I turned the Odyssey into a stick fight you shout at
It’s nine in the morning and I’m alone at my desk, shouting POW at a stick figure in a crested helmet.
He hears me — his spear arm snaps forward. The other fighter’s shield rings like a struck pot, and the word I yelled bursts across the screen in capital letters. Behind them both, the silhouette of a wooden horse looks on.
My wife and daughter hear me too. My wife just says, “Dad’s making weird sounds.”
The old fights
If you were near a computer in 2001, you remember Xiao Xiao — the Flash stick fights that passed through every school computer lab on earth. No faces, no costumes, no dialogue — two stick figures, and better fight choreography than most films managed.
They still hold up, because a stick figure has nothing to hide behind: all that’s left is weight and timing. The slow wind-up, the smear of a fast swing, the half-beat pause before a hit snaps home. Strip a fight down far enough and what remains is rhythm.
I’ve wanted to make one for twenty-five years, and this week I ran out of excuses.
A fight you read out loud
The stick fight is a one-on-one duel in Greek kit: crested helmets, round shields, long spears. Beneath the fighters, lines of epic verse narrate the duel like a bard paid by the drama.
And the verse keeps stopping: at each beat of the fight, a word card appears — POW! CRACK! SLAM! WHIFF! — and everything waits for you. Type the word, tap it, or lean into your mic and shout it. The moment you answer, the thing you read plays out in the picture.
Movie fights work the same way, and I stole that with a clear conscience. Every stunt is planned weeks before the shoot; the only thing decided late is the cut — which take makes the film. Same here: the choreography is ours, and the take is yours.
You don’t press a button that stands for the hit. You say the hit, and it lands.
That’s why the prompts are comic-book words — the ones your teacher called onomatopoeia. POW is one syllable, and so are CRACK, SLAM, and WHIFF. A four-year-old on any continent knows what they mean, because they sound like what they are. And there is no dignified way to shout POW at a screen — I’ve tried — which makes the input half the joke.
One honest note about the shout
Voice mode has two layers, and I want to be plain about both: the instant you shout, the fight moves. That first reaction is keyed to the burst of sound, so the hit lands right on your yell. The game knows you cried out before it knows what you cried.
Then the round ends, and a small speech model reads the audio back. It grades your verse fidelity: did you cry POW as written, or did you grunt on the beat and hope?
That model is the same private engine behind our transcribe tool — Whisper, running in your browser. It asks first, downloads once — about 40 MB — and from then on everything happens on your machine; your war cries never leave it.
Five days to Troy
Nolan’s The Odyssey reaches cinemas on July 17 — five days from now. For one loud summer, everyone you know is about to have Homer on the brain.
To be clear, our game has no connection to the film. We went to the source instead: Homer has been public domain for twenty-eight centuries, which keeps the rights meeting short. The film will be enormous, and I’ll be in the queue for it. Ours is the other door into the same old story: dumber, louder, two stick figures and a wooden horse — and you on sound effects.
So this week, before or after the cinema, pick up a spear. It’s free, it runs in the tab, and the mic is optional — typing and tapping land the same hits. If you’d rather duel in silence, the typing test is our other arena — though you should know how that ended for me. And if the shouting leaves you wondering what your voice could do on a workday, that’s the itch Clabrate was built to scratch.
My wife had it right: Dad was making weird sounds.