r/place recreates iconic Bad Apple music video with jaw-dropping timelapse

The r/place subreddit recreated the iconic Bad Apple music video of internet and Touhou fame, taking the platform by storm thanks to its users’ creativity and collaborative efforts.

If you’ve been on the internet for any amount of time, you’ve likely run into a song titled ‘Bad Apple’ at some point.

The beat is extremely famous, and the original music video for the track boasts over 74 million views on YouTube at the time of writing.

It was initially published on YouTube thirteen years ago, in 2010, and features several silhouettes of characters from Touhou Project, a bullet hell shoot ’em up series of video games created by a one-man, independent developer that have spawned a slew of literature and other media.

The song itself is a remix of an older version of the track and has cemented itself as one of the most prominent pillars of internet culture over the ensuing decade.

The music video is also quite stunning, featuring fluid animation that transitions from one character or object to the next almost seamlessly. It has also been recreated a number of times over the course of the years, becoming a timeless ‘meme’ of sorts.

Reddit users resurrect famous ‘Bad Apple’ music video on r/place canvas

Although it’s an intimidating project, users on Reddit decided to take matters into their own hands and recreated the famous music video on r/place.

R/place is a subreddit that features an open canvas, which registered users can contribute to by changing the color of a single pixel. After they change a pixel, users must wait for a limited period of time before they can make another change to the canvas.

Therefore, it seems almost impossible that so many netizens would gather together to make their own animated version of Bad Apple as a community — but recreate it, they did, and the results are stunning.

A short timelapse of the pixelated music video was uploaded to Reddit by user AmsterPlays, which took Redditors from communities across r/Hatsune, r/TouHou, r/osugame, and others nearly 72 hours to complete the project. The animation is even flanked by Touhou characters and is, simply put, a major feat of collective effort.

Commenters are collectively congratulating each other, remarking on more difficult parts of the animation, such as recreating the music video’s yin-yang orb.

“Congrats to this community, crazy!” one user wrote.

“Thank you, all of you, for this event,” another said. “Doing this animation was amazing and very tiring.”

This is just the latest project to take over the internet from r/place after users collectively decided to protest against Reddit CEO Steve Huffman’s proposed changes to the site’s API.