If I asked you to tell me what the most important physics-based video game of the last 20 years was, you might say Half-Life 2. And you would be wrong. The correct answer is Stair Dismount, a game released by Finnish demoscene group tAAT in 2002, a full two years before Gordon Freeman’s adventure with the gravity gun.

What is Stair Dismount, you might ask if you weren’t an easily-entertained high school student in the early 2000s? Well, it’s a game where you push a guy down some stairs. Yeah, that’s pretty much it. You’re shown a three-dimensional stick figure at the top of some stairs, given a few points on his body to select from, and then nudge him into a deadly tumble, with points calculated for damage done to his poor twisted frame. It’s barely a game at all, more of a physics experiment, but it was the first thing I ever played where physics were so integral to the experience.

Called Porrasturvat in its original Finnish (which allegedly means “Falling-on-your-face-on-some-stairs” and which Google Translate renders as “stair safety”), Stair Dismount was created for a game dev contest called Assembly and brought its creators wide acclaim outside of the demoscene. After all, it made it all the way to a Canadian high school, so it definitely had some reach. tAAt followed up Stair Dismount with a sequel, Truck Dismount, in which the unlucky protagonist is caught between a wall and a moving vehicle. Apparently, they went on to make other Dismount games and ported some of them to mobile devices, but I lost track of the series after Truck Dismount.

What was so compelling about the Dismount games? For one thing, they were a novelty at the time. Today, real-time physics are a staple of video games, but back then, we hadn’t really seen anything like them before. The concept of characters in a game reacting semi-realistically to your actions, rather than with canned animations, itself gave the Dismount games a ton of replayability. You wanted to see how far you could push the simulation, what might happen if you just changed your angle a little or used a bit more force. Like many of the online games popular in the early 2000s, Stair Dismount and Truck Dismount also benefitted from their simplicity. They didn’t demand much twitch skill from the player, or advanced knowledge of the rules. In a sense, they were kind of interactive toys showing off the future of games.

tAAt still appears to be active, having uploaded new demos to YouTube as recently as December of last year. The Dismount games now appear to be developed by Secret Exit, who also developed the early iOS darling Zen Bound. You can download the old versions of the Dismount games for free, though as the site notes, they are “from the age when computer programmers had sideburns,” and compatibility with modern systems isn’t guaranteed. The Mac version, for instance, is a PowerPC app that doesn’t run on contemporary versions of OSX. Such is the fate of many of these old indie titles — but at least you can still play the updated versions on iOS and Android.

Throwback Thursday: Stair Dismount Was a Physics Landmark in Games

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