Bennett Foddy

Bennett Foddy (born 1978) is an Australian video game designer based in New York. He is known for creating QWOP and Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy.

Foddy was raised in Australia and trained as a moral philosopher on topics of drug addiction. He was a bassist in the electronic music group Cut Copy and a hobbyist game designer while he finished his dissertation. During his postdoctoral research at Princeton University and time on staff at Oxford University, Foddy developed games of very high difficulty, including QWOP (2008), which became an Internet sensation at the end of 2010 with the rise of new online social sharing tools. He later became an instructor at the NYU Game Center. His most famous game aside from QWOP is Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, a philosophical, physics-based platform game released in 2017. He released Baby Steps in 2025.

Early life and education Bennett Foddy was born in Australia in 1978. His parents were academics. He studied philosophy in college and was working as a research assistant in the field when his childhood friend, Dan Whitford, started the Australian electronic group Cut Copy. Whitford was the sole writer for the first album but reached out to friends to expand the band. Foddy played bass, despite having little experience. When his duties to the band conflicted with his philosophy studies, he chose the latter. Foddy enrolled in a doctoral degree in philosophy in late 2003 at the University of Melbourne with an interest in cognitive science and human addiction and left Cut Copy in 2004. On the topic of leaving the band, he stated that the "touring life of waiting and partying did not fit my personality".

Career Foddy has said that his best design work happened while procrastinating on other work. He taught himself to program and design games starting in 2006 from online tutorials while working on his philosophy dissertation. In his first Flash game, Too Many Ninjas (2007), players defended their immobile ninja avatar against oncoming ninjas. The game mainly relies on reflexes and a small set of buttons. Its positive press encouraged Foddy to continue the pursuit. Still, Foddy hid this hobby from his colleagues to avoid the philosophy field's stigma against philosophers who do not wholly dedicate themselves to their philosophy work.

QWOP title refers to the four keyboard keys used to move the muscles of the sprinter avatar.

He moved to the United States as a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University from 2007 to 2010. and a maze of optical illusions (Zebra, 2016).

Foddy also expressed an interest in games history, particularly the English and European games not widely known in the United States. In 2014, his Indiecade presentation linked older, independently developed video games into the historical lineage of indie game development as it was contemporaneously known. In 2016, Foddy co-developed Multibowl, a competitive minigame compilation of scenes from 1980s and 1990s video games. Like the microgames of WarioWare, Foddy presents two-player, 30-second challenge scenarios culled from 230 commercial games, with a point awarded to the player who first completes the scenario's objective. Foddy was spurred by his interest in video game history and the accessibility of video game emulators. He privileged original titles in his selections. The game was exhibited at XOXO and Fantastic Arcade, and will not receive a public release to avoid legal issues.

Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy was released in late 2017. The player is tasked with scaling a mountain as a man stuck inside a cauldron using only a hammer. Wired described the game as both "uproariously, darkly funny" and "challenging to the point of impossibility." Foddy narrates the title on the topic of failure. The game was popular with video game streamers and nominated for the Independent Games Festival's top prize.

Personal life Foddy is married and lives in New York City as of 2018.