Zhenxin Town Xiaomao | wen
01
Heading into 2022, you can experience most of the games you want to play effortlessly. From free mobile games downloaded anytime, anywhere, to Steam, a must-have for PC players, to the Nintendo Switch that can be bought for half the price of a flagship phone.
You get all the gifts that come with technological progress, but you always feel that there are shortcomings.
Looking at the game full of warehouses into confusion, your mind is pulled back to that afternoon when birds chirped and cicadas chirped more than a decade ago. The rust-stained electric fan creaks in the back of your head, and you and your neighbor's little brother sit next to each other, venturing through the 8-bit pixel-stacked spiritual world.
It was an unforgettable day, and you suddenly broke through the door of the game world.
So after many years, you reopen the homepage of the 4399 website, but find that everything seems to have not changed. Or the familiar UI, or even the familiar games. The decline of Flash is also the decline of these websites, such a picture is not strange to me as a post-95 generation. There are no more new "childhood classics" appearing, and I think the works that remain are just lying quietly in the corner, forgotten by the time machine...
But the reality is not so bone-chilling. If you work to fish as hard as I do, you're likely to notice:
Station B is setting off a nostalgic craze for 4399 mini games, which has been going on for a long time. Many videos can gain tens of millions of views and reach the top ten of the site's leaderboard. Some archaeologists launched the "Wulin Waichuan" fan game "Wulin Waichuan Tongfu Inn" in 2009, using unpacking codes to uncover the hidden ending buried for 14 years - a New Year blessing from all the characters in the play.
UP Main: May Fourth IAM
Some people revisited the simulation business game "Daddy's Burger Shop", and after exploring the ending, they thought of going to the official website to download the original game, and used the archive coverage to unlock the hidden ending that can be called an urban legend.
UP Main: Hydaline Source
There are also people studying "NS-Shaft", commonly known as "is a man on the next hundred layers" of the game hidden plot, after attracting the attention of a large number of players and even Baidu officials, known as the reality version of the "number one player", but also because of the issue of washing the manuscript has been controversial, causing many video producers to denounce.
Regardless of the outcome, these 4399 old games are like wormholes in the universe, connecting the common time of generations after the 80s and 00s, and after many years, they can also attract the curiosity and desire of countless people to conquer.
In this wave of 4399 game renaissance boom, UP master "Shallow Singing Jun Jacky" is a representative. Strictly speaking, he does not have the representative works that are popular throughout the entire B station, but he has been able to continuously produce video works at a speed close to Zhou Geng.
It seems to be just the right amount of traffic, but asami himself is unexpectedly low-key, with few videos outside the game and no dynamics outside the game. Near graduation from college, he almost put his energy into life and video production, and only wanted to simply share game memories with everyone.
But "simple" does not mean "easy". There is not a lot of editing and sensational soundtrack in the video of Shallow Singer Jun, and some are just simple and unpretentious clearance experiences. Behind each seemingly short 5-minute video is countless attempts to face difficulties and game trivia that I don't know how much time it took.
Through his videos, it seems to be a return to the era when Flash was just emerging, and the creators unscrupulously vented their talents. Some of the game works with simple graphics have a very creative gameplay, and even if you revisit it today, it is breathtaking.
We will also find that in fact, the ending setting of most games is not complicated, often just a screenshot and a few messages. But these interesting works can come to us in a free form, and who can deny the true feeling of condensation behind simple words?
Speaking of which, the roles played by UP lords such as Asako Jun are more like the neighbor big brothers that everyone has envisioned in childhood. He personally teaches you the rules of the game that he does not understand, and he teaches the levels he cannot beat. You look at his back, full of the look you once envisioned.
In most cases, their video content may be a bit mundane, and in the forums where old players gather, almost everyone has experienced similar content, or even more complex and interesting game works. However, it is these small games that come together to fully record the unique game ecology of an era, which makes people wear the dream-like happiness of more than a decade ago, in that era of lack of resources.
02
Continue to look deeper, you will find another batch of 4399 "old people", who are closer to the traditional cognitive "players", who have little interest in cultural evidence, but have never stopped playing games, as well as in-depth study of a certain game.
UP Lord: Dragon_Morning
Let's talk about some digressions first. In the early years, there was a cruel competition between small game platforms such as 4399 and 7K7K. Since the Internet has not yet formed an effective regulation, these platforms have begun to carry a large number of edge ball games, attracting the attention of teenagers in a more "yellow storm" way than anyone else.
It wasn't until around 2009 that 4399 found a new and more secure way to monetize traffic – operating page games. The well-known "Sail" and "Moore Manor", as well as the "Tomb of the Panlong God" that is now little known but also popular, are from that period.
In the first decade of the 21st century, page games also have a high popularity and profitability, which naturally makes 4399 earn a lot of money, and gradually opens up the gap with other small game websites.
The reason why we talk about this history is related to the game we talk about next. In 2011, 4399 tried to develop its own game, and its DreamWorks studio launched the game "Dream Journey to the West". In industry jargon, this is called 4399 first-party work.
