Best. Video Game. Ever: Steam Hits Us With ‘Watch Paint Dry’

  That’s the thing about Steam, the App Store and other digital gameatoriums like that. The idea’s a real double-edged sword. On the one hand, it offers an easy medium for indie creators to share their gaming goodness with the world. There are some real masterpieces on offers, experiences that would otherwise never have seen the light of day. 

The problem is, this same freedom opens the floodgates to any old barrel of bollocks. That’s the curse of ‘shovelware,’ something that the Wii U eShop in particular is notorious for. With this kind of terrible in mind, it’s no real surprise that a prankster dropped Watch Paint Dry on the service undetected. It probably looked right at home.

Ruby Nealon was said prankster, and he managed to drop the 45-second ‘game’ onto Steam without going through its greenlight system or any other sort of quality control. The joke was, Nealon said, intended to highlight a ‘vulnerability in the service.’ Here’s IGN with the skinny:

‘Beginning with acquiring a Steamworks account (through unspecified means), Nealon found that he could fool it into thinking his trading cards - which he describes as a 'basic joke set' - had been approved by somebody at Valve. He then requested non-existent information that gave him a list of options, one of which could trick the system into thinking the game was 'released' To get Watch Paint Dry to show up on the store, Nealon manipulated a javascript function by adding his app ID and session ID - info from his trading cards - and voila, 'Watch Paint Dry' was in Steam's New Release Section.’

It all sounds a lil’ too complex for me, like those preteen tech geniuses you sometimes see hacking into top-secret government databases and such. The expolit's been removed since, but still, it was a neat little adventure for the dude. Let me be the first to predict: Watch Paint Dry for Game of the Year 2016.