I’m in the tutorial area of Big Walk, on hour seven of a day-long vigil. I’ve been sitting on this little yellow stool for hours, a glowing orb light in front of me at the center of a circle of stools. Also arranged in the circle are the bodies of three other players, stiff and abandoned by their hosts hours before. I’m tired. I’m bored. I’m ready to log off.
Then, I see it. Coming out of one of the starting doors. A glint of silver. A flash of red.
It’s him at last. It’s John Bigwalk.
I first learned about John Bigwalk in passing while scrolling through the Big Walk subreddit. My first encounter with the name was this post:
At first, I thought this person was just making some sort of goof I didn’t understand about the basic concept of a protagonist in the game Big Walk. But then I read the thread, in which people were claiming to have encountered someone in their games going by the name John Bigwalk. Some seemed to be joking:
But others appeared to be telling real stories:
I did more research. It wasn’t just a fluke. Some guy calling himself John Bigwalk really was joining people’s lobbies in Big Walk and making an impression:
Reading through the various accounts, I was able to assemble an idea of what was going on here. Normally, Big Walk is a game you play with a small group of intimate friends—there’s no random matchmaking or anything like that. But for those who don’t have anyone to play with, or who just want the experience of playing with strangers, various Discords and community spaces have popped up to facilitate people matchmaking themselves into groups. There, people will post lobby codes publicly and simply wait for players to arrive. And those lobbies are where John Bigwalk has appeared.
John Bigwalk, from what I could tell, has a few identifying features. For one, he apparently always talks in the lobbies he’s in and has a very pleasant, deep, good radio voice. He usually shows up as a character all in red. He does not help with puzzles unless very directly asked to participate, but he does come along with the group and observe and make polite (often humorous) conversation. And most notably, he seems to have the ability to fly around the map at will. Those who have witnessed John Bigwalk have written that he did not use this ability to mess with people’s games, but rather would help bring individuals who were lost back together if they requested it. And, occasionally, fly around just for show.
I also learned that there were seemingly a few other individuals also using this flying power who were not John Bigwalk. You can see it in this example, where the person in question pretends to be a developer. According to accounts, John Bigwalk would never:
I’m also pretty sure this person isn’t him, as they seem to have just kidnapped someone:
No, overall everyone who posted about John Bigwalk reported having a positive experience with him, with descriptions painting him as a friendly invader who was there for the love of the game. I love it when people take on larger-than-life personas in games like this (I wonder how Let Me Solo Her is doing?) so I decided to try to track down John Bigwalk myself and see if he’d be up for an interview. What ensued was what I thought would be a day-long, solo performance of Waiting for Godot…until the man himself finally appeared to make it all worthwhile.
Annunciation
I started my journey digging around for some Big Walk-themed Discords, but in all the ones I found I saw no mention of John Bigwalk, which suggested to me he hadn’t appeared to anyone in those lobbies. So I turned back to the old standby, Reddit, and made a post on the daily Looking for Group Megathread:
A few minutes after posting that, I thought better of my request and replied, saying I was opening my own lobby and if John Bigwalk wanted to come for an interview, I’d be there waiting all day.
So I opened up a version of the game I had played with two friends a week or so ago, where we’d just gone through the tutorial and nothing else. The gate in the lobby was open to the world, but all the puzzles were undone, which I felt was useful to have in case John Bigwalk for some reason wanted to do a puzzle. I grabbed a radio in case I wanted some tunes, turned on the light in the middle of a circle of yellow chairs in the lobby, sat down facing the doors, and waited.
I alt-tabbed, keeping this open on my left monitor so I could watch for John Bigwalk while working on my right monitor. Now, my screen was not this clear most of the time. In Big Walk, if you don’t move or talk for long enough, your character falls asleep and the world blurs and the screen edges darken significantly. So when I thought I saw a quick flash of movement out of the corner of my eye, at first I figured it was a trick of the lighting or something I’d imagined. But no: someone was in-game, and had run behind the structure to the right, hiding from me.
