a rant

Kano is ******* garbage. I wish you guys could understand the depths of my ******* rage toward this stupid ******* company.

FRHD was built off the back of Maxime's Canvas Rider. the only reason Free Rider still exists today is because of the hard work of Maxime, who made the first track database, who developed checkpoints, ghosts, rewrote the game in JS and HTML with a new rendering engine that improved performance a hundredfold. all the web dev work put in to make a db that amassed 1.5 million tracks over about five years, from the beginning of 2008 to the end of 2012. more popular than FRHD ever could dream to be.

all of those tracks on a site that never had intrusive ads, an admin who never took advantage of the community, never introduced ******* hats or "pro" subscriptions for coins. he simply added to the game for the love of the game. what did he get for his work? robbed and ******* shafted.

Ira, the owner of Free Rider (not creator, not a game dev in any sense), shut down CR, claiming Maxime stole intellectual property. Maxime was able to convince Ira to allow the tracks to remain playable, but the track editor and uploads are shut down. meanwhile Kano makes the extremely shitty FR3, then slightly less shitty FRHD, of course capitalizing on all of the innovations Maxime made over the years.

so the owner of Free Rider is totally fair in taking down a whole remake of a game he hasn't put any work into for the past 5 years! it is his property, right? we should respect that!

next up: every single community classic track is a track stolen from trackmakers. Kano did not have any right to do this, they did it without trackmaker consent. in fact, they actively disregarded the desires of Canvas Rider trackmakers like Gräggen and thefunkymonkie to have their tracks removed from the FRHD database.



these tracks were monetized by Kano, they ran ads on these tracks, they built the game and profited off the work of a hobbyist dev and thousands of trackmakers who made their tracks to be played on CR.

some tracks have over a million views. do you guys understand how much money Kano makes off preroll ads on tracks? and how many trackmakers see a single cent from their time put into the game?

let's flash-forward to current day. Kano and Ira are still making money off of your tracks, giving nothing in return beyond hosting the site. they don't give a **** about any of us. Eric hasn't been online since 2023. Kano won't respond to staff emails, and we don't have the ability to make any worthwhile changes on the site and barely have admin permissions on the forum. all of the new features that have come in the last five years or so have been community made.

the performance on the site when not using polygon's mod is dogshit. there are no new features, no new campaigns, no new anything. and the ******* fullscreen bug is still there. what kind of bullshit company can't even fix a ******* fullscreen bug to play a track?

Kano does not deserve any of your time. for the past year or so I've been strict on wanting to play by the rules, only creating a new track editor (as the FRHD editor doesn't run ads anyway) and directing all of the playing here on the db, not allowing uploads on the app, etc. and I've done a small bit of social media promotion, but it becomes more and more clear to me that I don't want to promote or encourage anybody to use this hellsite. it is garbage.

free rider is my favorite game. and while I can admit that FRHD ended up being a good addition to the series, I will not give any credit to the leadership at the company, only the game devs who cared enough to listen to the community and tried their best to make the players happy.

I know most of you guys started here. there's something to be said about the reach FRHD had on the chrome store or however else you guys found the game. but as I've pointed out here, this game would not exist without the community devs and players from even before FRHD, and the company has treated and continues to treat the community like ****.

you deserve better.

 

and actually I'm not done. I don't know if you guys were old enough at this point, but there was a McDonald's commercial made in ******* Line Rider.



Line Rider, the game Ira ripped off for the idea of Free Rider, has mass appeal in the form of videos because people sync music to it and post videos. people have made money off Line Rider, lots of money as some of their videos get millions of views on video sites. while maybe not bankrolled by Line Rider, the editor there doesn't run ads or anything like it afaik.

I feel like a big part of the reason that people like Maple get comments about "why would you spend so much time drawing in a shitty web game" and people undervaluing what the community does here is because Kano treats the players like that. like the community doesn't deserve anything for the hundreds of thousands of hours of drawing, making user-generated content for their game while Kano doesn't have to do any work. worse than ******* landlords that at least might take care of their rentals.

while money isn't everything, it's crucial to see how much your guys' time is worth, and how you are being taken advantage of by Kano.

we are literally the creators of the game content here. every single person here. whether you make tracks or make ghosts, you are populating their pages that they make money from. I want all of you to see what you are worth here. Kano doesn't deserve a community that gives a **** as much as you guys do. even on the forums, the amount of time people put into contests, informational threads, featuring tracks and ghosts with feedback, all the community here is supporting itself with no ******* help from the people profiting off of us.

