Jon Blask, who was wonderful playing the part of Grimloft in Cryptozookeeper, very nicely provided me with an icon file for the game. You can download it here, (please right-click and download) and then use your favorite Internet Search Engine to figure out how to make it appear as an icon to Crypto instead of whatever the default icon is. I will now tell a story.
There are things that are recognized on the Internet as being cryptids of note, and there’s trash like the hand spider. I can say with complete confidence that I wasn’t aware of any particular example of them when I decided to put one in my game. I just… I knew there was gonna be human DNA, and I knew there was gonna be spider DNA. When you combine the two, you really get a licensed Marvel Comics character with more than 40 years of backstory, storylines and history, all of which they tossed in the shitter to make the execrable third film. I felt that putting such a character in my game might be a bit “off-limits” in the current entertainment climate. Thus a hand spider. I see now that there are a few other examples through Google Image Search of people riffing on the same idea.
I think the biggest fake creature involving spiders that people can just use without getting their ass in a sling of litigation is that of the camel spider. The camel spider is supposed to be inspired by a real thing, Solifugae, and the Solifugae has a website — http://www.solpugid.com/. You’ll note that the opening page says Welcome to our website. This is because spiders of all forms are sentient, evil little pits that should never be trusted. Even if their websites look like they are either from the late 1990s or a typical state-of-the-art FM radio station.
The thing is, you don’t need much source material to fake a spider story. They all look like they’ve just arrived fresh from galactic slaving schooners, so they don’t become any more terrifying if you introduce the “giant” spider or whatever. You can’t multiply great evil by great evil and get something useful, which is why Lewis Carroll was such a poor suspect for Jack the Ripper.
I have an update coming soon about a limited-edition hard copy pack. It’s not limited edition because I am trying to play games with people, it’s limited edition because I am afraid I’ll lose my ass, financially, and I want to minimize the damage. More on that by the end of the week.
OK, I guess this post did something else than get you an icon file, but the ico file is the real star here, and I think you will agree. Here’s the link to Cryptozookeeper, hosted on archive.org if you’d like the entire game.
My dad has often said, if spiders were the size of dogs, one of us would have to go. Seriously, spiders are some of the creepiest critters to crawl the earth, and no amount of knowledge about how good they are at keeping other pests at bay keeps me from smashing them on sight. As far as most bugs go I’m generally a “live and let live” kind of guy, but since each spider I see may be the one that carries the “grow to dog size” gene … spider, meet my foot.