Jay Tholen turned a childhood game-engine bug into Mr. Grinman's ceiling-grip power

Mr. Grinman could burp fire and stick to ceilings. One ability was a character choice. The other came with the engine, whether its teenage designer wanted it or not.

Jay Tholen (@jaytholen) describes the June 2002 beta in his illustrated account of making games as a kid. The future Hypnospace Outlaw, Dropsy and Slayers X developer wanted a treasure thief who eventually became a reluctant hero. Ceiling the deal required a power the default platform movement already supplied through one of its notorious bugs.

Tholen lacked the math, loops and engine knowledge to replace that movement system. He had tried. Building the odd behavior into the character let him keep making his strange little world while a problem beyond his abilities remained underneath it. Readers can follow his account into the archived release, where that inability to repair the movement had become something the character could do.

“My first game with personality,” he calls Mr. Grinman. That personality included influences from Wario, Boogerman and Novabrain’s Grand Adventure. The initial review stung: Podunkian, a co-creator of that last inspiration, gave it 3/10. Meeting your heroes occasionally includes a score out of ten (ouch, extra credit).

The default movement had already drawn criticism when Tholen released his first game, GAGE. He says the Klik community disliked its glitches and expected custom movement. He deleted that upload a few weeks after posting. Today’s retrospective lets the adult explain what the young developer was attempting, with awkward edges still attached.

The Games Factory gave him an accessible way to make those attempts. Its animation editor helped him learn frame-by-frame animation; Microsoft Paint helped him work out pixel art. His notebooks filled with level designs and creatures. He liked filling worlds with details, even when challenge and scoring systems interested him less. He describes wanting to fill those places with things to explore, even before he could put a reliable game system beneath them.

That freedom also produced ambitious projects he couldn’t finish. Hover Wars slowed under particles spawning more particles. In Hover Wars II, he couldn’t reliably count the remaining enemies, so surviving for three minutes advanced the player. His exact simplifications are available for readers learning a tool today to compare with the mechanics in the archived work.

The Mr. Grinman download linked by Tholen gives the story something more substantial than a wistful screenshot. The old work is available for readers to investigate. His retrospective also includes clips, archived exchanges and abandoned plans, with the adult author correcting some of his younger self’s optimism.

One Army Man Bob help file promised three episodes. Tholen’s present-day annotation says there were no later levels. Even the title disagreed with itself: the in-game graphic said Army Dude Bob. Shipping a character apparently left insufficient time to settle the man’s employment status.

Beginner-friendly tools can leave behind more than beginner-friendly games. When makers document the workarounds as precisely as Tholen does, later readers can follow how an ability, a level rule or an abandoned ambition took shape. The record gets thinner whenever a creator deletes a version that has begun to look embarrassing.

Tholen still reports missing work, including an updated Uninhabitable Colony X build. An archive can restore what someone saved; it cannot reconstruct every file a teenager replaced. Mr. Grinman’s ceiling grip, at least, has made it into the account under its own name.

Gravity filed a bug report.