Two lineages that were animation before they were games
Long before either showed up in a browser tab, Monster School and stickman animation were YouTube formats with fixed rules.
Monster School is a Minecraft animation format in which the game’s mobs - zombies, creepers, skeletons, endermen - attend a school and are put through challenges, usually under a teacher figure drawn as Herobrine. Herobrine himself is not an official Minecraft character at all; he is a community creepypasta that grew out of a hoax around 2010 and stuck hard enough that fan media treats him as canon. The format is episodic by design: each video is a series of separate tests, each test is a self-contained gag, and there is no continuity between them.
Stickman animation runs on a different engine. The premise most commonly credited as its origin is Alan Becker’s Animator vs. Animation, a mid-2000s Flash short in which a drawn stick figure fights the person drawing it. Everything downstream inherits that reversal: the stick figure is not just a character, it is a character who turns on its author or its world.
Both formats survived the port into playable games, and what is interesting is that the structure came with them, not only the cast.
Monster School kept its episodic shape
Monster School 2 runs at 800x600 and is tagged minecraft, monster, school, zombie and noob - a fairly complete summary of the format in five words. Minecraft monsters are trained at the school by the teacher the game spells Herobrin, and you take tests to establish who is a noob and who is actually a pro.
The tests named are a bottle flip challenge, parkour, and a roller coaster. That is an anthology, and it is an anthology for a reason: the source videos are anthologies. A Monster School episode is a sequence of unrelated bits, so a Monster School game is a sequence of unrelated minigames, and trying to impose a single continuous level on it would have broken the format. Its entire control scheme is left mouse button to begin the tests, which fits - each bit needs to be understandable in the two seconds before it starts, exactly as a gag in a video does.
Stickman kept its role reversal
Stickman Zombie vs Stickman Hero is the clearer case, because the game states its own ancestry out loud. It runs at 1920x1080 as a side-on platformer, and its own description lists its influences: stick war, roblox, minecraft, and noob versus pro. The plot is a stack of internet references - a stolen lucky block, a zombie boss chasing the thieves to return it to a roblox world, a stickman hero escaping and resurrecting allies as he goes - and it advertises zombie, baldi and stickman animations as content.
The structural inheritance is the role flip. You first play the stickman hero running from the zombie boss, killing zombies and reaching the level end. Then you play as the boss, and the game describes that half as playing against the animator. That is the Animator vs. Animation premise reproduced as a mode switch, and it changes your inputs to match: WASD or virtual buttons to move, left mouse or tap to shoot as the hero, and F to infect or hit when you are the zombie. The same geometry read from two opposed goals is what the source format has always done.
Where the lineage stops being a reference
Obby & Dead River is the endpoint worth knowing about, because it is the point at which this stuff stops quoting videos and becomes a genre in its own right. It runs at 1920x1080 in first person, in a Roblox-styled world, and it drops the anthology structure and the role reversal entirely. What is left is a single long route down a river of death past castles, fighting monsters, pirates and dragons toward a final boss, collecting loot and upgrading as you go.
Its controls tell you how far it has travelled from a two-second gag: WASD to move, Space to jump, Left Shift to run, Tab to free the cursor, and B to open an inventory. An inventory key is a commitment. It means a section you cannot clear might be a gear problem rather than a skill problem, and it means the game expects a session rather than a sitting.
Playing them in order
Take Monster School 2 first for the anthology, Stickman Zombie vs Stickman Hero second for the reversal, and Obby & Dead River last to see the lineage grown up. All three sit in /category/obby/, with the wider meme shelf at /category/meme/.
