The Tumblr Files - Official Thread - An exposé on the media and people that destroyed the Internet

[Outer Space Traveller]

View attachment 8231695
95% Complete. If all goes to plan, expect Case IV next week.

You got this! Told you. It will be worth the wait.

 

[I_Am_Not_Bruce_Willis]

You got this! Told you. It will be worth the wait.

"After 8 months in development, hopefully it will have been worth the weight."

 

[Outer Space Traveller]

"After 8 months in development, hopefully it will have been worth the weight."

Thanks and have fun.

Really hits the Half-Life feeling, especially considering the "Half-Life X" project we have been hearing about. But alas, this isn't the Half-Life thread, is it, Doctor Freeman?

 

[Relinquish]

95% Complete. If all goes to plan, expect Case IV next week.

When you're done, you should sponsor this thread and put a banner in the OP. Or you can ask a janny to feature this entire thread because I think it deserves more attention

 

[Lieutenant Rasczak]

View attachment 8231695
95% Complete. If all goes to plan, expect Case IV next week.

This is going to be a great read once it's done.

When you're done, you should sponsor this thread and put a banner in the OP. Or you can ask a janny to feature this entire thread because I think it deserves more attention

100%, I'd put in a good word about the thread as well for good measure.

 

[UnsufficentBoobage]

Or you can ask a janny to feature this entire thread because I think it deserves more attention

We will immediately gets TLDRders, people who will suggest shit that is already in there, people who will suggest shit that is outside of this work's scope, coomers reminiscing about ripe teen nudes on Tumblr, fags and feature tourists (fags 2).

 

[I_Am_Not_Bruce_Willis]

I can't believe I'm actually saying this, but...

Tomorrow.

 

[Appletuncrusader]

I have never been more excited to check out a thread in my life.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

So what you're saying is, for once in the history of all OPs...

OP delivers.

 

[harmy.kook]

I can't believe I'm actually saying this, but...

Tomorrow.

On my off day as well?

Really out here working those holiday miracles, huh Bruce?

 

[Newcomer 42]

Since you cover the downfall of the Internet, perhaps this will interest you, as it talks about the topic:

https://x.com/0xAlaric/status/1995652304549404841

Per Mike Benz (and others, but he covers it best), DoD/State Dept/NATO policy toward the Internet until 2014 was max freedom & max accessibility. They pivoted to algo-censorship after losing the Crimean status referendum.Basically all online culture is downstream of this pivot...

 

[Idiot Sandwich the 3rd]

I'll go get some popcorn

 

[The_Gam3]

I will just be sitting here ................... patiently ..................... waiting

 

[FunPosting101]

Man, I'm getting some serious blueballs here, I need to read more about this insane shit.

 

[worldend_dominator]

Consider this an appetizer then

Obviously, the mere idea that not every online communication platform has to be a 24/7 toxic positivity circlejerk is a no-no for Undertale/Deltarune/Meta-Irony creatures. So yes, it is way to gate-keep in that regard.

If only, say hi to Naemuti. This is 4chan's staff in 2020, it has only gotten worse since then.

This is actually a common theme I have noticed myself. Many of the hyper PC and libtarded users and creators were at some point more that willing to use slurs and be poltically incorrect. I think this has to do with becoming widespread and needing to look respectable to a mass audience as well as getting flung into the hyper polarization and sensititvity that would define the era.

Millennials in general are Troll's Remorse: The Generation.
You're getting one more siivasperg here because @The Lawgiver @The Lawgiver @The Lawgiver @The Lawgiver @The Lawgiver seethes whenever there's no new info in their dedicated thread.
For the uninitiated: back in 2016 they had an ERP server, where both fans and team members where in there, and yes, that meant both minors and adults together (I have no caps so you'll have bear with me here, but anyone who was around at the time can confirm). It has been all but memoryholed. Notorious pedophile Blazephlozard was used as the single scapegoat for it thanks to how shameless he was. I bring this up to illustrate how transparent the posturing is.

And looking back, regarding your point, the writing was in the wall the whole time. That channel is part of the bigger tree that is the irony-laden, coastal US-based music scene. You could make a Pepe Silvia map with acts like Renard and his 'cord buddies, the more esoteric soundclown shitposters, SiIvaGunner, all the way up to mainstream hyperpop musicians.