I switched monitors, shook my character awake, and slowly crept over to the structure to see what was going on. Sure enough, someone popped out: a character in (from top-to-bottom) red, teal, and orange.
“Hello?” I called. No response. They sprinted away, grabbing a light orb as they went. I chased.
I hadn’t really expected the encounter to go this way, which is my own fault, so I wasn’t ready with screenshots or anything. I sprinted after them into the courtyard. We played chase for a few moments, before something unusual happened:
Okay! They could fly! Was this the elusive John Bigwalk, then?
I wasn’t fully convinced. John Bigwalk seemed like a social guy, and this person was not interested in chatting. They flitted around for a bit longer, at one point taunting me from all the way up here:
Soon, however, the figure descended and, in a sense, spoke to me. Only typing in text chat, they told me at one point, “he’ll be here soon” before flying around some more. After a few more minutes passed (it was difficult to actually speak with them when they were running around), I finally just directly asked them if they were John Bigwalk. This is the response I got:
Okay. I guess not. I followed up, asking if this person was the “angelic herald of John Bigwalk” which also seemed to amuse them, but I didn’t get a straight reply. I followed them around with a cowbell for a bit. Eventually, they went over to the side, told me “he” would be here in “two minutes” and then, with the characteristic Big Walk pbbt sound, logged out. I was alone again. If that had been John Bigwalk, which I was seriously doubting at that point, I’d missed my chance.
I waited two minutes. Nothing happened. I waited ten. Still nothing. I picked up the Herald’s body and set it down in my little waiting circle. I went to a work meeting, warning everyone I might have to dip suddenly if John Bigwalk materialized.
But about half an hour into my meeting, something else happened: another player showed up.
Visitation
Okay, maybe the Herald had been telling the truth! Maybe this was John Bigwalk! This character was red, yellow, and green from top-to-bottom, like a traffic light, but it could still be him, right?
Wrong. This was not John Bigwalk. But this was a welcome visitor: a Big Walk enjoyer going by Ruwbox.
Ruwbox was here because they wanted to help. They told me they had actually encountered the man himself the previous night in a game they were in. They described him as “very good,” saying he played with them for around 15 hours (wow!), taking them through both of Big Walk‘s endings. Mostly, Ruwbox said, John had just observed their game and didn’t interfere. He described John Bigwalk as “tasteful in the use of his god powers” and “restrained,” though they added that he zipped around the island and “herded them like cats” when they got lost.
Ruwbox’s verdict was that their group “had super fun last night,” and they had only good things to say about John Bigwalk. But they also had a key piece of information: they reminded me that in a given game’s moderation settings, you can see the player name of any user in the game at the moment. Ruwbox had checked John Bigwalk’s player name during the game, and had Googled it out of curiosity. It turned out that John Bigwalk’s player name was the same as that of a small content creator, one with a Twitch and YouTube page. Ruwbox shared the name with me on one of the whiteboards near the entrance, hoping it would help me get a message to John Bigwalk.
After sharing this knowledge, Ruwbox departed, and I had another lead. I found the content creator in question: no Big Walk content, in fact nothing new on their pages for several months. They did seem to have a Reddit account with plenty of gaming-related posts, so I sent a very awkward DM with apologies in case this person had no idea what I was was talking about. But there weren’t really any other leads I could follow up on. So I arranged Ruwbox in the circle and sat back down to wait again.
This was the longest wait of them all. I sat for about three hours, afraid to get out of my chair and refill my water in case he appeared when I wasn’t at my desk, but for a long time, nothing happened. I was beginning to think I might need to give up and just write a piece about John Bigwalk based on social media posts alone before a third visitor appeared in a delightful pink-green-pink color scheme:
This visitor had a fantastic voice, but made clear very quickly that he was also not John Bigwalk. This person introduced himself as Bartholomew P. Skibbenheims III (yes, really), and told me he was here because he’d been trying to connect to other public lobbies listed in the Reddit thread all afternoon but kept getting connection errors. My lobby was the first one he’d been able to get into.
