The Slippery Slope
An essay by Iron-K, written in 2013
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My name - for the purposes of this document, at least - is Iron-K. But this isn't my primary Internet name, or even my only account on Furaffinity - it's a pseudonym that I made up in the early 2000s to mask my more fetishistic activities from people who know about my online presence. Under this name, I post stories that take place in various environments - but they all share one theme, however tangentially: furries getting covered in gunge.

I thought I was alone in enjoying this idea for a very large part of my life, but over the last few years, the community of slime fans on Furaffinity has grown far more than I could ever have imagined. And over time, thanks to vast and fascinating discussions with other people (both those who shared my fetish and those in whom I just saw extraordinary parallels) I've discovered so much about what made me the way I am. And so, with some encouragement, I wanted to attempt to lay out and explain the entire thing - how I discovered gunge, how it turned into a fetish, what I especially enjoy about it, and the entire unlikely journey that led me eventually - through very little conscious decision of my own - to here.

Here's where it all started. I live in America but I grew up in Britain, and the first time I ever saw gunge on television was on a game segment on a Saturday show called Motormouth, cheesily called "Gunge 'Em In The Dungeon" - though I saw it out of context and wouldn't be able to actually identify it as this for many years. In this game, four contestants were seated in a row beneath a looming mechanical nozzle that could slide back and forth between them, and as the nozzle clicked into position over their heads they had to name things from a list of categories that the host gave them - continents, counties beginning with S, months with an R in them, and so on. If they couldn't give an answer, a tense clock noise started up, followed by an alarm as the overhead nozzle spewed out a deluge of thick green slime all over them.

And I ran off and hid behind the sofa! This was like nothing I'd ever seen before - the slimy stuff itself as well as just the idea of the game, putting four people into this fearsome machine that could pour this stuff from its ceiling. I remember, as I watched contestant after contestant getting doused and then dragged off into the darkness through the double doors at the back of the set, wondering why they didn't get out of the seat and run to avoid it.

I grew up in the post-Tiswas era, the late 80s and early 90s, when gunge was a staple of both children's TV and television in general, and even some of the cleaner shows couldn't resist including it. There was a little-known game show I watched called Eyespy, which only had a couple of series - and I think that I enjoyed it for the spy-themed puzzle-solving elements in the early games, but as part of the final obstacle course, the contestants had to choose from one of ten phone booth-like things that the show called "gunge cubicles", where it was explained that only four of them would let them through.

This was definitely behind-the-sofa viewing as well, at least at first - my heart raced as I watched them hovering between the booths making a blind choice, then I'd watch hesitantly as they went up to one and opened the door, stepping inside and waiting to be gunged or freed. By this stage I had ducked and closed my eyes, just listening for the glooping noise that signalled that they'd made a wrong choice. But over a few episodes of this show, my fear slowly turned into a fascination, and I started feeling the good tension that they were trying to inspire in the participants - a heart-pounding moment as they waited to see if they'd escaped. A few times, I was able to watch the game fully - including one I remember when one contestant escaped clean on every lap and the other unfortunate one got gunged every single time.

Looking back on this, I'm not surprised that I was scared - first of all, being gunged caused a dramatic transformation on people, painting them all over and turning them - if done as thoroughly as the BBC tended to - almost completely unrecognizable under the dripping slime. There was another show called The Movie Game, a film-themed quiz which I remember didn't use gunge (making it pretty much unique among kids' game shows at the time, I think) but there was one game where a team were taken backstage to the "makeup room" and had to race against time to dust each other with powder and stuff, even drawing fake glasses and a moustache on to each other's faces. I remember not liking the moment when they came out of the game room and back to the main set looking completely different. At the time I may not have realized that they were all right, even though they never seemed upset by it and would be completely back to normal again after cleaning up.

The other reason I was scared was because gunge seemed to always be put alongside much scarier things, or presented as something that you were meant to avoid - it was certainly always supposed to be something you didn't want to happen to you, and at this stage, I couldn't tell the difference between pretend, fun fear and actual fear. In Eyespy, the other obstacles were all sort of James Bond themed and one of the regular ones involved having to save the kids' teacher from being dropped into a prop rock crusher. And having seen a Youtube video of "Gunge 'Em in the Dungeon" that recently reappeared, I feel completely justified in my fear of that in particular! Usually your mind plays up what you saw in the past, exaggerating both bad and good memories - but when I saw it again after so many years, it really did have that massive feel, with a hydraulic hiss as the nozzle clicks into place, and the feeling of inevitability as it slid back and forth between the contestants waiting for one of them to slip up.

I'm not sure how I discovered all these shows other than just idly watching children's television - I definitely wasn't seeking it out at this point. And there was another afternoon show with a studio audience - which happened to be presented by Orville the Duck (if you don't know him, do yourself a favour and don't Google it) - in which I saw... something interesting happening. They had a couple of games involving gunge - in one of them, they had to jump into a pool of slime and retrieve rubber ducks or something, and I remember feeling my usual discomfort when they bobbed up again with their faces stained green.