I want to show you someone, or rather, his work. This is $44.000/PISS SPEARS/Melanie, creator of Pisscore

This is his most popular work, to make yourself a general idea of what his output was like: very loud and rapid, lots of dubstep, and obligatory IT SOUNDS LIKE SHIT ON PURPOSE LMAO sections or entire tracks. His was an early adopter, as you can see by "Melanie is just an innocent teenage girl who really likes Gumi but not like bad porn of Gumi (But I think she wants to get it in with Gumi if you know what I'm saying"'s "Zedd and Hatsune Miku Tell You About the Gender Binary" (2013), introduced by him ironically "introducing a new pronoun" and screaming; and "Yiff Collective"'s "100 Sec. Cishet Battle!!why do i keep remixing beatmania songs fml" (2014) , ironically using some sperging RW(?) streamer's argument with a caller. You can see the hallmarks of top down-mandated humor more concerned with activism than accidentally crossing some line, but under extreme amounts of sarcasm to the point you doubt he if truly believes in anything. Sincerity is a poison to these types.
And now you know pisscore was created by a woman

Wanna see an aside? This is Soundchaika's most commented track (2014),

https://soundcloud.com/chaikadubs%2Fwe-can-stop-now-guys-its-not-funny-anymore-rant

in which he moralizes over people using the "I'M THE NIGGA" clip. Most people told him to go fuck himself, funnily enough.

Come think of it, the discord trannies behind siivagunner could bring back their edgier side channel if they wanted to. Saying "nigger" is something these irony-deceased MtFs don't take as much of an issue with as you'd think, specially now that the summer of love is long over. They'd only take such content down if pressed enough... unlike saying "tranny", which is high treason. 9/11 is safe edgy, mocking it (in the "anti-american" way, courtesy of the american empire's soldiers) is virtuous and morally correct, twitter approves of it, and twitch's darling Hasan wants more of it.
You can even see it that one time fancord trannies tried to pull gayops on their thread, ironically agreeing while coping, seething and dilating through their teeth.

This is one of their banners, a Love Live 9/11 meme. Their pfps (military Umi, George Floyd drip, also "redditgold" in name because trannies pretend reddit is right-leaning and not 99% them) are their idea of what the posters in there are like, a "how do you do, fellow nazis?" kind of deal. Others like the Makifag went directly to ol' reliable "trans people are literally just existing" point.

You replied in response to Triple-Q defanging himself. Once again, you'll have to take my word for it, but I spotted him leaving a positive comment under a Hard Archive blaxplotation/DV humor song, implying he kept up with the Super Hand saga, which he deleted along with the entirety of his twitter account. You could say that kind of content was his true calling, but he's made his actual choice more than clear.

This has-been made a passive-aggressive mashup pledging allegiance to good and basic human decency, implying both that you can only sell out in monetary ways, and that he's doing the opposite, going to the less popular platform because he's a true believer. Personally? I think there was nothing to sell out to begin with, he will go wherever the wind in his surroundings blows. If he likes how tumblr functions as a website, he won't become a militant activist, but will adopt their views and passively shill for their users early on. If he has a sizable following, it would be unwise to seriously anger them, he might disagree and act standoffish when it comes to media happenings and his output being at odds with his audience at times, but there are some more serious matters that have been deemed not up to debate and he knows it. If his audience of 1st world autists is trooning out en masse, in a small part thanks to you turning them into himes, then trans rights are human rights and free palestine and the statue man donates to BLM and also here's funnyman content mocking Charlie Kirk's assassination, see more like this on my bluesky. (Many, many such cases among the old guard)
As long as he has a base amount of e-fame, sychophants, and sway within these autist circles he'll be satisfied. And this is how you mantain it.

But maybe I'm overthinking all this. At the end of the day, he's functionally identical to all the other irony leftists siivatrannies look up to.

TL;DR activists run rampant and people leave, join them, or do nothing, in order to stay in their good graces

 

[Outer Space Traveller]

But maybe I'm overthinking all this. At the end of the day, he's functionally identical to all the other irony leftists siivatrannies look up to.

