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The genitals were a mistake. More precisely, the genital physics were a mistake - after all, it's difficult to imagine any programmer plotting to make a character's appendage windmill around their groin like a sausage in a washing machine. But, for Mount Your Friends creator 28 year-old Canadian Daniel Steger, it was a welcome mistake. Since its launch earlier in the summer, this Xbox Indie Game has become the programmer's most successful release - one of the most popular games ever on Microsoft's service - and, arguably the first video game to find fame and popularity through penis dynamics. "Meat-spin, as I like to call it, was a bug," explains Steger, who created the prototype for Mount Your Friends during a Toronto game jam, an event during which amateur and professional game programmers gather together for a few days to create video games on a particular theme. "This year TOJam was packed; around 400 Toronto game developers met up for the weekend to make games around the common theme of 'Uncooperative'. I was placed in the hallway next to my friends."
Steger - one of the few developers to earn a living from selling Xbox Live Indie Games - had low expectations for the weekend in terms of creating a sellable product. "Most TOJam games I make aren't worth talking much about," he says. "Even the ones I've gone on to sell have performed poorly." But Steger immediately had an idea that he thought would work well with the theme: a competitive game in which players took turns to create a tower of bodybuilders. Steger borrowed the control system from Bennett Foddy's QWOP, whereby four different buttons each control one of the character's limbs. Players must use a combination of inertia and limb-swinging to hoist their character up the sticky mound of bodies (all of which stand, inexplicably, on the back of a mountain goat). When a player's character makes it to the top, control switches to the next player, and so on until someone falls off or fails to reach the summit within the time limit.
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