All Systems
Yipe!

In 2009, someone I never met emailed me about monsters.

His name was Kevin Kinell, and he was the creator of Yipe! … a series of independent role-playing games. The first appeared in the late 1990s as shareware. Kevin had made several Yipe games, developed a modest cult following, graduated from college, grown up and put away his independent projects.

Then the iPhone appeared. The App Store was new, and for Kevin, it offered something more useful than a new market. It gave him a reason to bring Yipe back.

While looking for inspiration, he found monsters on my website.

I had been drawing and painting peculiar creatures for years. Some had become sculptures and vinyl toys. They were generally caught somewhere between cute and alarming, with large teeth, uncertain motives and a poor grasp of personal boundaries. Kevin wondered if I might be interested in putting some of them into an iPhone game. I thought it sounded like fun.

At first, the arrangement seemed straightforward. Kevin had a game that needed artwork. I had artwork that might be amusing inside a game. He would program it, I would draw some monsters, and presumably everybody would return to normal life.

Instead, Kevin sent an email titled “Monster ideas.”

He had been thinking about Idle Hands.

Idle Hands was a ten-inch vinyl character I had created a few years earlier: red, horned, charming in a suspicious way and devoted to avoiding useful activity. Kevin suggested that he might have a larger role in the game.

I replied that I loved the idea and proposed a title: Yipe — Attack of Idle Hands.

Then I forwarded Kevin’s message to my friend Andrew Woods.

Andrew was an animator I had worked with, who spent years making music with his friends, often in forms designed to confuse half the audience and delight themselves. He had already written an Idle Hands theme song, and once Kevin’s game began absorbing the character, bringing Andrew into the conversation felt natural. Andrew agreed.

The team had been formed by email.

The accidental studio

Kevin sent me the artwork from the older Yipe games, including more than a hundred little Windows bitmap files with names like bmp00017.bmp.

The new game used tiles measuring 35 by 35 pixels.

My creatures had begun as drawings, paintings and sculpted objects. They had eyeballs, teeth, claws, stains, complicated silhouettes and, occasionally, pants. Converting one into a 35-pixel icon was less like illustrating it and more like attempting to preserve its personality during a minor industrial accident.

→

I began making tiles.

There were heroes, shops, trees, mountains, dungeon walls, doors, rivers, bridges, pools, plants, spiders, rabbits and creatures made almost entirely from mouths. Every answer produced another question. A monster might read clearly at 35 pixels but disappear against the grass. A dungeon wall needed to connect to another dungeon wall without creating a mysterious visual rupture in the kingdom.

The files multiplied. I made at least eleven versions of one 35-pixel icon sheet. One was named icons-35x35---8-bad-delete.

Kevin put the artwork into his maps and sent another build. Once I saw the images inside the game, I wanted to change them. Those changes gave Kevin new possibilities for environments and encounters, which gave me more things to draw.

The original division of labor began to dissolve. I was no longer supplying pictures to a finished system. Kevin’s programming changed my artwork, and the artwork changed the game he was programming.

Then Andrew downloaded Yipe III.

“Oh Crap is this thing addictive!!” he wrote. “He’s got this tuned just right.”

Andrew Woods, 2009

That message mattered because Andrew was not joining simply as a favor to me. He played Kevin’s older game and understood its peculiar strength. Yipe was mechanically simple, quick to enter and difficult to stop playing. It did not behave like an epic fantasy simulation, although it occasionally wore the clothing of one. It moved with the speed of someone telling a joke who already knew where it ended.

Andrew began writing music and making sounds. There were environmental themes, combat effects and noises for individual monsters. Kevin dropped them into the next build and wrote back that the sounds brought the game to life.

At one point he installed Andrew’s monster-death effects, then spent several minutes killing creatures just to hear them.

The work had begun feeding itself. Andrew’s sounds changed the personality of the monsters. The monsters suggested jokes and encounters. Those encounters changed Kevin’s maps. A new map required another tile, another piece of music or another line of dialogue.

Nobody had proposed forming a studio, and we never formally did. We simply kept sending one another work that made the next person want to do more.

The watercooler was email.

The monster takes over

Idle Hands had entered the project as a possible guest character, but the plot had thickened.

He was the villain.