The other one was called Messy Monsters, and I can't remember much of the game - it might have involved having to fish bits of a dragon jigsaw out of a cauldron of slime and assemble it on a wall - but it was what happened afterwards that stuck in my mind. The forfeit for the losing team was to be put in a "dungeon cell" behind a giant portcullis, where a massive trough of gunge on the ceiling would be upended on to them. But almost every week without fail, at least one of the winning team would tug on the presenter's shirt just before it happened, and he would let them go into the gunge device too. That was the first time that I was aware that gunge wasn't just some diabolical thing you had to avoid - it was something that these children wanted to have happen to them!

The programme that sealed my interest, though - and the first one that I remember watching in actual interest instead of actively scared by it - was called Clockwise. It had been a clean quiz show for a while but had gunge injected into it when it was moved to Saturday mornings. Like the shows I'd seen before, it seemed to revolve around avoiding being gunged, with many of the rounds having one team member trying to save the other from the dreaded plastic booth. They would have to hit enough targets or collect enough items before the ticking timer hit zero, the alarm went off and their friend got covered in brightly coloured slime.

The show had other types of messy game as well, the kind that involved just having to throw slime everywhere, or pouring a basin full of the stuff over someone who got a question wrong - but I was endlessly fascinated with the gunge tank. This was a machine unlike anything that appeared in real life - a thing that looked outwardly like a shower cubicle or phone booth, but with the mysterious feature of being able to pump weird, thick, colourful slimy stuff out on to whoever was inside, accompanied by a hooting klaxon. It was the kind of warning sound that meant you were supposed to run, to get away - and yet they were very deliberately putting contestants in to them to face the gunge. And the slime turned on automatically (or so it seemed to the viewer) as the result of losing the game, with nobody flipping a switch or anything - unlike just getting gunge poured on to them by hand, it really seemed that they were at the mercy of this incredible, insane device. I used to wonder in fascination what it felt like - both the slime itself and just being put inside one of those things.

It took some searching back through my memory, but eventually I realized the exact moment that my awe of this stuff solidified into a real obsession, and it was one of the games on Clockwise that did it. It was a classic of the Crystal Maze type - a contestant from each team had to race the others to guide a loop along a twisting wire, losing points for each time they touched it - with the buzzer wired up to a gunge tank with their teammate inside. I still remember the exact way that it was introduced, with the presenter saying "In our version, the light comes on, the buzzer goes off... and... this happens" followed by a close-up of the mechanism at the top of one of the booths as it snicked down the way, releasing a column of yellow gunge for a moment before it clicked back into position.

That - and watching the slimy carnage that followed during the game, with all three gunge tanks clicking on and off and absolutely covering the kids inside in a palette of red, yellow and green - crystallized my interest in gunge machinery and the games that used it. The weird up-down motion of the nozzle beneath the conical reservoir stayed in my mind - nowadays I imagine it must have been on a cam system with one turn dropping the stopper out and replacing it, but to my young mind the mechanisms behind these contraptions was an incredible mystery - it was rare and special to even get a close-up glimpse of the machinery, the view on the receiving end of the nozzle typically being unknown to everyone except the contestant beneath. And by now I knew that the contestants weren't in danger from them - by this stage I wasn't fearful of the "transformation" itself and I remember how they used to jump up and down and shriek happily as the gunge inevitably poured on to them - but there was something else that was beginning to make me uncomfortable instead.

I remember that I was raised mostly on schools programmes from an early age, the ones that were about counting and geometry and reflections and all seemed to be presented by Fred Harris - I think that at this stage, I was still very early in school but had been given a head start mentally due to the television I was raised on. And I knew that my mother didn't like me watching shows like Clockwise - if I misbehaved she would always (half-playfully) threaten to tape over any episodes that I'd asked her to record for later viewing. Come to think of it, I wonder if any of them have survived in the stash of old VHS tapes...

But the point is that I knew she didn't approve of anything that she saw as... mindless, or just not making me think, and that especially included anything involving gunge. I remember one specific game that must have been on Double Dare or Run the Risk where the two members of a team were squeezed into a booth together and were showered with gunge, with the objective to "sing in the shower" (which meant screaming) as loud as possible to stem the flow and score more points. And I remember her watching over my shoulder and seeming honestly horrified - I think she had just missed the introduction of the game and thought they really were screaming in terror - but that incident definitely caused a shift in how I watched these programmes.

From then on, I hid my interest and watching them became a private and anxious thing in the rare moments that I could get the front room to myself (televisions in bedrooms were unheard of at the time!), with the volume down low and my finger over the remote control ready to change channels if I heard the door open behind me. Conversely, I always had to make excuses to be out of the front room if there were other members of my family in it and there was a danger of anything slime-related being shown.

