Have You Played… Madness Interactive?
It's a maaaad house
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
Deep in the grey quagmire of my memory, there exists an immovable oval pebble, with a strange cross-like marking on it. I bend down to lift the pebble. It is a face. The face of a man, or perhaps a creature, who has never known an emotion other than bloodlust. What hellish land spawned this otherworldly avatar of destruction?
Ah yes, Newgrounds.
Madness Interactive is probably one of those “you had to be there” games. You played as a grey, simple-faced figure who could pick up all sorts of weapons and tools, for the purposes of murdering wave after wave of grey enemies that looked, more or less, just like you. Accompanied by its flash animations, it exists in my mind as a kind of janky, playable Matrix. There were guns, swords, lasers, zombies, eye patches, weird physics, god mode. You could throw things at people’s faces, that was fun. Now that I think of it, it was sort of a proto-Superhot.
But it’s also a reminder that flash games are a big part of gaming history. In the month that I discovered Madness, I honestly played more of it than anything on my PlayStation. Now that Flash is marching grimly towards its death in 2020 we should raise a glass to these games. Thanks for the bloodthirsty memories.