GameMaker Sandbox

» see sandbox.yoyogames.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

GameMaker was the program you got handed when you were twelve and announced you were going to make a game. It did not ask you to learn C, and it had a drag-and-drop mode for anyone who could not yet write a loop, so you ended up with a working executable on your desktop the same afternoon. What it did not have, for its first decade, was anywhere to put the result.

YoYo Games fixed that in 2007 by opening a portal on yoyogames.com where anyone with a copy could upload what they had built. Games got a profile page with screenshots the developer supplied, a star rating, a comment thread and written reviews. A forum sat alongside it for asking why the collision code was behaving like that. In 2011 the whole thing moved onto its own address at sandbox.yoyogames.com, and it absorbed an older collection from the Games Showcase site on the way, which is how uploads dated as early as 2005 ended up in there.

I was twenty-three when it opened, halfway through an engineering degree and writing code for coursework. The Sandbox was not aimed at me and I kept clear of it, which is the thing about it worth recording. Its population was thirteen-year-olds in bedrooms uploading a platformer with one level and borrowed sprites, and that population almost never gets archived.

~ the record ~

~ what a hundred thousand first games looks like ~

The number people quote is a bit over 100,000, and it comes from the rescue rather than from YoYo, because YoYo never published one. Archive Team ran a grab against the Sandbox in 2014 and took nearly everything on the site at that moment, which is the closest thing to a census the portal ever got.

The library is not a catalog of good games and was never going to be. It is the raw output of a decade of people learning, which means an enormous quantity of unfinished platformers, Mario clones, zombie survival prototypes abandoned at the second room, and a thin seam of real work by people who went on to ship things you have heard of. The strong ones only exist because somewhere was willing to host the other ninety thousand, and YoYo hosted them for nine years without charging anybody for the privilege.

~ the replacement that did not arrive ~

In October 2014 YoYo's community coordinator announced GameMaker: Player, pitched as something like Steam for GameMaker games, where you would download and run things properly instead of playing them in a browser window. A FAQ the following year answered the obvious question directly: the Player would replace the Sandbox, uploading would be disabled when the Player shipped, and existing content would stay up for a period after that.

In March 2016 a community manager named the date, and YoYo's own account tweeted it on 18 March: the Sandbox would close on the 8th of April. It did.

GameMaker: Player never properly arrived. Wikipedia's article on GameMaker now records the games as having been removed in favor of a replacement tool, and labels that replacement defunct in the same sentence.

~ what survived ~

Someone rebuilt a searchable front end for the rescued collection at yygarchive.org, and it is honest about the holes. Some games were missing from the 2014 scrape to begin with. The low-quality thumbnails came through but the original uploaded screenshots mostly did not, so a fraction of the library is illustrated only by whatever the Wayback Machine happened to crawl on its own.

A number of files also lost their names in transit and now sit in the archive as headerless blobs called download.bin. They are still games. You can still run them, if you can work out what they are first.

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