At a time when every show on children's television seemed to be trying to outdo each other with amount of gunge and how many people they used it on, though, this was not an easy thing to do. There were definitely a few times that I had to watch, cringing, as someone was put in a gunge tank and I had to act like I didn't have any reaction to it at all (which, of course, is a much less convincing response than just having a normal reaction), worried that someone was going to turn around and somehow catch me thinking about it, or even just mention something about it, and I'd be unable to respond with anything but tongue-tied gibberish.

One of the most unexpected was on a morning cartoon that I think was from the USA but might have been Canada, which was called Spacecats. In this, three furry crime fighters were dispatched weekly to places around the world to foil some villain's far-fetched plan to take over the world... and in the last episode, one of them was gunged. And I don't mean just got a bit of slime on him like in episodes of Ghostbusters or anything - the villains of the week honestly had him in a spherical contraption, with the top hemisphere clear so that you could see inside, and a pipe with a nozzle on the end pointing down into a gap in the ceiling, and they quizzed him until he got an answer wrong and was covered in yellow gunge that filled the tank to waist height.

Unfortunately, in a panic, I had had to leave the room as soon as the contraption was revealed, because my younger brother and sister were watching beside me and I couldn't face having to hide my reaction - although my leaving the room, flushed with embarrassment, with no excuse... it must have raised a few questions in itself. I don't think I realized at the time that they wouldn't instantly question me about it - I don't remember them or any of my friends being particularly fascinated or embarrassed by gunge, but at the time I don't think that I realized anyone had a different reaction from the one I had, that of embarrassed fascination. My sister used to watch Get Your Own Back regularly, which always ended with someone having to take a spectacular plunge into a ludicrous amount of slime, but I had to feign disinterest and stay out of the room.

I'm not even sure what reaction gunge was meant to inspire in 'normal' people - was it meant to be funny? Just raise the stakes in a game a little for tension? Just because slime is fun? Perhaps a mixture of all three, depending on the game it was used in. Across all the messy game shows, there were games where contestants had to ferry it from one place to another, make their way through an obstacle course with sprayers or pits of it or danger of it dropping from above (or just attempt a task under an onslaught of it for no reason), or my personal favourite, just being trapped and having to try to escape before it was poured on to them from above. The confusing message across all of these was that they were setting gunge up as an obstacle or forfeit, something to be avoided - and then made it all but impossible to avoid, because getting covered in gunge was fun.

I remember a few letters to the children's pages of the Radio Times throughout that era. It was amazing just to see people talking about this - I wouldn't have dared mention it to any of my friends or family. The first letter writer said she wanted to appear on a children's game show but didn't want to be gunged, and asked if there were any where she could keep herself clean. I thought at the time that it was an unusual choice of word, because I had never thought of gunge as "dirty" - and couldn't imagine why someone would want to avoid the experience, given the chance! As you might expect, they suggested The Movie Game to her.

The second letter I saw was from a girl much more after my own heart - she said she loved watching the parents being gunged on Get Your Own Back and wanted to know what the slime was made of so that she could have a go at home. They didn't reveal their recipe to her - keeping up the great mystery, it seemed that they were keeping it secret - but said that it was made of the stuff that you got in school dinners (which is actually a much more truthful statement than I realized at the time) and that she could replicate it with "cornflour and a bit of imagination".

But the third was the most interesting - it was from someone asking how to apply to be on Fun House. Until then, I had thought of the television as a whole separate world where you didn't see people from real life - I lived in a very rural area that wasn't ever even acknowledged anywhere on television. I had never even given the possibility of actually being on these things a thought because it seemed so... unreal. Besides, I was shy - even though I had had dreams about it happening to me, they were always sort of frightening dreams where I'd found myself there because someone had sent me there, rather than me participating voluntarily.

The response to the letter said that the Fun House team toured schools and did some auditions there, picking the two pupils that they thought would be the most entertaining - and suddenly my mind was flooded with questions. What if they came to our school? Would I dare to put myself forward, or would I shyly back away in embarrassment and let someone else take the chance? What if, by the remotest possibility, I actually got picked? Naturally, none of those questions got answered because my school was out in the middle of nowhere (especially by the standards of these pre-Internet days) and they never came anywhere near us to audition anyone. But the way that you had to be one of the few chosen by some mighty hand only added to this mystery that only happened within the confines of the television.

That was another thing that made me simultaneously in awe of and uneasy about gunge, and that was that it was often used on the kind of trickery programmes by Noel Edmonds and Jeremy Beadle that were based around the idea of being able to get you no matter who or where you were, at their whim - this hand that selected people for the forfeit was some larger-than-life entity that you couldn't stop, much like the ticking timer of the gunge machines on a much larger scale. The Saturday evening entertainment show Noel's House Party famously had a collection of mobile gunge tanks - either descending on to audience members from on high in the studio or being delivered unexpectedly to people's streets on the back of a flatbed truck after viewers wrote in to set up their friends or spouses.

One of the most infamous was the Number Cruncher, a modified phone box armed with a gunge reservoir. The show would leave it in a pre-arranged area and then show it on screen next to some landmark in Britain, encouraging the audience to race to be the one to find it first and play the game. Once someone entered it, the booth would lock them inside and they would have 45 seconds to find the four-digit code that would let them out before they were gunged.