 

what you guys do is ******* art. just because you ride a bike in the game doesn't mean that you aren't drawing every single line to create incredible works. in an unconventional medium sure, but some artists draw with stranger tools and items. it is not a waste of time and it is not wasted effort just because Kano doesn't let you see a monetary return on your work. they make money off of you, millions and millions of times your tracks have been played. you are the reason people come to the site still. YOU. people come to see YOU make a track, to see YOU make a ghost, to see YOU make a funny forum post.

**** Kano and their devaluing of every person here.

 

great post ! often me and ness will work in tandem on stuff and post simultaneously to boost threads, but in this case i just happened to be reflecting on this same sh/t only days ago lol. two days ago, i was poking through the thread wherein maxime announced CR was shutting down. Ira makes a visit, and increasingly acts like a d/ckhead the longer the thread goes on; so, in the spirit of the above rant, allow me to remind everyone that Ira is a slimy, greedy, selfish, dirtbag c/nt who cared nothing for the game except for the money he could squeeze out of it.

let me show you all a screenshot from his interaction with the cr community when it was announced it would be shutting down



community notes for this post:
> "i am the owner of the free rider franchise, myself and pete spent a lot of time and money building the original free rider 1 and 2." ira is not a developer, he is a business person (today, he's a real estate investor - cant be much more of a parasite than that!). free rider originally was a slight variation on line rider iirc. so the time and money he is referencing here is severely overstated; im certain he invested in the game, and pete - the actual developer of the game - would have spent a bunch of time. but it wasnt an original idea, and ira had sweet f/ck all to do with anything but bankrolling it. he is taking liberties - already - with the narrative
> "maxime is a talented guy who saw an opportunity" the opportunity being that ira did not have a track database developed for years lol. the community - including maxime, whose was the biggest and was making databases as early as in FR1 - made the databases for tracks to be uploaded!!!!!!!! the whole game prior to that was just a f/cking editor and a subforum on oml!!!!! to play other tracks, people would post them to the oml forums and share between friends. the ""opportunity"" in question is adding an integral part to the game!!!!!
> "but also was not 100% in the right in doing so from the start" maxime had the blessings of pete (and/or) ira to create track databases, i have screenshots from FR1 with proof of this!!!! but when CR became a huge success, ira wanted a piece of the pie
> "we know fr3 right now has a way to go, but it was made very quickly as a placeholder for the future" fr3 was a huge step back from CR because it still used flash in the big 2013!!!!! reading between the lines, CR et al were shut down because they were superior products to fr3 (and arguably frhd prior to the editor update in 2015), but ira wanted money now, and so - instead of releasing a product on par with CR and then sending cease and desists - jumps the gun to rake in as much money as he can, splintering and destroying the massive CR community in the process (it would take kano another almost 12 months from that post to release frhd publicly; do you think the old CR community is waiting around a full year for a slightly worse version of CR? whilst playing on the archaic fr3? f/ck no!!!! if he cared for anything but money, he would have waited or sorted out some sort of deal with maxime!!!!)
and of course, the worst-aged quip of all time in this game:
> "shutting down the clones is what will enable the future of Free Rider to continue and put the proper resources behind it." lol. the resources in question: editor update, minor additions to the old databases, cosmetics etc, an attempt at an iphone free rider gacha game, and then nothing for almost seven years running

but dont just take my word for it; have a read of what the dumb c/nt has to say in this thread here ! ira's posts start on page 6 - note the tone of someone who is a grown adult interacting with teenagers, who you would presume would approach the situation with some amount of maturity (hint: there is very little given the circumstances!!!!) https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/fr2db/canvas-rider-track-editor-discontinued-t33732-s75.html. youll even recognise some familiar faces in the thread too!

this is the pillar frhd was developed on; greed. no wonder kano ditched this sh/t the moment they couldnt milk it for all its worth with a mobile app, that was what they bought in to from the get go from ira

 

i hope a bigger game dev company helps frhd.app get a wider release onto steam or something of the sort. not to make the game more popular or anything, but solely to get kano to issue a lawsuit, and because the other game company is bigger, they will afford better lawyers, thus winning the lawsuit and bankrupting kano

 

I completely understand this rant. it's been 13 years since it's happened and let me tell you I am still ******* angry about it as you are. I don't do it for them though, I do it for me and the community and they'll never have that.

