Perhaps a dozen, but yeah I get your point, as in it would be pointless.
I was a weeb, I don't feel very in tune with it anymore.
Dragon Ball had aired in syndication under the radar, I didn't really get much chance to watch it, but what actually started me on this journey was finding a copy of "No Need For Tenchi" at my local library. From that it was Toonami, then Internet ecchi sites, then fanart sites, and onward.
Inceldom was less common pre smartphone which is why the forum is younger
B
It'll be five people.
There's already more than 5 over 35's mentioned in this thread alone, though it don't matter as the idea will never come to light Bro.
B
Nah @Emba is pushing 60. Sorry dude, don't mean it to sound that brutalPlus @FrustratedWhiteMale is also in his 50's, though he hasn't been active for ages.
Damn, I thought he was like 40. My mistake, uncle Emba.
And what about game culture. What kind of games you were involved in across ages. And what other parts of the culture were you indulged in.
This is really interesting. Like talking to someone who has seen it all.
I don't much like the OP's tone. Makes him sound like an ageist normie zoomer flexing his zoomer supremacy out of pure bullying.
I'm an oldcel by this forum's standards. Its still kinda bizarre to see guys here that are my dad's age. They still be cool tho
Damn he was last seen 5 months ago i hope he is ok. I completely forgot about him and his creepy pictures of sex dolls sitting around table.
I knew he was a boomer
Forgot about those damn dolls jfl! I remember the black one had rip marks on her arms, probably from hanging her on hooks
Those are incels
My very very first video game "console" was a VIC-20, but I almost never touched it. It was more like a computer, and you needed to read textbooks to understand how to do stuff with it. My parents got it for me because there was this commercial that aired when I was a kid that convinced them that this was basically programming for children, and if I start now I'm gonna be in demand for jobs when I grow up. Anyway, I didn't touch it. But I did lie and say I was "working on stuff."
The first console I bought with my own money was an NES from Toys R' Us. Speaking of copes vs. a healthy social life. I liked to believe I had friends in high school, but they never came over to play video games with me and I never thought to invite them over. I like to tell myself it was because my parents were persnickety about letting people into our house. It was never clean enough for their liking. But they insist "No, you could've had friends over, we never said you couldn't have friends over." So maybe it was partly my not really caring that much about them. I switched schools for my senior year and never made an attempt to reach out to them again. Spent senior prom at home playing Wizardry. A game I liked to make characters for. If I had friends, I would've put us all in the game, and said "Okay it's your turn, what move are you gonna do?"
In adulthood I managed to gather a little more money and I spent that on frequent rentals. One notable rental was Mortal Kombat, Sparkster, and Awesome Possum. I remember it so distinctly because I was mugged that night and they stole my games and I had to pay to replace them.
I was also an early adopter of the 3DO.
Very expensive, very useless, it gathered dust because the N64 was not long after. When I got the N64, I think the game I played the most was Pilotwings 64. It was just the perfect game to chill with.
It was a little after this that I got my own computer. That came with PC gaming, which to be fair I didn't get the best exposure to. I mostly played DOS games. Hero's Heart, The Pack Rat, SkyRoads, Champions of Zulula, Hocus Pocus, Baldies, the Hugo trilogy, and they were fun, but console games had 3D graphics, PC would always be second, I figured. But I didn't have any friends, and access to the Internet was making me feel like "If there was some way to play games with people over the Internet, that would be the ultimate. Console quality games with people over the Internet." Which reminds me, it was around this time that I decided to get a Game Boy because they were coming in color, and Pokémon was starting to become a thing. I liked the idea of having a magic animal companion, but again, I wished I could battle people over the Internet. There were games like that on the Internet where you could play with/against people, but I wanted to do that with Pokémon and other "real games."
As the century drew to a close, I discovered Smash Bros.
This commercial blew my mind. Yes, perfect! What IF all of the Nintendo characters were friends and lived in the same universe? It was the perfect video game, basically. Even though you couldn't play it online, I wanted to look into the World of Nintendo as this single, vast place where all of the people that I thought once belonged to separate universes all live together and are friends. It was like a story I could enjoy alone. It didn't have much compared to future Smash games obviously but it was the gesture alone that was enough.
The 2000s brought with it MMORPGs. Specifically Graal Online. It has graphics that were a knockoff of Zelda: A Link to the Past. And this is an example of that whole "Notable names in various nerdy things" thing. For instance, Jay Fubler Harvey was a notable anime guy. And Graal, when you played it, you had to log onto a server or "playerworld" I think they're called today. Because theoretically, any player could make a server. I think you had to pay to do it, maybe that's why I never did it. But I did want to do it. Because there were notable names like LiquidIce and AcidIce and Jubei Saotome who had contributed to the Graal community with their servers, I wanted to be like those guys. I wanted to be an anime notable, while also doing Graal servers and stuff. And any other stuff I could think of. Like Jubei Saotome. Saotome is a good example of this. He wasn't just known for making a Graal server, but he also did funny Internet animations. I wanted a business card like that. "Graal Server Maker/Funny Internet Animation Maker/etc." A list of titles related to stuff I liked. I didn't actually make a live server, but I did plan one, I fiddled around in the offline developer, making characters and maps and stuff and thinking "Man, what if someday I was to put this online?" Crafting my world.
Eventually the 6th gen would come along. That brought a new Smash game, and it had Event Matches, which I loved, because they were like chapters in the story of the Nintendo saga. That's how I saw them. But what piqued my interest was that this Xbox thing was coming along. And the way I saw it was, gaming had two flavors. Japanesey, and Americanny. Sega was kinda fading compared to the Genesis era, and in the Genesis era, Sega was effectively the serious, gritty "Americanny" answer to Nintendo's kiddy girly stuff. I liked both, but I was interested in the contrast. And with Sega very quiet now, I was interested in seeing what Xbox would be as the inheritor of this "Americanny" style, being an actual American company. I think it came at the right time, too. The early 2000s in America was the perfect sort of "American gamer" culture. That trash-talking Dorito-eating Monster-swilling gamer image you envision, it had its birth in the early 2000s and the coming of the Xbox. Also because this was a brand new console, I wanted in on the fandom. Again, I wanted to be notable in all things that I liked. I was looking forward to what would be for this future video game empire. Who would be their "Mario," for instance?
Then I saw this commercial for Blinx: The Time Sweeper.
Then I figured "Oh, this, right? Surely this is Xbox's Mario." I made sure to be an early adopter. And true to what anyone could see at the time, Sega and Sonic eventually dropped the console battle and could be played on Xbox and Gamecube.
Oh! Another candidate for the Xbox mascot, some were saying, was the Oddworld franchise. Even though it started on Playstation. But Munch's Oddysee was an Xbox exclusive. Oddworld games were another one of those games I just relaxed with and burned away the hours on a cozy day.
Which I enjoyed a lot more of because around 2003 or so I lost my job. I was between opportunities a lot, and so I had a lot of time to explore other nerd stuff on the Internet. It was around this time that I discovered ROMs and emulators. So many games I didn't get a chance/have the money for back in the day, so I did a lot of that. Played a lot of the Shining Force franchise. These ROM sites were also another example of how hobbies blend together. ROM sites like Angel Roms didn't just feature ROMs. They had a section for "Anime Girl Pictures." They had a section for "Angel Roms Babes." It was all related. If you like ROMs, you probably like anime lewds. That's why all the ROM sites back then had hentai ads, and those GIFs of the girl with the ribbon. You know the one.
Also, if I was gonna be notable in the community, I had to know where the "community" was. There were chatrooms, yeah, but I think the real hubs were forums. And it was around this time that I decided I would make it official with the forums and join as many of them as possible. With the same name. Because it was about brand awareness. Jubei Saotome is called "Jubei Saotome" where ever he goes. I spent most of my time on the Mortal Kombat/Midway forums. Mortal Kombat: Deception was on the way and I wanted to share in the enjoyment with the Mortal Kombat fandom. I wanted to be notable in the Mortal Kombat fandom. Like Jubei Saotome was notable in the fandoms he's notable in.
Which raises another aspect of video game culture, particularly one important to Mortal Kombat: Flash videos. Whether they be sprite animated or hand drawn (Saotome did both) these were a big hit for fans of video games, specifically Mortal Kombat, because everybody worth their salt had to make some kind of Street Fighter vs. Mortal Kombat video for Newgrounds or Albino Black Sheep, or Dagobah, or TX Mafia, there were so many dedicated sites. Or just some website, they could be hosted separately. One of the sites I and many others visited back then, The Kombat Pavilion, is still online today.
