On October 31st, 2015, I created a new Scratch account called BennettStudios. This wasn’t my first account on Scratch, nor would it be my last, but it was by far the most significant part of my time on the website. I didn’t expect much to come out of it; maybe some people would watch my animations here and there, but for the most part I was only making projects to have fun. I joked about my lack of popularity from time to time, even making an entire project called the Unpopularity Simulator, but in reality it didn’t bother me. I was perfectly content with having 10 followers and zero views on most of my projects. And then that changed. There were many turning points in the history of BennettStudios that led to my sudden spike in “popularity”. One of these was my series of Pink Sheep projects; the Mixtape AMV, a silly animation I made about a silly song, completely blew up after gaining the attention of Shadowblaze—I still remember the overwhelming excitement I felt when I saw that she had loved it. I made two more Pink Sheep projects, capitalizing on the success of the first, and was even somehow able to get Blazeheart to voice act in one of them (another one of my all-time favorite Scratchers). This led to a significant wave of Pink Sheep fans following me, but that was nothing compared to the oncoming avalanche called APOCALYPTIC. On June 22nd, 2016, after seeing Finding Dory in theaters with my mom, I came home to see the first episode of my animated series on the front page of Scratch. Somehow, some way, I had achieved something most Scratchers can only dream of: I had been featured. This was the day my Scratch career began, and yet simultaneously, this was the day my Scratch career ended. The response to the first episode was phenomenal. People loved it; it quickly shot to nearly 2,000 loves, and in a matter of days I had gone from 100 followers to more than 500. This was reinforced when I released the second episode, which reached Top Loved and stayed there for a full week. The message from my newfound fanbase was clear: make more APOCALYPTIC. And I wanted to. I wanted to do nothing but make more APOCALYPTIC and make more people happy. But one of the side effects of the series’ popularity that I had failed to consider was attention from actually popular accounts. APOCALYPTIC’s success drew the attention of people like FunnyAnimatorJimTV, Dhilly, and most importantly, the Storymode Team. In case you weren’t around during this time, or simply don’t remember, this was the age of Scratch where “Story Mode” projects were immensely popular. People like ClassicRampage and cutupuss were skyrocketing in popularity from projects based off of Telltale’s interactive story games, specifically Minecraft: Story Mode. The most popular of these creators came together to make a team of Scratchers focused on making storymode-like games. And one day, I received an invitation from one of them to join the studio. They wanted me, BennettStudios, to be a part of the Scratch-renowned StoryMode Team. There was just one problem: I had no intention of ever making a story mode game. But what could I do? Say no? These were some of the most well-respected people on Scratch wanting to collaborate with me! I couldn’t refuse the offer. In my mind, I was one of them. In my mind, I was now a famous Scratcher. (continued in notes + credits)
(continued from above) I quickly got to work on making my own story mode game called WAR; it was a story inspired by Fallout and 60 Seconds where a nuclear bomb goes off and your family is forced to hide in a bomb shelter. Was it creative? Of course not. But I needed something to make myself feel like I was a part of this team, so I stopped focusing on APOCALYPTIC and spent most of my time on WAR instead. This did not go unnoticed by my followers, and they made it clear they weren’t happy. While some people were excited about the game, most were concerned about the lack of new episodes of APOCALYPTIC and didn’t care that I was working on something else. To make things worse, the StoryMode Team went through a large deal of drama and eventually rebranded, then disbanded. The team was gone, and I had wasted a lot of time on a project that I now wasn’t going to finish. But by then it was too late. When I finally released the third episode of APOCALYPTIC, I was stunned at what seemed like a lack of support from my followers. In the first few days the project amassed about 50 loves and favorites; this was far more than what I should have been happy with, but I had come to expect a much greater response due to the success of the first two episodes and was accordingly disappointed. In a desperate attempt to regain the popularity of the series, I asked an upcoming Front Page Curator to curate the episode, and they kindly obliged (unfortunately I can no longer remember who the FPC was). This gave a major boost to the third episode’s popularity, sending it to Top Loved for a period of four days, but the same problem persisted for episodes #4 and #5. Even though there was a group of 40-50 people that still really cared about the series, in my mind everyone had moved on. I wasn’t popular anymore. My “fanbase” dwindling took a major toll on my motivation. I rarely wanted to work on Scratch projects anymore, and it was very obvious; the quality of the projects dropped consistently throughout the series, which coincided with APOCALYPTIC #4 being released two MONTHS later than I had originally announced (keep in mind that this episode was literally put together over a total of four hours). After the end of Season 1, I gave up altogether and stopped working on the series at all. Every day I would tell myself that I would start up episode 6 tomorrow, but every day tomorrow would arrive and I would say the same thing. I tried to build up hype for the second series by unsharing all of my projects except for a short teaser, even though I was very aware the episode was never going to be made. At one point I tried to make a comeback by creating “BennettGames” and restarting APOCALYPTIC as a video game series, but the account was extremely short-lived and never released a full project. Finally, in September of 2018, I officially announced that I was leaving Scratch for good. I still periodically checked in to view others’ projects, but I was done making them myself. And for a long time, I stayed true to that self-promise. The only project I had made in more than a year and a half since that time was an update about why I was happy I had left the website. But then I saw the ending of the Scratch Saga. WazzoTV’s Scratch Saga was a massive collaboration of many of the best animators to ever create on the website, and in July 2019 he released the final part of the saga that simultaneously represented the end of his Scratch career. It showed that he was moving on from Scratch while still giving his fans a proper goodbye. That’s when I realized the one thing I had never given my own followers: closure. I never provided any closure on the rest of APOCALYPTIC, and I knew that despite the fall in popularity there were people out there that wanted to know how it ended. That’s why I’m here right now, writing a massive page of text instead of doing something fun. I want to give you closure. On June 22, exactly four years after the first episode of APOCALYPTIC was featured, I will be releasing a project titled APOCALYPTIC: The Full Story. This project will go over what I had planned for the second and third seasons of APOCALYPTIC, which unfortunately were never created. I have no idea if anyone will actually watch that project, just as I have no idea if anyone is reading this, but just the idea that someone would feel more satisfied with the story gives me enough motivation to finish it. Thank you so much for sticking through this entire story—it means the world to me that you would care enough to read the whole thing—and I hope that you’ll join me for the ending of APOCALYPTIC. The ending of BennettStudios.
