Inventing a Trick: Animal's Quest

by Crazy Ivan

What Myachi enthusiast doesn't dream of creating a trick?  A well crafted move that is stunning enough to catch eyes with a well crafted name would ensure anyone a place in Myachi history.  Your name might even be captured within the move itself as it was with the "Brooksie", the "Maverick" or the "Crazy Ivan".  It is among the highest achievements in the game (full disclosure, that last one was named after me).

To be fair, though, when I started with the game, inventing a new trick was much easier.  Back in 2004 there were about one one thousandth as many people playing and not many skill toy fanatics had really gotten time with Myachi before that.  As an avid juggler and cool-thing-manipulator, I went to work on Myachi and came up with a lot of new stuff.

Today the task is much harder.  With over a million Myachis out there on the backs of hands on 5 continents, the notion of doing something nobody's ever thought of before is a much more forbidding task. In this way you can kind of see the flaw in using creating a trick as a hallmark.  I mean, I came up with the Swordfish back in 2005 but if somebody who'd never seen it done came up with the same idea now it wouldn't be any less creative than it was when I first did it.  In fact, it's entirely possible that somebody else came up with it years before but they weren't connected back to the movement so we never heard about it.

Like, if this guy played Myachi, we would probably never know.

Clearly the bar on creating a trick is raised every day.  With talents like Monk, Maverick, Bones, Noodles and Bamboo in the game, every new combo suddenly has 46 variations (only about half of which I can do) and the upper crust of difficulty keeps rising as well.  Where I could once add 3 or 4 new tricks to the world of Myachi in a day, I now consider myself lucky if I could come up with that many in a year.

A person new to the game in 2011 will have a much more daunting path to immortality than we had back in 2004.  But even in 2004 the market on novel tricks was tightening.  That was my first year with Myachi and thus the year I first met Animal.  He was fresh out of high school at the time and he was eyes-popping excited about everything he was doing.  Who wouldn't be after landing "Playing Myachi at an Amusement Park" as their summer job?

I also met former Myachi Master Butter that summer.  By the time I came into the game he had already distinguished himself by coming up with the Ninja.  With a name like that it was bound to stick, but it also happened to be an incredibly cool trick.  He had a very unique style and even when you watched him do basics like the 360 and the Wolverine it looked like he was doing a trick you'd never seen before.

The same, I'm sad to say, could not be said for Animal.  The dude had sick skills and really fast hands, but his jam was pretty much the same every time you saw it.  He had a little run of tricks he would go through and he would tweak it here and there, but essentially you saw everything he had in his bag every time he played the game.  I know that sounds really mean, but trust me, Animal would agree.  And if you're a big fan of Animal, don't worry, by the end of this story he gets much better.

Eventually he even learns to play the drums.

See, what Animal wanted more than anything in the world was an Iron Man-style armored chassis, but barring that he really wanted to invent a trick.  He saw me doing it.  We were both present the day Butter came up with the Dark Slide.  Kids who were new to the game were coming up with new moves the same day that they started playing.

But Animal had nothing.  You would catch him once in a while off to the side working variations on familiar combos and trying to find some way to tweak something or reverse something or rewind something to make an old move new.  He came up with a few new combos and some cool new Myachi games but through the whole summer he never came up with anything that rose to the level of a "new trick".

The following summer came and Animal tried again with the same results.  We were split up that year with him jamming out in Missouri and me in Tennessee, but I was in constant contact with Kid, Butter and Animal.  I would call them excitedly to try to explain a new trick in the pre-YouTube days and then Butter would tell me about a new trick he'd come up with.  And then Animal would be eerily silent.

Back before You-Tube we had to get our
farting pandas from this thing...

Each year it was only getting harder but at the same time, Animal was getting better.  By his third summer with Myachi he was no freshman.  He was a veteran player with sick foot tricks, juggling skills, incredible style and as if that wasn't enough, he'd also taken it upon himself to learn contact juggling, pen-spinning, devil sticks and poi between assignments.  He came to Orlando, Florida in the summer of 2007 light a prizefighter before a match.  He was perfectly prepped and tuned and this would certainly be his year.

And, of course, it was.  If I recall correctly, the Smooth Criminal came first but after that there was no stopping him.  He must have come up with a dozen moves that year, most of them crazy tough 2 sack combos or foot/portal variations.  Nobody was exactly keeping score, but I'm sure he beat my total for that summer.  He's also probably challenged my total every year since.

But there are still a ton of moves to create.  Monk believes that most of the yet undiscovered moves lie in the realm of portal tricks and splits but there are obviously a gazillion 3 Myachi tricks yet to find as well. What's more is that there are still new tricks being invented every day.  I used to think that at some point we would peak on new tricks and there would be less and less to learn each year.  I've since rejected that idea altogether.

I mean... think of the moves we'll be doing once they
have a Disney world on the moon.

It stands to reason that we will never start running out of new moves.  When Monk came up with the Flying Fish back in 2008 it spawned a whole new genre of moves that now has hundreds of variations.  When Maverick started goofing around with the Matrix he turned a trick with 3 variations into a trick with 300.  There are probably whole genres of tricks that have yet to be done and when we discover them, new tricks will come flooding in for months and months afterwards.

It's obviously a good thing in a lot of ways.  It means that if you get serious about the game you'll never run out of challenges, it means that whatever type of trick you prefer will have plenty or variety and, most importantly, it will make sure that the guy who does the trick of the day is never out of a job.