The guy who started it is actually running a YouTube channel now. So I guess he's never been more successful.
Anyway, with it came the Flash videos we enjoyed back then. As well as comics and MIDIs and all the other stuff that made a decent fansite/shrine. And I thought "Okay, I need to be like Jay Fubler Harvey, and Jubei Saotome, and Tabmok99, and the people who make the Flash videos on Tabmok99's website." I guess if I had to pick a single person to idolize at the game of mostly-video-game-based Flash animations, it would be MajinPiccolo. He also had his videos hosted in multiple places, and he was "King of the Flash Portal" on Newgrounds. And he had his own studio website, Dungeon-Studios.com, where he and his collaborators would post their stuff. I wanted to do that. Have my own Dungeon Studios, and maybe my own collaborators.
Mortal Kombat was seeing a pattern of releasing a new game every year. They weren't always good, that's what a production schedule that demanding will do to you. But because there were frequent updates like that, the forums were always jumpin'. There was always something to discuss, whether it be rumors of "Super Unlockables," or maybe someone just had a funny YTMND to share. I was playing a lot of Smash Bros. Melee at the time, so I lead a lot of "Mortal Kombat/Smash Bros compare & contrast" discussion.
And I still played MMORPGs. I think around this time, for one reason or another, I had to stop playing Graal. I think it stopped being free or something. So I moved on to a new game called "Endless Online."
Endless Online - Massive online RPG
Welcome back to the free classic online rpg!
This was a time in MMORPGs where you just hopped on Yahoo and searched "anime style MMORPG." I don't think World of Warcraft was a thing yet. There was Ragnarok Online, there was Gaia Online, but Endless Online was my favorite, despite being a much shallower game. I'm not sure which I spent more time on, but the Midway forums and the Endless Online forums/global chat/IRC room were my main hangs for a while.
Some time in 2006 Newgrounds changed their slogan/tagline from "The Problems Of The Future, Today" to "Everything, by Everyone." I remember being a little let down by this. Because at this point I was committed to being some kind of important nerd, and what was crucial was not going "mainstream." Preserving the countercultural nerdy/punkiness of all my hobbies and how they interconnect. This was kind of a hangup for me, probably more back then than it is today. For instance, Linkin Park. I considered that within the purview of these hobbies of mine. The Meteora music video had a Gundam in it. Plus a lot of anime fans liked Linkin Park anyway. So I figured if you like anime, you like this alt-rock stuff that's happening a lot now. But then Linkin Park collaborated with Jay-Z for "Collision Course." And I was all like "No! Jay-Z is too mainstream! They're trying to make Linkin Park mainstream! Linkin Park is for us, not them!" And you might be thinking "Rap is not new to Linkin Park. Nor are rap/rock mashups." And I would tell you "I know that! It's not because Jay-Z is a rapper! It's because he's MAINSTREAM!!!" And so that was an attitude I carried into 2006, when I decided to be mad at Newgrounds for changing their tagline.
My drive to cling to non-normieness led me to 4chan, which I spent a lot more time on in 2006 because the Mortal Kombat fandom was kind of dying around this point. Late 2006 to early 2007. Because Armageddon was presumed to be the last Mortal Kombat game ever. And so there wasn't much more to talk about. My time on the Midway Forums was fast being taken up by 4chan. Problem was, 4chan was anonymous. And I get that's the point, but I wanted was a community. People I could know. And for people to know me. I considered becoming a tripfag, but I decided on doing a much stupider thing: Signing my posts. As in...
Blah blah blah whatever I would post in a typical 4chan post
~FrothySolutions
...making sure to include my e-mail address. Somehow I felt like this was more definite. That I might "lose" my tripcode or something because for some reason I felt like it was only stored temporarily. Anyway, I got lots of...
Disregard that, I suck cocks
~FrothySolutions
...as well as e-mails from people saying they didn't care who I was and to stop signing my posts. 4chan was good if I wanted to find porn, or wanted to learn where a certain image came from, but a community it was not.
But what was a community was GameFAQs. And Nintendo was entering a new and exciting time. The Wii era. Super Mario Sunshine wasn't a "must buy." But when I saw that in Super Mario Galaxy you could walk on spheres, I was like "I need to get in on this fandom. This game is beautiful." The Nintendo Channel and Wii Shop Channel, they weren't games but if you look at my hour log you'll find that I spent most of my time on those. Just browsing. Watching trailers, learning about games, checking out demos. But most importantly, a new Smash Bros. game was coming. With Kid Icarus and Zero Clothes Samus. And a Smash Bros. Dojo with mostly-daily updates. And they were having a party over on the GameFAQs Brawl board. Waiting every day for a new update. Filling the waiting period with shitpost after shitpost. So many ASCII memes. Except we didn't call them "memes" yet, a "meme" was something you saw on 4chan. These ASCII threads were "fads." People would post their erotic Samus fanfiction, their erotic Peach fanfiction, their erotic Zelda fanfiction, YouTube was just starting to snowball so there were lots of interesting YouTube links people were posting, I remember one guy posted a video of some dude with a bag mash on his head who warned of some coming suffering, then cut his own hand open. It was crazy shit. There was dramatic forum politics, there were boys simping over girls, there were account suicides where people would post furry porn of Krystal, who wasn't even in the game but the thing is, Smash is about all things Nintendo, and anyone featured in the games. So Krystal was fair discussion on the Brawl boards. And when Sonic was confirmed for Brawl? Are your kidding me??? I dare say it was the most fun I've ever had on a forum. Over the past earlier years I had been going through the motions as far as my goal of being an important nerd, but the GameFAQs Brawl boards (and I guess accessory boards we kept an eye on, like Smash World Forums) renewed my fight. Maybe it had more to do with that I had a truly steady job again at this point and could afford to buy more video games stuff, but at this point I was like "This community, I need to make stuff for this community, I need to be important to this community." Mortal Kombat, if I'm brutally honest, was dead to me by now. I didn't need to be anything regarding Mortal Kombat.
But what did being important to the Smash/GameFAQs community entail? I should probably be some kind of pro Smasher. Those are notable names. Mew2King and the like. Sure he nutted in someone's bed. And we all knew back then, and no one cared. We all would've nutted in that person's bed because being a weird autist was part & parcel to being part of this community. I needed a YouTube account for Smash related videos. I saw a video at one point comparing how fast each character in Brawl was. I needed to make videos like that. I needed to make combo videos too. I needed to make 300 parodies and Bill Cosby parodies. More fads of the time. I needed to make Speakonia videos like HoodboyTails, he was kinda big at the time. I needed to make YouTube Poops. Because if you liked Nintendo, you made YouTube Poops. Not just because the primary pooping source was old Mario & Zelda & Sonic stuff, but because everyone in the community had Smash/Nintendo themed names like MasterLinkX or SSBMEXPERT. I needed to do Wii homebrew and develop mods. Matchmaking in Brawl was anonymous, I wanted to be the hacker on steroids who developed a way to encounter someone on "With Anyone" and learn their Friend Code, that way we could reunite instead of never seeing each other again. And of course I had to shitpost on the Brawl boards. Participate in their polls and forum games. Share erotic art. MAKE erotic art! Like SigurdHosenfeld! Frequently posted on the Brawl boards, it was clean enough to not get you banned though. And perhaps most ambitious of all, I needed to make my own whole indie video games.
I didn't do much of that. But I did still spend lots of time with the Endless Online community, where I was something like notable. Like Graal, you could develop fanmade content for it. In a much more limited capacity, but I did what they would allow me to do. But Endless was starting to show signs of... I guess not "wear and tear" but it was starting to not be my home anymore. For instance, when I first started playing we had this fanmade Endless Online Internet radio station that you would play through Winamp. And the person on shift would either be on the forums or in the game, usually in the game, and you would go find them and make song requests. And they would play Christmas music around Christmastime, and it would snow in the game, and they gave out Christmas hats, it was beautiful. But by 2007/2008, there was still snow and Christmas hats, but Endless Radio was gone. They tried to replace it with something Ice Radio, but it wasn't the same. All the old notable names had retired from play. The game itself was more popular than ever though. It was so popular the maps were too small to hold everyone. This also might have something to do with the constant downtime Endless suffered. Couldn't handle the loads. I guess you could call that "wear and tear." Also, there were hackers & autobotters. Oh, like the GameFAQs Brawl boards there were forum politics. Look up "Endless Online" and "Small Sunday." It's kinda too long of a story for me to recount here. Stuff like that was happening a lot in the Endless community. I wasn't really invited to take part. I wasn't that notable. That was for people like Cazz and Pgstyle.
