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.

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1. I should point out that the fantastic folks at the Seattle-based digital media agency Smashing Ideas did most of the heavy lifting. [↩]