When Stick Figures Fought
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The article discusses the history of stick figure animations, particularly the popular 'Xiao Xiao' series, and how they influenced a generation of animators and developers. The discussion revolves around nostalgia and the impact of Flash animation on the community.
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Nov 3, 2025 at 7:48 PM EST
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I did think Stick Death came out before Xiao Xiao?
The group hasn’t been active for many years now it looks like, but the group page still exists.
https://www.deviantart.com/flashers
Group founded 2004.
There’s not much in the group gallery now, so probably I was looking in the individual galleries of some of the members and I think some of the time some member would make something and post it to Albino Blacksheep and sites like that and maybe post a journal entry about it to their own individual journal on their own profile.
deviantArt also had IRC-like group chats. Flashers had a chat room. There’s a link to it still in the about section of the group, but that link doesn’t work any more. Even if a group didn’t have much posted into its gallery they could have a lot of member activity in those chat rooms. And from what I remember, I think I visited the flashers chat room a few times and that it was pretty active.
I think some chat rooms were private, and some were open even to people who were not in any particular group.
Definitely remember Stick Death in highschool around '99-'01, 2+ years before this flashers group supposedly started.
You talk about stuff everyday, and stuff shows up on HN everyday, eventually they’ll coincide.
Group chats are the closest thing we have to that experience today, but they're probably more socially-oriented on average, unlike the groups I rolled with back in the aughts which were all heavily creative- and fandom-oriented.
Sometimes, they interact with real world too!
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npTC6b5-yvM
"Animation vs Physics"[1] was video which got started me with the channel. The presentation is beautiful there!
[1]: https://youtu.be/ErMSHiQRnc8
I remember towards the end of my lan party going days, these sick fights were finally outdone by the much more advanced Killer Bean.
Just a bean, trying to get some sleep.
Those were the days
I'm so happy people still remember it. We used to watch 2.1 at every LAN, too.
The videos directly there are a bunch of internet famous things, some of them in German:
Basshunter_Boten_Anna_German.avi, PatchMeUpMusicVideoByRootKit-GeekVideo.avi, trafo-entkopplung.avi, wow_forporn.avi, fainting goats.flv, gangbang.flv, Gruftis1989.flv, hape kerkeling.flv, HumanCamera.flv, Wii.vs.PS3.flv, der_stack.m4v, hacker_packen_aus.m4v, 3dshot.mov, ACUVUE_Hearts_on_Fire.mov, AtheistenOnly - JesusVideo.mov, fsm-spotting.mpg, Stroh.flv.MPG, tetris.mpg, test.swf, theresheis.swf, blowdarts.wmv, einsteinthebird.wmv, FLURL-dot-com-30292-Mafia.wmv, FLURL-dot-com-50776-korn_mosh.wmv, FLURL-dot-com-51227-pop.wmv, getalife.wmv, hamburgertrick.wmv, insane.wmv, mariopiano.wmv, nintendochoir.wmv, SOAD_gremlins.wmv, supersoakerflamethrower.wmv, theglasstrick.wmv, TRANIX.NET-11-String-Bass.wmv
"gangbang.flv" is some French movie student project "Revenge of the Gangbang Zombies", not actual porn ;)
The Fun\old folder has these:
Folders: CS ft. Southpark, Dela&Ort, HTF, Knight Rider, Lenore, XiaoXiao
Files: AYB.swf, AYS.swf, beer.swf, c_d_mmorpg.swf, cow.swf, crab.swf, cruise.swf, dengdeng.swf, fuckher.swf, hhonda-ad-300k.swf, humor_pong.swf, knowjackschitt.swf, metaluohigh.swf, optical.exe, rgb.swf, starwarz.swf, trafikskolen.swf, urbanlegends.swf, winrg.swf
I had actually built a bot named Anna to trick friends on IRC (with AIML) so when I came upon the song it felt hilarious.
This is particularly sad to me because I dabbled in Flash animation too back then, since I was in art school at the time. None of my creations survived. Some were even acceptable work.
Loved this stuff so much. I miss my summers off from school, where I would never think of a day gone as time "spent".
If memory serves, the sound effects were a fantastic touch on top of the multiplayer hilarity of that game.
Looks like there's still an active community around it today, based on a cursory YouTube search.
[1] - https://www.toribash.com/
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkqDoAYKG4A
I sometimes wonder why such concepts went away, and everything became far more complicated.
Some things are much better today, like Procreate.
It never even got some convincing demo. All those I have seen at the time were the "spend a lot more time to produce something much less impressive" kind of anti demos.
But Adobe's missed opportunity was keeping Flash alive, "just" adding a html5 / canvas / JS version instead of the browser plug-ins that were killed when smartphones/tablets refused to support them.
