Andre - The First RHG...?

Prelude

If you've been around the Gildedguy community lately, or are just a fan of the more old-school characters, chances are you've encountered this guy at some point:

Image by En3l

Andre. Electric man with a big hammer. These days he's not as well known as characters like FLLFFL or Oxob, but those that do know him remember him for a very specific reason: He was the first RHG. The original, the founder, the start of it all. He was even created by "Papa" Stone himself, the very person who made the RHG system in the first place. It's an honor that's long been attributed to him and has stuck to his image like gum on the bottom of a shoe.

But unfortunately, it's a bit more complicated than that.

Through a combination of  Stone's personal accounts and some personal research of my own, I have compiled a well of information about the character, the background behind his creation, and his history, to paint a complete picture of RHG's grandfather and one of its most iconic fighters. And strangely enough, it's a picture that both refutes and supports the claim of him being "the first".

So let's get right to it, shall we?

Chiseled from Stone

The story begins at, well, the beginning, with the very first RHG fight. On a currently unknown day in 2005, Stone vs Thizik premiered to rockhardanims.com. It was animated by Stone and, though only thirty seconds long, set a quality standard for the time.

The first thing to notice is that Andre is nowhere to be found. But there is Stone. For reference, he's the one on the left with the black head (as opposed to Thizik on the right with the white head). As you might imagine, he was also made by Stone the animator, who I will be referring to as "Travis" for the rest of the article to avoid confusion with the character.

Stone is an interesting case. In the animation proper, he's shown running in and breaking out of what appears to be a strait jacket. According to Travis, Stone was supposed to be a mental patient, a crazed lunatic who broke out of his ward. The idea was to keep things very simple, Travis was always a man of the people and didn't want to accidentally beat someone else to a more unique character concept that they liked a lot.

This simplicity pervaded every aspect of this starter character. Generic stick body, no clothes, no apparent powers, and a reason to fight that boiled down to being stark raving mad. Hard to get much simpler. In future battles, Stone would gain a knife, no doubt to add to his psycho image, but interestingly, this knife generated electricity.

So the seeds were there from the beginning, but Andre would still be a while off. Meanwhile Stone was starting to change more. Aside from the above-mentioned knife, his head also gained a white center, making him look more like Thizik.

Confused? Don't worry, that's normal.

So how about a brief detour?

The year was 2006. Halo 2 had already been released in North America for around two years, but only now was a young Travis nearing the finale. Spoilers inbound for that game if you care about that kind of thing. At around the same time, he was considering a rework for his character. RHG had been around for about a year now, and it was time for a change. 

One can only assume this was going through his head when he met the final boss, a huge brute with a giant hammer.

Naturally, young Travis was (possibly literally) struck with inspiration. It helped that one thing he was (and still is) good at animating was big, impactful hits. A hammer seemed like the perfect way to incorporate that strength into his new character.

Travis would soon get the perfect opportunity to test it out when, at the tail end of 2006, an animator named Tekkan challenged him to an RHG battle.

The above is Tekkan's version of the animation, Travis's side hasn't been recovered yet, but the important thing to note is that Tekkan's character had a hammer. A big one. Reportedly, Travis had a blast animating his rival's weapon, firmly cementing his choice to go the mallet route.

So the rework began. The giant hammer was obviously a must, but the knife would not go away completely, with its electric element being transferred from the blade to the bludgeon. Finally, Travis capped it off by intentionally choosing a color he knew nobody else would use: A murky orange brown.

And thus, Andre was born.

While he was not the first RHG ever, it wouldn't be a stretch to imagine him as at least an evolution of Stone. In that way, he could be considered the first, even if the two are technically different characters. Maybe that doesn't matter either since they were both made by Travis and one effectively replaced the other. Or maybe you still hold that Stone was the first, and not Andre.

Whatever the reasoning, the answer to whether Andre is the first or not is up to you at this point. Either way, the facts are at your disposal to make that decision for yourself.

A short and illustrious career

By the time Andre was created, rockhardanims had perished and fluidanims rose in its wake, making him Travis's RHG for the site. According to the forums, the character was registered by April 28, 2008 at the latest. Andre was finally a true RHG, and as one, he had a staggering tenure of three battles.

A single full battle and two speedbattles. That was it. At least, as far as Travis participated anyway. Plenty of other people animated Andre, but none of them were actually competing against Travis. A second full RHG battle against Terkoiz'z FLLFFL was planned but never saw the light of day.