 

The history of the Free Rider series is incredibly unique and extensive, there are almost no comparisons when it comes to browser games. It baffles me that people don't know that that Free Rider was pretty much a copy of Line Rider. Sure, the idea wasn't originally, but everything turned out great, Free Rider 2 and Canvas Rider were massive, FRHD never reached that type of popularity. Then things changed for the worst.

As I began working on the FRHD Timeline, I became invested in the past history of the series, and I learnt so much that I didn't know before. Ira clearly was a d!!k and Kano doesn't care about the community, but what killed the series was Free Rider 3. The downgrade from Canvas Rider and the long wait for FRHD made most of the OG players leave and somewhat tarnished the future audience of the game. The funniest thing is how Maxime did everything better than what Ira with OML and Kano did with Free Rider 3 over two years before. They said they rushed the game, clearly why the game was in flash and not HTML. They rushed it so they could shut down Canvas Rider ASAP, all about the money.

I'm not 100% sure about Kano App's plans for FRHD and when they began working on it, but reading what happened in that time period in early 2013 was almost heartbreaking and anger inducing. People spending hundreds of hours on a browser game only for the best alternative to be shut down. Black Hat Rider upon investigation wasn't as big as I thought it was, it was more exclusive than I originally imagined. Volund told me it had a peak of 500 players. You could say the same about FRHD with people wasting their time as Kano doesn't reply to emails or give updates, but the community is quite strong with decent content still. I want to make content that has a lasting effect on this game, like the Timeline and my other pinned threads.

As Ness said, the community is what is keeping this game alive. It's also a real shame that despite the monitsation and Ads of FRHD that they couldn't find an easier way for people to join forums or have content from forums appear in-game. Kano didn't look at the big picture at all. And as Ness mentioned again, they couldn't even fix bugs like the fullscreen one. And yet over the years, mods, tools and scripts by people like Polygon, Calculus, Pie42 etc make the game operate better and more fun, proving Kano's lack to detail and fixing the game before adding new stuff. Some of the stuff they added they often removed or changed, the devs were so indecisive.

But in summary, this rant by Ness should be 100% taken seriously, Kano is taking advantage of us. Not even 3 years after FRHD released, the game updates pretty much stopped. The Ads, all they care about is money. They only time they come to help is if the game is being hacked as it's clear that the foundations of the game aren't secure, heaps of glitches too. FRHD's popularity has stagnated over the last 2 years. Older players are returning, forums activity relatively the same, same tracks being published. Unless Kano does something, our game won't reach a wide audience, especially in 2025. There is very little we can do, and even if we do something, it is not guranteed.

 

i've never even heard of Ira, thats how much impact he's had on the game

 

however, I am glad we don't make revenue from our tracks. If people were inspired by profit rather than a love for design and the desire to create, the database would be full of cheap attempts at grabbing your attention. it would turn into youtube which would be horrible to see happen to this game. we've gone through some rough spots but we're still dedicated players in 2025. i am proud of this community, no matter how small it is

 

looking at the thread i saw a message from someone named "Mickey_Mouse_Inc" (who i have no clue is, if i should tell me) and in a message he listed a pastebin link that says a lot about what Ira and Kano had done.

for anyone who wants a look at it here:
https://pastebin.com/qyQHFLMB

 

BRO Mickey_Mouse_inc is MMI, he made CO2 and CO3 with pssst and the first descent with me

 

oh shi-
mb

 

I'll gladly keep using uBlock Origin to put a tiny dent to Kano's revenue, like I've been doing for the last few years.

 

this is a good point. a beautiful part of free rider is that we make tracks because we love the game, and we're willing to create art and content without a profit incentive.

that is why the anger here is deserved. Kano takes advantage of this fact and profits on the work of every player here. because of community developments and continued activity on the db, by people wanting the game to continue to exist and thrive, Kano manages to do zero work and make more and more money off of us. every new track posted is another page view and therefore more money for them, no matter the view of a trackmaker simply wanting to draw on the game.

 

i could still use some money tho lol.

 

bro you made me cry

 

I've known for a while that Kano doesn't really care about us but there was so much in this thread that I didn't know yet. I wanna thank everyone who shared here for helping to raise awareness about the things that Kano has done.