The first couple of times, this game was set up as if the participants really didn't know what was going to happen once they were inside, but I now know that they must have had at least some idea, and that the show wouldn't have trapped unsuspecting people in the gunge tank without some warning - there must have been some off-camera vetting of some kind first. But all of this gave the impression that these traps were everywhere, and it could happen to me, and... I didn't know whether I was scared or excited. I know I still can't look at the few phone boxes that remain without feeling a little nervous.

So that was the kind of environment I grew up in - the ubiquity of gunge on television and the constant threat that I was led to believe it posed in real life - but after all of that, I can't say when all of the above actually became a fetish. I can explain so many of the pieces that I like about it: the fun tension as someone's put into the drop zone (or as they try to save themselves or watch someone else attempting to), the screaming, laughing reaction that they have as they get covered, the way it pours and completely transforms everything it hits in bright colours... but I can't fit them all together into the puzzle of why it sparked a sexual response. I hadn't even realized the potential Freudian implications of my favourite scenario of it - of being drenched in what resembles a screaming mechanical orgasm - until many years later.

Perhaps it was just the repressed nature of my interest finding an outlet (and I should mention that you should probably skip this paragraph if you don't want to read about personal sexual habits). I know that the first few times I masturbated, I just imagined a classmate who had big breasts - the thought of imagining her being gunged came later, but when I thought about it, it made things... amazing. Eventually, in addition to thinking about the stuff that I'd seen on television, I started dreaming up games and devices of my own, and putting her and me into these challenges, connected together in a journey through an insane labyrinth that expanded night after night.

The unchallenged and peerless best time of my life for this stuff was towards the end of school, when I had a television in my room and could wake up and watch the Saturday morning show Live and Kicking in private with the volume down low and the screen strategically faced away from the door. They had a gunge tank built into their set, and in a regular game called "The Kid Gets It", would surprise a member of the studio audience by announcing they were going to be put inside it. So again there was the feeling for the entire audience of knowing that it could be anyone and that they were in danger of being in there, but I was very impressed with how they handled a girl who really didn't want to be put in - they encouraged her a couple of times to no avail and then asked if she wanted them to gunge her friend instead.

By now, this had taken hold as a full-blown fetish in my young mind. And with very few exceptions, it always seemed to be a girl about my age who was picked for the game - so weekly, I got to watch them squirming nervously inside as the presenters got that week's celebrity guest to speak while trying to avoid an unknown "trigger word", followed by the inevitable spectacle of the girl screaming and laughing as she got splurged by the booth. The nervous buildup and the gunging method itself both hit all of my triggers. At that stage of my life, it was all I could ever have asked for!

The era couldn't last forever, though, and the final series of Live and Kicking was one of the last times I saw gunge machinery on UK television. There was one show after it, called Twister, that was put together around the year 2000 when someone at ITV suddenly realized that they hadn't paid the US makers of Fun House about ten years of royalty fees, and the show was recognizable as a poor copy of Fun House in every respect.

However, if there was something remarkable about Twister it was its inconsistency. A lot of the time, the mess content would be just having to slide about in a shallow pool of gunge, or unsatisfactorily throwing flour everywhere instead, but occasionally they played games with a couple of massive square hoppers of the stuff suspended from the ceiling over two of the team members, accompanied by a pair of - and I am not exaggerating this in any way - slime-filled cement trucks. This was very much like a return to the style of game I'd loved from Clockwise, with one team member helpless under the slime - there was a game where one half of the team would have to run about ferrying the slime from the trucks while simultaneously trying to touch the triggers on the floor that would gunge the opposite team's girl underneath the tanks - and when they played these games, it really was spectacular, with noticeably loving gunge shots that went into slow motion to capture every drip and splatter. Disappointing as it was that that kind of game only got played occasionally, if that was the last gungy game show ever to happen on UK television, having boasted that game would be a really good way to go out.

I'm very aware, by the way, that talking about children's TV in the context of a fetish is an awkward thing at best. It's one of the reasons that I'm still so embarrassed about having an interest in all of this - that it's viewed so much as a children's thing, and when you're talking about a sexual response, you don't want people's minds to go straight to children. I was very fortunate that Britain had the thoughtfulness to provide so many adult gungings as well - so while the game shows of the 90s that shaped my interest primarily starred children, it's not out of the question to imagine over-18s getting the same treatment.

And why shouldn't it be? Some other things that fall under the category of "messy" seem so popular that I wouldn't even describe them as fetishes - many people love the idea of watching wrestling in mud, jelly, lube, and basically anything that involves bodies sliding together chaotically in something slippery. There was even a group of erotic pole dancers covered on Eurotrash one week (another great advantage of having a television in my own room) who performed with soapy water being poured on to them from the top of the stage, and with the opaqueness of the foam and the way it domed off their heads when it hit them, it looked exactly like they were being gunged. But I thought that the resemblance was just in my imagination, and even though I knew people in general liked... things that could broadly be described as slime, I thought I was alone in enjoying gunge the way I did for a long time.

