HomeNewsLine Rider
11 years later, this gobsmacking Line Rider track is finally complete"I will never spend so much time on a Line Rider track ever again."
“I will never spend so much time on a Line Rider track ever again.”
You rememberLine Rider, right? That Flash game with the wee man on a sled who slides down whatever track you’ve sketched? Great little time-killer, that. Only, it seems one artist has wiled away more than a few hours on the slip ‘n’ slider. Having spent hundreds of hours over the past decade putting it all together, David Lu is finally ready to show us Omniverse 2 - an exhaustive showcase of high-velocity puppetry that turns the web toy into a mind-bending work of art in its own right.
Now, it’s been a good few years sinceLine Rider’s inception in 2007. Thankfully, folks are still soundtracking vids with The Matrix: Reloaded score. Some things never change.
Watch on YouTube
Watch on YouTube
Accompanying the video is alengthy readover on Lu’s blog, detailing the exact hows and whys and whats of the track’s creation. The original Omniverse was pretty low-key in comparison, a simple demonstration of all the known physics tricks in Line Rider. Its sequel was conceived of as an extension of that idea, and the plan was to have it wrapped up for a community competition all the way back in 2008.
An early Omniverse 2 draft from 2009.
“Of course, I was too ambitious and settled with releasing an unfinished version of the track,” writes Lu. “While it was widely praised, my vision wasn’t complete, and I continued working on it sporadically. Eleven years later, after I reversed engineered and recreated Line Rider, after I developed as an artist and explored all types of creative mediums, I finally completed the project and even went beyond my original vision, reclaiming the project to tell a new story.”
The post is also a fascinating read for folks interested in the wider Line Rider community, mind. Lu tracks the scenes movement in tastes and trends - noting a shift from scenic tracks to those that flaunted more impressive puppetry - as well as the movement’s resurgence as a music video community, following anhonest-to-god post-rock Line Rider feature film.
Of course, Lu isn’t using exactly the same software I was messing with back in 2007. Rather, he currently maintains amodernised web version, one that runs a bit better and should avoid the imminent death of Adobe Flash. But while he plans to continue experimenting with the thing’s “expressive possibilities”, don’t expect another project of this scale anytime soon.
“I will never spend so much time on a Line Rider track ever again.”