That being said, this thread reminds me of an idea ShamatoZ and I had. A few years back we were thinking about making a YouTube channel similar to the FRHD Creators channel. We never really got down a concrete list of things we would make videos about, but the idea was to have stuff like tips and tutorials for ghosting, tips for things you could do in the editor, and videos about the history of the game. We both eventually got caught up with other stuff, and the idea never became a reality, but I still think it has potential.

I'm probably not the best guy for the job, but I've still been wanting to make a YouTube channel centered around this game. But now that I'm seeing how many knowledgeable people there are in our community, I think that a YouTube channel would work best if it wasn't owned by a singular person. If we had a YouTube channel that was run by the community we hopefully wouldn't have to deal with people burning out and quitting or becoming overworked.

One of the reasons I bring this up is because I've seen so many successful video essays about obscure topics on YouTube over the years, and I feel like this issue is something that other people might take an interest in. If we took the time to make a well-edited video essay about things that Kano has done then maybe we'll be able to bring more attention to this game. Even if the videos didn't do well at first, I feel like a catalog of videos about FreeRider could be the type of thing that blows up randomly. And if enough people are made aware of the situation we're all in, then maybe something will come of it.

I have a good mic (I'm also one of the few students with access to my school's recording studio), and I also have access to the entirety of the Adobe Creative Cloud. So I'd be able to help edit things and do voiceovers if needed. But I definitely don't think I could make this happen on my own, especially given the fact that I haven't been a part of this community for as long as others have. But I think that if people with more knowledge about the game wanted to help me, then this could be a really good idea.

If anyone has any feedback on what I've said then please let me know.

 

"Rising Above Corruption"

 

Capitalism has always been a crude method ever since the industrial revolution, and although we as a community arent as prominent as, say, the fanbases of other games that started small like krunker or zombsroyale.io, but like they care. It's also insane to learn that there are actual staff for managing Discord bots like Dank Memer and Epic RPG and they work just to make virtual users more accessible and fun to engage with, and I know they are experienced programmers and they stick to their promises.

If they make money, I'd say they have some valid reasons why, but Kano literally dipped on us, barely updating FRHD. And then Char left, and God knows who's responsible for FRHD's code repository. All I know is that with the many incredible add-ons and mods created by Polygon, Pie42, Calculus, Ness and isekeb (as someone who only racked up like 2 years of experience in Python, I deeply respect them as ghosters, creators and programmers), they make the current state of FRHD like s**t. It's like we're the dregs left behind by Kano's complacency and disregard for the artistic incentive and passion creators have, as well as ghosters who are still capable of making unbelievably difficult and wack ghosts. Kano takes that s**t for the money. We're like factory workers stuck inside a f**king Temu or Shein factory while the Kano CEOs or whatever horses**t they have back in Canada -- MY HOME COUNTRY -- and they make whatever money they find like how desperate people look in the "return change" chute of a vending machine.

I checked their website, and they claim to be still "working on" FRHD, which is at the bottom of that list. They can't even update the description. Their other games, while I understand the effort, is simply BS, not because I think they can't do s**t, since they are more adept at programming than me, but it's quantity over quality. Kano's other games remind me of those game demo ads that pop up back when I played Geometry Dash without the full version and piss you off when you can't press that small-a** close button in the upper right corner of the screen. It just pisses me off so much that they mooch off money from our creativity, regardless of the quality of the tracks we make.

I didn't ask to be paid for whatever stuff I put up on FRHD. I didn't ask for more streams to get royalties when I drop music. I also wasn't forced against my own will to be up until 2am at my place just to check some FRHD stuff. This is my choice, at my age I don't really give a damn too much about money except for preparing for university, but if there's one thing about Kano's capitalist approach, it's that they're an example of abusing and ruining the ideology of capitalism that if we were in the Cold War, the Soviets would easily have made all of North America become Communist.

Honestly, f**k Kano.

P.S.:
Maxime created the track database that we basically still use today. Ira swoops in and literally ruins the main intention of FR like Daniel Ek to Andreas Ehn but worse, and Maxime take the blame. ABSOLUTELY DETRIMENTAL AND UNPROFESSIONAL BEHAVIOUR. And when I learned about FR3 through TPlacella's FRHD Timeline or something related to that, it clicked. I can see why FRHD's popularity was also unstable; FRHD was kind of impacted, even overshadowed, by the lacklustre and unpretentiousness that FR3 sent ripples through. CR shut down, and Free Rider is literally dead in the water. As well as using Flash instead of the more secure and solid HTML to make FR3? Do they really show sympathy to players getting blasted with ads when they just want to see a drawing?