What is your fondest memory of jank? 14 game devs tell us

Jank, the website, is one month old. That's old enough to cry for attention. Which is what we've done. We gave this PC games blog its name out of fondness for broken but ambitious games. Jank is often the byproduct of game designers trying to bulldoze their way through realistic expectations. There are borked games and then there are borked games that exude raw zeal through ragdolling corpses or flying animals. When a game reaches for the sky, it sometimes turns the skybox inside out. 

We aren't the only ones with fond memories of jank in videogames. To celebrate our scrappy website's continued existence, we emailed a bunch of game developers and asked them a simple question: "What is your favourite memory of jank in a game?" Here's what they said.

Brendon Chung, Blendo Games

(Lead designer of Skin Deep, Quadrilateral Cowboy)

"During my playthrough of Fallout 4, the fast travel system stopped working. This meant my only mode of traversal was: walking. To get anywhere, I had to hoof it. And it was great? 

"I became crazy stingy about how much stuff I was lugging around. Embarking on a long journey became a supply logistics puzzle; finding a settlement was like finding an oasis. Instead of rabidly accepting every quest, I had to first do a cost-benefit analysis of where the hell it wanted me to go. I love poring over inventory and poring over routes on a map, so having the game suddenly transform into a survival logistics simulator was a welcome surprise."

Martin Halldin, Wrong Organ

(Audio designer on Mouthwashing)

"I think my favorite instances of jank in games are where they inspire players and fans to create things beyond the game itself, not to make fun of the game but to highlight a very particular unintentionality people cherish fondly, or just find amusing. 

"Take Half Life for example. Even to this day you will see people making memes or edits using the voice clips of the scientists talking over animal videos, or sound effects of boxes hitting things rapidly from Half Life 2. I love that people can band together over something ultimately very silly but in a way that pays homage to said games because of their jank."

Cole Jeffries, ColePowered Games

(Lead designer of Shadows Of Doubt)

"I can’t think why you would be asking the developer of Shadow of Doubt about jank [nervous laugh]. Jank to me is magical as it often appears alongside big ambitions, even if the ideas within are often held together with hopes and dreams. My answer to your question is the infamous game Boiling Point from 2005. It’s an ambitious first-person open world game with pretty much the exact plot of the film Taken. The player is some middle-aged badass looking for his kidnapped daughter in a fictional south American country. It’s genuinely a good game, but absolutely riddled with bugs.

'Dogs don’t have shadows for some reason.'

"People fly around, grenades are lethal but only if NPCs physically get hit with the actual grenade. Drivers occasionally go insane and run over everyone. Jaguars float across the jungle at treetop level. Dogs don’t have shadows for some reason. You can blow up the police station with a single crossbow bolt. This one is anecdotal but I swear once I drove my car through a road block manned by gang members with assault rifles, only to find that my car left the scene with more health than it started with- presumably because of the added metal from the bullets?

"The damage system separates out your different limbs (like the original Deus Ex). When you apply medical items you can choose which limb to treat, which is fine and makes sense for stuff like bandages. Turns out though, food is also classed as a healing medical item. I just love the idea of rubbing an orange into my broken leg to make it feel better. But to say what’s good about it also; it's a massive open world in 2005. It takes ages to travel across the map, and it’s quite dangerous which gives it a unique feel of peril."

Robert Yang, Radiator Yang

(Designer of Tryhard, many new game ideas)

"My favorite jank is the original Oblivion NPCs struggling with the confines of their simulation: snapping awkwardly into place for animations, living deranged daily schedules, crash-zooming the conversational camera into their tortured faces. Yeah, Skyrim NPCs have their own charm too - I like how guards go to bed in armour - but they fixed too many bugs and improved the FaceGen too much. Oblivion NPCs had so much more comedic talent and power.

'Jank is the signature aesthetic of the videogame medium'

"Generally I believe the best jank emerges from these cracks between complex game systems, the gaps that emerge from design risks, foolish ambition, and magnificent failure. Those cracks are how the light floods in. Here I often think of that famous Brian Eno quote: 'Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature.' Jank is the signature aesthetic of the videogame medium."

Tanya X Short, Kitfox Games

(Publisher of Caves Of Qud, Dwarf Fortress)

"Nothing could compare to the beautiful, nigh-infinite jank of A Tale In the Desert, which I played more than 20 years ago but is still live today in its eleventh season. In A Tale in the Desert, structures are player-made, and this causes predictable noise and chaos, but one of my favorite design decisions was to try to empower 'art' in the game. 