Even though his reason for being here wasn’t exactly relevant to what I was doing, when I explained the situation, Skibbenheims told me he had also met John Bigwalk. He confirmed a lot of what I already knew: John Bigwalk has a “golden radio voice,” doesn’t help with the puzzles or spoil the game for people, and “has got his flyin’ thing goin’ on” that he uses to ferry people around who ask for it. He shows up in “solid red.” And Skibbenheims also seemed familiar with the content creator name Ruwbox have given me.
“I like him overall. I would say that if it was my very first time playing the game—which that match was not, I’d already 100%ed it before—if it was my very first time playing the game, I probably, and this is just me personally, wouldn’t want somebody picking me up and ferrying me around. Like, let me get lost, let me have that experience. But from what I understand, he’s respectable enough. If you ask him, you don’t want him to do that stuff, he won’t do it. I guess technically, maybe he’s a hacker? But if he’s a hacker, he’s a white hat. He’s got no ill intentions toward anything.”
“His radio voice sounds like an American DJ that would be on [with a radio announcer tone] ‘Hot 107.9!’” Skibbenheims added. “But I don’t think he’s American.”
Skibbenheims was delightful and friendly, and we chatted amicably for a bit before he pbbted out to go find a server where people were actually playing Big Walk.
At Skibbenheims’ recommendation, I replied to my post in the Reddit thread one more time, mentioning I’d be on for one more hour that day waiting. I wasn’t optimistic, but after my encounters with Ruwbox and Skibbenheims, at least I’d gotten a fun story out of it.
Incarnation
It was just after 4 p.m., and I was feeling a bit dejected. I had to admit to myself that this was a silly experiment. I was banking on one guy to happen to be online during my specific working hours, see my post, and be both available and interested in an interview about himself. It would be wiser of me to try again tomorrow, maybe wait and see if the content creator whose name I’d been given responded to my message.
Then, right about when I was thinking of throwing in the towel, I saw it. A flash of red. And…silver?
He wasn’t in all red (I like to think he dressed up for the interview), but as soon as he opened his mouth there was no mistaking it. Golden radio voice. The ability to paint himself silver out the gate, something you normally cannot do. A slight European accent, and a very friendly demeanor. I checked the moderation settings, and the player name was the same as the content creator name I’d been given. I was sure this was John Bigwalk.
Apparently, John Bigwalk had been playing a horror game for most of the day, and once he signed off, someone in his own Discord server tipped him off that a reporter was looking for him. He told me he had nothing to do with the first person who came into my game and flew around. And he was up for an interview! We spoke for about 40 minutes, during which time I was impressed with how expressive he was with his character. This was clearly someone who had played a lot of Big Walk, and had gotten very comfortable with how to move the character’s arms and head as he spoke in ways that very accurately mimicked human, conversational gestures.
Though I was already convinced this was the man himself, I did ask him to demonstrate his powers, and John Bigwalk obliged. I assumed he would just fly around for me, but instead he asked me to stand up and “hold onto your seatbelt.” He picked me up, and took off.
An aerial photo doesn’t do it justice. It’s fun as hell to fly around in Big Walk, especially having seen both the game’s endings already and no longer feeling like there are secrets that could be spoiled by doing this. Satisfied, I sat us back down to grill John Bigwalk: Who was he? Why was he showing up in people’s games like some sort of playful internet sprite? What did he get out of playing and replaying Big Walk, over and over, with strangers?
The Tale of John Bigwalk
John Bigwalk is in fact a small content creator, and after some discussion he suggested I might keep his actual streaming name anonymous. He knows, given his player name, that it’s not exactly hidden information from those who play with him, but for now he hopes to keep at least a little bit of the mystique of John Bigwalk intact.
