Back around 2007 I created a game for The-N.com (now TeenNick.com) called Slasher! It took the classic set of party-game rules variously known as Mafia, Werewolf, or Assassin and adapted them for online play. The N’s audience being 75% teen girls, we gave Slasher! a literally campy horror movie theme, with the players trapped at Camp De-Cap-A-Lot as a psycho killer wipes them out one-by-one by impaling them on the tetherball pole, dropping them into the swimming hole chained to the Ms. Pac-Man machine, and so on. The campers have to uncover which of them are secretly slashers before they all end up dead.

We1 did a nice job of making the game Internet-specific, with chat, private messaging, synchronous or asynchronous play, and a bunch of other game-nerdy stuff all wrapped in beautiful illustrations by the very talented Ward Sutton.

Slasher! turned out to be popular, so much so that it crashed the entirety of The-N.com on a few occasions and had to be reengineered to handle the player load. It came and went from the site while we nursed it, and even after we finally got it working we had to limit the amount of simultaneous games, which at times made it impossible to get in and play. All of this lent Slasher! a sort of cachet brought on by its perceived exclusivity among the sizable The-N.com community. The fact that users often couldn’t play it made them want to play it even more. It took on a very minor legendary status. We even spun off a Facebook version (back in the days when Facebook was friendly to multiplayer games) with turn-based play ala something like Words With Friends.

Anyway, Slasher! didn’t survive The N’s 2009 transition to TeenNick. But now a bunch of faithful kids with a little moxie and a lot of copyright infringement have reopened Camp De-Cap-A-Lot. Their version isn’t the original game, more of a homage that repurposes some of the artwork and copy. Because they use only scheduled games I haven’t yet had a chance to try out a full game and see how similar it is to The N’s version.

Intellectual property theft aside, it makes me happy to see Slasher! living on. As far as I know it’s the only one of my projects that someone’s liked enough to try to bring it back from the dead. I wish the new Slasherites all the best, so much so that I’m giving them a present. Several presents actually:

1. Ward Sutton’s original illustrations. They’re great and deserve to be seen by the world, despite being owned by Viacom in perpetuity and throughout the Universe.
2. The original death scenarios I wrote for the game, which still make me laugh.
3. This is a special gift, because it’s never surfaced before. Slasher! included several special roles randomly assigned to players — the Psychic, who could identify whether players were Slashers; the Cop, who could protect players; and the Tabloid Reporter, who could listen in on Slashers chatting. But we planned several even more complex roles that, when the game ran into technical problems, we never implemented. So I’m posting the list of all the roles, the original in-game descriptions of their abilities, their illustrations, and a few notes so that the resurrectors can include them in their new version if they’d like.

You can find all that stuff after the jump.

Roles

Camper:

You’re just an innocent camper, trying to live through the summer. Or even through dinner. Work with the other campers during the day to figure out who the Slashers are and to get them before they get you. You win when all the Slashers are out of the game.

Slasher:

Good news! You’re a twisted psychotic murderer. Every night, you and the other Slashers need to agree on a camper to kill. Everyone else thinks you’re just an innocent camper, so do all you can to keep them thinking that. You win when there are more Slashers than Campers left in the game.

Psychic:

You’re an innocent camper with secret special abilities. Every night you can use your psychic powers or big creepy eyes or whatever to learn one other player’s role. But be careful… Every time you use your power there’s a chance that your secret will be revealed to everyone. You win when all the Slashers are out of the game.

Tabloid Reporter:

You’re a tabloid reporter posing as a camper to get the story of the decade. You can use your paparazzi skills to listen in on the Slasher chat room and the Slasher board, but you can’t tell who’s talking. But every time you snoop, you have a chance of getting found out and almost certainly killed. You win when all the Slashers are out of the game.

Cop:

You’re not really a camper. You’re a heroic undercover cop trying to root out the Slashers. Every night you can pick one player to protect–if the Slashers try to kill that player, they’ll fail. But every time you protect someone, there’s a chance you’ll get caught, revealing your secret to everyone. You win when all the Slashers are out of the game

Cop One Day Before Retirement:

You’re not really a camper. You’re a heroic undercover cop trying to root out the Slashers. Every night you can pick one player to protect–if the Slashers try to kill that player, they’ll fail. But you’re also just about to retire, so chances are that you’ll mess up and both you and the protectee will die. You win when all the Slashers are out of the game.

Sicko:

Dude, you’re messed up. You’re a twisted camper who’s secretly helping the Slashers kill everybody. You know who the Slashers are, and at night you can plant incriminating evidence to frame innocent campers for the murders.2 You win when the Slashers win. Sicko.