TL;DR activists run rampant and people leave, join them, or do nothing, in order to stay in their good graces

People like this (and their defenders) are genuinely an AIDS among the many that are killing the West.
Perhaps it is hyperbolic, yet I want to find one shred of evidence of any of these kikes bringing one shred of net positive to our society. I wonder why we suffer with immigration?

Honestly, it almost feels like a divine punishment.

 

[I_Am_Not_Bruce_Willis]

The Tumblr Files
I: Steven Universe
II: Tumblrcore & the Wii U-Chew
III: Undertale
IV: Games Repainted, Discord, & Overwatch

When I released Case I last October, @Enig said to me, “fucking 11/10 thread btw, if it is blasting that much just on part 1 it's going to be borderline end of evangelion by part 4”. End of Eva, eh? Alright, Enig. How about this?

My only request is that you read (or reread) cases I~III before reading this one, in case you haven’t already.​

The Gaming Industry in the 2000s


The early 2000s marked a major turning point for video games as a whole. While the generation before marked a major demographic shift amongst gamers, which necessitated games for older and more mature audiences, such as epic RPGs like Final Fantasy from VII onwards or Parasite Eve, or more cinematic-driven games like Konami’s Metal Gear Solid, the 6th generation of consoles would kick off with the one-two-punch of the sandbox-open-world Grand Theft Auto III, and the first-person shooter Halo: Combat Evolved, both releasing in 2001.


Not only did this now cement that mature-rated games were here to stay, and that they were no longer a simple novelty like the original Mortal Kombat or Doom, but now developers and publishers on both sides of the pond felt they needed to jump on this newly forming mature, western-based, “dude-bro” zeitgeist in order to stay competitive.

For example, Capcom, after seeing how huge of a success Grand Theft Auto III was (especially since they published it in Japan), started an internal initiative to put Japan-focused games to the side and make more games for western audiences. Headed up by Mega Man co-creator Keiji Inafune, Capcom released many games with a more grungy, “western” feel in the late 6th generation, and all throughout the 7th generation, with infamous games like Devil Kings, Final Fight: Streetwise, 2009’s Bionic Commando reboot, and the most infamous one of all, Ninja Theory’s DmC: Devil May Cry.


This wasn’t necessarily done to spit in the faces of loyal fans, though many did take it that way, especially those on 4chan’s /v/ board.

The industry caught wind of where the market was shifting and reacted accordingly. Anyone who didn’t follow this trend ran the risk of being left behind or being seen as “out of touch”.

For example, the Yuji Naka-led Sonic Team continued to release games featuring the blue blur during this time, as well as cult classics like Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg, in spite of then-president of Sega of America, Peter Moore, calling in many Sega executives & creatives to tell them about this industry shift, and even showing them video of gamers’ current opinions of the company as proof.

There are a lot of videos out there that all retell this story from differing perspectives, so I took the effort of slicing bits and pieces of them together for your convenience:

(Video sources are noted at the top right)

In the midst of it all, you had Nintendo with their 6th gen console, the Nintendo GameCube. At the time of its release, most onlookers didn’t think much of Nintendo’s “Purple Lunchbox”, as many a gamer coarsely referred to it.

The Nintendo GameCube


Just like the N64 before it, the GameCube (GCN) was referred to as the “kiddy system” of its generation, compared to the PS2 and Xbox. To onlookers, it had this weird, colorful controller with an unorthodox button layout, the console itself had a handle, it had a very “Fisher-Price” look to some gamers, which was one of the reasons Nintendo felt the need to redesign the original Famicom when bringing it over to the west as the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Nintendo was one of the companies that stuck to their guns during the 2000s, sticking to releasing games that felt more “kiddy” to onlookers, such as Super Mario Sunshine, and the many, many Mario spin-offs that released during the back-half of the GameCube’s life, but one of the most notable impasses came in the form of the GameCube’s big 3D Zelda title, The Wind Waker.

