All hail Bethemotep!

A Madison game developer keeps adding legs to his nightmarish creation.

The digital entity now known as “Bethemotep” began life innocently and adorably enough. Madison-based video game developer Aaron San Filippo, director of indie studio Flippfly, was experimenting with animating a video game character’s legs and the mechanics thereof as part of continuing work on the studio’s in-the-works Whisker Squadron games. On Sunday evening, San Filippo Tweeted a clip of a blocky little fellow ambling around on two legs in a blank-slate checkerboard environment. 

“I will add a leg for every 50 likes this gets,” he wrote in the Tweet. And like so many capricious little godlings, people began smashing like. The critter grew a couple new legs at a time. His life improved! For an hour or so, San Filippo updated the thread with videos of our polygonal friend gaining new capabilities, like navigating an obstacle and then picking it up and carrying it. A productive exercise for creator and creation alike. You can never have too many limbs, as anyone who’s played Playdead’s Inside can tell you.

“I was working on a system for procedurally generated limbs, for the bosses in our Whisker Squadron: Survivor game,” San Filippo tells Tone Madison via email. “This was just a little…side quest!”

Before long, snowballing likes pushed the creature into a Cronenbergian puberty, his smile turning to a gawp of dismay and his movements becoming tortured as he scuttled ever more leggily. Just an hour and a half or so into the experiment, San Filippo wrote, “We did this to him, and we all share in this responsibility now. He’s clearly very distressed and I think he’s trying to find the edge of the map to put himself out of his misery.”

By Monday afternoon, likes were soaring past 17,000 (that’s 340 legs). San Filippo had named his beautiful son “Bethemotep, devourer of the sky,” and the now-hulking form began to sprout extra red-eyed faces along with all the legs. No longer gamely skittering through the adventures of youth, Bethemotep now lumbers along under an angry sky, his approach as inevitable as doom itself.

Also I regret to inform you that Bethemotep has started to reproduce 😬😬😬 pic.twitter.com/WoD6Qvk6Ev

— Aaron San Filippo (@AeornFlippout) October 9, 2023

Before long, Bethemotep had begun to sprout little ones of his own, becoming not so much one entity as a compounding colony of abominations. The dread beast and its young draw ever closer, sure to flatten us all in a grisly parable of man’s hubris. For now, the early access version of Whisker Squadron: Survivor is available on Steam. Flippfly added an update to the developing game in late September, and plans to officially launch it “around March next year,” San Filippo says.