The first domino that led to Skibidi Toilet fell 30 years ago this week
In a “want to feel old?” move aimed at PC gamers specifically, I must report that Monday was the 30th anniversary of Valve’s founding, back in 1996. You know, the before times. And if you’re not a habitual PC gamer, that might not sound significant, but it’s honestly hard to overstate how influential the company Valve has been, on gaming and beyond. If you have a child at home who has exposed you, at any point, to the word “skibidi”, that’s because of Valve.
Valve was founded in the USA by Gabe Newell (now commonly known to gamers by the mononym “Gaben”) and Mike Harrington. After working for Microsoft, the pair decided to make their own FPS, which became the first game released by Valve Corporation – 1998’s Half-Life. The vision was that an FPS game could be more than point and shoot, and that it could, in fact, have a story.
This proved to be an extremely popular vision indeed. Half-Life was not just a commercial success but a critical darling, and the follow-up, 2003’s Half-Life 2, regularly turns up on lists of the best games ever made in the history of ever. In fact, the Half-Life series as a whole has had an enormous influence on the FPS genre. In 2020 Valve made a foray into VR with Half-Life: Alyx. Valve's VR headsets sold out soon after the game was announced, and it remains one of the most successful VR games ever made.
Valve's early games became so popular that in 2003 they created the software Steam as a way to distribute digital updates for their games, but by 2005 Steam started selling third-party games, too.
Today, Steam is the main way that PC gamers buy and play their games, and on 8 January 2023 over 33 million users were logged on at once, the most simultaneous users on Steam. This number was partly driven by the launch of Valve’s handheld gaming device the Steam Deck in 2022. A bunch of people got it for Christmas and all logged on to check out the Steam shop.
But what does this have to do with Skibidi Toilet? That series of bizarre shorts, which began in 2023, is “machinima”, a technique where a video is filmed and animated in a videogame engine. Skibidi Toilet is made in Source Filmmaker by Alexey Gerasimov, and Source Filmmaker, or SFM, is a free bit of software published by, yep, Valve. In fact, Skibidi Toilet uses assets from Valve games like Half-Life 2 – including the titular porcelain throne. The more you know.