It was less that I had fallen out of love with Endless, and more that I had fallen in love with this new video game landscape in the late-ish 2000s. Brawl was a cottage industry. Brawl birthed so much. Like Brawl in the Family, and other Brawl in the Family-adjacent video game webcomics. That was another thing I was gonna have to do at some point: Become an accomplished webcomic artist. Probably pin that onto being a video game erotica artist. But Brawl wasn't the only community I was excited to be a part of. When it came to video games that were getting YouTube Poops and other non-poop uploads in frequent supply, there was Brawl, and there was Team Fortress 2. And other Steam related games. YouTube had kinda, or was slowly in the process of, replacing the Newgrounds-based sprite Flash culture. It was no longer about Mortal Kombat vs. Street Fighter or Mario vs. Sonic, especially as you could do the latter for real now. It was YouTube Poops and stuff. And it was YTPMVs. So I had to learn how to pitch shift. Like Arghivebeenshot. I also had to learn GMod. You had the models, you had the voice clips, any creative Team Fortress 2 fan would be making GMod videos. Also, making maps. Like Xenon. Making my own models. Making ingame items, eventually. I didn't do any of these things, by the way, these were just things I decided I had to do if I wanted to be notable in the community.
By 2009, Endless really was starting to show wear and tear. The hacking, the downtime, it had been going on for a while. But what the real sign of the end was, they stopped updating the front page. Like Mortal Kombat, Endless Online used to get frequent updates. But then they slowed down, and eventually just stopped in November of 2009. Forums were still up and the game was sorta still up, but the operation was pretty much entirely turnkey at this point. Didn't hear from any of the admins. I mostly just popped in to check on the Lounge.
2010. The forum was still king. But the seeds of what would be were being sown on something called "Reddit." r/Incel was founded. Nothing would happen there, but what matters is the idea was born.
I was still enjoying my time on GameFAQs. Not just on the Brawl boards, but on GameFAQs as a whole. The Brawl boards were still a good general Nintendo discussion forum, but I also branched out to lounge-y forums like Poll of the Day. E3 was a treat every year, I would tune in with the community on GameFAQs and GameTrailers and talk about all the news live, whether it be exciting or disappointing, or best of all, bizarre. It was hype, even on a bad day. But while times were good, I started to notice a lot more of what I didn't like. Little gripes and hangups that I would argue about as far as video games. The harbingers of what would eventually get me to swear off video games, and all my copes, by 2014/2015. I won't get into the specifics of my hangups, but let's take one game for example. Kid Icarus: Uprising. Revealed at E3 2010. Originally I was excited, this was exactly what I felt like being a Smash fan was about. Play Smash, see character in it that hasn't had a game in a while or something, that character's fandom is rejuvenated, you see that character get a new game, and you're like "Hey Pit was in Smash and now he's getting a new game!" And this 3DS, couldn't wait for that. But eventually I didn't like Kid Icarus: Uprising. Particularly, I didn't like the promotional shorts. And at the time I did like anime, but I didn't like these shorts. I won't get into the specifics of why I felt the way I did. But I argued a lot about it. And I decided I would not play Uprising. Nintendo in the 2010s would give me a lot of headaches like this.
Mortal Kombat had returned from oblivion in the 2010s. "Rebooted" as simply "The Mortal Kombat," I maybe could've gone back to the Mortal Kombat community. They had new forums and everything. At the time. But can you go home again? Can you recapture the magic, the naivete, of the Midway Forums days? When everything seemed so simple, so possible? What would I be going back to? What do I want with that community, if anything? In the Midway Forums days I wanted to be so notable in the community as to be able to reach out and touch Ed Boon. By 2010/2011, I just didn't anymore. Maybe I needed the old community. Maybe by 2010 the celebrity had worn off.
But I was still excited about some of the stuff Nintendo was doing. Like Miiverse. Now there's where I wanted to be notable. Imagine, Sakurai taking notice of me on Miiverse. Being able to actually ask someone like him "What did you mean by this?"
In related news, it was around this time that Fire Emblem: Awakening was released. Didn't like that. Nintendo was a mixture of a lot of good, and a lot of stuff I would fill threads up with rage for. Team Fortress 2 on the other hand didn't rock my boat that much. I didn't mind it going Free To Play, in fact the way I remember it, the ones who cared only cared as far as to laugh about the trend of Ghastly Gibuses amongst those who couldn't play very well. Source Filmmaker was also released around this time. I do remember feeling like this was gonna oversaturate the "funny video" market though. I didn't understand much about Source Filmmaker at the time, but it seemed to make it easy for just anyone to make AAA-quality animations, if they had the models. Like you could you could just play audio through it and the program would automatically map mouth movements to it. Source Filmmaker videos felt like they weren't going to be "special." And maybe I wasn't that alone in feeling like that because there were a few holdouts that refused to migrate over to Source Filmmaker, even though they could. From the looks of the landscape now I guess I was worried about nothing. But I remember another guy I wanted to be like, Waxonator, a Poopist & Source Filmmaestro. When SFM was first released, he could not stop bigging it up. He was excited. And then he started making videos out of them. And compared to the GMod stuff I was seeing, I was impressed. And I was thinking "So everyone's just gonna be able to do this now?" Didn't bother me as much as Kid Icarus or Fire Emblem, but I was a little worried.
Another big title of the early 2010s, and relevant to the whole GMod/SFM/modding thing, was Skyrim. I like that, so I had to make Skyrim videos as well. Skyrim mods, Skyrim machinima, etc. Like Mans1ay3r. But also starting to take off, particularly with PC games where you can just extract the raw audio files? Video game prank calls/Ventrilo/voice chat pranks. I decided I had to make calls like that and upload them. Instead, as usual, I mostly just watched other people do that. Like ICEnJAM.
People say the early 2010s were a weak time for Nintendo. I remember E3 2013 well, and how Geoff Keighley put the screws to Reggie about how back in 2011 they were stuffing Christmas stockings with a whole-ass Zelda game, but for Christmas 2013 they've got Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze? It was definitely a time of transition. I didn't mind Tropical Freeze. But what did come as kind of cold water was the little things of the Wii Era that the Wii U Era didn't have. Like, the Nintendo Channel. I would spend so much time window shopping there. And then it was taken away. Why? Because the time for watching trailers on your console is done. It's the 2010s and YouTube is relevant enough now that even corporations can get in on the fun. Nintendo made their YouTube channel in 2011.
Nintendo
Welcome to the official Nintendo YouTube channel where you'll find all the latest videos, news and content from Nintendo including Nintendo Switch, Wii U and...
If you look at the join date it says December 27th, 2005. That's a lie. The original YouTube account called "Nintendo" was created in 2005, but it lie abandoned for many years, supposedly. Maybe whoever made it just hadn't signed in in a long time. But because Nintendo is Nintendo, YouTube just gave them the account in 2011. Like how Reggie, because he's Reggie, got to take the @Reggie account on Twitter. Anyway, trailers are for uploading to YouTube now. That was the policy as of 2011. Also as of 2011 we get the Nintendo Direct. We lost a lot in the Wii U era, but the Nintendo Direct was a good win. If only there were some notable games on it. One notable game was revealed at E3 2013. Smash 4. I remembered the hype of the Brawl days. Mega Man was gonna be in it. I remembered how people talked about him in the Brawl days. Time to start the hype train up again. Or was it? Much like with Mortal Kombat, I wonder if you can go home again. Because it just wasn't the same. Could it have been the same? One thing I think was lacking was that there wasn't a Dojo this time around with daily updates. That was really key to what turned the Brawl boards. There were Nintendo Directs, but they weren't frequent enough. Or maybe it was the fact that, because Smash 4 was being released for two consoles at once (A decision I thought was stupid and overly complicating), the community didn't have just the one board to congregate on like with Brawl. GameFAQs split it into two boards, the Wii U board and the 3DS board. Or maybe the GameFAQs mods were a little stricter on the rules. I think I remember them being like that at the time. Any off-topicky socializing stuff had to be relegated to "Social" boards. Or maybe the community just wasn't right for it anymore. Different people with different needs. All I know is, I spent more time than I would've liked remarking about how there was just something about the Brawl boards that the Smash Wii U boards weren't capturing.
