Line Rider

History

Line Rider is a browser game/software toy originally released on the 23rd of September 2006 by Boštjan Čadež, a Slovenian student. Soon after its initial appearance on DeviantArt, Line Rider became an internet phenomenon, inspiring other games such as Free Rider.

Čadež was a student at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Slovenia and was assigned to do an art project by the school's illustration class in 2005. He planned the project to be coded animation software, as he had previous programming experience. Čadež noticed a program by Anderas Gysin named Cronodraw that partially matched this frame-by-frame animation concept and later placed the drawing and mouse control mechanics of Gysin's program into the final product of Line Rider. Čadež then found a page in his sketchbook that consisted only of a small man sledding on a tilted line; this brought back memories of when he was a child doodling the man sledding on various "path lines", and he decided this would be the basis of the project.

Line Rider was developed in non-consecutive periods for more than a year, the amount of work totalling four months; the development process involved Čadež learning physics and vector mathematics through tutorials. He shared his first Beta Concept on the 21st of December 2005, and on the 23rd of September 2006, he released the full Beta Version to the world. The basic concept is to draw one or more lines with the mouse on which a boy (referred to as "Bosh" by the creator) can ride a sled on the drawn lines after the player presses the "Play" button. The game includes simulated physics, which means the track must be sufficiently smooth to prevent the character from falling off the sled.

After its initial exposure on DevianArt, Line Rider gained major popularity on the internet as the Official Website launched in November 2006. The 6th of December saw the release of Beta 2, which included the eraser, zoom features, straight line tool and two new types of lines, orange/red, which speed boosted Bosh and green, which were scenery lines Bosh couldn't ride on. Black lines became blue to signify regular physics lines that Bosh can slide down or up if given enough speed. Boštjan was contacted in November by Brian Fargo, the founder of video game studio inXile Entertainment, about acquiring the console rights for the game, as the studio had intentions to release a version for the Wii and Nintendo DS. By the 19th of December, Boštjan agreed with the terms, releasing his control over developing the game.

A Community Forum was set up on Linerider.org, and in February of 2007, the Unofficial Forums I Ride The Lines was created, growing the game's player base. Within its first months of release, Line Rider won the Best Webtoy of 2006 Award on Jay is Games, a small achievement but a hugely positive sign for the game. Players started to become increasingly creative, making a variety of tracks with certain line techniques, most commonly manuals with orange/red lines, automated blue line tracks, and XY tracks, which have small vertical and horizontal blue lines. Players soon discovered that there was a physics glitch where Bosh could be pulled between lines depending on which side he was on, allowing him to speed boost without orange/red lines. This was termed Anamoly76 and Gravity Wells by the community.

By 2007, downloadable versions of Line Rider existed online so people could play using Adobe Flash Player offline with no internet. As players go better and more creative, people started to share their tracks on forums and record their tracks to YouTube with music playing over the Bosh riding and sliding around these amazing tracks at scintillating speeds, insane angles or extravagant scenery. This allowed the introduction of contests, which included Movie of the Week and Tournament of Champions. As thousands of people shared their work with the rest of the world, dedicated community members also rated published tracks each year in Top 10 Rankings, which garnered thousands, if not millions, of views among the epic track recordings on YouTube. However, players still had innovating to do. With the previous knowledge of Gravity Wells, people used quirks to create extremely fast tracks or manuals called Manuquirk (Manual + quirk). Other techniques and lingo include Granuals (Gravity Well + Manuals), integration, air time, flow, style and omnitrack.

In 2007, Line Rider won the Innovation Award at the Game Developers Choice Awards. On the 16th of September 2008, Line Rider 2: Unbound was released on Windows and the DS, developed by inXile Entertainment and published by Genius Products. Focussing on story mode, freestyle and puzzles. Bailey and Chaz would be new characters joining Bosh in the game. In the story mode, the player competes against Chaz in hopes of winning the ultimate sled and the love of Bailey. This mode spans 40 courses, all of which were designed by TechDawg, a well-known track designer. The player can also download other people's tracks on the internet from the game's website.

Line Rider 2 featured more possibilities than just the blank canvas in the original Line Rider, whilst offering greater colour options with ice-themed backgrounds to go along with a typical DS menu appearance and layout. Although the concept was cool, the graphical implementation was done poorly, and many people preferred the canvas and simplistic style of regular Line Rider, not the concept of the toy implemented into a proper game. The game was nominated for two Nintendo DS–specific awards in IGN's 2008 Game of the Year awards, namely, Best Puzzle Game and Best Original Score. On July 31st 2009, Line Rider: Freestyle (the same as Line Rider 2: Unbound) was released in Europe, published under Deep Silver.

Over the years, many unofficial versions and mods of Line Rider were released, significantly Beta 3 and Line Rider Silverlight, created by inXile, which included a female version of Bosh, trapdoor and slowdown lines. These were not taken well by the community as they strayed too far away from the base game on the web or weren't that great. However, community member MHenr18 (Matthew Henry) made many mods to Beta 2, ultimately finishing with Beta 2 Version 6.7, which added XY snap, colour eraser, delete last drawn line, timer and extra zoom settings. This was game-breaking.

Players started spending hundreds of hours perfecting tracks for syncing music to them and getting the perfect lines for Bosh to perform insane movements. When people started creating tracks with loads of scenery, lag became a problem. Tracks with over 10,000 lines made this process extremely difficult, which resulted in players using a complex technique known as Scenery Splits, which involves adding and removing sections of scenery lines to allow more lines to be placed for less lag. Some tracks somehow exceeded 500,000 lines running at 5fps. This period was known as the Linecount Wars of The Grind.

By 2014, the Line Rider Community was practically dead, but a rebirth happened after an 18-hour livestream commentary marathon was hosted by the community. A major reason why new people didn't want to join the Line Rider Community was how toxic it had gotten. People needed to find new ways to draw tracks to spark change, which is where animation came to light. Making Bosh travel at high speeds creates distance between frames, and using the pause and frame-step feature in editors could create smooth animations as the track changed from frame to frame.

In the Spring of 2015, Line Rider Advanced was released by JealousCloud, an open-source successor. It was THE ultimate Line Rider version, having enormous lag reduction, a file manager built in, timeline scrubbing, live updating, a line adjust tool, and most importantly, music sync built in! This not only encouraged people to draw the best Line Rider tracks at a faster rate, but also fostered experimentation with different techs and just having fun with the options provided by the new editor. That same year, Conundrumer (David Lu) also released Line Rider JavaScript, which was intended for players who wanted to use Line Rider for art. These two unique versions helped create a divide in the community: The Artists and The Gamers. However, this didn't diminish each other's presence on YouTube, sharing their remarkable tracks for the world to see almost a decade since Line Rider came out.

After years of stagnation, the 23rd of April 2019 saw linerider.com return with Matthew Henry, David Lu and Tobias Bessler releasing the best and most publicly available version of Line Rider on the internet, hosting features from editors of the past and constantly being updated. The rights were finally given back to Boštjan as well, and in 2020, he made Line Rider a registered trademark under his name. He has discussed a possible Line Rider in VR on articles here and here. The community slowly transitioned to using Discord in the 2020s, leaving behind the decade-old forums with thousands of messages, allowing the community to communicate more easily and store relevant resources, Line Rider versions and content from the game's decorated history.

Sources

Line Rider Wiki (Fandom)

Line Rider Wikipedia

History of Line Rider by Line Rider Review