The day ROBLOX Died

 The king is dead

Even those of us who have abstained from the Internet's favourite passtime has heard the stories of the ROBLOX supremacy. A online infrastructure that appears to have existed forever and, indeed, even surpasses Minecraft in it's legacy. I think it's fair to say that no one really knows where the game came from, but practically all have heard of it today, as the defacto raising tool for most children to teach them that the world is full of opportunities for their hard work to be exploited by lazier and smarter adults. I can't even say I recall the time in history when ROBLOX levelled up from being a game and into an empire, it slipped under my nose before I could even see it happening, one day it just became a fact of life that we all just laughed about and pretended we always knew it was there. And I, amazingly, never actually played the thing myself when I was a kid. I didn't know it existed. Thank god too; with the amount of 'free game' scouring I did all over the Internet back in my youth, ROBLOX would have swallowed me up and spit away the key.

ROBLOX began life all the way back in 2006, or 2005 for the beta, or 2004 for the founding of the company. It began with the name DYNABLOX, probably in reverence to the 'dynamic game engine' that the game was philosophically founded upon. And, to my utmost surprise, the original beta for the game looked utterly primitive compared to the game today. I mean visually. Yes, that visual palette which looks like it originated from the early 2000's is actually an updated look for the game over the years as it became what it is today! I know many long-running games get visual overhauls, but usually they endeavour to improve the palette of the game to make it more modern or chic, but I guess ROBLOX always valued it's ability to run on every chunk of hardware more than how it looked, and even in it's later years they never wanted to lose that avid ZX Spectrum fanbase. The game changed many development hands, got picked up by a few visionary corporations who sought a monopoly over the kids market and the rest is history.

Which is to say, the rest has been a history of fraught and questionable relationships between ROBLOX proper and the child labour it relies on to make it's user base happy. Because ROBLOX is very much an engine for minigame creation using their proprietary interactive game engine. Hop on the ingame tools and you can build anything into a game for others to form a community around. I would say "Anything within reason", but due to the utterly non-existent moderation by the ROBLOX owners, as well as the questionability of letting kids make anything without oversight, most of ROBLOX is decidedly unreasonable. I knew this all the way back in 2013 when my investigations uncovered an entire community dedicated to roleplaying key positions within British Parliament in their own facsimile of central London. Why? I can't say. But it was real. And, of course, if you searched deep enough there were less wholesome games too.

I can't pretend to know enough about ROBLOX to know the details about their seedier elements, all I can recount are anecdotal tales I've heard of NSFW themed games, which boggles the mind knowing the palate that creatives are working with on ROBLOX; but I guess that's the power of imagination, right? (Who am I kidding; there's some increadibly popular NSFW games nowadays that are totally text based browser games; I shouldn't be shocked.) These have caused some scandal over the years and even a few PR disasters when the ROBLOX main office have turned blind eyes to the sorts of environments frequented almost entirely by children. Seems they wanted the audience without the responsibilities. But no scandal has stuck with them enough to hurt the giant. But if there is one slap across the face that not even ROBLOX will withstand, it's the murder of their most iconic element; The 'Oof' sound.

Arguably even more famous than ROBLOX itself, the 'Oof' sound affect holds it's origins in the genesis of mankind. Ashurbanipal, king of the Neo-Assyrian empire in the 660's BC is recounted as having delivered the first Oof when locked in mortal hand-to-hand combat with a deathly lion. Of course, Ashurbanipal is also noticed as one of the very first recorded sources of propaganda, so it's very possible that such an 'Oof' may in reality have been uttered by someone else entirely, or mayhaps even the lion itself. Certain translations of the ancient Hebrew texts that make up the commonly recognised 'old testament' accredit such a sound, or something similar, being spoken by a dying Abel as Cain bashed his melon in with a rock. But studying the work of Milton's Paradise Lost has presented a recanonisation of the sound to an even earlier mythical event, as the sound made by Satan when he hit the ground after getting yeeted out of heaven. Perhaps the true origins will forever remain mysterious.

If you ask the plebs around the 'normal spheres' you'll be told that the noise actually originates from a former composer for the game, Tommy Tallarico, and that ROBLOX has run into issues with Tommy for years over the use of that sound byte. Apparently there was a kerfuffle quite some years back which rendered the sound a premium commodity that ROBLOX creators had to pay a little fee in order to licence use in their games. Such a fee was only a temporary solution, it would seem, because after all this time ROBLOX proper have come and pulled the plug entirely on that classic noise in order to replace it with the sound of a man sneezing caught on laughable bad audio equipment. At least that's my best guess on this replacement, it's almost terrible enough to become iconic all on it's own, to be honest.

And to think that this all happened because the ludicrously profitable people over at ROBLOX simply refused to pay the fee to buy the sounds rights; which were reportedly no more than $10,000. That's- criminally underpriced given how famous the sound byte in question is; and it really speaks to how desperately petty the ROBLOX team is that they didn't want to part from literally pocket change over this issue. They'd rather take the substantial hit to public perception than settle an infinitesimal amount over this. At this point it's pretty clear that it wouldn't matter to them if this was $1000, or $100, or 10 cents; they just didn't want to give anyone else the satisfaction of winning; because when you make a children's game for so very long I suppose the target demographic can start to rub off on you.

Oof is hardly the most serious scandal that ROBLOX has faced over the years. Afterall, they're well known for exploiting the talents of their children player base for profit and totally wiping their hands of the safe guarding jobs required to keep that player base safe from dubious and harmful entitles. They just can't be bothered to trouble themselves with literally anything that makes them look like a somewhat standup company; but they've been doing this for so long that they could literally be sacrificing their children audience to the devil and still be making a mint doing it. In the world of Ubisoft's and Call of Duty's; ROBLOX is the one demon titan even bigger than all that to be utterly scandal proof; except, of course, for the elimination of their very soul, just recently, when Oof died. They may carry on, and probably will; but the beating heart of the franchise is gone; and it's only a matter of time before the body starts to fester and rot. Poor sad, ROBLOX; doomed to moult and wither all alone in the world. Do not cry for them. DO NOT CRY!