Who Made The Visitor? Zeebarf, Newgrounds and the Two Sequels

A Newgrounds game with a different protagonist

Jay Ziebarth, posting as Zeebarf, released The Visitor on Newgrounds in October 2007. Point-and-click adventures were common on the portal, but almost all of them cast the player as someone trying to get out of a room. The Visitor cast you as the thing trying to get in, and the whole design follows from that: every puzzle is about feeding the creature, and every solution is an animation of it eating something.

Why it was remembered

The art. Ziebarth draws in heavy black outlines with flat colour, and the transformations are staged like a cartoon rather than a slasher film, which is what made the gore watchable. The game is short enough to finish in one sitting and has three endings, so it was passed around and replayed. Sponsor and portal logos in the SWF are still there today; on this site the links they point to are disabled so a stray click never opens a tab.

The sequels

The Visitor: Massacre at Camp Happy followed in 2008 and moved the creature to a summer camp with a longer cast and a longer run time. The Visitor Returns, in 2012, sent the survivor of the first game back to the same cottage and put the creature in his path again. Both are more elaborate than the original; neither is hosted here. The 2007 game on thevisitor.org is the original SWF, run through Ruffle.

Flash to Ruffle

The game was written for Flash Player 8. Ruffle, the open-source emulator, runs that generation of ActionScript well, so the version here is the untouched file with a modern wrapper around it: it scales to the window, works on touch screens and needs no plugin.