Colin Mang’s eyes glow, reflecting the piercing light of the library computer monitor. His brow furrows and the veins in his hand flex with each click of the cursor. I watch a mitten-clad, sled-riding stick figure gracefully tumble down slopes and ramps for some reason that I cannot yet perceive and wonder, Why on earth could this be fun? We are side by side, each at our own computer, and both on the website LineRider​.com. Colin seems to know a lot about the game so I focus on his screen to pick up tips.

“Sweet, I just figured out how to make perfect curves with straight lines,” says Colin, “because if you use the pencil tool to make curves, Dude will crash, but if you use straight lines and web them, he’ll ride smoothly.”

“Who’s Dude?” I ask, selecting one of the many items I did not understand from his elaborate instructions.

“He’s the guy who rides the sled,” Colin replies as if it were obvious.

For the next 15 minutes, I dink around with the game Colin calls “an internet phenomenon” attempting to understand the goal of this puzzling application. Eventually I piece together that one is supposed to build ramps and jumps that allow Dude, the sled-guy, to move through space and defy gravity. Over the next few days, I am on LineRider​.com all the time, making new courses and perfecting my techniques.

Perhaps with too much time on his hands, a Slovenian pre-grad named Boštjan Čadež created Line Rider in September of 2006 for his illustration class. The application was simple and rough, prompting California based InXile Entertainment to buy its rights, perfect it, and post it on its own website. Since, it has spread rapidly, and gained much notoriety, most notably from The New York Times, which called it “amazingly simple, but overwhelmingly addictive.”

Although I had discovered that Line Rider was indeed addictive, I am still skeptical of it being a “phenomenon” as Colin so enthusiastically described, so I decide to see if people besides us were influenced by typing Line Rider into YouTube​.com. The first video that appears is entitled “Jagged Peak Adventure” and appears to be promising. Upon clicking on it, I see that it has received well over five million views, almost 5,000 comments, and been favorited more than 9,000 times. The video begins and Dude appears out of nowhere, immediately landing on a steep path in the middle of logging country. Within 15 seconds, he has hit three masterfully crafted jumps and also grinded down a log cabin. Not only was this track built smoothly to keep Dude from falling off of his sled, it was also an artistic masterpiece featuring hollowed out logs, icy bridges, and stalactite-filled caves. This video would win Line Rider of the year, if such an award existed, I thought to myself, not knowing that my next click would cause me to reject that statement.

As YouTube’s red streaming bar begins to move, I see a new Dude zoom down a flawless curve into an abstract world of monsters, anime, and pop stars. The video is posted by TechDawg, who is obviously more than just a computer geek with his superb use of shading and detail, far better than the previous artists’. He has posted 12 Line Rider videos, each with thousands or millions of views. I look at the comments on TechDawg’s videos and then click on the profiles of many positive comment-writers to get a sense of Line Rider’s audience. I find that the age-range is generally from about 18 to 30 and people of all nationalities show an interest, from Africa to North America, and all around the world. “TechDawg Tributes” have been made by fans of the artist’s work, one featuring Dude gliding along large bubble letters reading “TECH DAWG, YOU’RE OUR HERO.” Although not all 11,000 Line Rider videos on YouTube are this widely appreciated, most have a substantial amount of views, comments, and favorites.

Shortly after my introduction to Line Rider, I have mastered the skill of perfect curves using many straight lines, a technique Colin mentioned in the library. I am over at his house and we are watching one of the courses he has made recently. Although Colin’s tracks do not feature the elaborate artwork of many of the YouTube tracks, his technical skill is impressive.

“I’ve been thinking about maybe making a really big track with art on it to post on YouTube,” says Colin, watching Dude slide seamlessly down the course he just finished. “That’s kinda the whole point: having a lot of fun in your down time and then having something to show for it.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I just mastered making perfect curves like you were talking about.”

Colin laughs. “I don’t even do that anymore; it takes too much time. I just zoom in all the way and free-hand it.”

My spirit sinks. I have just spent a week perfecting a now inferior tool. Colin reveals that he gets these new techniques from the tutorials posted on YouTube, informing people of different skill levels of helpful tips to improve Line Rider tracks.

InXile Entertainment was quick to expand Line Rider after seeing its massive success on the Internet. In December of 2006, just three months after the original application of Line Rider was up and running, the game development company announced that Line Rider would be modified to run on both Nintendo Wii and DS and expected to ship in Spring of 2007. Most Nintendo Wii games are sold at $50 each, a substantial monetary boost over the website’s virtually ad-free layout. InXile Entertainment hopes people will be drawn to its DS version because it is portable and its Wii version because it is the ultimate, big-screen edition of Line Rider.

I have begun work on a master track and have made several features that I am proud of, especially an enormous loop-the-loop. After I perfect the track, it will be time to fill in the artwork. Colin still periodically gives me advice on the geometry of webbed ramps and useful tools he has recently discovered, and I am quick to use it. Just like a Slovenian college kid, an artistic YouTuber, and a sled-guy named Dude, I ride the line.