ROSS'S GAME DUNGEON: BOPPIN'

[giwake]

On the website for Boppin' the following quote is given:

 

Quote

If you run out of spare lives in the game, and you lose your last life, then, you die. You can die as Yeet, or you can die as Boik.

 

The cool thing is that Yeet and Boik, being digital samurai heroes of the people, do not wait for some errant scrap of code to kill them, they commit seppuku. Boik goes for the traditional stuff, and uses a classy Japanese sword, but Yeet is more...modern... about such things. Try to see both.

Yes, this is a puzzle game with ritual suicide in it.

 

We think that is something special.

 

I've seen other people talk about the suicide animations too, but I haven't been able to find any footage of it and I'm not sure which version of the game contains them. I recall someone mentioning that Yeet being "more modern" about seppuku means he just shoots himself in the face.

[Tom]

Revisiting this video years, later, I was suddenly struck by a thought: do you suppose the block-throwing character Yeet in this 1994 game could be the origin of the now-common term "yeet," (verb), "to throw something with a lot of force," popularised in 2014 but known to be in circulation since the early 2000s?

[Deep Dive Devin]

I think it's probably a coincidence. This page seems to connect the phrase with dance moves before naturally expanding out into various physical actions. The girl throwing that can is the one I always knew about and assumed was the origin.

[Snave]

Quote

I've seen other people talk about the suicide animations too, but I haven't been able to find any footage of it and I'm not sure which version of the game contains them. I recall someone mentioning that Yeet being "more modern" about seppuku means he just shoots himself in the face.

From recollection (and I'm reaching back deep here), it's all versions. An early version apparently had them by default, but the later ones including the Apogee shareware version included a command line argument on the executable to re-instate them. The pre-title developer splash screen changes too.

 

How do I know this? Well, it was before I had internet, so all information about it *had* to be on the disk somewhere. First port of call would be to check the install for any readme.txt files, second would be to try stuff like -h or -help arguments on the command line. One of them should yield an answer. And yeah, "modern" is gun in mouth.

Edited November 18 by Snave (see edit history)