Stick figure

Stick figures are often drawn by children, and their simplicity and versatility have led to their use in infographics, signage, animations, storyboards, and many other kinds of visual media.

As language began to develop, logographies (writing systems that use images to represent words or morphemes) came to use stick figures as glyphs.

[vague][3][4] In 1972, Otto "Otl" Aicher designed round-ended, geometric, grid-based stick figures to be used in the signage, printed materials, and television broadcasts for the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich.

Tom Fulp began to produce 2D stick figure animations on his Amiga computer for entertainment purposes in the early 1990s.

[citation needed] Fulp began to work with Flash, a piece of software used to produce interactive games and animations, soon after its acquisition by Macromedia.

[7] Prompted by the website's popularity, Fulp introduced a portal through which users could submit Flash animations and games of their own in 2000.

Stick Figure Death Theatre[verify notability], often abbreviated as SFDT, was founded in 1996 by Matt Calvert, initially as a personal website[vague].

[11] Accompanied by bit-crushed audio samples, it shows two simple stick figures fighting with their fists and various weapons over a white background.

As the fight gets increasingly intense, more tools including a bow and arrow, rocket launchers, and duplication abilities are introduced before the battle comes to a violent conclusion.

Almost a decade earlier, Adobe had turned down an offer to buy FutureSplash in favor of their own Acrobat system.

[16] As of December 2024, the series contains eleven main episodes and a number of spin-offs, among them include the video "Animation vs. Minecraft", which has gained over 305 million views as of March 2022.

At some point between June 2008 and April 2009, an Internet copypasta began to appear featuring a Unicode stick figure named Bob.

Following Adobe's announcement of their intention to retire Flash, online communities began efforts to preserve the genre's history.

In January 2018, a YouTuber named Ben Latimore, going by the online handle BlueMaxima, created Flashpoint Archive, an open-source project aiming to preserve the functionality of many Flash animations and games.

Despite the impending discontinuation of Flash, its final years saw the release of some of the most popular and most polished stick figure animations and games of all time.

[46] Due to the conservation efforts of Flashpoint Archive, and because of big hosting platforms like Newgrounds and Kongregate developing their own workarounds, the Flash community, and, with it, the stick figure animation subgenre, were preserved from extinction.

Creators from that point onward found alternatives for the now defunct software, such as Pivot and Flash's official successor, Adobe Animate.