That, of course, was sorted out by the Internet. Shortly after I moved out to university I dared to type "gunge" into Google for the first time ever, and was greeted with a small collection of sites on Geocities and the like that had picture sets of gunge scenes that I recognized from Live and Kicking as well as a few that I hadn't ever seen before. This was years before Youtube was invented and made video sharing commonplace, so these scraps of scenes were all that could be shared easily - but I squirreled those and the rare blocky 30-second videos that I could find away on my hard drive, fascinated and intrigued that there seemed to be other people that liked the same stuff that I did and made it available to other fans.

This was also my first exposure to foreign gunge shows. I had thought that, as gunge-filled as British television had been when I was growing up, there would surely be an absolute wealth of unseen slimy delights available when I had the whole world to choose from. I was very surprised at how much there... wasn't - there were a few here and there, many of them adaptations of British shows in themselves, but it seemed Britain had had a very special love of it - it was certainly the only country that dropped people into a four foot deep vat of the stuff on a regular basis.

There was Nickelodeon, of course - but there's something odd about its brand of chaos that doesn't quite sit with my own liking of this. I can't speak about how good it might have been in the past, but in my experience it's always seemed to... think it's far better than it is - it manages to promise absolutely ludicrous amounts of slime and then use them in the most disappointing way possible (examples in recent memory being Heidi Klum being flung bottom-first at a wall full of slime balloons in an all-over jumpsuit, and someone skydiving into a lake of vaguely green water).

But I've seen a couple of clips of a phone game on a show that I think was from the late 90s, Slime Time Live, which was pretty comparable to the British shows... with one interesting difference. America, perhaps due to being largely a more straightforward culture than Britain, didn't bother to disguise the fun aspect and treated being slimed by Nickelodeon as a thing of honour, and outright desirable. In the UK, the game they played would undoubtedly have been about saving the studio contestant from the gunge machine - a seat that could be rolled back along a rail so that it was in the drop zone between three huge buckets held on frames - but here, instead, the objective was to activate the massive tip-tanks and gunge them as their reward for winning the game. It's not a scenario that's all that much less appealing - the tension and buildup is still there, and in the few clips I've seen of it involving the female presenter of the show, the gunging was beautiful - but there's an interesting difference in attitude recognizable there.

At the time I discovered these videos, the community of slime-lovers was largely fragmented around a set of Yahoo groups with limited space, and from them I learned the term "WAM", for Wet and Messy. I have never liked the term much, even though there's nothing really wrong with it - I certainly can't complain about a word just sounding unpleasant when I love the word "gunge". Perhaps it feels a bit impersonal to me as it encompasses a very wide group of interests.) But as I discovered more and more little groups with a few files and a couple of spam posts each, it was quite fascinating to dig around and see what came up in searches for this thing that I thought I'd been alone in loving. One in particular caught my eye - it was called "messygameshowstories", and was exactly what it said on the tin - a group of people who, not being in a position to bring their ideas to life through the television, made up their own games and put characters through them in story form.

I don't think that I truly appreciated how incredible that discovery was, at the time - this was a sign not just that people liked gunge, but that they thought like I did, fantasizing spectacular sets for the deployment of it. But after my limitless repressed fascination with gunge while growing up, when suddenly faced with such an accessible array of videos and authors I began to realize that I liked some scenarios better than others (leading to my eventual discovery of the kind of setup I really liked which I mentioned a few times over the last million words or so). Mainly, many of the stories on the messygameshowstories group were overly cruel, or focused on the distress and agony of the participants getting covered - emotions that I'd never seen on the screen. On the shows I had watched, there was a little good-natured discomfort, certainly, a good amount of squirming - but it was never cruel, never truly... negative.

One night shortly after I discovered that this entire community existed, during the university break in spring 2003, I had a dream - I often got unusual dreams when I was at home because of suddenly changing beds, but this one was special and incredibly vivid. It was a gunge dream, which was rare enough to start with - I had had them occasionally before, but they were all from my own perspective leading up to the gunging, and I always woke up before it actually happened. This one, instead, starred a rather beautiful and voluptuous pink dragon girl, sitting naked in a clear sphere very much like the one I'd seen in Spacecats, and squeaking and squirming as she was drenched in yellow and blue gunge from above, the colours swirling together and forming a green mixture in the bowl formed by the the bottom of the sphere.

I woke up from that and was struck with the crazy idea of writing it down so that I could share it with the people that appreciated this stuff on the Internet. I hadn't really written anything since school, but I had enjoyed and been encouraged for my creative writing in English classes, and the standard of the written word in some of the existing stories was... not incredible, so I was tentatively hopeful I could produce something that people might like. When I got back into my private space at university, I opened up a text file and just started writing down the final moments during the countdown for this attractive pink dragoness, giving her a Welsh-sounding name and describing the gunging and her reactions as best as I could.