Nintendo was kinda letting me down in the 2010s. I still had the Team Fortress 2 community, but that wasn't really on GameFAQs. I needed a forum. Team Fortress 2's community existed in the ether between Steam and YouTube comments sections. If I wanted to interact with the Team Fortress 2 community, I typically did that ingame, not in the peaceful setting of a forum. I needed a place I could chill. The whole "pro gamer" thing I was starting to realize probably couldn't happen anymore. I was kicking 40's door down. And I was noticing how good my nephew was at "fast reflexes" video games. Like fighting games. He's an adult now so I can admit, I was irrationally angry at how good at video games he was. And he didn't get bored either. Like he would play Brawl too, but he would just play match after match against CPUs, and would be like "Aren't you bored??? There's nothing left to unlock or complete!" Age was setting in. I was never gonna be MLG. I needed something... casual. Fortunately the Metal Gear Solid franchise was still there for me. It didn't rely on fast reflexes. It relied on slow, creative thinking. So it was especially amusing for me when I discovered EvilAJ2010 and his "This Is How You DON'T Play" videos of DarkSydePhil stumbling his way through Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3.
How I discovered there's something like a... I wouldn't call it a "hatedom," but a fandom of people who show up to watch DarkSydePhil get frustrated with himself when he plays video games and generally be an idiot. Credit due to DarkSydePhil, people say he exaggerates when he says streamers like PewDiePie jacked his swagger. But he's one of those forgotten names of early Let's Playing, like WingsOfRedemption, who maybe doesn't get as much credit as he's owed. He's still bad at games, but people like him and Wings were doing this before there was even Twitch. As it stands, Let's Playing on YouTube is about dead. Twitch has taken the whole market share, basically. But DSP was around back when YouTube Let's Playing was alive, when streaming wasn't even possible, and before it was even really born.
But Twitch offered the people who wanted to see DSP win and the people who wanted to see DSP fail the opportunity to see it in person. I wanted in on this fandom. To laugh at DSP. The "Kojima World Order" they were named in scorn/pride. There was no forum, really. But they did gather regularly whenever DSP streamed to gather material for clipping, then returned to their YouTube channels. And is that really that much different from the Team Fortress 2 community? I feel like it is. There are a number of TF2 channels like there are a number of DSP channels. But just about everyone gathers in one fixed place. As they do in TF2. But unlike TF2, they don't gather in a game, a game that I'm now much worse at than I used to be. To interact with the TF2 community, I have to play the game. To be part of the "Laugh At DSP" community, I need only relax and watch livestreams. But was I really gonna make a whole Twitch account and tune in regularly to a bunch of games I maybe don't even care about? No. I was doing this to watch DSP play a particular game. Soon a new and ambitious Metal Gear Solid game would be upon us. Metal Gear Solid V. And it seemed so intricate, there was no way it wasn't gonna be gold when DSP picked this one up. I joined the community and watched him fumble, but it was all just an appetizer, preparation, for when he would do MGSV.
That was basically 2013. A lukewarm return to the Smash community, and hope for a future Metal Gear Solid game. Maybe GameFAQs in 2013 wasn't what it used to be because the Internet itself was changing. "Reddit" continued to grow. If you didn't know where to discuss something, Reddit had a place for it. Reddit even had a place to discuss inceldom. But nobody used it or even knew it existed. Which is why in 2013, r/Incels was created. Incels. Instead of r/Incel.
Now, I still loved video games, still wanted to be a part of things, but I had my gripes. Particularly with a lot of the games Nintendo was releasing. But know what's good for that? Being able to reach out and touch industry notables. Like if I don't like something in a game, I'd like to be important and in contact enough to say "Hey I don't like this thing." And there was one place I believed I could do that, but up until 2014 I didn't take the steps to join because I saw it as a harsh and unforgiving place. Where they were strict about rules, and if I fucked up I would be banished forever. The opposite of what I remember GameFAQs to be. This place was NeoGAF. And at the time they were so exclusive that you needed to have a personal e-mail to get in. As in, not a free webmail thing like Hotmail or GMail or Yahoo Mail. Something you couldn't just make extra accounts on. That way if they banned you, you likely weren't coming back. They prided themselves on a "higher standard." And that's why industry notables used that forum. I wasn't making much progress on being an important nerd, but this would be a giant leap. This would fast track me to a major goal in that overall life project. I would be talking to important people. So I set up e-mail service with my cable provider and made a NeoGAF account. Spent that year's E3 between NeoGAF, GameFAQs, and the GameTrailers live chat. Man, did NeoGAF threads move fast.
It was kinda my last purely happy memory in the video game... community, I guess you could call it. Because shortly after or around E3 I had one of my usual debates about what grinds my gears about a particular game/series. And because it was NeoGAF, the production team on that very game was there to butt heads with me. And if anyone's gonna say "No, you're wrong, my game is great" it's gonna be the people who make it. But I guess I just thought there'd be more people who saw it my way. Who clashed with the creators with me. It was then that I realized I must be the one who's wrong. I must be crazy. But I can't help it. The games will be what they are. But I hate them. And seeing it from atop NeoGAF, I saw that this was really an industry-wide thing. Nobody cares about this thing I'm hung up on, in the whole industry. Least of all Nintendo, who I have fanboy'd for against my better judgement. I'd been fighting these battles so long that it had gotten to the point where I couldn't just settle for a good game anymore, in the same way Twitter can't just settle for a good shoe from Nike or a good chip from Tostitos. They need Nike and Tostitos to be "socially responsible." And that's what I needed out of my video game creators now. I needed to know "What do you think about this thing I hate? You hate it too, and will stand against it with me, right?" And from atop NeoGAF, beholden to the industry entire, I saw the answer wasn't just "We don't really care," it was "Not only do we not care, we sometimes do that thing that you hate." And these gripes, they spread beyond just video games. Video games were the last straw. There had been lots of other straws before video games. Anime, honestly, had been a headache since the sub vs. dub debates of time immemorial. Anime was a headache from the beginning. And I was too old for headaches. So I gave it up. I gave it all up. The 2D, the gemus, everything. Not immediately though. I spent many a sleepless night typing up long rants, a lot like this one, to send to journalists & editors in the video game industry. I think exactly one person got back to me.
By the end of 2014 I was done. Kind of a sad note to end on. Towards the end of 2014 I was still carrying my 3DS around with me where ever I went because I wanted to meet Miis. Like everybody I would get the random Miis you never see again and don't know where you met them. But for a while, on the bus to work every morning, I would encounter this Mii, a brown haired girl. I knew she had to be nearby because I only encountered her on this bus. And she was dedicated. Most people don't change their Mii greeting or whatever it's called, they don't really commit to the whole Mii thing. She did. I remember it was windy in our area for a while. Her Mii stopped by my 3DS. And her Mii said "How's the wind?" Maybe it's the incel in me. But to see that genuine effort to reach out to someone, however small it might seem from an unbiased point of view, I just hadn't seen it before in the Miis I had encountered. This continued even into December. I encountered her Mii. "Merry Christmas!" she said. I wasn't ready to actually talk to this woman, but at this point I knew which person on the bus she was. I could see her, some seats ahead, playing with her 3DS. Brown hair. Same face. I don't need to make an "approach," but I'll just go over and see what game she's playing. Just to learn a little bit about who she is as a person.
Kid Icarus: Uprising. And that was the end of that. Again, I was surrounded by people who just didn't "get it." But I'm sure I'm the one that's crazy. I didn't touch my 3DS again in 2015.
Today video games and their Internet communities are much different. I think the change took place right around the time I left. When I was doing it, it was all about releases by established publishers. But then Five Nights at Freddy's came along. And that was huge for a while. Then Undertale. That's still huge. And the communities that enjoy them are different too. Today video game communities produce these Vine-like memes as their testament to fandom. They edit a clip or something to make it look like Sans, I dunno. A far cry from the ASCII fads of my time. SigurdHosenfeld on deviantArt is old news. Now Diives wants you to pledge to his Patreon. Video games on YouTube, it's not even really a thing anymore. Not like it used to be. You don't do "Let's Plays." You might instead do a compilation of dialogue quotes from MK11. If you're gonna actually play a video game, whether it be on YouTube or Twitch, it's probably Fortnite. Or Minecraft, I guess that's back. But it used to be even the worst crap by Nintendo was worth a playthrough series. Because those were the games that were available. You played it because it was a new game by the only people who made video games.
And the forum? The forum as a concept is fuckin' dead. Everybody says so. Now it's Twitter and Reddit. It's visual content, a still image or a 10 second video. You state how you feel about it, and you move on. Instead of "gathering" in a place, you "follow" a single person. Speaking of which, for good or ill these industry notables have lost all their celebrity. They're all just there on Twitter. At one point I would load myself up with caffeine just to catch a Fight Night with Ed Boon. Now? The Mortal Kombat staff are just... "on Twitter." Sharing their life's personal details and interacting with people about those personal details. I don't even think Mortal Kombat has an official forum anymore.