As a streamer, John Bigwalk has been having a bit of a rough time lately. He had some computer trouble that halted his streaming for a bit, and then his beloved dog passed away. He tried to get back into streaming after that, but more things broke, and he decided that what he needed was to focus on his real-life job for a bit, build up some time, and take an actual vacation before he got back into it. He’s still hanging out in his Discord and gaming with his friends, and he purchased Big Walk two days after release. He loved Untitled Goose Game (Big Walk developer House House’s previous release), and said it was a “no brainer” to buy Big Walk after that experience. He played it through with his friends, seeing both endings, and loved it all. Wanting to play more, he started joining lobbies through Reddit. People quickly dubbed him “Radioman” at first, and he quickly got a reputation of being “a little cheeky.”
“I’d say little bits like ‘You’re listening to Radio 102.2 FM, up next…”Billie Jean” from Michael Jackson,’ for example. And introducing myself with a ‘Good Evening!’ no matter the time of day. Small humorous jokes that tend to land well. From there, after a little while, I started introducing myself as Radioman, too, as it was easy for people to say that instead of ‘This red guy.’ I have my actual online nickname, of course, but the anonymity in the game felt special in a way that people don’t have to necessarily know your name, so I leaned into it.”
John Bigwalk describes himself as a “naturally curious person” and an avid gamer who’s played hundreds of games. So his first thought, he says, when holding a light orb in Big Walk, was ‘Can I stand on this?’ He could. So then he wondered, if he dropped it while in the air, could he jump off of it? And then, doing that, could he chain those things together? Still yes. And so by repeatedly dropping and picking up a light orb while moving forward and jumping in a certain way, John Bigwalk flies. He tried to teach me, and I couldn’t quite get it, but what I learned in that moment is that this is actually a known speedrunning strat that lots of people could do. It’s surprising to people who are playing for the first time or who don’t know the game, but it’s really not shocking at all that someone came into my lobby earlier in the day and demonstrated the same trick.
With that little trick in his arsenal, John Bigwalk says he started being a little cheeky with it, doing things like flying to the other side of a raised drawbridge early in the game and waiting for groups to lower it, then greeting them from the other side, saying things like “Ah, you’ve passed my test!” and the like.
“With those little things, a person eventually made the joke that I was ‘John Bigwalk,’ explaining away any and all discrepancies with ‘What do you mean? He’s simply John Bigwalk,’ which I found incredibly humorous. I figured that having a name like ‘John’ would be easier to introduce myself with too instead of ‘Radioman’ so I took the name and started using it in the lobbies after that funny moment. Tons of people would instantly latch onto it, get the joke, and run with it, too, to explain away anything which became the inside joke in many lobbies I’d join.”
John Bigwalk quickly developed a sort of code for how he would interact with those he played with and how he would use his powers, and it lined up with what others had said about him: he’s friendly and polite. He lets people figure out the puzzles on their own unless they’re so stuck they directly ask for help, and the game’s host gives the okay. Even then, he’ll usually drip-feed hints, just enough to get people moving in the right direction rather than giving away the whole answer. He’ll use his powers to fly himself around, but won’t mess with other people unless they give him permission, and then usually only to help them reunite with the rest of their group if they get lost.
“It’s all about context. The thing is, when you’ve played so many multiplayer games, you get a good idea for what people want to do, how they want to play the game. Every group is a little different, but when you interact with them for like, an hour, you can get a good sense of it, because in this game the Host is king. The Host is the one who created the lobby, they’re the ones who make their own rules. As long as I stay within that, I don’t necessarily see a problem with it. If they say, ‘Hey Mr. John Bigwalk, please don’t do this, don’t fly people around, don’t do this,’ I’ll be like, ‘Okay. That’s it. That’s fine.’ It’s their lobby, and I’m going to respect that.”
John Bigwalk has been in “tons” of different games now, and has mostly had good experiences in them. He tells me one of the best, most memorable moments was at the ending of one session, where one of the total strangers he had met in that lobby cried when they said goodbye.