First revealed at SpaceWorld in 2001, fans who loved the previous 3D Zelda titles, Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask, for their darker and more cinematic takes on the franchise, felt completely betrayed by the new cartoony, cel-shaded look. One only needs to look at reactions from the then-popular fan site, The Odyssey of Hyrule, to see just how livid the fans were:


Even though Wind Waker would go on to be beloved by both critics and a new set of fans outside of the burned dudebros, sales of the game ended up performing under Nintendo’s expectations, due in part to that initial backlash turning many gamers off while they left to go play GTA and Halo instead.

As a response to the sluggish sales of both Wind Waker and the GameCube itself, Nintendo decided that they would forgo a sequel to Wind Waker in favor of a grittier 3D Zelda, set to appear on the GameCube and Nintendo’s upcoming system, codenamed “Revolution.” To say the reaction to this new “more adult” Zelda was positive would be an understatement.

An entire meme was born out this reaction, emblematic of the hype culture surrounding E3 at the time.


As it turned out, this “Revolution” Nintendo was touting would turn out to be a radical departure from their previous consoles, now featuring a dramatically new controller, resembling a TV remote, with other controllers you could attach to it. The new console catered towards what then-CEO Satoru Iwata touted as the “Blue Ocean” audience, people who either had never played video games, or hadn’t played them in a long time. They were what most people would go on to refer to as “casual gamers”, or just “casuals.”

Even the console’s name raised eyebrows, “Wii.” After how no-frills the GCN was, and how low its sales were, what were the chances this new “Wii” system would ever make a dent in the market? Not to mention the console was significantly less powerful than the newly re-released consoles, such as the Xbox 360 and PS3. 100 million units later, and the Wii would prove to be a gamble worth taking and would go on to define the next decade of both Nintendo hardware and software.

The GameCube’s Vindication & the Dolphin Emulator


While the GameCube was the worst-selling console of its generation, in the years since, it gained a very passionate fandom that looks back on it fondly, and a decent chunk of said fandom had no idea it sold as poorly as it did compared to the PS2 back in the day.

Technically speaking, Sony had a near monopoly sales-wise for two generations in a row, with the PS1 being the first video game console to crack 100 million units sold, and the PS2 selling 65% more than that. Yet, this was also a time when console gaming was in a slump, at the risk of stagnation. Remember, the GCN and OG Xbox sold around the same number of units (21m vs 24m), and given the PS2's massive install base, its bestselling games had underwhelming attach rates. For example, the PS2’s bestselling game, GTA San Andreas, sold 17 million, only 11% of the people who owned a PS2 bought it.

The early to mid-2010s in particular would mark a major turning point for the legacy of the Nintendo GameCube in particular. This would be due to a combination of factors:


First, there was the competitive scene for Super Smash Bros. Melee. Following the release of the Wii entry, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, many hardcore fans of the previous game were bummed out by the slower pace of the game, combined with random elements being baked into the gameplay such as characters tripping while running, making the game less competitive and more random/casual-focused. It became the posterchild of the direction Nintendo had taken with their games during this era. “A Zelda game Grandma can play” or “A Metroid game Grandma can play” was the mantra that led to divisive entries in beloved franchises like The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, or Metroid: Other M.

While Melee had always had a sizable and passionate competitive scene dating back to when it first released, competitive Melee would explode in popularity thanks to the Melee It On Me Podcast, hosted by BobbyScar and various major figures in the scene, the competitive Melee documentary, “The Smash Brothers”, releasing in October 2013, and the rise of Project M, a mod for Super Smash Bros. Brawl that made the game’s speed faster and incorporated a lot of techniques and systems found in Melee, in addition to later adding new content of its own.

The second factor was Nintendo’s then-current home console, the Wii U, being criticized for relying too much on its major gimmick: the Wii U gamepad, and how it was shoehorned into certain titles. This discourse would come to a head with the release of Star Fox Zero, which required using the Gamepad as a viewfinder to aim the Arwing’s shots.



The third factor was the proliferation of a program called “Dolphin.” Among the many different emulators that can run software from a variety of gaming consoles, both old and new, Dolphin is arguably the most popular. With releases dating all the way back to 2003, Dolphin can run games from both the Nintendo GameCube and Wii and would continue to be supported as of the time of this writing.