I guess Discord would be the closest thing.
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JFLL
But ded srs if u dont rope, we are gonna be like him before u know it
My very very first video game "console" was a VIC-20, but I almost never touched it. It was more like a computer, and you needed to read textbooks to understand how to do stuff with it. My parents got it for me because there was this commercial that aired when I was a kid that convinced them that this was basically programming for children, and if I start now I'm gonna be in demand for jobs when I grow up. Anyway, I didn't touch it. But I did lie and say I was "working on stuff."
The first console I bought with my own money was an NES from Toys R' Us. Speaking of copes vs. a healthy social life. I liked to believe I had friends in high school, but they never came over to play video games with me and I never thought to invite them over. I like to tell myself it was because my parents were persnickety about letting people into our house. It was never clean enough for their liking. But they insist "No, you could've had friends over, we never said you couldn't have friends over." So maybe it was partly my not really caring that much about them. I switched schools for my senior year and never made an attempt to reach out to them again. Spent senior prom at home playing Wizardry. A game I liked to make characters for. If I had friends, I would've put us all in the game, and said "Okay it's your turn, what move are you gonna do?"
In adulthood I managed to gather a little more money and I spent that on frequent rentals. One notable rental was Mortal Kombat, Sparkster, and Awesome Possum. I remember it so distinctly because I was mugged that night and they stole my games and I had to pay to replace them.
I was also an early adopter of the 3DO.
Very expensive, very useless, it gathered dust because the N64 was not long after. When I got the N64, I think the game I played the most was Pilotwings 64. It was just the perfect game to chill with.
It was a little after this that I got my own computer. That came with PC gaming, which to be fair I didn't get the best exposure to. I mostly played DOS games. Hero's Heart, The Pack Rat, SkyRoads, Champions of Zulula, Hocus Pocus, Baldies, the Hugo trilogy, and they were fun, but console games had 3D graphics, PC would always be second, I figured. But I didn't have any friends, and access to the Internet was making me feel like "If there was some way to play games with people over the Internet, that would be the ultimate. Console quality games with people over the Internet." Which reminds me, it was around this time that I decided to get a Game Boy because they were coming in color, and Pokémon was starting to become a thing. I liked the idea of having a magic animal companion, but again, I wished I could battle people over the Internet. There were games like that on the Internet where you could play with/against people, but I wanted to do that with Pokémon and other "real games."
As the century drew to a close, I discovered Smash Bros.
This commercial blew my mind. Yes, perfect! What IF all of the Nintendo characters were friends and lived in the same universe? It was the perfect video game, basically. Even though you couldn't play it online, I wanted to look into the World of Nintendo as this single, vast place where all of the people that I thought once belonged to separate universes all live together and are friends. It was like a story I could enjoy alone. It didn't have much compared to future Smash games obviously but it was the gesture alone that was enough.
The 2000s brought with it MMORPGs. Specifically Graal Online. It has graphics that were a knockoff of Zelda: A Link to the Past. And this is an example of that whole "Notable names in various nerdy things" thing. For instance, Jay Fubler Harvey was a notable anime guy. And Graal, when you played it, you had to log onto a server or "playerworld" I think they're called today. Because theoretically, any player could make a server. I think you had to pay to do it, maybe that's why I never did it. But I did want to do it. Because there were notable names like LiquidIce and AcidIce and Jubei Saotome who had contributed to the Graal community with their servers, I wanted to be like those guys. I wanted to be an anime notable, while also doing Graal servers and stuff. And any other stuff I could think of. Like Jubei Saotome. Saotome is a good example of this. He wasn't just known for making a Graal server, but he also did funny Internet animations. I wanted a business card like that. "Graal Server Maker/Funny Internet Animation Maker/etc." A list of titles related to stuff I liked. I didn't actually make a live server, but I did plan one, I fiddled around in the offline developer, making characters and maps and stuff and thinking "Man, what if someday I was to put this online?" Crafting my world.
Eventually the 6th gen would come along. That brought a new Smash game, and it had Event Matches, which I loved, because they were like chapters in the story of the Nintendo saga. That's how I saw them. But what piqued my interest was that this Xbox thing was coming along. And the way I saw it was, gaming had two flavors. Japanesey, and Americanny. Sega was kinda fading compared to the Genesis era, and in the Genesis era, Sega was effectively the serious, gritty "Americanny" answer to Nintendo's kiddy girly stuff. I liked both, but I was interested in the contrast. And with Sega very quiet now, I was interested in seeing what Xbox would be as the inheritor of this "Americanny" style, being an actual American company. I think it came at the right time, too. The early 2000s in America was the perfect sort of "American gamer" culture. That trash-talking Dorito-eating Monster-swilling gamer image you envision, it had its birth in the early 2000s and the coming of the Xbox. Also because this was a brand new console, I wanted in on the fandom. Again, I wanted to be notable in all things that I liked. I was looking forward to what would be for this future video game empire. Who would be their "Mario," for instance?
Then I saw this commercial for Blinx: The Time Sweeper.
Then I figured "Oh, this, right? Surely this is Xbox's Mario." I made sure to be an early adopter. And true to what anyone could see at the time, Sega and Sonic eventually dropped the console battle and could be played on Xbox and Gamecube.
Oh! Another candidate for the Xbox mascot, some were saying, was the Oddworld franchise. Even though it started on Playstation. But Munch's Oddysee was an Xbox exclusive. Oddworld games were another one of those games I just relaxed with and burned away the hours on a cozy day.
Which I enjoyed a lot more of because around 2003 or so I lost my job. I was between opportunities a lot, and so I had a lot of time to explore other nerd stuff on the Internet. It was around this time that I discovered ROMs and emulators. So many games I didn't get a chance/have the money for back in the day, so I did a lot of that. Played a lot of the Shining Force franchise. These ROM sites were also another example of how hobbies blend together. ROM sites like Angel Roms didn't just feature ROMs. They had a section for "Anime Girl Pictures." They had a section for "Angel Roms Babes." It was all related. If you like ROMs, you probably like anime lewds. That's why all the ROM sites back then had hentai ads, and those GIFs of the girl with the ribbon. You know the one.
Also, if I was gonna be notable in the community, I had to know where the "community" was. There were chatrooms, yeah, but I think the real hubs were forums. And it was around this time that I decided I would make it official with the forums and join as many of them as possible. With the same name. Because it was about brand awareness. Jubei Saotome is called "Jubei Saotome" where ever he goes. I spent most of my time on the Mortal Kombat/Midway forums. Mortal Kombat: Deception was on the way and I wanted to share in the enjoyment with the Mortal Kombat fandom. I wanted to be notable in the Mortal Kombat fandom. Like Jubei Saotome was notable in the fandoms he's notable in.
Which raises another aspect of video game culture, particularly one important to Mortal Kombat: Flash videos. Whether they be sprite animated or hand drawn (Saotome did both) these were a big hit for fans of video games, specifically Mortal Kombat, because everybody worth their salt had to make some kind of Street Fighter vs. Mortal Kombat video for Newgrounds or Albino Black Sheep, or Dagobah, or TX Mafia, there were so many dedicated sites. Or just some website, they could be hosted separately. One of the sites I and many others visited back then, The Kombat Pavilion, is still online today.
The guy who started it is actually running a YouTube channel now. So I guess he's never been more successful.
Anyway, with it came the Flash videos we enjoyed back then. As well as comics and MIDIs and all the other stuff that made a decent fansite/shrine. And I thought "Okay, I need to be like Jay Fubler Harvey, and Jubei Saotome, and Tabmok99, and the people who make the Flash videos on Tabmok99's website." I guess if I had to pick a single person to idolize at the game of mostly-video-game-based Flash animations, it would be MajinPiccolo. He also had his videos hosted in multiple places, and he was "King of the Flash Portal" on Newgrounds. And he had his own studio website, Dungeon-Studios.com, where he and his collaborators would post their stuff. I wanted to do that. Have my own Dungeon Studios, and maybe my own collaborators.
Mortal Kombat was seeing a pattern of releasing a new game every year. They weren't always good, that's what a production schedule that demanding will do to you. But because there were frequent updates like that, the forums were always jumpin'. There was always something to discuss, whether it be rumors of "Super Unlockables," or maybe someone just had a funny YTMND to share. I was playing a lot of Smash Bros. Melee at the time, so I lead a lot of "Mortal Kombat/Smash Bros compare & contrast" discussion.
