“Worth a Try”: The story of the now obscure Roblox forum pornographer
Author’s Note: This is a personal anecdote/story time from the Wild West days of the Roblox forums. Most of the evidence of ComputerRat and his animation’s existence have since disappeared from the Internet. I will use what I can remember in addition to the little evidence I have to tell this story. This story contains descriptions of Roblox related pornography and mentions of child grooming. If you are not comfortable with any of those topics, please stop reading.Otherwise, I hope you find this story interesting.
Tulpas are imaginary friends with a life of their own. Several believe that their Tulpas occupy their brains, and they can ‘switch’ between their mind and their Tulpa’s brain. This may have been the case for Roblox user millsbuddy, who created several Tulpas and introduced the Roblox forums to the idea of them. None of their Tulpas had as much success than FloralTigress, a female anthropomorphic tiger.
Floral was active in the Off Topic subforums, where she quickly caught the forum’s attention because she was a female in the forums, which were considered to be majority males. Almost inevitably, immature teenage boys would make threads making lewd jokes and/or remarks towards her, as well as the occasional troll who would filterpass the swear word filter Roblox had in place while making a post crudely describing what they would do to FloralTigress. Despite all this, nothing could have really prepared millsbuddy!FloralTigress for what would happen in late July of 2014.
Roblox Youtube animation was still being made in Roblox Studio at the time (and most animations still are), but by the mid-2010’s, Roblox’s most skilled animators began experimenting outside the box of Roblox Studio, and began to move to 3D animation softwares. TheCoderBunny, previously trying to gain a foothold on Minecraft animations, moved to Roblox animations, netting him more than 6 million views on Youtube. Soon, examples of Roblox animation went from the slideshow-like Lord of the Flies parody by the disgraced Youtuber MisterObvious, to more advanced animations like The Last Guest by ObliviousHD.
In 2014, advanced Roblox animation was only getting started, so Roblox’s forumers were surprised that fateful July night when one such animation featuring one of their own was uploaded to Youtube by a user named ComputerRat and posted to the forums. It was FloralTigress, on her knees, in front of Loleris, creator of that summer’s smash hit in the Games page, The Mad Murderer, giving him fellatio. The video was named “Worth a Try”. The video quickly spread like wildfire across the forums. Almost every forumer was talking about Off Topic’s Rule 34 before Roblox’s moderation team caught wind of the story and removed all the threads and banned anyone who discussed the topic. The story of ComputerRat, however, was still beginning.
For several weeks afterwards, ComputerRat would upload several more videos in a series called “A Rat’s Life”. These would begin with a shot of a Roblox rat mesh staring at something offscreen, before panning out to reveal that the rat was observing two members of the community in sexual acts. ComputerRat was open for requests, and two “lucky” members of community who requested an appearance would have their avatars having an intimate moment. This would not be without controversy. Besides the expected outrage by certain forumers over pornography being made of a kid’s game, one video in particular showed two forumers in prison suits, which immediately drew comparisons to prison rape, and many had actually believed the acts depicted on screen were actually that of prison rape. ComputerRat responded to these allegations denying that the acts were nonconsensual, and condemned rape as evil. Eventually, Youtube would take down their account, ComputerRat3D, and they would be forced to migrate to a new account named ComputerTheRat, which still exists to this day.
ComputerRat would eventually fade away into obscurity between 2014 and 2015, reducing his online presence to a few forum posts before becoming inactive. This would be the end of the story, an anonymous person coming to the Roblox forums, making porn of its members in never before seen animation quality, and then disappearing as fast as they appeared. As far as I can tell, they abandoned their account for a while afterwards. Speculation flew around as to who was the person behind ComputerRat. Many forumers accused FloralTigress of being the rat, which she quickly denied. ComputerRat himself posted on the forums that he was a user named gentaurg, but the current theory shifts the topic towards something more depraved than Roblox porn.
In June 14th, 2017, at approximately 2:30 AM UTC, the first allegations were posted claiming that the once beloved Roblox animator, MisterObvious, had been “using his fame to sexually exploit children between the ages of 13 and 15 years old”. 4 days later, Roblox youtuber Ruben Sim posted his now infamous video, “MisterObvious Is a Pedophile”, which now has nearly half a million views. The immediate backlash against MisterObvious grew more and more intense. MisterObvious himself reacted very harshly to these allegations, threatening legal action among other things, before finally leaving the Roblox community that had once gained him fame and admiration, who now scorned and hated him.
Before the allegations resurfaced, it was becoming more evident that MisterObvious might have been anticipating that the allegations would come out. Besides cryptic tweets, he began removing various videos from his account, and eventually he posted a video where he deleted all of his video files and deleted all of his videos off Youtube. This was not the first time a Roblox Youtuber had done this. ComputerRat, in April of that year, released all of their animation files in a video and removed their videos from Youtube, as well as publishing a note called “ComputerRat’s Last note”, which at least one forumer noted, “ …is in a similar fashion to an actual seppeku [suicide] note.”
Roblox Youtuber Kasodus on his now suspended Twitter account had pointed out the visual similarities between MisterObvious’ video deletion video and ComputerRat’s video deletion video. Further adding to this speculation, in 2013 and 2014, MisterObvious (in his alternative Youtube account AwesomeRobloxians) posted two animations clearly not done in Roblox Studio, in a style somewhat similar to the ComputerRat animations. In his tweet comparing the video deletion videos, Kasodus concluded that ComputerRat, the mysterious pornographic animator, was a secret side project by MisterObvious.
It’s not completely known for sure if ComputerRat and MisterObvious were connected, and we will likely never know, but whomever the real identity of the Rat is, the story of ComputerRat’s videos is one in a bizarre series of stories that one would experience in the Roblox forums.
Lycaon_Pictus is the creator of Insignificant Values and has been in the Roblox community since 2009. He can be contacted on Twitter at Lycaon_Pictus_R or his main account mexicanwilddog.
