Eel Slap (eelslap.com) is a website in which a video is played of a man being slapped by an eel. The user can ‘control the eel’ with the video scrolling through where the cursor is located.
Both the video and the website were created by Act Normal, a web development team.
History
The video and code for the website were originally created as a promotion for a small fighting game that primarily involved fish slaps. The promotion for the game became popular in Japan shortly after and a standalone domain name, “eelslap.com”, was made shortly after its explosion in popularity, in which the website was moved to said domain and stripped of any promotional ties.
A while ago we created a little fighting game where you got to slap people with different kinds of fish. It definitely sounds a lot more fun than it actually was. We made a promotion video for the site, where we had some fun with a high speed camera and some fish. Per (one half of Act Normal), took the clip of him getting slapped by an eel and made a quick little web toy, just for the amusement of a few friends.
Sometime later, we notice there is a LOT of traffic to the server where it was hosted. Apparently the link had just spread like wildfire and it was a big hit in Japan, without us having any idea. After coming to terms with being some kind of bizarre web celeb, Per bought Eelslap.com and put up the site there. Since then it’s had over 30 million visitors. The Internet is a crazy place, kids. A crazy place.