a bad game I still want to play it and will do so one day.
Brief
- Title: The Irate Gamer Game
- Year: 2013
- Platform(s): iOS [32-Bit]
- Developer(s): Mad Media Labs
- Publisher: Mad Media Labs
- Playable-If-Recovered: Somewhat...
Evidence Dump