That was saved under the cryptic name "fgm.txt" (standing for "Furry in gunge machine") in a corner of my hard drive, but the idea didn't stop there. With a start made, I came up with a reason why she might be in there, a game show like the ones that had fascinated me but on an even bigger scale, and the scene I'd dreamed about that night wasn't the only idea that I had stored away - there were so many diabolical ideas left barely touched in that dream labyrinth that I used to think about during the night. But if this was to be a full game show, I needed some other team members.

I had had anthropomorphic characters in my imagination for a long time (and my entrance into the furry community could be another essay in itself), but this was their first chance to actually be in something that I shared with others, and I put a team together from the characters that had been at the forefront of my mind recently. The idea for Electra came from a drawing of a blue rabbit-like girl, the first nude furry picture that I'd ever seen on the Internet. Cleo was dreamt up as a sultrier version of one of my first furry crushes, Sally Acorn. Rachel, uniquely, was human when I first wrote her into the story, but there was a feline character I hadn't named yet - an enthusiastic California beach blonde type - who eventually inherited the name. And Gwen came out of nowhere in that dream and was given basically my own background and fascination, instantly becoming one of the characters that I still love the most.

The show needed a presenter, and after a couple of names and species changes, Alex was hired for the position. In the distant past of my imagination he was originally a silver lizard-like anthro who wore a futuristic Star Trek TNG-like eye-mask and had a hovering robotic assistant called Uero - his middleman with the machinery of the set, who he could call upon to open up paths through the base, prepare the games, free the contestants who won and gunge the ones who lost. This was just a sketch of an idea, and the "robotic assistant" role got switched to the antagonist, the base's computer Silicon (who really deserved a better name), and Alex was turned into a fox and eventually a red wolf, as well as changing to be - mostly - on the contestants' side. Even though he was never meant to represent me directly, he is something of a male Mary Sue - well-loved, charismatic, muscular (out of necessity for pulling team members out of the gunge vats!) and very popular among the ladies who he gets to lead through the slime-filled environment.

So that spark of a scene gradually had a backstory and a cast built up around it, and it turned into a full story from Gwen's perspective as she and the team were led through the huge set. I hadn't intended the story to resemble The Crystal Maze quite as strongly as it eventually turned out - the format grew naturally out of the way that I just needed a huge environment that I could fill with the products of my imagination that I'd built up over so many years (as well as throw in a few of my favourites that I'd seen growing up). It didn't have a name for a long time, but as it was so much like The Crystal Maze, I chose to name it in tribute to my favourite area of that show, a name that sounded big and mechanical and a little intimidating - Industrial Zone.

I'm really not a confident person in real life, and I had been caught out by friends who knew my online identity and had discovered my furry activities before, so I made up a pseudonym to hide my true identity - it was originally "Ironknuckles", a name chosen to be as far away as possible from anything I would ever have normally used, but I changed it to Iron-K fairly early on because it was also a name that was stupid. (Someone later asked if it had meant to be an analogue of "Metal Sonic", which would have been quite clever if it had been intentional.)

Even behind the comfort of a pseudonym, I really can't say what made me get over my shyness to post the first completed scrap of my story on the messygameshowstories group - especially as it involved furries, making sure that even the people who shared the fetish I was embarrassed about had a bit of a step to get over. Perhaps I got over it through my desire to see if anyone else enjoyed the two things together, hoping that they would speak up. And, to my surprise, someone did.

I unexpectedly got an email from the user now known as wamkitty on Furaffinity, who introduced himself as another furry/mess author and who was really interested in providing feedback on the story that I had so far. I sent it over to him, he pointed out the things he liked and areas I could improve on. He also sent me some of his own writing along the same lines, and he had wonderful personality to his characters... he was a guiding hand in the early days when I had no idea what I was doing, and I owe him a great deal for making the first Industrial Zone story what it was at the time.

That said, I've mentioned a few times that I don't really like the first Industrial Zone story these days. But don't misunderstand - I'm really glad that other people still do. A lot of it is just because I feel I can write so much more competently now, but there's also the way that in the story I was still experimenting with what I enjoyed, putting a bit of everything in - an excuse for food WAM, a bit of disgust in the muckier games, and so on. Some scenes were very sexual in nature due to Gwen sharing the same fetish as me, and I actually revised the story after the first version because I thought I'd gone too far for my own comfort. Basically, the story was written to cater to a lot of tastes rather than truly reflecting what I enjoyed all the way through - but it's because at that point I wasn't really aware of what I enjoyed.

When it was eventually finished - having become a rather larger endeavour than I had intended at about 30,000 words - I posted it on the Yahoo group that had got me started as well as ECGunge, a site that I had registered on in the meantime. At the time ECG was a fantastic hub of mess fans sharing their thoughts, preferences and experiences and just interacting socially, and I still visit it even though it's quietened down considerably today.