Thanks to it, as well as all Wii systems made before 2011 being able to play GCN games through backwards compatibility, many GCN games went viral in Nintendo fan circles, giving games like Mario Kart: Double Dash, Kirby Air Ride, F-Zero GX, Super Mario Sunshine, and more a second chance. Especially so, given the new-found desire for Nintendo’s next system to go back to a more “standard” approach with an emphasis on making great games compared to the gimmick-reliant Wii and Wii U.

In the eyes of many, gimmick-based consoles may have worked more in the late 2000s, but after the novelty wore off and most casual gamers jumped ship to mobile gaming, or browser-based social games like FarmVille, people became ever-so disgruntled with Nintendo continuing to rely on gimmicks to push their hardware and games, rather than making the more complex games their core fans wanted to see, such as a new Metroid or F-Zero.

Because of these factors, the GameCube would go on to become a hot topic in the buildup to Nintendo’s NX. Many Nintentubers and social media eCelebs alike would praise the GameCube and its no-frills approach. Even the things that gamers previously mocked for being kiddy or unorthodox, like the controller, would become beloved. You’d be hard-pressed to find a competitive Smash Bros. player that doesn’t use a GCN controller, so much so that Nintendo released a GCN controller adapter that allowed them to be used on the Wii U and future Nintendo systems.

The console would also make waves in pop culture and media made by the people who grew up with it, such as how it made cameos in Steven Universe.


There was also a fourth factor involved in the GCN’s newfound popularity online, and it’s quite a doozy:

Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door

The 2nd entry in the Paper Mario series, released for the GCN in 2004.

The Paper Mario series has its roots in the desire for Nintendo to create a new Mario RPG for the Nintendo 64, in spite of the bad breakup between Nintendo and SquareSoft in the late 90s. Fire Emblem and Famicom Wars developer Intelligent Systems stepped up and released the original Paper Mario in 2001. Work on a sequel for the GameCube began soon after and would be released to a positive reception amongst fans.

While the mainline Mario platformers, as well as Mario Kart, tend to sell the best amongst the franchise, it is the Mario RPG series of games (that includes the original Super Mario RPG for SNES, Paper Mario, and the Mario & Luigi series) that have arguably gained the most passionate fans, especially amongst the millennial and early zoomer generation. In the halcyon days of the internet, fan sites for the series began to pop up, as did plenty of fan art on sites like DeviantArt, SheezyArt, and Pixiv. Anyone who was around during this era can attest to just how influential these games were for the Mario fandom as a whole. For example, Triple-Q used to draw fanart of Paper Mario characters during his early days on DeviantArt, and even to this very day, he uses the series’ iconic font in his videos.


The passion for Mario RPGs, Paper Mario especially, was prevalent. Even when the next game in the series, Super Paper Mario for the Wii, changed up the gameplay to play more like a traditional Mario platformer, some fans still loved the game for its memorable characters and gripping story. Following Super’s release, Intelligent Systems shifted their focus to other projects, such as new entries in the WarioWare and Fire Emblem series. Then, 5 years later, a new Paper Mario would be released for Nintendo’s next handheld, and to say this entry would go on to become infamous would be an understatement.

Paper Mario: Sticker Star

The 4th entry in the Paper Mario series, released for the Nintendo 3DS in 2012.

While the game returned to the turn-based combat of the first two, the battle system was changed drastically, relying on collecting stickers and using them for attacks. EXP/Star Points were removed completely, and only coins were rewarded for completing battles, rendering battling pointless for some players. Add on top of that the lack of partners, or any characters that set the Internet on fire, as well as levels and set pieces that many considered frustrating, and you have a recipe for a divisive entry.

When the game was first revealed at E3 2010, many fans were looking forward to what seemed to be a back-to-basics approach for the series, given how much Super raised the stakes. Many of the areas and set pieces that were included evoked the vibes of the original Paper Mario for N64. While the game’s style was more in-line with the first two titles, and even a Chain Chomp partner was shown off, inspiration was also being taken from the New Super Mario Bros. series, which at that time had released on both the DS and Wii and revived 2D Mario.

