:the game: is a VERY violent, bloody, hilarious, and, most of all, Bloody Hilarious game on MaxGames, Armor Games and Newgrounds by a young Nicky Case. It's about... well... life. Kind of. There's not really any plot to speak of until the third game, and for most of the time, it runs on Vulgar Humor, though the games are a frequent vehicle for political commentary. It later received a sequel called Replaying :the game:. The first and second games are VERY simple: Jump off a ledge. That's it, barring the odd minigame. Each level has you do so with a different theme, such as art, or open source. The only real variables are the character, and the background. Occasionally, you get a cut scene. They are very tasteful and wholesome. And funny.

The third game is right here, Reimagining :the game:. This one actually has a plot... kind of. You jump off a cliff, and land in another world. Then, Lady Gaga, the cast of Toy Story 3, Apple, and even freaking Paul Vasquez (AKA the Double Rainbow Guy) all do... their thing. Then, the head of BP causes an oil spill, which he uses to land in an incinerator. Then Zalgo posesses him, and tries to kill everyone. Chell of Portal, Paul Vasquez, Barack Obama and Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, Justin Bieber and Edward Cullen of The Twilight Saga, the Angry Birds, and Airport Security and the TSA all team up. Then, you use the power of jumping off a cliff to kill him. His explosive death is so epic that everyone dies.

The official site is here.

TROPING
:the game:

(AKA spread the information, suckas):

• Adjustable Censorship: Replaying has a censorship option that's unlocked when all achievements are unlocked.
• Art Evolution: Reimagine has a more defined cartoon art style than the two preceding games.
• Author Tract: Occasionally, notably Toy Story 3.
• Auto-Tune: Parodied with Kesha before she fuses with the smoke monster.
• Background Boss: The final boss of Reimagine.
• Bloody Hilarious: As mentioned above, the game pretty much runs on this.
• Cut and Paste Environments: Deconstructed. Subverted in Reimagine.
• Double Jump: Or rather, "Double Rainbow Double Jump", with YosemiteBear and Katy Perry.
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom: The "Homeopathy" ending in the "Alternative Medicine" level of the original game and the end of Reimagining.
• Edible Theme Clothing: Reimagine has Lady Gaga wearing a super meat dress in her level as a reference to the time she did that in real life.
• Eldritch Abomination: The final boss.
• Every Episode Ending: Every episode ends with big red text and small white text.
• Eyed Screen: Present in the first game's "Shooting Lawyers in the Face".
• The Faceless: Everyone (except when they need to talk or emote).
• Faux HTML Tags: The advertisement space in the original's loading screen has the words "<advertisement> </dignity>" written on it if no advert is present.
• Final-Exam Boss: The last stage of Reimagine.
• Five Stages of Grief: The Five Stages. The bargaining stage has them say they can dance if you hold space. The following two stages then have them automatically jump off, first by being depressed, then discovering that it's fun.
• Foreshadowing: The Boss's eye is visible as a sun in the social media levels of Reimagining.
• Glasses Pull: Parodied in Replaying. Horatio does a CSI Miami style one-liner for every character who died in Hamlet, but he doesn't take off any of the glasses he put on, resulting in him wearing glasses on glasses on glasses. For the final one-liner, he drops a giant ball of glasses from the air.
• Good Night, Sweet Prince: Said by Horatio himself in Replaying, with a Glasses Pull in between.
• Gorn:
  • The very intro of the first game puts this on full throttle by depicting a violent fight scene between a group of white characters and a group of green characters (the latter of which don't actually appear in-game)... for a few seconds, just to be paused by the white character carrying the green controller before swinging off into the variant of the MaxGames.com logo.
  • The "Gun Control" level in Replaying is full of this; especially at the second-to-last enemy, whose head literally explodes and unleashes a massive blood fountain after killing him with a very long streak of bullet hits.
  • "Apocalypse 2012" from the same game: every death releases several organs, which just float around.
  • While the characters and their deaths are much more cartoonish in Reimagine, this one is still present; death on various platformer levels (usually achieved by touching the Unicorn Horns of Doom) causes characters to violently bleed. The blood is affected by gravity, and colors unicorn horns red.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: The Gun control level in Replaying, finished with a single character that has the similar crying and background sound to The Witch. She's Immune to Bullets, and when you approach, she runs up and attacks.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Every level is called "[Insert Subject Here] :the game:" AKA [insert witty comment here]. The third game drops the "AKA" but keeps the witty comment.
• Jump Scare: The "Supernatural Claims" level in the first game ends with a rather loud and sudden one.
• Loading Screen: Replaying has a minigame, where clicking on the characters launches them, and cause a chain-reaction death. It also leads to an unlockable.
• Mayan Doomsday: The "Apocalypse 2012" level in Replaying, specifically using Planet X as the cause.
• Mini-Game: The games that don't involve jumping off the cliff, such as alcoholism (staying on the line), Troll, Bush Administration (Asteroids clone), Couches (tap two buttons), and Capitalism (collect falling money). Of these, only the single-player verison of capitalism remains misère.
• Misère Game: The objective of most levels in the first two games is to jump off and pancake against the ground below — normally considered a losing condition.
• Not Hyperbole: One stage in the first game has a man tell his wife to "Go get the damned groceries." If you do, you find out he wasn't just swearing for emphasis; the groceries are actually damned (and organic!).
• Rage Quit: Sarah Palin does this in Replaying.
• Screamer Prank: The "Supernatural Claims" level in the first game. It's basically a Flash animation of Pac Man contemplating the purpose of his presence in the maze, and what it stands for.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: In the level "Pacifism". Just about to fall off-screen, the character suddenly stops in mid-air and starts a to point out that after 37 deaths the game gets pretty stupid and gets fed up with everything, promptly leaving.
  Player Character: hey^[sic] at least it's not VIOLENT, GOOD GAWD.
• Send in the Clones: After unlocking all of the achievements in Reimagine, you can not only fully customize a character, you are also granted the option to replace every character in the game with that particular one.
• Shout-Out: Plenty, some of which are more subtle than others.
• Spikes of Doom: Represented herein by unicorn horns, their unusual appearance is lampshaded by the Hippie. Partially justified, as "Rainbows" is the first level these appear in.
  • Unicorn horns everywhere!
• Stylistic Suck: Some levels in :replaying: bring up how the creator is running out of ideas. One of the levels even has an AKA reading "the level that's not as intelligently designed."
• Surprisingly Creepy Moment: The "Supernatural Claims" Level from the first game, which starts with gameplay of Pac Man before the main character suddenly contemplates the maze, with him believing the dots are "ghost orbs", before running into Blinky. And then it suddenly gets screwy, before ending with a Jump Scare Screamer Prank. Probably doesn't help it's the only level in the first game to veer into such territory, which up until and after that point was more tongue-in-cheek.
• Webcomic of the Game: Faceless & Hopping.