It was beautiful seeing the reaction that people had to this story. As I mentioned, being furry and messy together was a rare thing, and furries were still the most looked down upon Internet subculture of the time - but even though there were a few people who found the furry aspect a little weird, people were really fascinated by it. One of the moderators of the group - now Fyrefennec on Furaffinity - even said that the story had made her realize that she really enjoyed messing up anthropomorphic characters as well.

And then, something massively important happened, although I didn't realize it at the time - a message came into my inbox on the ECG forums, with the writer of it astonished that there was someone out there who had written a huge story about furries getting covered in slime, something that had been special to him for a long time. This was my first contact with Susi.

Being quiet and reserved, especially about my liking of this stuff, I was actually very nervous about talking to someone who seemed so outspoken and enthusiastic, but I connected with him over ICQ (this being in the days when anyone still used ICQ) and Susi and I became friends quickly - he was from America and I was from England, so we had a lot of different experiences to share with each other. And in his artwork, which was then on VCL, I saw the first drawings I'd ever seen of furries actually being gunged - a five-picture series of his character being covered in green slime with the dome shapes and splatters lovingly recreated - and I couldn't stop thinking about them. He enthused about Industrial Zone, and it's largely thanks to his encouragement that that story - which had meant to be just an experiment I did once in my life - became the series it turned into.

A couple of years of posting on ECGunge later, Susi encouraged me to join Furaffinity myself so that I could present my stories to a furry audience. It definitely took a lot of courage and convincing to hit that Submit button for the first time, but no disasters happened and over time, I quietly built up a small audience of fans there. It was incredible to see each and every one of them when they spoke up, going through the exact same revelation that I had had years ago - saying that they thought they were alone in this interest but that now they had found someone who was writing exactly what they had fantasized about. It was a huge honour that my stories were the ones to do that to anyone - for them to be found by people who were uncertain about themselves and their fetisehs, and to be the introduction that I had to scrape together in sporadic doses years ago.

Susi himself was much more visible on the site because he's an artist as well as a writer, and he had the confidence that I lacked, building up a sense of community among the scattered fans after they were drawn in by his artwork or my stories. It's thanks to him that we all came together, and he inspired a lot of things that became known even outside the community - for example, the first slime video from Tilt, who is now famous in the community for absolutely obliterating Greifer in all colours of the rainbow in his videos. The community of people who enjoy slimy furries is growing more and more, and more impressively than that, is just... existent, now, where there was little or nothing in 2003.

You can't last forever without karma catching up to you, and for me, that happened in the form of my first visit to Susi a few years ago. While at university in Hawaii, he had been spurred on to put on a stage show for families, and had the most experience in basic theories of slime equipment construction of anyone I knew. So when I went for a visit of a few days, I was very much aware of what was going to happen to me.

A couple of days into my visit, I was sitting in the front room, forbidden from looking outside at what he was setting up. I was incredibly excited at having something happen to me that I'd been so curious about for at least twenty years... and also very nervous. Would this dispel the mystery that had built up around this stuff all my life? And what if, in a fit of hilarious irony, it was actually completely awful and it put me off writing about it ever again?

I couldn't have asked for a better way to be gunged - he'd really made it as close as it could have been to the games that had fascinated me with the resources he had available. That afternoon I found myself seated underneath a suspended water barrel with an added spout and slide valve, and was quizzed with a homemade version of one of the most recognizable games from Industrial Zone.

In the first story, I had come up with a device that I had called the Pod, which was meant to be iconic of the series in-universe. It was meant to look like a relic of alien technology - a large dark sphere with softly pulsing lights, supported on three spindly insect-like legs. The player was seated in the middle beneath a spout on the sphere's underside, which would pour out gallons of alien slime on to them if they failed the challenge. It was actually based on something I'd seen from one of the space-themed final rounds of Double Dare years ago, where the team had to run under a very similar device before it opened - but frustratingly it was always set up to miss completely. In my version, they were seated directly underneath the pod with no chance to run, and the team had to search through a grid of alien symbols and pick out the few unique ones before the timer hit zero.

And suddenly playing it in real life made me realize what an excellent gunge game I had accidentally created. I had barely given it any thought at all when I first wrote it, but having a bit of paper in front of me with the same challenge I'd issued many teams of furry girls and finding in that moment exactly what I'd put them through... it was beautifully ironic. My favourite types of games are the kind that I grew up watching, like the Number Cruncher when people had to find a four-digit code by rearranging numbers - they appear to give the contestant a chance of escape, but are very difficult to do under pressure of time. Knowing that there's a tank above your head that's going to splurge you if you don't succeed makes it impossible to concentrate fully no matter how hard you try - it's a fantastic, thrilling kind of tension, knowing that this is about to happen to you and that it is unstoppable.

