Format: PC
Developer: ?

"The strangest part about this game is that no-one is really sure where it came from," says Jaybird, on his Crazygame.exe fan-page. "It just seems to circle through people by word of mouth and sending it from friend to friends via AIM." 

I first encountered Crazygame.exe several years ago in the pages of EDGE. Hunting around for it again today, I was surprised to find that not only has the tiny programme survived the last half-decade, it has quietly thrived, gathering an odd kind of following, and pulling together something of an underground reputation. Google it to see for yourself, just don’t try and grab the file from Jaybird’s site - that landed me with a Trojan downloader virus. Thanks, Jaybird.

It doesn't really matter though. Happily, I was using my girlfriend's computer at the time, and when she returned home after a hard day's work, I was able to suggest that any subsequent malfunctioning was probably down to something she’d done on Facebook. Besides, if I’m being perfectly honest, the virus only added to Crazygame.exe's peculiar mythos a little: it’s not only hard to find, it’s actually dangerous.

Crazygame.exe is a kind of restless traveller of the internet, a bewildering castaway known for washing up on the least likely of beaches. It’s rarely found in the same place twice, and nobody has claimed ownership of it. Reputation aside, I don't really believe there's anything particularly mysterious about all this: although I'd like to think the whole thing's the product of some kind of Crying Of Lot 49-styled underground counterculture, or that it’s the videogame equivalent of 2001’s Monolith, turning up inscrutably at the hinges of human history, I suspect that the pocket-sized shooter (with or without a virus in tow, it weighs in at around 28k) wasn't actually designed by the Anasazi, based on etchings left by Venusians, and I doubt that the secrets of the Medici lie buried somewhere in the folds of its hi-score table.

I think it's much more likely that whoever coded it just forgot about it: Crazygame.exe is slight and rather one-note, after all, and for a game with "crazy" in the title, it's actually rather tame, too. It’s basically a one-way trip to Bullet Hell: you pilot a tiny ship through waves of deadly asteroids that converge from all sides, trying to survive as long as you can without being hit. There are no enemies to shoot, no passing planets or nebulae to spice up the star field unfolding behind you, and your only reward when you finally expire - probably, at first, somewhere around the twenty second mark - is a muddled score breakdown in Japanese text.

What makes the whole thing so special, then? I put that down to the fact that Crazygame.exe is hard: viciously, unusually, memorably hard. Eugene Jarvis, father of Robotron and Defender, recipient of The Friday Game’s first Living Legend award (okay, this award has not actually been issued yet, but in my dreams it’s chrome-plated and resembles a Dan Dare rocket ship trailing a cloudy pillar of exhaust fumes made from assorted coinage) and a man who knew a thing or two about crafting games of brilliant shining difficulty, used to grade the success of his products on how much abuse they took, how many people had punched the screen or ripped off the joysticks, because only then could he be sure his work was really getting a reaction from his audience. It's easy to imagine Crazygame.exe fitting into that kind of world, easy to imagine the shiny black expanse of its cabinet showered with glass grit thrown out by the size-nine Converse that’s just been put through its monitor.

Games aren't as hard as that anymore, and most of the time they aren't as self-effacing, either. That's why Crazygame.exe continues to hold such an appeal, for me at least: it’s needlessly brutal where other titles have become gratuitously friendly; it’s faceless where others have resorted to a mocking pantomime of winks and smirks.