I started writing dialogue for him, and Kevin and I worked out how he would move through the story, confront the player, retreat and reappear. We discussed his battle lines, the final cave and the ending. Kevin had approached me because he liked my monsters; now one of them was restructuring his game.

This was appropriate behavior for Idle Hands. He had been created as a character who avoided work, and he now had three adults working nights to build a kingdom for him to terrorize.

The title settled into place: Yipe! V: Attack of Idle Hands.

There is also an early combat mockup in which a knight faces a Bloody Spider, a Donut Master and a Zombie Wolf. The available commands are FIGHT, ITEM and RUN … which is still how I respond to most situations.

We were approaching the familiar condition in which we thought we were finished before discovering, like Sisyphus, more work.

Artwork was still arriving. Dialogue was still changing. Andrew was still producing sounds. Kevin was distributing builds, implementing features, repairing problems and trying to keep the application below Apple’s size limit. Just when we were learning which rules of the App Store were most inconvenient, Kevin sent us an email ...

“All Systems Yipe!”

Kevin Kinell, November 24, 2009

“I really can’t contain my excitement right now!!!!” he wrote. “Off to go get a beer.”

Yipe 5 appeared in the App Store in December 2009.

Then we discovered that finishing a game is how you begin operating a software company.

There were promo codes, sales reports, updates, customer messages, bug fixes, review sites, screenshots, advertising experiments and an iPad version. We made a website, press materials and new store graphics. I began thinking as much about the presentation surrounding the game as I did about the artwork inside it.

The reviews confirmed that the peculiar combination was visible from the outside. One writer called it a “lovingly-crafted adventure with all the polish and spirit of a mom-and-pop venture.” Players mentioned the pacing, the jokes, the strange monsters and the feeling that the game had been assembled by particular people rather than manufactured by a studio.

One player wrote, “The website sold the game, for me.”

Ideally the game would also sell the game, but compliment accepted.

Then we all met

Then we held a launch party at Modern Relics in San Francisco. It was the first time we all met together.

The event made the collaboration visible. Kevin’s shareware world, my creatures and Andrew’s music were no longer separate bodies of work that happened to occupy the same application. They had produced something none of us would have made independently, and people had come out in the rain to stand inside it.

By then, we were simply friends.

Reality bytes

Yipe 5 was now available in the world, and even got some good reviews:

The game even developed a modest cult following, and much to my Mom's concern, my Dad became addicted to it. So we were quite pleased to see people enjoy it, even if it didn’t fill our coffers with gold bouillon.

Yipe was a thing again.

But the iPhone version of Yipe 5 eventually stopped running on newer devices. The artwork still existed. Andrew’s music still existed. The maps, dialogue, monsters and jokes still existed. Kevin put away the game, and focused on being an adult again, or trying.

Software rarely survives in its original form. Hardware changes, operating systems change, companies change their rules, and a working program gradually becomes an artifact from a civilization that ended eleven months ago.

Kevin brought the game back as a web application in 2021, and a few years later he began thinking about Steam.

The obstacle was not desire. Kevin had already demonstrated a suspicious willingness to resurrect Yipe whenever life permitted it. The obstacle was time.

Porting a seventeen-year-old game to modern Windows and Macintosh computers required excavating old code, replacing obsolete systems and resolving a long sequence of technical problems. Kevin had a job, a family, and a life. The game might still be worth saving if the conversion was just a bit more practical.

In 2026, agentic AI gave him the luxury of attempting it.

It could investigate, translate, test and help work through portions of the conversion that would otherwise have consumed more time than Kevin possessed. It did not invent Yipe, write Andrew’s music or redraw my monsters. The creative work was already there. What it changed was the amount of effort one person could apply to recovering that work.

On August 17, Yipe! V: Attack of Idle Hands appeared on Steam, now running on modern computers with achievements, cloud saves and all the conveniences that had not existed when we started. Much of the promotional copy I wrote in 2009 appears on the new store page nearly intact. Apparently “escape from the drudgery of your own despair” has aged better than the operating system.

It's just like the old Yipe with its addictive gameplay, retro sound and music, oddball humor ... and a new fishing mini-game, because heroes need to relax sometimes. The credits remain there too.

Kevin Kinell

Original game and software

Andrew Woods

Music and sound

Dylan Sisson

Artwork

Seventeen years later.

You made it this far?Check out Yipe on Steam →