Slope

Since time immemorial, man and nature have had an uneasy relationship. An early humanity, born of wilderness, with great spirit and great zeal, secured its existence in spite of the weight of predation and starvation on its shoulders. She harnessed the mystical power of fire, she developed the tools, and soon, she became not only a user, but a producer, as the great life-giving force of agriculture led her to found societies around various rivers. But even there, the fear of beast and storm never dissipated—the shadow of Enkidu was ever in the mind of the Sumerians.

Centuries and millenia passed as the backs of our ancestors were broken to conquer the great abundance of natural wealth we were given. We built cities, crossed oceans, razed cities, built great machines, and put our minds and hearts to create great works which are still admired today, some of which foreshadowed the development of the seminal Flash game Slope. Humanity entered the tumultuous era of industrialization, covering the skies with baleful black smoke as a harbinger of the eternal blackness toward which we are rolling with locomotive speed. Yet the blackness of the epoch also brought with it hope of a greater humanity.

A winter-kissed, northerly child born of the late twentieth century to the early twenty-first century may have once, inbetween joyous sessions of Flash gaming on the great childhood amphitheaters of Y8, spela.se, or hamsterpaj, looked up at the bright stars which sprinkle the dark sky with eyes wide of admiration. And in that moment, that child may have had a fleeting thought that it too should slowly but surely traverse the perfect upward slope toward cosmic infinity and opportunity. And, still, how do those with the purest of hearts and minds still see, with a seventh sense approaching that of a feinter yet far deeper touch, still see the shining slope toward the skies, ripe like a plum for our taking?

Or, as it seems today, behind the executives of oil and war which make up the brain pulling our collective gestalt’s every muscle and crackling tendon, will our eight million-celled monstrous Ahab will instead be pulled into the Ocean’s depths by the temporarily angered jaws of the cold and unforgiving universe?

As humanity, and with it, all fruits of Mother Nature, shall surely tumble into the oblivion which shall swallow Earth with an inanimate, and therefore all the more vivid, vengeance, so too shall you enjoy the eerie tumbling of the bright green mesh sphere below, reaching greater velocities and dodging an infinite barrage of sanguine obstacles and bottomless pitfalls, down the slope toward its inevitable doom.

Lament, ye red jester, at the defiance with which our reader plays the classic Y8 Flash game of Slope!