Um, let me just show you this thing really quickly. She hit a wall, and that’s when she came to me. She’s gone on forums, she’s searched through comments on videos, she’s found this whole community of people who are like, “I’m looking for Bunni: How We First Met too! Do you know where it is?” In all her searching, she hasn’t found the game, she hasn’t found the creator. PHIA: Kris has spent the last six months, trying to find this game. I couldn't understand what was happening, And she goes to a couple of other links on other sites, they're dead, too. It looks it's loading, and then nothing appears. So she googles Bunni: How We First Met, finds it, she clicks on the link. PHIA: She wants to go back to that feeling of just being with a really good friend. KRIS: And it's not fair of me to like, compare her to her like, 12-year-old self. That friend who I had at that time doesn't exist anymore. KRIS: I'm missing that feeling of hanging out with someone who is like, that close to you. She was like, "What kind of person would make a game like this?" But she also loved it, and she found herself in her apartment in Belgrade really missing that time she played with Kaça playing Bunni: How We First Met. PJ: It just sounds like the person who made this game had a lot in their head, you know what I mean? Like they were going through something. And for some reason, you know you're supposed to end up with the gold digger, but you really want to be with the stripper. PHIA: But then, in the middle of the game, this very grown-up, complicated drama starts to unfold, where you meet this other female bunny who you really like. KRIS: Yes, you need to buy her dress and buy her rings and you need to buy her love. PHIA: Oh, weird! Like you had to earn a certain amount of money in order for her to be your wife. KRIS: You just-you had to provide for her so she would marry you in the end. KRIS: And you had your girlfriend-or she wasn't a girlfriend, she was more like a person you were trying to marry. But the way you think you can find that is by acquiring lots of money. In the game you’re a bunny, and all you want is to find someone who will love you. PHIA: You put them to work either in lumber mills or like mining for gold. PHIA: But you are trying to gain as many gems and coins as you possibly can, and to do that, you're enslaving other bunnies. You're the bunny king on this island and you hop around the island, popping bubbles and finding ghosts that'll help you out. She desperately wants help finding this game. And this is what Kris wants my help with. And there's this one flash game that Kris remembers playing that she says was the best game that they played. It was always like shoot a celebrity or play pinball. Like the cheap, the dumb, cheap games that were free.
KRIS: She had this old PC, and we would just spend just the entire day just playing Flash games. And then, one of those years, during one of those summers, they discovered computer games. PHIA: So this would happen every summer, like when Kris was nine and Kris was 10 and 11. We used to play inside the house like hide and seek and stuff like that. And then she like lived in this huge, like, it's the biggest house I was ever inside of. KRIS: Who lived like, across the street from me, and I would just climb over my fence, and just go into her yard. Specifically these summers she spent in her childhood with her best friend, this girl she was really really close with named Kaça. PHIA: And so she she started doing the thing you do when you’re lonely- she started reminiscing about times she was really happy. And there are these stretches, like days go by where she doesn’t have a conversation with anyone at all. PHIA: So she's living alone in this big city. I live alone, and I'm just like removed from all my friends and family. KRIS: And I've kind of been lonely these few months, since I'm not from Belgrade. PHIA: And last year she graduated high school, and she moved to Belgrade to start college. PHIA: Her name is Kris, she's 20 years old, and she lives in Serbia. And she was writing because she’d lost something on the internet and she really wanted help finding it.
So three months ago, I got an email from one of our listeners. PJ: We are in the studio with Phia Bennin. ALEX GOLDMAN: From Gimlet, this is Reply All.
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