And I still played MMORPGs. I think around this time, for one reason or another, I had to stop playing Graal. I think it stopped being free or something. So I moved on to a new game called "Endless Online."
Endless Online - Massive online RPG
Welcome back to the free classic online rpg!www.endless-online.com
This was a time in MMORPGs where you just hopped on Yahoo and searched "anime style MMORPG." I don't think World of Warcraft was a thing yet. There was Ragnarok Online, there was Gaia Online, but Endless Online was my favorite, despite being a much shallower game. I'm not sure which I spent more time on, but the Midway forums and the Endless Online forums/global chat/IRC room were my main hangs for a while.
Some time in 2006 Newgrounds changed their slogan/tagline from "The Problems Of The Future, Today" to "Everything, by Everyone." I remember being a little let down by this. Because at this point I was committed to being some kind of important nerd, and what was crucial was not going "mainstream." Preserving the countercultural nerdy/punkiness of all my hobbies and how they interconnect. This was kind of a hangup for me, probably more back then than it is today. For instance, Linkin Park. I considered that within the purview of these hobbies of mine. The Meteora music video had a Gundam in it. Plus a lot of anime fans liked Linkin Park anyway. So I figured if you like anime, you like this alt-rock stuff that's happening a lot now. But then Linkin Park collaborated with Jay-Z for "Collision Course." And I was all like "No! Jay-Z is too mainstream! They're trying to make Linkin Park mainstream! Linkin Park is for us, not them!" And you might be thinking "Rap is not new to Linkin Park. Nor are rap/rock mashups." And I would tell you "I know that! It's not because Jay-Z is a rapper! It's because he's MAINSTREAM!!!" And so that was an attitude I carried into 2006, when I decided to be mad at Newgrounds for changing their tagline.
My drive to cling to non-normieness led me to 4chan, which I spent a lot more time on in 2006 because the Mortal Kombat fandom was kind of dying around this point. Late 2006 to early 2007. Because Armageddon was presumed to be the last Mortal Kombat game ever. And so there wasn't much more to talk about. My time on the Midway Forums was fast being taken up by 4chan. Problem was, 4chan was anonymous. And I get that's the point, but I wanted was a community. People I could know. And for people to know me. I considered becoming a tripfag, but I decided on doing a much stupider thing: Signing my posts. As in...
Blah blah blah whatever I would post in a typical 4chan post
~FrothySolutions
...making sure to include my e-mail address. Somehow I felt like this was more definite. That I might "lose" my tripcode or something because for some reason I felt like it was only stored temporarily. Anyway, I got lots of...
Disregard that, I suck cocks
~FrothySolutions
...as well as e-mails from people saying they didn't care who I was and to stop signing my posts. 4chan was good if I wanted to find porn, or wanted to learn where a certain image came from, but a community it was not.
But what was a community was GameFAQs. And Nintendo was entering a new and exciting time. The Wii era. Super Mario Sunshine wasn't a "must buy." But when I saw that in Super Mario Galaxy you could walk on spheres, I was like "I need to get in on this fandom. This game is beautiful." The Nintendo Channel and Wii Shop Channel, they weren't games but if you look at my hour log you'll find that I spent most of my time on those. Just browsing. Watching trailers, learning about games, checking out demos. But most importantly, a new Smash Bros. game was coming. With Kid Icarus and Zero Clothes Samus. And a Smash Bros. Dojo with mostly-daily updates. And they were having a party over on the GameFAQs Brawl board. Waiting every day for a new update. Filling the waiting period with shitpost after shitpost. So many ASCII memes. Except we didn't call them "memes" yet, a "meme" was something you saw on 4chan. These ASCII threads were "fads." People would post their erotic Samus fanfiction, their erotic Peach fanfiction, their erotic Zelda fanfiction, YouTube was just starting to snowball so there were lots of interesting YouTube links people were posting, I remember one guy posted a video of some dude with a bag mash on his head who warned of some coming suffering, then cut his own hand open. It was crazy shit. There was dramatic forum politics, there were boys simping over girls, there were account suicides where people would post furry porn of Krystal, who wasn't even in the game but the thing is, Smash is about all things Nintendo, and anyone featured in the games. So Krystal was fair discussion on the Brawl boards. And when Sonic was confirmed for Brawl? Are your kidding me??? I dare say it was the most fun I've ever had on a forum. Over the past earlier years I had been going through the motions as far as my goal of being an important nerd, but the GameFAQs Brawl boards (and I guess accessory boards we kept an eye on, like Smash World Forums) renewed my fight. Maybe it had more to do with that I had a truly steady job again at this point and could afford to buy more video games stuff, but at this point I was like "This community, I need to make stuff for this community, I need to be important to this community." Mortal Kombat, if I'm brutally honest, was dead to me by now. I didn't need to be anything regarding Mortal Kombat.
But what did being important to the Smash/GameFAQs community entail? I should probably be some kind of pro Smasher. Those are notable names. Mew2King and the like. Sure he nutted in someone's bed. And we all knew back then, and no one cared. We all would've nutted in that person's bed because being a weird autist was part & parcel to being part of this community. I needed a YouTube account for Smash related videos. I saw a video at one point comparing how fast each character in Brawl was. I needed to make videos like that. I needed to make combo videos too. I needed to make 300 parodies and Bill Cosby parodies. More fads of the time. I needed to make Speakonia videos like HoodboyTails, he was kinda big at the time. I needed to make YouTube Poops. Because if you liked Nintendo, you made YouTube Poops. Not just because the primary pooping source was old Mario & Zelda & Sonic stuff, but because everyone in the community had Smash/Nintendo themed names like MasterLinkX or SSBMEXPERT. I needed to do Wii homebrew and develop mods. Matchmaking in Brawl was anonymous, I wanted to be the hacker on steroids who developed a way to encounter someone on "With Anyone" and learn their Friend Code, that way we could reunite instead of never seeing each other again. And of course I had to shitpost on the Brawl boards. Participate in their polls and forum games. Share erotic art. MAKE erotic art! Like SigurdHosenfeld! Frequently posted on the Brawl boards, it was clean enough to not get you banned though. And perhaps most ambitious of all, I needed to make my own whole indie video games.
I didn't do much of that. But I did still spend lots of time with the Endless Online community, where I was something like notable. Like Graal, you could develop fanmade content for it. In a much more limited capacity, but I did what they would allow me to do. But Endless was starting to show signs of... I guess not "wear and tear" but it was starting to not be my home anymore. For instance, when I first started playing we had this fanmade Endless Online Internet radio station that you would play through Winamp. And the person on shift would either be on the forums or in the game, usually in the game, and you would go find them and make song requests. And they would play Christmas music around Christmastime, and it would snow in the game, and they gave out Christmas hats, it was beautiful. But by 2007/2008, there was still snow and Christmas hats, but Endless Radio was gone. They tried to replace it with something Ice Radio, but it wasn't the same. All the old notable names had retired from play. The game itself was more popular than ever though. It was so popular the maps were too small to hold everyone. This also might have something to do with the constant downtime Endless suffered. Couldn't handle the loads. I guess you could call that "wear and tear." Also, there were hackers & autobotters. Oh, like the GameFAQs Brawl boards there were forum politics. Look up "Endless Online" and "Small Sunday." It's kinda too long of a story for me to recount here. Stuff like that was happening a lot in the Endless community. I wasn't really invited to take part. I wasn't that notable. That was for people like Cazz and Pgstyle.
It was less that I had fallen out of love with Endless, and more that I had fallen in love with this new video game landscape in the late-ish 2000s. Brawl was a cottage industry. Brawl birthed so much. Like Brawl in the Family, and other Brawl in the Family-adjacent video game webcomics. That was another thing I was gonna have to do at some point: Become an accomplished webcomic artist. Probably pin that onto being a video game erotica artist. But Brawl wasn't the only community I was excited to be a part of. When it came to video games that were getting YouTube Poops and other non-poop uploads in frequent supply, there was Brawl, and there was Team Fortress 2. And other Steam related games. YouTube had kinda, or was slowly in the process of, replacing the Newgrounds-based sprite Flash culture. It was no longer about Mortal Kombat vs. Street Fighter or Mario vs. Sonic, especially as you could do the latter for real now. It was YouTube Poops and stuff. And it was YTPMVs. So I had to learn how to pitch shift. Like Arghivebeenshot. I also had to learn GMod. You had the models, you had the voice clips, any creative Team Fortress 2 fan would be making GMod videos. Also, making maps. Like Xenon. Making my own models. Making ingame items, eventually. I didn't do any of these things, by the way, these were just things I decided I had to do if I wanted to be notable in the community.