I even made this terrible thing as my first foray into AS2:
https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/408469
My initial career idea was to become an animator but I found forums of senior animators complaining about low wages and long hours and it made me second guess myself about all that and I slowly picked up programming instead, I did get a copy of a great book called "The Animator's Survival Kit" by Richard Williams, best known for directing "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?", the book still lives in my library and I hold it in great steem.
By the way, if anyone wants to relive some old flash games/movies, there is https://ruffle.rs/, an open source Flash implementation. It's great!
Then it all congealed into the tentacles of 4-5 corporations and now we're forever stuck in their "How do you do fellow kids" cringefest..
AI also ha[s/d] potential, but it's already getting crippled at birth by corporate idiocy and lawsuit fever.
Godot might be today's analogue for games.
For the uninitiated, behold peak animation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EI-IbwOveII
I'm not sure it was XiaoXiao, I (don't) remember some other letter combination in the names of files.
Still find it incredibly sad that Adobe and Steve Jobs were able to destroy it together.
This tool was able to draw in creative, previously non-technical people and provide a gradual ramp of complexity that we could navigate.
Nothing has come close since.
This was months before the iPhone announcement.
I can see why they killed it.
Google were ok with "works but janky af", but Apple weren't.
People here complain like they have issues with long term memory, but reality was - there was no real web video before. That apple had more issues than others was problem that should have been contained to apple walled garden alone. World was, is and will be much larger than that.
> Mitre lists more than 1,000 Adobe Flash vulnerabilities.
>Flash ranks 14th on the list of products ranked by the number of vulnerabilities – one of only two applications in the top 25 that aren’t operating systems or browsers.
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/security-and-risk-manage...
I suppose itch.io fills that niche now.
Yes the games and videos were cool, but 99% of the usage of Flash was awful ads and UI/UX elements.
That’s basically how h.264 and DRM is being done in the browser for stuff like Netflix, today, right?
Perhaps there was a memory leak in Unidentified Flying Assholes or the endless line of punch-a-celeb games or the thousands of stick fight productions and so on, but no one cared and enjoyed them immensely anyway. You could do something cool without ever learning about things like memory leaks or vulnerabilities in the underlying platform.
Some of that did, at least for how that creative work was almost exclusively delivered to the world. Those bugs were not just excessive resource usage and instability, they were incredibly often exploitable security flaws that were regularly weaponized against a huge swath of internet users. The ubiquity of the Flash browser plugin was simultaneously one of the greatest strengths of Flash as a creative platform and one of the greatest risks to the average person browsing the web in the 2000s.
The plugin needed to die. Unfortunately the Flash community was so firmly built around the web plugin as their distribution method of choice (presumably because many of us were browsing animations and playing games at work/school where we couldn't necessarily download and run arbitrary .exes) that the plugin was more or less a diseased conjoined twin, and when it died the community didn't have long left.
Compare this to Java where the death of the browser plugin caused a number of badly designed banking sites to have to be redesigned in a less stupid (but quite often still very stupid) way but the community as a whole continued on without huge disruption. The browser plugin was just one of many places Java existed, it wasn't the dominant focus of the community.
Now, the code people wrote was CPU hogs, because lots of non coders were writing code and they would do anything to make it work. The Flash runtime was not causing the Punch the Monkey and to peg your CPU, it was because the punch the monkey ad was fucking awful code.
All those Flash programmer went on to write the first wave of HTML5 stuff which, shock horror, where vastly CPU inefficient.
- Vector drawing and rendering for extremely fast performance and file size
- Visual authoring tool that invited creative, non-technical people to the party
- Deep support for managing state changes over time
- Gradual ramp of complexity that balanced ease of entry without overly constraining expertise
Were most Flash apps slow and buggy? Yes
Did Flex have tons of bloat and memory leaks? Yes
Did Flash create a cambrian explosion of creative and fun projects that inspired a generation of young people? Yes
However, Flash sucked. It ran terribly, it was insecure, and a mess to maintain. It needed to go.
It's sad what happened to Flash, sure we have plugin free interactive content using JS but I'm not sure if anything has replicated the IDE. Though I guess the decline can also be attributed to the users moving onto other platforms. The kids making games moved on to making Android/iOS games and the animators moved to Youtube.
Stick Death was online when I first starting used the WWW, I was obsessed with it! It was just incredibly to me that someone could easily make these animations and get them online for everyone to see! I believe this around the same time as 2advanced and the "Flash intro" craze...
https://homestarrunner.com/main
Using Ruffle. Like the others, it's somewhat recent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestar_Runner#cite_ref-18
[0]: https://ruffle.rs/
[1]: https://ruffle.rs/compatibility
https://zhu.newgrounds.com/
I am sure if I add an extra couple of pixels to the end of the Nike Swoosh, I can use it for my own branding everywhere, because it is not the same and a rounded tick is just too simple to copyright in any case ... /sarcasm
I could even cite the original ruling against Zhu as a precedent for extra kharma points.