"This was the first game to my knowledge to allow players to creatively combine any asset in the game in a 3D space ('a sculpture') and name it. Then the way to progress as an artist was to receive up-votes or down-votes from passersby. So people would build absolutely hideous, hilarious, or downright bizarre things, and they would be incentivized to build them along the common routes people would use running between destinations. Certain artists stuck in your mind for their style or inspiration or prolific output, because what else was there to look at and think about while running to fetch more flax seeds?"

James Wragg, Lovely Hellplace

(Lead designer of Dread Delusion)

"The concept of 'videogame jank' is pretty close to my heart. You could even say it's the foundation of my entire career... I would use the example of Morrowind as a systems-driven world in which overbearing simulational complexity leads to a sort of high-functioning jank to attain a near godlike status (enchant a ring to make you better at enchanting rings, for example). If your Morrowind playthrough doesn't end with you hurtling through the sky and vapourising enemies with merely a wink and a grin, are you even playing Morrowind?

"But my absolute fondest experience of jank is the videogame Crypt Worlds, released in 2013 by creator Lilith Zone. It's like a detonation of jank straight into your cerebral cortex. It was released on a basic HTML website as a .zip download, bundled with a game manual written in biro. It's a game where your only verbs are talking and pissing. There's an alien in your back yard, a bunch of archeologists in your basement, and a cluster of anthropologist-druids in the archaeologists' tent in your basement. Venture into town and you'll find a marketplace of puritans selling nihilistic televisions which, if spoken to, lament being televisions. In a field nearby you can conduct a piss-ritual to summon a demon and end the world (and your playthrough). 

'Why do we even bother with interactive art if we're not willing to encounter the unexpected?'

"Crypt Worlds was my main inspiration to become a developer. I'd become pretty disillusioned with the industry around that time; fatigued with open world fetch-quests and insufferable hand-holding. But here was a game that felt like a messy punk record blasting from dingy club speakers - a pure expression from a singular voice, unconstrained by industry expectations and brimming with genuine soul and wit. Honestly, to this day I still struggle to find anything as inspiring as Crypt Worlds; a game that turns jank into an art form. 

"It has felt like for much of videogaming history, developers have always tried to reign in the jankiness of player agency with cutscenes and tightly scripted sequences... But I think games fundamentally can never have the jank filed off. It's just an innate quality of letting a player run riot in a small, simulated world - and far from this being a problem, I think jank is something to be celebrated. Because jank is when unexpected things happen, and why do we even bother with interactive art if we're not willing to encounter the unexpected?" 

Aron Koning, Sokpop

"Hello Brendan! Sorry we don't know enough about jank to say anything interesting about it, but the website looks very sick!! Best, Sokpop."

[Editor's note: Sokpop have made roughly nine billion videogames.]

Matt Dabrowski

(Lead designer of Streets Of Rogue 2)

"My favorite examples of jank tend to result from overambitious developers punching above their weight... When I think of supreme jank, the first game that comes to mind would be William Shatner's Tekwar, a 1995 attempt at an FPS/im-sim using an early version of the Build engine from an era where its only contemporary in that space may have been System Shock. While System Shock works despite its own high levels of mid-90s jank, the same can't really be said for Tekwar.  Everything in this game feels ugly, broken and generally just 'wrong'. But a real effort was clearly made! They shot for the moon and didn't get anywhere close to it, but I'm glad this exists.

'I am suddenly face to face with a bear that has spawned behind me.'

"While playing The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, I entered a house and accepted a quest from the homeowner. Apparently, a large bear had found its way into the Ambrose residence, and the owner was willing to pay a small sum for its removal. I close the quest interface and check my map for the Ambrose residence... I am currently standing in the Ambrose residence. Upon turning around, I am suddenly face to face with a bear that has spawned behind me and is succeeding in clawing me to death. And of course, the questgiver doesn't acknowledge this or care, because NPCs in buildings are essentially just immovable signposts. 

"Daggerfall uses a procedural quest system, and my assumption is that the game either isn't checking to ensure that the quest giver location is assigned differently from the quest target location... I've gone to great lengths to avoid this sort of thing happening in Streets of Rogue 2, though part of me suspects it would make the game much more amusing if I let the occasional bit of 'fun jank' slip in. Though I'm sure that's more an inevitability than something I can reasonably avoid."

Holly Jencka, Dark Machine Games

(Lead designer of White Knuckle)

"This is kind of a common form of jank throughout a lot of games, but I always love abusing NPC pathfinding peculiarities. Like, the kind of jank that allows you to juke an enemy NPC by running back and forth over a small obstruction, forcing their AI to navigate around some longer stretch of terrain, or picking an enemy off from just outside of its reach while it can't do anything to stop you. It's certainly not fair to the intentions of the designer, but it is engaging to me in a very primal way, like I've discovered some secret technique that lets me bypass the regular ebb and flow of an encounter or section.