By 2009, Endless really was starting to show wear and tear. The hacking, the downtime, it had been going on for a while. But what the real sign of the end was, they stopped updating the front page. Like Mortal Kombat, Endless Online used to get frequent updates. But then they slowed down, and eventually just stopped in November of 2009. Forums were still up and the game was sorta still up, but the operation was pretty much entirely turnkey at this point. Didn't hear from any of the admins. I mostly just popped in to check on the Lounge.
2010. The forum was still king. But the seeds of what would be were being sown on something called "Reddit." r/Incel was founded. Nothing would happen there, but what matters is the idea was born.
I was still enjoying my time on GameFAQs. Not just on the Brawl boards, but on GameFAQs as a whole. The Brawl boards were still a good general Nintendo discussion forum, but I also branched out to lounge-y forums like Poll of the Day. E3 was a treat every year, I would tune in with the community on GameFAQs and GameTrailers and talk about all the news live, whether it be exciting or disappointing, or best of all, bizarre. It was hype, even on a bad day. But while times were good, I started to notice a lot more of what I didn't like. Little gripes and hangups that I would argue about as far as video games. The harbingers of what would eventually get me to swear off video games, and all my copes, by 2014/2015. I won't get into the specifics of my hangups, but let's take one game for example. Kid Icarus: Uprising. Revealed at E3 2010. Originally I was excited, this was exactly what I felt like being a Smash fan was about. Play Smash, see character in it that hasn't had a game in a while or something, that character's fandom is rejuvenated, you see that character get a new game, and you're like "Hey Pit was in Smash and now he's getting a new game!" And this 3DS, couldn't wait for that. But eventually I didn't like Kid Icarus: Uprising. Particularly, I didn't like the promotional shorts. And at the time I did like anime, but I didn't like these shorts. I won't get into the specifics of why I felt the way I did. But I argued a lot about it. And I decided I would not play Uprising. Nintendo in the 2010s would give me a lot of headaches like this.
Mortal Kombat had returned from oblivion in the 2010s. "Rebooted" as simply "The Mortal Kombat," I maybe could've gone back to the Mortal Kombat community. They had new forums and everything. At the time. But can you go home again? Can you recapture the magic, the naivete, of the Midway Forums days? When everything seemed so simple, so possible? What would I be going back to? What do I want with that community, if anything? In the Midway Forums days I wanted to be so notable in the community as to be able to reach out and touch Ed Boon. By 2010/2011, I just didn't anymore. Maybe I needed the old community. Maybe by 2010 the celebrity had worn off.
But I was still excited about some of the stuff Nintendo was doing. Like Miiverse. Now there's where I wanted to be notable. Imagine, Sakurai taking notice of me on Miiverse. Being able to actually ask someone like him "What did you mean by this?"
In related news, it was around this time that Fire Emblem: Awakening was released. Didn't like that. Nintendo was a mixture of a lot of good, and a lot of stuff I would fill threads up with rage for. Team Fortress 2 on the other hand didn't rock my boat that much. I didn't mind it going Free To Play, in fact the way I remember it, the ones who cared only cared as far as to laugh about the trend of Ghastly Gibuses amongst those who couldn't play very well. Source Filmmaker was also released around this time. I do remember feeling like this was gonna oversaturate the "funny video" market though. I didn't understand much about Source Filmmaker at the time, but it seemed to make it easy for just anyone to make AAA-quality animations, if they had the models. Like you could you could just play audio through it and the program would automatically map mouth movements to it. Source Filmmaker videos felt like they weren't going to be "special." And maybe I wasn't that alone in feeling like that because there were a few holdouts that refused to migrate over to Source Filmmaker, even though they could. From the looks of the landscape now I guess I was worried about nothing. But I remember another guy I wanted to be like, Waxonator, a Poopist & Source Filmmaestro. When SFM was first released, he could not stop bigging it up. He was excited. And then he started making videos out of them. And compared to the GMod stuff I was seeing, I was impressed. And I was thinking "So everyone's just gonna be able to do this now?" Didn't bother me as much as Kid Icarus or Fire Emblem, but I was a little worried.
Another big title of the early 2010s, and relevant to the whole GMod/SFM/modding thing, was Skyrim. I like that, so I had to make Skyrim videos as well. Skyrim mods, Skyrim machinima, etc. Like Mans1ay3r. But also starting to take off, particularly with PC games where you can just extract the raw audio files? Video game prank calls/Ventrilo/voice chat pranks. I decided I had to make calls like that and upload them. Instead, as usual, I mostly just watched other people do that. Like ICEnJAM.
People say the early 2010s were a weak time for Nintendo. I remember E3 2013 well, and how Geoff Keighley put the screws to Reggie about how back in 2011 they were stuffing Christmas stockings with a whole-ass Zelda game, but for Christmas 2013 they've got Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze? It was definitely a time of transition. I didn't mind Tropical Freeze. But what did come as kind of cold water was the little things of the Wii Era that the Wii U Era didn't have. Like, the Nintendo Channel. I would spend so much time window shopping there. And then it was taken away. Why? Because the time for watching trailers on your console is done. It's the 2010s and YouTube is relevant enough now that even corporations can get in on the fun. Nintendo made their YouTube channel in 2011.
Nintendo
Welcome to the official Nintendo YouTube channel where you'll find all the latest videos, news and content from Nintendo including Nintendo Switch, Wii U and...www.youtube.com
If you look at the join date it says December 27th, 2005. That's a lie. The original YouTube account called "Nintendo" was created in 2005, but it lie abandoned for many years, supposedly. Maybe whoever made it just hadn't signed in in a long time. But because Nintendo is Nintendo, YouTube just gave them the account in 2011. Like how Reggie, because he's Reggie, got to take the @Reggie account on Twitter. Anyway, trailers are for uploading to YouTube now. That was the policy as of 2011. Also as of 2011 we get the Nintendo Direct. We lost a lot in the Wii U era, but the Nintendo Direct was a good win. If only there were some notable games on it. One notable game was revealed at E3 2013. Smash 4. I remembered the hype of the Brawl days. Mega Man was gonna be in it. I remembered how people talked about him in the Brawl days. Time to start the hype train up again. Or was it? Much like with Mortal Kombat, I wonder if you can go home again. Because it just wasn't the same. Could it have been the same? One thing I think was lacking was that there wasn't a Dojo this time around with daily updates. That was really key to what turned the Brawl boards. There were Nintendo Directs, but they weren't frequent enough. Or maybe it was the fact that, because Smash 4 was being released for two consoles at once (A decision I thought was stupid and overly complicating), the community didn't have just the one board to congregate on like with Brawl. GameFAQs split it into two boards, the Wii U board and the 3DS board. Or maybe the GameFAQs mods were a little stricter on the rules. I think I remember them being like that at the time. Any off-topicky socializing stuff had to be relegated to "Social" boards. Or maybe the community just wasn't right for it anymore. Different people with different needs. All I know is, I spent more time than I would've liked remarking about how there was just something about the Brawl boards that the Smash Wii U boards weren't capturing.
Nintendo was kinda letting me down in the 2010s. I still had the Team Fortress 2 community, but that wasn't really on GameFAQs. I needed a forum. Team Fortress 2's community existed in the ether between Steam and YouTube comments sections. If I wanted to interact with the Team Fortress 2 community, I typically did that ingame, not in the peaceful setting of a forum. I needed a place I could chill. The whole "pro gamer" thing I was starting to realize probably couldn't happen anymore. I was kicking 40's door down. And I was noticing how good my nephew was at "fast reflexes" video games. Like fighting games. He's an adult now so I can admit, I was irrationally angry at how good at video games he was. And he didn't get bored either. Like he would play Brawl too, but he would just play match after match against CPUs, and would be like "Aren't you bored??? There's nothing left to unlock or complete!" Age was setting in. I was never gonna be MLG. I needed something... casual. Fortunately the Metal Gear Solid franchise was still there for me. It didn't rely on fast reflexes. It relied on slow, creative thinking. So it was especially amusing for me when I discovered EvilAJ2010 and his "This Is How You DON'T Play" videos of DarkSydePhil stumbling his way through Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3.
