My Brute (La Brute)

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

~ the last words ~

My Brute was a fighting game with the fighting taken out of the player's hands. You typed a name into a box at mybrute.com and the game generated a brute for it, with random looks and stats, and sometimes a weapon or a dog. Then you picked an opponent from a list and watched. The fight played out on its own in a small Flash window, and all you could do was see whether your brute won.

It came from Motion Twin, a game studio in Bordeaux that has been a worker cooperative with equal pay since 2004. The French original, La Brute, was at labrute.fr by June 2008 as something even smaller: a page where each name you typed always produced the same fighter, with sample matchups like david vs goliath and gandhi vs jack bauer. By February 2009 it had an arena with a ranking, and it had pupils. The English site followed, and the Wayback Machine has it from 1 April 2009 onward.

Motion Twin announced on 4 September 2023 that Twinoid, the portal all its browser games had been folded into, would close. On 2 November 2023 every one of them went offline. mybrute.com still answers, with a plain notice in two languages that begins "Our web games are no longer available."

~ the record ~

~ six fights, then three a day ~

A new brute got six fights on its first day and three on every day after that. Each level raised one stat and sometimes added a weapon or a skill, from pools of 26 and 28. The luckiest roll was a pet, and the largest pet was a bear. Reviewers liked how little time the game asked for and complained about the same two things: you could not steer the fight, and you ran out of fights.

~ the pupil link ~

The cap had a way around it. Every brute had its own address, yourname.mybrute.com, and anybody who created a brute through that address became your pupil and fed you experience. So the fastest way to level was to put your link in front of as many people as possible. It spread the way chain letters do, except that the person on the receiving end got a toy out of it.

My Brute had its Turkish moment in April 2009. The DonanımHaber thread opened on 5 April and ran to 164 replies. On Ekşi Sözlük a topic where writers listed their brute pages started on 21 April and passed forty pages. I was 25 and finishing university, and the places the link turned up were the usual ones for that year: forum signatures and MSN personal messages, in the spot where a hardware list or a song lyric normally went.

~ what the studio said ~

Motion Twin's FAQ is blunt about why the web games ended. "The wave of mass-social networks like Facebook hit us quite hard," it says, and after that the studio "kinda" failed at taking the mobile wave in the early 2010s. My Brute did get an iPhone port, made with Bulkypix and sold for 4.99 dollars.

Support for the web games stopped in early 2020, the year Flash itself was switched off, and the servers were left running for three more years. By then the studio lived on Dead Cells, which entered early access in 2017. KadoKado, the oldest game on the portal, had been online since 2004.

~ haxe powered ~

The 2009 homepage carried a small badge reading "haXe powered". Haxe is a programming language that Nicolas Cannasse wrote at Motion Twin in the mid 2000s, so that one codebase could target the Flash client and the server behind it, and the studio later wrote Dead Cells in it. The brutes did not last as long as the compiler. They have a second life all the same: Motion Twin published the source and assets of its old games on GitHub under a non-commercial Creative Commons license, and a volunteer group called Eternaltwin runs a rebuilt La Brute with the studio's consent.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »