If you are an advanced internet surfer, a god who knows all kinds of rotten internet memes, then you certainly recognize these things below.
You might instantly name a few well-known characters, roughly understand their backgrounds, or even know that you need to shout "Tung" nine times when saying "Tung tung tung sahur." But you definitely don't understand foreign "Shan Hai Jing" as well as today's kids do.
They can recite the names of characters from foreign "Shan Hai Jing" backwards, endlessly repeat these names in front of others, and even cosplay as these characters for real-life brawls... Countless parents believe that foreign "Shan Hai Jing" is overly sinister and should be completely banned.
But just as people debated "how immeasurable the impact of foreign 'Shan Hai Jing' is on children," another subculture circulating among young netizens quietly became parallel to foreign "Shan Hai Jing," even surpassing it in bizarreness, making people exclaim, "Are there still experts?"
Many parents turn pale at the mention of such content, even posting videos to criticize it. This is what we're discussing today—"Incredibox."
Searching for "Incredibox" online, you can see various forms of expression. Sometimes it's strange animations with rough visuals, high saturation, and illogical content, relying solely on sensory stimulation to attract viewers.
Sometimes it's a game, divided into different versions, but the chaotic introductions leave people completely confused, unsure of what the true "Incredibox" is.
If it were just this, it wouldn't cause panic among countless parents. But when you dig deeper, you'll find that both "Incredibox" animations and "Incredibox" games contain various bloody and violent elements, often turning the entire screen black or red, maximizing impact.
One moment it's a child-oriented saturation warrior, the next it's adult-oriented bizarre face-slapping, relying on contrast to generate stimulation and topic interest. This inevitably reminds people of a certain smiling flower. But clearly, today's "Incredibox" has greater influence.
Many children imitate the character images of "Incredibox," gradually delving deeper from child-friendly content into horror stages—although it looks quite ridiculous, you can't imagine what bizarre things they've seen, making parents exclaim that it's even weirder than foreign "Shan Hai Jing."
Children's旺盛 curiosity, combined with their strong tendency to imitate, has brought the mysterious culture of "Incredibox" gradually to light—thus giving rise to more and more questions.
What exactly is "Incredibox"? Why do some people find it eerie while others think it's normal? How did it become并列 with foreign "Shan Hai Jing," becoming a mysterious cultural symbol circulating among contemporary elementary school students?
To understand this, we must first return to Incredibox itself.
In 2009, the French studio So Far So Good developed an application called "Incredibox." On its official website, Incredibox is described as "like a game and like a tool," "a perfect combination of music, graphics, animation, and interaction."
The main gameplay of Incredibox involves controlling little figures on the screen to sing. Simply put, each figure represents a different music track, and players can mix by controlling different tracks. Essentially, it's about creating using official assets on this simplified mixing console, with real-time performance resembling a launchpad style—in short, Incredibox is an interesting music software.
Due to its interesting gameplay, Incredibox quickly gained a large number of downloads—in China, it was translated as Incredibox. But you must have noticed that Incredibox, translated as Incredibox, is very different from the bizarre "Incredibox" mentioned above—the most obvious difference is the character images. So why is this?
The reason is that although those bizarre cartoon images are called "Incredibox," these images do not come from the official version of Incredibox, but from the Incredibox fan mod Sprunki—it's worth mentioning that this fan mod named Sprunki also has a tortuous development history.
In August 2024, a 15-year-old named NyankoBfLol uploaded an Incredibox mod called "Sprunki" to the youth coding platform Scratch. For several months prior, the mod had been repeatedly taken down due to its bloody content. It wasn't until months later, when Sprunki was reposted on other platforms and discovered by countless Incredibox players, that it truly made a name for itself.
On the surface, Sprunki looks quite cartoonish and completely harmless. But remember, the more cartoonish something is, the greater the contrast—this is also recorded in #Funtime Friends.
The Sprunki mod has two modes. If you don't touch the "black top hat," the mod remains a friendly, child-oriented rhythm game. But if you use that black top hat, the game enters horror mode—in this mode, every character image undergoes special changes. They either go insane or bleed profusely, and the resulting audio tracks are all extremely noisy, completely turning into a horror movie scene.