Following the release of New Super Mario Bros. on the DS, and especially New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Nintendo took steps to standardize the aesthetic of the Mario franchise across all its subseries, mainline or otherwise. It just so happened that that aesthetic happened to revolve around the visual elements of NSMB, a series designed to cater to the more casual crowd Nintendo was aiming for at the time.

This meant that the number of new characters spinoffs could introduce either had to be dialed back ten-fold or forgone altogether. To use Sticker Star as an example, only pre-existing enemies from the mainline Mario series were included, with no new enemies or new versions of existing enemies having been created. Even enemies that were technically newer but debuted in New Super Mario Bros. DS or Wii, were allowed, but not much else.

Not only that, but the settings of each of Sticker Star’s chapters were very reminiscent of the worlds from NSMB Wii, be it grass, desert pyramid, poison forest, snowy mountain, jungle, Bowser’s Castle, etc. Paper Mario 64 did something similar, but still found ways to make each chapter stand out in some way, either through the characters or scenarios they presented.

This also bled into the style of the game’s NPCs, with the design of Toad-themed characters being the biggest standout amongst the fans.


Judging from personal experience, I don’t think any game has collectively mind-broke the Nintendo community quite like Sticker Star did. The ripple effect it had on people’s perception of the Mario franchise, the company, and even Shigeru Miyamoto, the godfather of many of Nintendo’s most iconic characters and games, cannot be understated. The aforementioned Star Fox Zero, and other games that were released around the same time, didn’t help either.


A lot of blame for the new direction the series had taken was placed on Kensuke Tanabe (left), best known for being the producer for Nintendo titles made by western developers, such as Retro Studios and Next Level Games. Tanabe had also been the producer of the series since TTYD, yet Ryota Kawade (right), the director of the first three entrees, was not involved with Sticker Star, or any of the games that came after.

In his stead was Taro Kudo, who had previously worked on Super Mario RPG, and was even once a music composer at Konami. According to an Iwata Asks interview, 90% of the developers were new to the series, and it definitely shows. The general inexperience amongst the staff led to what many considered an uneven game. Even Miyamoto played an early build and found it to be boring.

Despite the game’s mixed reception, Kensuke Tanabe said that he felt Sticker Star would be used as the template for the series going forward, and 4 years later, the fans would witness the fruits of that statement.

Paper Mario: Color Splash

In March of 2016, a new Paper Mario game was revealed for the Wii U. While fans had hoped the next entry would steer the series back in the right direction, what was shown had more in common with Sticker Star from a gameplay and philosophy standpoint.


While some thought Sticker Star would just be a one-off, and the next game would be different, this is the point where Paper Mario fans really put their foot down in protest. Chief among these fans was Arlo, a then-small muppet YouTuber who got his foot in the door from collaborating with MatPat/Game Theory-wannabe, Lockstin/Gnoggin.

Thanks to his videos on Color Splash, and the Paper Mario series as a whole, Arlo would find himself as the champion of Paper Mario, both on YouTube and the Nintendo community at large, and helped his channel take off going into the Switch era.

Smashtuber RelaxAlax also shared similar sentiments, given he too is a quirky millennial who loves Smash Bros. and GameCube-era Nintendo.

Meanwhile, on a certain YouTube channel known for High Quality Video Game Rips, the anger towards Color Splash’s announcement was very much felt. It just so happened that the channel had ripped and uploaded the title screen music to Color Splash early, except this rip acted as nothing more than a microcosm of how people felt about the game, especially given how many people on the team were huge Paper Mario fans.


Paper Mario’s Influence and Newfound Popularity
Because of the newfound discussion and discourse surrounding Sticker Star, Color Splash, and the demand for a new entry in the style of the first two, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door essentially gained a second life on Tumblr in the mid-2010s. Plenty of memes and fanart about the game and its characters were posted all over Tumblr.


TTYD would also show its influence in many millennial-led indie media, such as indie darling Shovel Knight, where the text effects that the game used made their way into the game:

(Note the text distortion in the first words of both text boxes)


An indie 3D platformer that was in development during this period, A Hat in Time, took heavy inspiration from TTYD. The game’s director, Jonas Kaerlev, cited multiple GameCube-era games, such as TTYD, as his main influences when it came to the games he’s made, and it shows. One of A Hat in Time’s first bosses directly borrows from the Chapter 5 fight against Lord Crump.