So how did Andre become so well known?

In the world of RHG you'll often find a character who achieved massive popularity without having to battle much. Sometimes their animator made one amazing animation with them that stuck in people's memories for years. Other times they participated in smaller events and got their character known that way. But there's a third method: Frequently using a character as an extension of the creator.

In the previous post, I already discussed how large an influence Travis had on the fluidanims community, but an important thing to note is that back then, creators were largely represented by their RHGs. Terkoiz was FLLFFL, Hyun was Yoyo, Chuck was Endo, etc. Separate characters to represent animators like Hyunrolled had yet to be invented.

So whenever people wanted to represent Travis in anything they made, Andre was the go-to.

(Animation: "My Birthday" by David "Drifts" Craig. He uses the hammer, I promise)

That's not to say the character himself didn't catch on. Andre was beloved by the community and remained simple at his core, making him easy to understand and animate. Plus, what wasn't to love about a guy swinging a big hammer around? On top of all this, he gained a lot of popularity just from being Travis's character and it could be argued Andre got as many tributes as his own creator, with many people throwing him into their works and lumping him in with the RHG greats.

But the good times would not last forever. As Travis's life took a change, Andre soon followed.

Post-FA and legacy

Following the merge with stickpage, Travis took Andre with him as he went to work under Crazy Jay's wing. While he didn't make any more animations with Andre, the character appeared far more than he ever had before. This was due to the contract Travis signed with Crazy Jay, which required him to make a certain amount of games for the website each year.

Obviously since Travis was responsible for and in charge of their development, Andre was an easy choice for a protagonist. The character appeared in Combo Factory as the player character, Combat Tournament Legends as an unlockable fighter, and Rock Hard Coliseum among nineteen other RHG characters. Don't worry, I'll get to that one day. 

But then there's his most notable appearance: Andre's Adventure.

It's hard to describe what kind of game it is, it's more like an interactive action movie where you have to click the right thing to progress. Choose wrong or don't react fast enough and you die. The game was short, but personally I found myself playing it a lot (and getting stuck on the stupid ledge part every time).

Outside of games, he did still have a role in RHG, albeit a minor one. Clans, for those that don't know, were formal groups where animators and their characters teamed up and joined forces. Some examples of popular clans are Zetabrand and NEMESIS [sic], both of which are still quite well-known to this day. So when RHG moved to stickpage, Travis decided to create his own clan for the new site: Clan Crown. 

The clan enjoyed healthy success for a while, with enough people trying out to fill up a full six-man roster. But after submissions were over, everything stopped. With nothing for them to really do, the group fizzled out and, not even a year after its birth, Clan Crown quietly disappeared from the forums.

Andre continued to appear in other people's animations, but the tempo slowed down rapidly. Looking on stickpage will give you two or three instances of Andre outside of his games, and that's only if you know where to look. Less and less newcomers knew who Andre was, even as other legacy characters like FLLFFL and Yoyo remained popular as ever. These days your average newcomer to Hyun's Dojo will have no idea who Andre is.

But that's not to say he's forgotten.

While Andre may no longer be a "household name" within the community, his memory lives on through those that were there for his glory days and people curious enough to look into where Hyun's Dojo came from. With future projects in the works from both Travis and others, there could even be a day where he returns to his former prestige.

But until then, Andre remains a pillar of the past to those that remember him. One of the time's most popular figures and, to some, a symbol of an era long gone. But more than any of those, Andre was an inspiration born of inspiration. First or not, he was a core member of RHG and its community, and neither would truly be the same without him.

What's next?

Other than his involvement in Gildedguy & the Rock Hard Gladiator, I don't know what the future holds for Andre. The character hasn't been retired, but what he'll be in next and when is a mystery. I couldn't tell you even if I wanted to. No, this section is about the future of the blog. 

Originally I made this as a personal thing to ramble about RHG and what I liked and didn't like about characters and their animations, but I believe these first few posts have set a precedent. This ain't fun and games anymore, now I gotta have thorough research and facts instead of just spouting my opinions.

Of course this severely limits my options, but working in less than ideal situations is a part of life. From now on, I'll only be able to cover characters and topics that I both know a lot about and will have fun writing about.

Fortunately, I already have a perfect candidate for the next article.

Thanks for reading, and Rock On.