It was precisely this dual-mode setting that made the Sprunki mod famous overnight. Various derivative works related to the Sprunki mod emerged and achieved impressive view counts. On YouTube, fan-made videos of the Sprunki mod easily garner tens of millions of views, demonstrating how popular these characters are.
Under the trend of the widely spread Sprunki mod, it even performed more explosively than the original Incredibox. According to the Sprunki Wiki, after the mod went viral, countless clickbait accounts and websites profited from it, some created large amounts of brain-rot content using Sprunki character images, and others developed reskinned games based on the mod to make money... Things spiraled out of control, far exceeding NyankoBfLol's expectations.
As the Sprunki mod spread further, people even mistakenly believed that Sprunki was the original version and Incredibox was just another version of Sprunki. This sparked new controversies. As the saying goes, fans' actions are paid for by the author; hackers attacked NyankoBfLol, causing his Discord account content to disappear; others used doxxing weapons, exposing NyankoBfLol's profile picture and real name.
In the end, under various external pressures, NyankoBfLol chose to delete the Sprunki mod he created and terminate the development plan for the remake, which is quite lamentable.
Although NyankoBfLol chose to stop development and delete the Sprunki mod he published, the热度 of this mod never decreased. Even, due to the disappearance of the original author, it no longer had a centralized platform.
Thus, Sprunki, completely脱离 from the original creator's control, began to grow wildly, becoming a decentralized carnival where anyone could create derivative works. Most of these derivatives focused on character designs, having nothing to do with the original game Incredibox. Stories about these cartoon characters were continuously expanded, various conspiracy theories were filled in, and it became a new pop culture phenomenon.
This phenomenon is also happening domestically. Moreover, since Sprunki doesn't have a sufficiently well-known common translation, it has become completely confused with Incredibox, becoming "Incredibox." In the gaming field, similar to early occurrences overseas, many people mistakenly believe that Sprunki is the original version and Incredibox is a modified version called "Uncle Version"; in terms of character images, they even refer to Sprunki animations as "Incredibox animations," even when no game elements are present.
Catchy Chinese names, the uniqueness of dual modes, horror content and conspiracy theories worth digging into, and numerous derivative works have made Sprunki popular in China for a while, ultimately attracting many children to participate.
In the comment sections of related videos, you can easily find comments from children who are very familiar with these images and even know the deep horror plotlines inside out.
This actually requires no logic, after all, curiosity is innate, and the bizarre stimulation in the Sprunki mod objectively exists. Moreover, there is a continuous stream of new bizarre derivative works being produced, making Sprunki particularly attractive, especially to children.
Just like foreign "Shan Hai Jing," it's just a bunch of "brain rot" memes with no practical meaning. However, the bizarre images generated by AI and the messy yet catchy character pronunciations still give viewers the illusion that their brain folds are being smoothed out, leading to widespread imitation and causing attracted children to memorize them backwards. Looking at it this way, Sprunki with its conspiracy theories seems somewhat more normal—at least this thing makes people think about what kind of horror plot exists.
However, whether it's foreign AI "Shan Hai Jing" or "Sprunki" called "Incredibox," their target users are not children. But once widely disseminated on the internet, the audience is beyond your control. These freely spreading pop cultures always manage to hit the interest points of children, leading to waves of imitation and learning.
Fortunately, most of these pop cultures are fleeting. Children will imitate them for a while and always be ready to learn new pop cultures. The person shouting "Tong tong tong tong tong tong tong tong sahu le er" one moment might be looking for the so-called "horror version of Incredibox" the next, and then shooting guns while calling for mom the moment after that.
In this current era, there is never a final moment.
They shape recommendation algorithms suitable for them, are simultaneously transformed by these algorithms, and finally complete their last underground exchanges within social circles. In this situation, perhaps only guidance from guardians can help avoid more negative impacts—you wouldn't want your child to go crazy over short videos all day, would you?
So, how should we view this matter? My suggestion is to let them watch it themselves—in this era, dark histories are all in 1080P. You can save videos of children mimicking and talking nonsense while watching "Incredibox," and let them see ten years later what constitutes an "immortal dialogue."