"It's the kind of thing that I enjoy to such a degree that it makes me wonder if there is some kind of potential gameplay experience built entirely around that abuse of procedure. I bet someone has already made that game, actually."

Stephen Gillmurphy, aka thecatamites

(Maker of Anthology of the Killer, Space Funeral)

"For me jank is about substitution - the feeling that the specifics of a videogame don't matter as much as a general feeling of 'videogameyness', and that anything can be repurposed into anything else as long as it holds together just barely long enough. Golf game engines turned into dungeon crawlers, wrestling games converted to workplace simulators, religious parables built in the Wolfenstein engine, RPG towns that are just repurposed inventory systems...

"For this reason my favourite jank in games is probably the work of prolific DOS-era shareware developer Gary Acord, who makes the most extraordinarily permeable games I've ever played, games that feel like they were made wholly from that destructible mulch substance in the one level of Earthworm Jim. 

'Jank is about substitution - the feeling that anything can be repurposed into anything else as long as it holds together just barely long enough'

"My favourite might be CAPN ZAPN, which answers questions like 'what is the gameplay' and 'what perspective does this use' and 'is it sidescrolling or top down' with: 'Yes'. Gravity sluggishly applies but can be negated by walking straight up, as you wander a vast maze combining sideways, top-down and isometric perspective assets, presumably repurposed from many different games... You have two different weapon buttons, three different jump buttons (two of which just push you in a halfhearted diagonal), an inventory screen, a BOMB key that also propels you gently into the air. Demonic floating heads move around and make your guy emit a distressing beep when touched, and the soundtrack is a looping midi of In The Still Of The Night by the Five Satins. 

"It all feels so easily breakable that it produces a strange feeling of tenderness, as if you were cradling an egg. Future generations will think this is what videogames were, and they will be right."

Cosmo D

(Maker of Tales From Off-Peak City Vol 1, The Norwood Suite)

"Everything by Piranha Bytes had jank in its DNA. The Gothics, the Risens, the Elexes. From the first game to the last, they tried to revise their combat system with each game and the 'jank' would somehow catch up with them every time. 

'One time I loaded in and an entire town was missing'

"It wasn't just the controls, though. Their proprietary engine was sluggish, inconsistent and you could tell they were creatively pushing against it in the end. There was one time I loaded in a level and an entire town was missing. That sort of thing. Still, the creativity was undeniable. Here's hoping they come back in some new form with new varieties of jank!"

Xalavier Nelson Jr, Strange Scaffold

(Publisher of I Am Your Beast, Clickolding)

"Jank is the purest reminder that video games are artificial worlds, built with intentional rules. When you interact with jank, you are having a conversation with a game developer about the rules of that world, and the experience they intend to create.

"My favorite expression of that is walking, jumping, and mantling up steep slopes in RPGs. When I'm running sideways up a mountain in Oblivion, or hopping on any available edge in The Witcher 3, I'm figuring out the exact line between what I'm allowed to do, where the game actually has somewhere meaningful for me to go--and what new way I'm going to get my dumb ass killed. It's one of the best feelings in video games."

Tom Francis, Suspicious Developments

(Lead designer of Tactical Breach Wizards, Heat Signature)

"Playing an early version of Supreme Commander 2 in the PC Gamer office with Rich McCormick - we had a fun, challenging match, but I eventually stomped him. Ever gracious, I reassured him that he had given me a run for my money. But it also sounded a lot like he was reassuring me that I'd given him a run for his money.

'I mean yeah, I did win.'

'Er, I won.'

"Turns out we'd actually become disconnected halfway through the match, and the game had silently replaced each of us with a bot in the other's game. Each of us had defeated our robot opponent at around the same time, and came away victorious. It was honestly quite a nice way for PvP to work."

[Disclosure: Graham works for Suspicious Developments but I asked Tom about this behind his back so I think we're okay.]

Mike Bithell, Bithell Games

(Lead designer of Tron Identity, Thomas Was Alone)

"I gotta go for an obvious and nostalgic one, the Halo bug that makes your third-person model bob his gun and head up and down in a jittery manner in multiplayer. A bit of animation blend jank that spawned Red vs Blue, and arguably as a result influenced a whole lot of the nerd culture I consumed as a teenager. You know jank is good when it becomes an expected feature of all future releases in a franchise."

These answers have been edited for clarity and also to make the article not be ten million words long. Turns out game devs love talking about game development, all you have to do is ask them. Incredible. You all doubtless have your own favourite memories of jank. Don't be selfish, share them with us. Let us all feast on stories of games being comically stupid and lovable.