Tricky Slasher:3

Good news! You’re a twisted psychotic murderer. Every night, you and the other Slashers need to agree on a camper to kill. You also can plant incriminating evidence to frame innocent campers for the murders. You win when there are more Slashers than Campers left in the game.

Virgin:

Congratulations, you’re a virgin! This is a good thing, because slasher movie rules say the virgin can never die. If the Slashers try to kill you, you’ll survive and you’ll know who the Slashers are. But you won’t be able to vote anymore, and the other campers might not believe your story.4 You win when all the Slashers are out of the game.

Hottie:

You are totally freaking hot. So hot that everyone loves you and wants you to like them, so your votes count double. You win when all the Slashers are out of the game.

Ghost:

I never wrote a description for this, because we never implemented the role. Ghosts would’ve players who were killed off but could still chat.

The end screens when the Campers and the Slashers win, respectively.

Death Scenarios5

1. [Username] is dead! The cook found [him/her] drowned in an industrial-size tub of baked beans. In other news, baked beans are half-off.
2. [Username] is dead! [His/her] head’s jammed on to the satellite TV dish. (Don’t take it off! We get Cinemax now.)
3. [Username] is dead! At least it seems that way. The shoes lying in that pile of goo underneath the wood chipper look like [his/her] size.
4. [Username] is dead! [He/she]‘s at the bottom of the lake with a Ms Pac-Man chained to [his/her] waist. If your initials are “P.O.O.” the police would like to speak with you
5. [Username] is dead! [He/she] appears to have accidentally swallowed the camp’s collection of rare machetes.
6. [Username] is dead! [He/she] was a victim of E. Coli-infected spinach. Someone parked a truckload of it on [his/her] head.
7. [Username] is dead! At least [he/she] went quietly. Who knew that pavement saws had a silent mode?
8. [Username] is dead! Counselors found [him/her] frozen solid in the meat locker. In other news, from 5-7 tonight the cafeteria will be serving complimentary daiquiris.
9. [Username] is dead! Apparently [his/her] electric blanket malfunctioned somehow. We’ll know more once we pull it out of [his/her] colon.
10. [Username] is dead! Turns out [he/she] was flushable.
11. [Username] has mysteriously disappeared! [His/her] possessions have been ceremoniously eBayed.
12. [Username] has mysteriously disappeared! [He/she] was last seen screaming in fear as [he/she] plummeted from strolling quietly along Mt. De-Cap-A-Horn.
13. [Username] has mysteriously disappeared! In other news, the owner of the pack of Komodo dragons found in [Username]‘s bed can claim them at lost and found.
14. [Username] has mysteriously disappeared! Also, the camp post office requests that whoever is mailing the 150 lb. package to Papua New Guinea add another $4.35 in postage.
15. [Username] has mysteriously disappeared! Also, please note that holes #10-13 of the miniature golf course are out of service for cleaning.
16. [Username] has mysteriously disappeared! In a completely unrelated development, all pottery projects in the kiln will require a thorough reglazing.
17. [Username] has mysteriously disappeared! Anyone with any information regarding [his/her] disappearance is requested to report to the scary dilapidated tool shed tonight at 3am.
18. [Username] has mysteriously disappeared! Also, all members of the Beach Party Committee are advised that tonight’s bonfire will require extra kindling.
19. [Username] has mysteriously disappeared! In an unrelated matter, residents of Sequoia Cabin should note that bulk garbage pick-up is every third Thursday.
20. [Username] has mysteriously disappeared! Also, the badminton committee would like to inform campers that the strange new lump in the court is nothing to worry about and is not at all [Username]-shaped and why don’t you just play around it already.

1. I should point out that the fantastic folks at the Seattle-based digital media agency Smashing Ideas did most of the heavy lifting. [↩]
2. Incriminating evidence is a gameplay feature we eventually removed and that I won’t get into. We simplified this role so that the Sicko’s job was to trick the Campers into eliminating themselves. [↩]
3. Another character we left out of the game after we dumped the Incriminating Evidence feature. [↩]
4. We eliminated that not-being-able-to-vote thing when we decided to always make players’ votes visible. At one point Slasher! was to include an advanced option to make voting secret. [↩]
5. You might be interested to know that the Nick Standards and Practices department, while okay with the evil slashers killing campers, wasn’t happy with the idea of innocent campers killing slashers to save themselves. Hence the “mysterious disappearances” in some of these scenarios. [↩]