VVVVVV is a modern classic in the platforming world and it’s getting an update after many years of being left as is. The reason? Feedback from users in the open source community.

Released onto steam on 8th September 2010 VVVVVV had its source code released onto GitHub on 10th January 2020. This release was to celebrate the game’s 10th anniversary and to open it up to the public who had played it over the years.

The game’s creator, Terry Cavanagh, now returns to the Steam version to update it.

“We’ve got a big update to VVVVVV live in the steam beta branch “2.3-testing” – the first update to the game in nearly seven years. Feedback and bug reports very welcome!” Cavanagh writes, “As well as generally making the game run better on modern computers, the update finally adds 60fps support, new editor features (like ghosts) and fixes a huge number of longstanding bugs!”

As for the reason behind this, it was the community, but specifically one user.

“Virtually all of these fixes and updates are due to source contributions – in particular, from @Info__Teddy , who’s submitted hundreds of pull requests over the past year!” Cavanagh adds.

Checking out the GitHub page for the game and there have been 586 pull requests over the years. At the time of writing 571 of those requests were closed and 15 are open.

Looking over the requests and the username “InfoTeddy” comes up very often – 461 closed requests and seven open requests all stem from this one username. Now that’s dedication.

If you’d like to support the game on Steam you can still buy it for the minuscule amount of R55. Owners of the game on Steam can then access to the beta branch 2.3 to try out these new changes.

More recently Cavanagh was also behind the game Dicey Dungeons, a unique roguelike that combines dungeon crawling, deck building and, of course, dice.