The "Journey to the West" series was a great success, and 4399 also launched a number of sequels while it was hot, and later integrated them into "Dream Journey Online", and gradually shifted its focus to the mobile game version.
But what I didn't expect was that even after more than a decade, the original web version of "Journey to the West" still had a large number of veteran players, and the relevant videos could even get nearly 5 million plays on station B, rushing to the 4th place in the ranking of the whole site.
UP Lord: Uncle Yi Ling
It is also because of the popularity of this video that I contacted the UP master "Uncle Yi Ling". He first launched the challenge of "Journey to the West" and added more than 100,000 fans in the past two months, which shows the enthusiasm of the players.
As a relatively young post-00, Yi Lingshu's game enlightenment actually comes from the small games on 4399. Growing up playing Adventure King, Q Bubble Hall, and Locke Kingdom with friends. When he grew up and bought computers at home, he gradually fell into the pit of "Dream Journey to the West 3", and the most impressive thing was to secretly charge the game with 10 yuan.
Prior to this, Yi Ling's memories of "Journey to the West" were more related to "rubbing rice", most of the cases were sneaking to a friend's or relative's house to play, fortunately, there was no incident of being angrily reprimanded by his parents.
Uncle Yi Ling recalled that the main attraction of "Journey to the West" at that time was the game background and art, obviously every level existed in the Journey to the West, and the combination completely subverted the original plot direction, hiding a huge conspiracy. During the game, he felt "an atmosphere that is difficult to experience in other mini-games", which impressed him deeply.
This game was still a bit scary as a child
Nowadays, the popularity of web games is not as good as before, and Yi Lingshu's feelings about it are a kind of dazed: "At present, the basic people who support this game are college students, and may be able to catch fire for a while." But when all these people worked, the game was estimated to really decline. ”
But when I asked him how he would pass this difficult series of games with his life, he immediately became interested, and the conversation box was opened and gushed:
"Now the web version has been mined out of various bugs, resulting in a change in gameplay. But in fact, there are many tricks to play without using bugs, such as the character of the sand monk who does not have a recovery skill, but cleverly uses several skills of voodoo doll + fierce toxin + paralysis potion to make the boss move and cannot be killed indefinitely. Both Goku and Tang Monk are relatively simple to bring back blood, and the Eight Precepts are also very difficult characters, because the damage in the later stage is very gua sha..."
"Okok", I interrupted Uncle Yi Ling's strategy experience and continued to ask: "If you can pass the level of one life, what level do you think your game talent is?" ”
"In fact, my game talent is very pulled, dream 3 of a life to pass I played for more than a month, dream 4 is estimated to be longer, is to rely on the liver and time." Once can not be twice, as long as it is not necessary to fail, there will always be a success. ”
Probably the boy's characteristic competitiveness, I summed it up for him.
Of course, Uncle Yi Ling did not expect his video to get so much attention, it turns out that there are so many people on the Internet who resonate with him, and he also has more motivation for liver challenges, and such videos and games may not be available in the future.
Finally, I asked him why he had paid attention to old games for many years, and Uncle Yi Ling's answer to me was only 4 words: it was really fun.
Later, he added, it is difficult to immerse people in today's games, but in the past, these games could be played for a long time. Although the design is not complicated, some games are not easy to understand after stuffing too many things.
03
"It's really fun" is the most satisfying answer I've gotten from these 4399 veteran players. Even if you open the good memories filter and see the "dirty" side of 4399's handling pirated copies and operating page games, the happiness it provides to small players is true, and it is still heart-warming after many years.
I remember that two years ago, a screenshot of the 4399 mini game comment area on Weibo was reprinted by netizens in large quantities. The latest comment was in 2012, when two players were arguing about who was the first, full of cute stubbornness of small children.
According to the logic of adults, under the reply of "so slow", either follow the scolding manufacturer, or teach you to increase the speed of the Network, how can not jump out of the "I love you ha" such a reply.
This is the child's thinking, the mood of mankind when it first discovered the New World, and it is a picture that is difficult to see on the Internet now.
Interestingly, when I went to the comment area of the 4399 mini-game in order to collect information, I found that the style of the comment area was still very cute. Even if you are a freshman in high school or freshman year, your favorite game will not change.
"Men to the death are teenagers" typo
Equally interesting are the people in Baidu's "4399 Bar". It's still quite lively, with posts updated every day. Some people are looking for games that have been played but have forgotten their names; some people find that their browsers can't run flash, and they are anxious like schoolchildren; and others are looking for friends who play games together, just to relive the familiar happiness.
There is also a "tall building in search of old memories", which has been built to 4218 floors today. Some people succeed in finding answers, while others look for fruitless results. The bad at words will even try to piece together the full picture of the game by drawing by hand, trying to awaken the memory fragments of other people.
There are always people who are young, and there are people who are always young. I think each of these 4218 floors has a fond memory. You sometimes think of that hot and dry afternoon, when your parents are not secretly turning on the computer, pressing the switch is the buzzing computer host fan, until the display screen lights up, you pick up the mouse and keyboard, and countless unknown new continents unfold in front of your eyes.
And behind that number are the childhoods that wait to get out of class, wait for school to end, wait for games.
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