'Go up! Up, up!'
'No, that's how I died last time!'
'On your left!'
'They're everywhere!'
'Eat it! Eat that one!'
'It ate me!'
'That's not fair!'
'I was definitely bigger than the one that ate me!'
'Stupid game... Shall we play again?'
When I was seven years old, this is what my lunch breaks looked like: my best friend and I would yell at her computer while playing a game called Fishy. My best friend was from South Africa and every time she visited her family there, she'd come back with awesome online discoveries. Fishy was one of them. The objective was to eat all the fish in the pond, while being a tiny fish yourself. My friend and I were terrible at it.
'We're never going to beat this game,' I said one day. 'I bet there isn't even a real end to it.'
'My cousin in South Africa did it. He said you'll get a message that you broke the pond.'
'Impossible,' I said. Little did I know that twelve years later I'd beat that game myself...

From Envy's Make it Happen List
#31: Play Fishy all the way to the end
Status: Awesomeness achieved

Throughout the years there have been times when I didn't think about Fishy at all. Sometimes I gave the game a try again - only to fail after five minutes of frantic keyboard slamming.
After eight years I still didn't believe what my friend had told me about the end of the game. She lied about South Africa more often, just to see how much nonsense I'd believe.
At 18 I came close to beating the game, but I got reckless. A big purple fish ate me and I swore I'd never play the game again. Until I saw Markiplier play and beat Fishy. The rumoured ending was true. I knew there was only one thing I could do: I had to play and make seven-year-old me proud.

My hands were shaking as I waited for the game to load. I was supposed to write a report on my trip to Berlin for college, but this was way more important.
With a splash my character in the form of a red and yellow fish was dumped in the pond. Quickly I brought the fish to the middle of the screen. I'd learnt my lesson all those years ago: lingering around the edges would get my killed before I'd gotten the chance to blink twice. The pond was full of enemies: every fish bigger than me would instantly kill me by eating me, even if I only brushed it's fin...
This time I had a strategy though: stay in the middle, run/swim from the big fish and let the small ones come to me. For a while this strategy worked great. It took me some time to get to the point where I could swim around and eat the slightly bigger fishies. Then, somehow, I was trapped in a school of big blue fish. I let my fish zip around the pond like a kamikaze pilot, my heart beating at full speed, my palms sweating. I slipped out of a very dire situation with a lot of luck and the remnants of twelve-year-old gaming skills. I sighed with relief - and got eaten by a purple fish twice my size.

Fifteen bad words that I will not repeat here later, I was ready to try again. Same strategy, different result. Sooner than I'd expected, but still after quite a long time, I reached the point where I could eat almost all the fish. It felt so good. I had all the power in the pond.


Within a few minutes, the end was near. I couldn't even move my fish around anymore, it took up the entire pond. Then the message popped up: I'd successfully destroyed the pond's ecosystem. Like a boss.


For five seconds I was very happy. Then I realized that my fishy had eaten the pond empty, which is quite a horrendous things to do. I felt bad for all the dead fishies in it's stomach. Yet in a way I was also really proud of myself. I'd played a game, finished playing it nonetheless, that Markiplier had finished too. I was basically at his level for a few minutes. Say what you want, but that's freaking awesome. And seven-year-old Envy? She would've beamed with pride if she could see me grin at a screen with a quite disturbing message.

Stay Awesome!