How I discovered there's something like a... I wouldn't call it a "hatedom," but a fandom of people who show up to watch DarkSydePhil get frustrated with himself when he plays video games and generally be an idiot. Credit due to DarkSydePhil, people say he exaggerates when he says streamers like PewDiePie jacked his swagger. But he's one of those forgotten names of early Let's Playing, like WingsOfRedemption, who maybe doesn't get as much credit as he's owed. He's still bad at games, but people like him and Wings were doing this before there was even Twitch. As it stands, Let's Playing on YouTube is about dead. Twitch has taken the whole market share, basically. But DSP was around back when YouTube Let's Playing was alive, when streaming wasn't even possible, and before it was even really born.
But Twitch offered the people who wanted to see DSP win and the people who wanted to see DSP fail the opportunity to see it in person. I wanted in on this fandom. To laugh at DSP. The "Kojima World Order" they were named in scorn/pride. There was no forum, really. But they did gather regularly whenever DSP streamed to gather material for clipping, then returned to their YouTube channels. And is that really that much different from the Team Fortress 2 community? I feel like it is. There are a number of TF2 channels like there are a number of DSP channels. But just about everyone gathers in one fixed place. As they do in TF2. But unlike TF2, they don't gather in a game, a game that I'm now much worse at than I used to be. To interact with the TF2 community, I have to play the game. To be part of the "Laugh At DSP" community, I need only relax and watch livestreams. But was I really gonna make a whole Twitch account and tune in regularly to a bunch of games I maybe don't even care about? No. I was doing this to watch DSP play a particular game. Soon a new and ambitious Metal Gear Solid game would be upon us. Metal Gear Solid V. And it seemed so intricate, there was no way it wasn't gonna be gold when DSP picked this one up. I joined the community and watched him fumble, but it was all just an appetizer, preparation, for when he would do MGSV.
That was basically 2013. A lukewarm return to the Smash community, and hope for a future Metal Gear Solid game. Maybe GameFAQs in 2013 wasn't what it used to be because the Internet itself was changing. "Reddit" continued to grow. If you didn't know where to discuss something, Reddit had a place for it. Reddit even had a place to discuss inceldom. But nobody used it or even knew it existed. Which is why in 2013, r/Incels was created. Incels. Instead of r/Incel.
Now, I still loved video games, still wanted to be a part of things, but I had my gripes. Particularly with a lot of the games Nintendo was releasing. But know what's good for that? Being able to reach out and touch industry notables. Like if I don't like something in a game, I'd like to be important and in contact enough to say "Hey I don't like this thing." And there was one place I believed I could do that, but up until 2014 I didn't take the steps to join because I saw it as a harsh and unforgiving place. Where they were strict about rules, and if I fucked up I would be banished forever. The opposite of what I remember GameFAQs to be. This place was NeoGAF. And at the time they were so exclusive that you needed to have a personal e-mail to get in. As in, not a free webmail thing like Hotmail or GMail or Yahoo Mail. Something you couldn't just make extra accounts on. That way if they banned you, you likely weren't coming back. They prided themselves on a "higher standard." And that's why industry notables used that forum. I wasn't making much progress on being an important nerd, but this would be a giant leap. This would fast track me to a major goal in that overall life project. I would be talking to important people. So I set up e-mail service with my cable provider and made a NeoGAF account. Spent that year's E3 between NeoGAF, GameFAQs, and the GameTrailers live chat. Man, did NeoGAF threads move fast.
It was kinda my last purely happy memory in the video game... community, I guess you could call it. Because shortly after or around E3 I had one of my usual debates about what grinds my gears about a particular game/series. And because it was NeoGAF, the production team on that very game was there to butt heads with me. And if anyone's gonna say "No, you're wrong, my game is great" it's gonna be the people who make it. But I guess I just thought there'd be more people who saw it my way. Who clashed with the creators with me. It was then that I realized I must be the one who's wrong. I must be crazy. But I can't help it. The games will be what they are. But I hate them. And seeing it from atop NeoGAF, I saw that this was really an industry-wide thing. Nobody cares about this thing I'm hung up on, in the whole industry. Least of all Nintendo, who I have fanboy'd for against my better judgement. I'd been fighting these battles so long that it had gotten to the point where I couldn't just settle for a good game anymore, in the same way Twitter can't just settle for a good shoe from Nike or a good chip from Tostitos. They need Nike and Tostitos to be "socially responsible." And that's what I needed out of my video game creators now. I needed to know "What do you think about this thing I hate? You hate it too, and will stand against it with me, right?" And from atop NeoGAF, beholden to the industry entire, I saw the answer wasn't just "We don't really care," it was "Not only do we not care, we sometimes do that thing that you hate." And these gripes, they spread beyond just video games. Video games were the last straw. There had been lots of other straws before video games. Anime, honestly, had been a headache since the sub vs. dub debates of time immemorial. Anime was a headache from the beginning. And I was too old for headaches. So I gave it up. I gave it all up. The 2D, the gemus, everything. Not immediately though. I spent many a sleepless night typing up long rants, a lot like this one, to send to journalists & editors in the video game industry. I think exactly one person got back to me.
By the end of 2014 I was done. Kind of a sad note to end on. Towards the end of 2014 I was still carrying my 3DS around with me where ever I went because I wanted to meet Miis. Like everybody I would get the random Miis you never see again and don't know where you met them. But for a while, on the bus to work every morning, I would encounter this Mii, a brown haired girl. I knew she had to be nearby because I only encountered her on this bus. And she was dedicated. Most people don't change their Mii greeting or whatever it's called, they don't really commit to the whole Mii thing. She did. I remember it was windy in our area for a while. Her Mii stopped by my 3DS. And her Mii said "How's the wind?" Maybe it's the incel in me. But to see that genuine effort to reach out to someone, however small it might seem from an unbiased point of view, I just hadn't seen it before in the Miis I had encountered. This continued even into December. I encountered her Mii. "Merry Christmas!" she said. I wasn't ready to actually talk to this woman, but at this point I knew which person on the bus she was. I could see her, some seats ahead, playing with her 3DS. Brown hair. Same face. I don't need to make an "approach," but I'll just go over and see what game she's playing. Just to learn a little bit about who she is as a person.
Kid Icarus: Uprising. And that was the end of that. Again, I was surrounded by people who just didn't "get it." But I'm sure I'm the one that's crazy. I didn't touch my 3DS again in 2015.
Today video games and their Internet communities are much different. I think the change took place right around the time I left. When I was doing it, it was all about releases by established publishers. But then Five Nights at Freddy's came along. And that was huge for a while. Then Undertale. That's still huge. And the communities that enjoy them are different too. Today video game communities produce these Vine-like memes as their testament to fandom. They edit a clip or something to make it look like Sans, I dunno. A far cry from the ASCII fads of my time. SigurdHosenfeld on deviantArt is old news. Now Diives wants you to pledge to his Patreon. Video games on YouTube, it's not even really a thing anymore. Not like it used to be. You don't do "Let's Plays." You might instead do a compilation of dialogue quotes from MK11. If you're gonna actually play a video game, whether it be on YouTube or Twitch, it's probably Fortnite. Or Minecraft, I guess that's back. But it used to be even the worst crap by Nintendo was worth a playthrough series. Because those were the games that were available. You played it because it was a new game by the only people who made video games.
And the forum? The forum as a concept is fuckin' dead. Everybody says so. Now it's Twitter and Reddit. It's visual content, a still image or a 10 second video. You state how you feel about it, and you move on. Instead of "gathering" in a place, you "follow" a single person. Speaking of which, for good or ill these industry notables have lost all their celebrity. They're all just there on Twitter. At one point I would load myself up with caffeine just to catch a Fight Night with Ed Boon. Now? The Mortal Kombat staff are just... "on Twitter." Sharing their life's personal details and interacting with people about those personal details. I don't even think Mortal Kombat has an official forum anymore.
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I guess Discord would be the closest thing.
Damn, this was a great read tbh, ngl.
Literally all the early Internet stuff you recounted is practically identical to what I experienced, besides the fact that any violent computer games that I played back in the day were pirated, because my parents didn't allow that shit.
You mean like you were able to play Mortal Kombat on a computer?
Yeah, I played Mortal Kombat on DOS (through DOSBox) when I was younger.
It's funny watching him die in dark souls, he's as bad as I am, if not even worse
It's funny watching him die in dark souls, he's as bad as I am, if not even worse
I was hoping for worse. When I saw him play, he knew to check for mimic chest traps. I was hoping for a new compilation or something.
Y
Brutal agepill.
Well what do you expect when people talk about spreading the blackpill and the beta male revolution?
Many edgy teenagers will insist on joining in and attacking anyone that is skeptical of them as a lame oldcel or fakecel.
True a lot of people lie or stretch the truth about how far they've gotten with women sexually.
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