Baldi’s Basics

What is shown on the title screen

The frame shows the game’s start menu with a version label 1.3.2. At the top is the title: the word “Baldi’s” in green, “BASICS” in large black letters, and below it in red “in Education and Learning”. In the center stands Baldi himself: a bald head with bulging eyes, red lips, a green shirt, blue trousers and a long wooden ruler with markings. He stands at a blackboard, where the words “HISTORICALITY” in green and “YUM!” in turquoise are written at an angle. Nearby float yellow volumetric symbols that look like digits.

At the bottom are the buttons “START” and “HOW TO PLAY”, on the right a “Mouse Sensitivity” slider, and in the upper right corner a red window-close icon. In the lower corner the authorship is indicated: “©2018 Micah McGonigal”. The graphics are deliberately rough: three-dimensional and flat elements sit side by side, and the fonts don’t match. The contrast between the childlike, almost cheerful presentation and the game’s alarming content is what makes the frame recognizable.

Where the game came from

The game was made by a single developer, Micah McGonigal. It came out on 31 March 2018 for Windows, macOS and Linux. The work took about two weeks, starting on 17 March 2018. The project was created for the Meta Game Jam and took second place there.

The concept is a parody of 1990s educational games. The author named as his inspiration the 1996 program “Sonic’s Schoolhouse”: recordings of such games seemed strange and unsettling to him, and he tried to reproduce that feeling with mixed graphics, where flat pictures combine with three-dimensional models.

Who Baldi is

The character appeared before the game itself — in the same author’s comics, where Baldi was an inventor whose inventions always broke down. Later the author dropped the comic and moved the character into the game.

In the game Baldi is a strict teacher. The player collects notebooks, solves examples in them, and mistakes awaken anger in the teacher, who starts chasing the student through the school corridors. Where the name “Baldi” came from is not reliably explained, so it is not worth inventing a biography for him here.

How the game became a meme

In April 2018 the outlet Kotaku wrote a positive review of the game, and in May, when video bloggers including Markiplier played it, the game went viral. By August 2018 it had more than a million downloads, by December 2019 more than five million, and videos about it gathered hundreds of millions of views on YouTube.

Then fan animations, songs and modifications appeared. Later separate versions came out: the mobile “Classic” in December 2019, “Plus” in early access in June 2020, and the remaster “Classic Remastered” in October 2022. Frames from the game spread without context, so the title screen is easy to recognize even outside the game itself.

Caption examples for the frame

Below are several invented captions. All of them build on the contrast between the cheerful text on screen and the threatening plot.

“The teacher said the test would be easy.” The caption promises calm, while the ruler in the character’s hand warns of something else. Expectation and reality diverge, and that is already funny.

“When there’s a problem in the notebook again that can’t be solved.” A joke about the school feeling when a familiar object turns into a threat.

“YUM! is the only thing I understood in this lesson.” The word on screen becomes a student’s line. It works because the word is visible to everyone and sounds like an unexpectedly honest answer.

“Leave the ruler at the door, we’re starting the lesson.” The caption turns a piece of set dressing into a warning. Short captions here are usually stronger than long ones, because the picture itself sets the tone.

How to use this frame

The frame suits texts about the game, pieces about early internet memes and jokes on school themes: tests, homework, strict teachers. The authorship is printed directly on the image, so it is better not to crop the line “©2018 Micah McGonigal”.

The frame shows the menu, not a scene from the plot, and it should be captioned as the title screen: the buttons “START” and “HOW TO PLAY” can also be turned into a joke, for example about the start of the school year. If the topic is the character, it is better to rely on what is known about the game and the author’s comics rather than on guesses.