The Arfenhouse Series and its Impact on the Internet
CW: Spoilers for the Arfenhouse Series
Sometimes you watch stuff when you’re a lot younger and you
enjoy it for being irreverent and random and so forth, that it feels like a
mystery when you get older and wonder how you’d react to it now? Does it wind
up losing its impact or does it still somehow managed to hold up? What kind of
surprised me in particular about the Arfenhouse series was that it still felt
really fresh and funny in a way that I really didn’t expect it to, having a
strangely incisive edge to it that felt like it was digging at a lot of
insanely online stuff.
Arfenhouse, for people who aren’t aware, was a series
consisting of three RPG games released from 1999 to 2000, then followed by a
flash animated series from 2002 onto 2006 – both of which were stylised in a
way that involved intentionally crude graphics and characters who talked in
some sort of bizarre amalgamation of leet speak. I remember this series being
really random and having a sense of humour where it felt all over the place,
and I think this series was kind of a proto version of the sort of “random”
humour that would take off in stuff like asdfmovie and so forth – although this
was a bit different in terms of its garish art style and its explicitly mature
content, and was often way more scathing in tone.
The first two RPG games were kind of just crude throwaway
games. The first game has a string of random encounters with a single type of
enemy (frogs), a single boss battle with an “evil kitty” and that’s basically
about it. There’s no ending, and frankly it’s very grinding and repetitive. The
second game is a bit more elaborate but with a really simple storyline where
you essentially enter a house and battle a dog, an old man and a cat, as well
as introducing a bratty young boy named Billy and the seemingly only sane
character in the series Joseph. It’s also not really anything special, often
feeling like something a child would produce – there’s a sort of laziness with
the crude graphics and boss battles that are essentially just jpegs of animals
and people.
Then you get to the third game which is so elaborate and
intricate, turning itself into a full-fledged game that would probably take
around 2 hours to complete, multiple levels and zones, multiple endings,
elaborate and intricate backstories to characters, tonnes of NPC conversations, as well as introducing way more
innovative game mechanics. It’s probably the most playable of the series, and
when you play it – it has this effect like you’re being suckered into this
insane world, and there’s something about this game that’s genuinely charming,
even when it’s essentially an expansion on the previous two games. It has a
feeling like a lot of effort was put into it, which kind of undercuts the fact
that it’s still so fundamentally crude – with stolen assets, music and playing
fast and loose with copyright – and having this general feeling where it has a lot of fun just by desecrating all the things you'd otherwise expect out of an RPG game.
It’s also strange how there’s not really much info on these games, despite the subsequent very popular flash animated series – and it was rated as the best OHRRPGCE (Official Hamster Republic Role Playing Game Construction Engine) game during Spring 2001. There’s a sparse TV tropes page on the games, not really that any gameplay videos or walkthroughs on Youtube or really that much written about the games that I could find. For the record, the third one is definitely well-worth playing through, even if the first two don’t really have much to show for themselves. These games can be easily accessed by downloading it along with the OHRRPGCE game player which I’ve linked at the end of this article.
Playing through the third game adds a strange clarity to the
flash animated series, and it kind of made the RPG combat parody bits in
Arfenhouse: The Movie make a lot more sense – because it makes it obvious that
the series was an adaptation of a string of RPG games. You also start to notice
way more side-characters and background details, like enemies you’d fight in
that game would appear in the grocery store in Arfenhouse 2 and so forth – and
also all the digs at Pokemon, Starcraft, Final Fantasy and so forth. Eventually
it seemed to jettison most of the RPG elements and became more like its own
thing and seemed to focus way more on Joseph’s confusion around the gang – as
well as the increasingly escalating conflict between Housemaster and Billy.
“HAUSMAASTR DDI U 33T UR CUHNKEE n00d13 $0uP?!?!?!?”
“NOO!!!!1 BIBIBIBIBIBIIBYBYEYYBYEBE”
“IDIOT!! That’s OUR base!!!”
But part of what made this series so great was that it was
something that basically involved you in this insane, alien world – where the
dated pop culture references actually kind of help with this regard. An obvious
influence on the series would be the cartoons Terry Gilliam produced for Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which as Trey Parker put it “what’s so funny
about the animation was that it was such crap.”. To be honest, I think a lot of
flash animations were animated in that way, with lots of stolen assets and some
utilisation of vector graphics for crude mouth syncing and so forth. Stuff like
the Wassup parody animations definitely fit this bill, and it was a style that
was extensively used with animuations like Hyakugojyuuichi – and it’s used quite
frequently here with stolen sprites, as well as characters like the “Buhhs”
that were depicted as Pringle cans.
Although, the series itself also had a lot of fourth wall
breaks with the characters Joseph and the animators who would often frequently interrupt
itself – often contemplating the insanity of the stuff they’re producing, which
provides some amount of grounding to it. It’s self-aware in a way where it
feels like it definitely has something to say about itself, and there’s
definitely a lot of character added to it with the creators framing themselves
like they’re knowingly making an abomination. The creators of the series would often put themselves front and centre in the animations, and there’s
a lot of mileage it gets from just probing the level of insanity involved.