“We were with the group, I was one of the first ones chosen to walk through the door…and he walked up to me and was genuinely sniffling, half-crying, and he was like, ‘No, John Bigwalk! No, not yet!’ To be seen! And imagine, you’ve only been playing with those people in one game for X amount of hours, and then to leave such an impact! It crushed my heart in a good way, to say goodbye after that.”
But it’s inevitable that one runs into someone they don’t vibe with eventually. He tells me about an awkward encounter where someone in his group had a mic on with terrible echo, and John Bigwalk was trying to help them out to no avail. Eventually, he suggested using Push to Talk, which caused the person to suddenly mash a bunch of buttons frantically and then shut down the entire game.
A day later, John Bigwalk ran into the same person in a different game. The person saw him, heard his voice, and ran up to him, yelling “Yoooou! Yooooooou!” while doing this:
Ever good-humored, John Bigwalk says he just responded in the same tone, going “Meeee! Meeeee!”
The game went on, with the person in question constantly trying to grab whatever John Bigwalk was holding and kicking the objects away, every time. John Bigwalk wasn’t fazed. He explained the issue to the host, who kicked the person out. Since then, John Bigwalk has seen them in a few other lobbies, but has gone out of his way to avoid them.
“Saying that you’re a humble person means that most people aren’t, but there’s no other way for me to really put it. I’m just here to have fun, meet people maybe, and just have experiences. The first time I had the experience meant I wanted more…and the fact that people want me on their journey so many times, what more can someone ask, than to be invited?”
As our interview drew to a close, I asked if I could get some footage of him flying around. Again, he surprised me by offering to fly me somewhere specific for the clip instead of just doing a solo trip where we were, so at my request we took off toward a nearby beach.
I need to note here that as we flew, John Bigwalk started singing the opening lines from “Breaking Free” from High School Musical. He has a lovely singing voice. I joined him a little.
When we got there, though, I realized he hadn’t brought an orb light with him. Didn’t he need that to fly?
Apparently not.
It was here that John Bigwalk revealed some of his other powers to me: he can change his own color at will, explaining how he always shows up in all red when normally you need another player to paint you. “Red-red-red is my signature color, if I’m not sure if the host is okay with [silver]. Otherwise, I’m a big, huge fan of silver as well. So I’ll just go red-silver-silver.” [The silver paint is hidden in the game, and its placement is such that it’s typically a late-game find.]
He can also see character names through walls, which helps him pinpoint lost souls in the world and help ferry them to their destinations if desired, though he usually doesn’t mention that so people don’t feel “weird about it.” He can see items, too, which is helpful for rescuing keys that people inadvertently chuck off cliffs. All of this is accomplished, of course, via mods. “I’m a big fan of modding. I love to play games through first vanilla, then if there’s cool mods for it I’ll install those mods and then play with those. Risk of Rain 2 is a really popular example.”
We pop up to a little viewpoint over the beach, still chatting about our hopes for Big Walk DLC and our shared belief that nice as it would be, Big Walk doesn’t need it. He tells me about one more power he has: he can separate the camera from his body, meaning he can get a screenshot of both of us simultaneously, which is something I wish the game had let me do to get group photos during my run with my friends.
John Bigwalk intends to keep popping into games for a while yet, as long as it keeps his attention, but also intends to start streaming again in October, so he may stop his Big Walk adventures then. Despite the fact that he’s seen all there is to see, he doesn’t get bored. He says he’s had groups that were “the equivalent of a SWAT team, very goal-oriented” but then other groups that are more emotional, or “groups that are the reincarnation of a golden retriever.”
“Every single one of those lobbies had new people and experiences,” he says. “That is what makes this game always fresh to me, always unique.”
Before I published this piece, I asked House House for comment on John Bigwalk’s activities. They declined, so I asked John Bigwalk what he would do if they ever patched his flying abilities out of the game.
He isn’t too fussed about the possibility. “John Bigwalk can still walk.”
