BUILT TO LAST
As tourists step off the steamboat into the Giant Man Experience Centre, a few fail to mind the gap and fall into the abyss below. Listen carefully and you can hear them roar as they despawn, their limbs exploding outward in a bloodless gibbing. Those that do make it inside the glass-walled building admire the model display cabinet that contextualises the 175-metre Giant Man alongside the Eiffel Tower (318m) and Ireland’s Tallest Tree (56m). There’s a ‘bing-bong’ as one guest presses the big green button on the nearest Information Point and an amiable Irish voice rings from the speaker: “We here at the Giant Man know that you have a choice of Giant Men to visit, and we appreciate you choosing us. We hope you have a very nice time today.”
The voice belongs to Terry Cavanagh, the acclaimed developer of games such as Super Hexagon and Dicey Dungeons. But the button, and everything attached to it, comes from Roblox, the user creation platform. It’s the meeting of the two that has piqued our curiosity and brought us here, to the size-879 feet of Cavanagh’s Giant Man.
“I guess I’ve been playing a lot of Roblox games,” Cavanagh says. When the pandemic hit, he and his friends cycled through a number of multiplayer options to keep their social life breathing. After Tabletop Simulator and Everybody’s Golf, they landed on Roblox’s endless librar y of experiences. “It was this huge discovery for me personally,” Cavanagh says. “I didn’t really know anything about it. I knew it was a kid’s platform, and I had heard that it was very microtransaction-y. That’s where I started.”
is the quintessential post-Minecraft phenomenon: enormous, genreless, ineffable, an industry unto itself. At the height of lockdown last August, it drew in an estimated 164 million monthly users, and was played by more than half of all American children under the age of 16. Both game and development tool, is comparable to other user creation platforms such as , . Yet for the most part it has sat adjacent to the game industry, rarely discussed and little understood, perhaps because of its young audience.