Misteroo also made a few other flash animations, notably Hero Coryal Returns Christmas, Hero Coryal Halloween ’05 and 8-Bitch5: EvilOnTheAttack, all of which feature some overlap with the Arfenhouse series. Both the Hero Coryal cartoons are drawn with squiggly lines where most of the animation is just alternating between two frames, and centre around two boys who basically ramble and shout their entire way through the cartoons – recorded with audio that always either clips or redlines. It’s joyful in a way, but it also shows the boys as being antisocial, impulsive, overly fixated on stuff, and with a father who is very casually emotionally abusive. The animation style would also feature somewhat in Arfenhouse 6 – as a whole these two cartoons share the same sort of trademarks as Arfenhouse.
8-Bitch5: EvilOnTheAttack was a parody of the 8-Bit Theater
sprite comic, seemingly made because the creators of this show absolutely hated
media that extensively used sprites from other properties and nothing else –
and has a feeling to it like you’re stuck in a mic-spam RP server where all the
noise winds up quickly driving everyone insane. Really, if you know what that
experience is like – you’d probably find this cartoon to be hilarious and
relatable, especially the digs at the contrast between the player characters
and the nerdy, awkward people playing them. Arfenhouse 2 also opened with a scathing
parody of sprite animations, where it just shows the utter contempt the
creators had to them.
They also knowingly messed with their fans, like with
Arfenhouse 3 which was teased at with a Kill Bill montage, which is less
interesting as a cartoon, and way more interesting as an elaborate joke at the
expense of people who were invested in the series. Arfenhouse 4 further
cemented this by just having a cartoon featuring a fake trailer of Hero Coryal
characters playing Pac-Man followed by a Beavis and Butthead parody that
“They’ll never score.”, just straight up suggesting that they’d never make
another actual Arfenhouse movie. They did wind up making another Arfenhouse,
Arfenhouse 6 (the one that skipped 5) – which also messed with fans with its
ending, and the fact that they never made another one after this.
Misteroo himself seemed to have just disappeared off of the
face of the Internet around 2009, which wound up inspiring rumours that maybe
he died or something – but I think he probably wound up just logging off and
seeking out a professional life and just not looking back on it. I think it
seems strange when artists on the Internet do this, especially when there are
zero subsequent updates – but I think that’s very likely the explanation in
this case, and similarly it’s also kind of hard to find any information about
the creators outside of Newgrounds, DeviantArt and their now defunct website
Disaster Labs.
I think what’s kind of noticeable about these cartoons is
that they were kind of emblematic of a type of thing that was made by a
tightly-knit group of people who were really into the Internet and made media that
had a tonne of in-jokes, which reflected heavily in the content they’d throw on
the Internet – and the creators themselves were a distinctive personality. Even
when a lot of this is clearly an artefact of a very specific online culture that
existed during the 2000s, there’s still something about this series that feels
fresh although it’s kind of hard to put my finger on what it does. It has a
feeling where it just kind of worms its way into your subconscious and it makes
a strange amount of sense even if you don’t really know how to fully describe
it, something that I think is the most appealing quality with a lot of videos
on the Internet.
arfenhouse teh movie too (2003)
AHTM3 Trailer: Kill Billy (2004)
Arfenhouse Teh Movie 3 (2005)
Arfenhouse Teh Movie 4!!! (2006)
Arfenhouse Teh Movie 6 (2006)
Hero Coryal Returns Christmas (2003)
Hero Coryal Halloween '05 (2005)
8-Bitch5: EvilOnTheAttack (2005)
Hyakugojyuuichi!! (2001)
asdfmovie series (2008-)
Elian - Wazzup!!! (2000)
Beavis and Butthead Do America (1996)
Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969-1974)
Comics Referenced
8-Bit Theatre (2001-2010)
Links
https://rpg.hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce/Top_30 - Ranking of Hamster Republic RPG games (including the Arfenhouse 3, Spring 2001 entry)
https://rpg.hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce/Downloads
- OHRRPGCE Game Player (install this if you want to play the RPG games, and
then just open the RPG files)
Arfenhouse RPG links
https://www.angelfire.com/scifi/jm11/games/Arfenhouse.html
- Arfenhouse 1 (RPG game)
https://www.angelfire.com/scifi/jm11/games/Arfenhouse_Two.html
- Arfenhouse 2 (RPG game)
https://www.angelfire.com/scifi/jm11/games/Arfenhouse_Three.html
- Arfenhouse 3 (RPG game)
Misteroo’s flash animations on Newgrounds
https://misteroo.newgrounds.com/
(Including all the animations I referenced here)
And DeviantArt Page
www.deviantart.com/misteroo (which includes the Arfenhouse 9 teaser that never came to fruition)
DM me on Twitter to obtain hints on how to beat the Arfenhouse RPG games @easy_andy
(Offer ends 1st February 2022.)
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