After my inevitable failure at the challenge, the slide valve was pulled and the gunge was released. And inexplicably (like most things about this whole fetish), it was both exactly like what I had expected and completely unlike anything describable on earth. For the first split-second when it hits your head, it feels just like water, and then an instant later it flops down over you and it feels nothing at all like water. The weight and feel of it were things that I couldn't have imagined - it really pushes you down as it slithers all over you, sort of trapping you underneath the flow just by its own... existence. And as the torrent from above eases off, you stop feeling the drips on the top of your head because it's already completely coated in a layer of the stuff - you're left with it clinging and crawling down all over you, not sticky but very... heavy and wet and slippery. It's amazingly... icky, in the best possible way.

Gunge as used at the BBC - and the stuff that I was covered in that afternoon - is made from an industrial food thickener, a hydroxyethylcellulose under the brand name Natrosol. The mystery substance that had enthralled me growing up is made up by mixing a powder with hot water and whisking it up to within an inch of its life, then leaving it to settle, cool and bond - and what you end up with is smooth, slippery... thickened water. It is very much like what you get in school dinners, as that letter years ago had said - I had always imagined it as similar to custard, but it's thicker than that. This is going to sound much more disgusting than I mean it to be, but if you can imagine the feel of the thick sauce that you get in mass-produced meat pie, when it's cold... it's that - fortunately without the unpleasant congealing or odour. For colour, the BBC used a pretty severe brand of dye called Helizarin, but if you're producing the stuff at home, food colouring will do almost as well, with a bit of shaving foam to give it its opaqueness - child-safe poster paint or tempera also works wonders, and you need very little to colour it.

And while I had enjoyed being gunged, I was worried about the magic of it disappearing now that I knew all of that and had experienced it first-hand. But while the mystery of the actual substance is gone, it's still completely unique - the bizarre way that it pours, twisting, separating into ribbons and forming smooth domes as it splashes against things and engulfs them, transforming whoever's underneath into a dripping, painted mess. When combined with a game, it's unique in the sense of looming tension that it provides without danger - the way it can make someone squirm in anxiety or anticipation, either way still looking forward to it happening... there's nothing quite like it.

And I still have an immense, unquenchable fascination with the gunge tank. As simple as it is at its core - just something that needs a valve or stopper to let a tank of liquid pour downwards at the right time - the idea of that switch being pulled at the mechanical level, by whatever actuator or solenoid is used to do it, makes my heart race. The thought that people used to be tasked with building these things - machines with the sole purpose of just gunging whoever was inside really well, often with extra nozzles being added at the top edges or from the front, or even filling with foam as the gunge fell from above... it's just overwhelming to me, even though to most people they're just stage props lying around somewhere in a BBC basement.

My fetish is very particular (though seeing objects of affection just covered in slime without the buildup is nice as well) - but I've learned from talking with many other fans of it that there are so many flavours of mess fetish, and mine is just a corner of what's enjoyed by the wider group - it's as if fetishes are never truly shared but are just completely unique to each person, intersecting at a few points along their complicated strands. Even just in the realm of substances, people can love more naturally occurring "slime" like mud or quicksand, lumpy concoctions of food like spaghetti in sauce or baked beans, or are thrilled by the idea of people getting custard pies in their faces - both literal pies and the shaving foam replacements. Ever since I found this community by having the courage to post my stories, I've been learning more about everyone else's fascinating desires and interests.

The thoughts about... control and the power fetish that I seem to have built up around my interest differ, too. The reason I love the gunge machines is that they give the impression of being so... powerful - whether in an enclosed booth or with an overhead nozzle, the gunging is (pretending to be) out of human hands and is... not being forced on to the subject, exactly, but is uncontrollable. For someone else, the way that the slime just dropped out of nowhere on You Can't Do That On Television might be their ultimate fantasy, for almost exactly the same reason - I've heard people say that the way it could strike anywhere gave it a larger-than-life, godlike quality, meaning that it could get you anywhere.

Even though I've come a long way since embarrassedly watching the 90s game shows when nobody else was around, none of the feelings surrounding the whole thing have disappeared. My parents came to visit me recently and we went to an outdoor activity place - and at one of the corporate events taking place at the back of the grass area, there was a dunk tank - a tarpaulin pool with a girl in a bikini perched above it, ready to be dropped into the water when the target beside her was hit. I felt the same rush of excited embarrassment that I hadn't felt in years - the hope that nobody else had noticed, or at least they wouldn't mention this thing to me and get me to have to hide my response! Apparently my fetish extends to all machines designed to administer semi-sexy punishments - I'm just glad (and also very disappointed) that it hadn't been filled with gunge.

But shy as I am about my enjoyment of this stuff, I would never trade it for anything. There was a thread on ECGunge a while ago that asked people if they would get rid of their fetish given the chance, and I was horrified by how many people said that they would because it made their lives too awkward - having to go through admitting it to girlfriends, or just out of plain shame about enjoying it. I'm proud that even though my fetish was something repressed and embarrassing for many years, I eventually found a way to release it and share it with others through the efforts of the people who stood up and created communities for it. Doing so led me - through a bizarre route that I couldn't ever have imagined - to meet a great group of friends today, who produce amazing stuff from their imaginations and who enjoy my writing in turn.

In so many ways, life would be a lot less fun without it.