A random creator in China in the early oughts wouldn't have a chance in hell against Nike or any other big corporations, trademark and copyright isn't and wasn't set up for foreign citizens to leverage IP against domestic entities. Without starting with a big legal team and a US corporation and having all the reams of paperwork and registrations and forms in triplicate, he just wasn't playing the same game. He should have been reimbursed or gotten a royalty, from a moral standpoint, but he didn't have any valid legal standing.
A court tried to be generous in the interpretation of the law in order to grant him his first victory, and that would probably have been a good precedent, but the law isn't really designed to be flexible like that - it's very rare that "the right thing" ends up congruent with how the law works in practice.
I did however manage to get Delphi Personal Edition off a cover CD from a magazine grey-imported from up-north.
I proceeded to create "TISFAT" (This is Stick Figure Animation Theatre) in Delphi, inventing my own "inverse kinematics" algorithm, quotation marks not only because I had no idea what that was at the time, but I also had no way to look it up, and it was ghastly (the day I found out what atan2 did unlocked everything!).
Being a cocky teenager, I thought, "this is great!" and sent it to the local version of "PC Format" magazine and got it on the local coverdisc.
That's when I first learnt several very important things about having users! Always -always- version your file formats!
Anyway, it somehow made its way onto "the world wide web", and someone set up a forum about it, and a small community built around my bug-ridden app. Then the religious wars of "Pivot vs. TISFAT" started, so I reached out to the author of Pivot just to say I wasn't any part of it, and I'd be keen to add support for the Pivot file format.
Later on I learnt about verlet particle physics, made better "IK", made a Pascal wrapper for the Chipmunk physics library, allowing me to add physically-driven animation creation.
I look back with awe at younger me, because I wouldn't have the energy to power on like I did, and I'd think more-than-twice about showing anyone my work nowadays (I have the physical Winamp part 2 video basically done, but the fear of showing it in public is holding me back).
You can still find videos created with TISFAT on YouTube, and I've still got a complete rewrite sitting on a HDD somewhere, where I planned a "no UI" way of animating, targeting all the "new" multi-touchscreens back then...
Ah, good times.
That link seems partly confirmed since they mention an online predecessor called Stick Figure Death Theatre and the Liquid Television segment (which re-enacted famous movie scenes with stick figure animations) was called Stick Figure Theatre.
Pretty much each individual segment of that show was mind blowing (it launched Beavid and Butthead) but the stick figure interpretation of Night of he Living Dead stuck with me for years.
YouTube has a compilation: https://youtu.be/-M7-Sew5aU8
[1] https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/25718
It was such an impressive piece of art for younger me (12 years old then and just getting started with this „internet“ thing) that apparently it made some lasting memories. Made my day to revisit these videos after such a very very long time. Thanks!
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LF2kGSAIljU
There is even a timeline if you want to know the full history; https://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/timeline3/latest/embed/index....
I kind of miss that era of the internet where there were random, niche sites you would fall in love with and it wasn’t all just a post on YouTube or Facebook or Reddit or something.
Many people use the former purely to make animations.
You could pick weapons used by the scientists. In most, he’d just get blown away, but in one scenario, he grabs the gun, and kills everyone in the facility.
Not sure if it was this guy, or was just inspired by him.
>… intense creativity, easy-to-access software, notable but not crippling limitations, almost universal compatibility across the entire technological space of its time, widespread adoption by encouraging free consumption and sharing in an age where “going viral” actually meant something, all combining to influence the entire entertainment industry with one strike after another? That’s something that we’ll never be able to recreate, only remember fondly. All driven by a bunch of guys sitting in their bedrooms who watched too much Xiao Xiao.
https://archive.org/details/flashpoint-a-tribute-to-web-game...
for some extra nostalgia, check out "one finger death punch 2" game (and its prequel). i bet it's sort of an homage to those animations.
Thanks for reminding me of that one
This doesn't make any sense. From earlier in the same article:
> Zhu didn’t invent violent stickman animations. In the ‘90s, the Western site Stick Figure Death Theatre hosted exactly what its name implied. But Xiao Xiao, and its mix of Jackie Chan with Jet Li with The Matrix, perfected the idea.
> Either way, it was Xiao Xiao that made “stick fights” massive online. Clones were rampant — even Stick Figure Death Theatre had them. As one paper reported in 2002:
>> The Web’s legions of part-time Flash animators have begun producing their own copies of Xiao Xiao — so many, in fact, that there’s a whole portal dedicated to them. Stick Figure Death Theatre ... has so many stick man knockoffs, you have to wonder why Zhu doesn’t just give up.
If we assume that people at Nike were familiar with Xiao Xiao... and that they were also familiar with the mountains of similar material, what are we saying they did wrong?
Also anyone else remember when websites used to make Flash intros that you'd have to skip to get to the content?