Even little things from the series, like the button prompts or explanation bubbles found their way into YTPs or animations that were made by fans of the series, such as Geibuchan or Chaofanatic.


Going back to GiIvaSunner, the anger towards Color Splash from them didn’t just come from a hatred for the game, but love for the originals. How so? It just so happens that around the same time GiIvaSunner was conceived, a group of SoundClowns had started work on Paper Jams, a collaboration album featuring mashups and remixes of songs from across the Paper Mario series. In fact, to promote the album, many members of SoundClown/SiIvaGunner had Paper Mario-themed PFPs, all created by PinkyOats. The album would later be completed and released in 2020.




You could even make the argument that Undertale partially owes its popularity to Paper Mario. Not only were EarthBound fans desperate for new content during what felt like a renaissance period for the series (see Case III), but Mario RPG fans also desired worthwhile new content that catered to their tastes. Given Undertale’s sense of humor, quirky characters, and memorable music, and even its system of dodging enemy bullets being inspired by Mario & Luigi, it’s no wonder that Paper Mario fans latched onto the game just as many others were.


Not only that, but around this time, Cartoon Network and Grumpyface Studios released a Steven Universe RPG on mobile, entitled Attack the Light. It and its sequels, Save the Light and Unleash the Light, took inspiration from the Paper Mario series, with their battle systems using timing-based action commands.

At E3 2016, YouTube news channel Gamexplain interviewed one of Color Splash’s producers, Risa Tabata, and asked her about the possibility of a remake or remaster of Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, to which she replied, “I think if we hear that a lot, that’s something we’ll think about.”

When asked about the series future beyond Color Splash, Tabata replied that it would be great to keep doing things that are funny and interesting, but that they’ll have to think of new ways to play with the “paper” theme. This flew in the face of what many fans loved about the series, that modern Paper Mario placed more emphasis on the “Paper” and less on the “Mario.”

Bottom line is: Tumblr loved Paper Mario, especially since they were being deprived of the kind of content they wanted. Put a pin in that for now.

 

[I_Am_Not_Bruce_Willis]

The Fapping Guys

The early 2010s saw the rise of group Let’s Play channels, with the Yogscast, The Runaway Guys (Chuggaaconroy, NintendoCapriSun, & ProtonJon), and Game Grumps (Egorapter & JonTron, later replaced with Danny Sexbang) leading the pack. With the popularity they had, it was only natural that other aspiring groups of gamers would band together to capitalize on the hype.

Enter Angelo Furfaro, AznAndy94, and Fred Fuchs. Together, they formed their own friend group and collaborative YouTube channel, The Fapping Guys. Their bread and butter was streaming on YouTube back when it was just introduced to the site, while competing platforms like Twitch.tv were on the rise.


From there, more people would be brought into the group, such as Jake, Spencer, Shayna, Cael, Dommy, and more. They all hooked up either through Skype or meeting up at IRL events/conventions like MagFest.

One member of particular note was Seth, or SayYesToGiygas, who stemmed from the YouTube Poop scene and was even a user on YouChew at one point. His most notable contribution to Internet culture was “ROW ROW GALO POWA,” a mashup of "Galish Man GAL" (Better known as simply “Galo Sengen”) and “Rap is a Man’s Soul” from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann.

These days, TheFappingGuys is a name & channel that has been mostly scrubbed from the Internet, due in part to its relative obscurity before it started doing the thing that really put them on the map. Archives on WayBackMachine, Archive.is, and GhostArchive are near-nonexistent, and even googling them won’t bring up much.

Angelo John Furfaro III / MustacheTangelo / TRMario

Having joined YouTube when he was just 13, Angelo, under the alias “TRMario”, created his account on October 31st, 2006. While his earliest videos documented glitches found in Super Mario Sunshine, he would hop on the growing YouTube Poop fad in 2007, making many YTPs that utilized DiC’s Super Mario World cartoon.

When it came to YouChew, Angelo created an account on the forums back when it was still new, but he wasn’t as involved with their ingroup and wouldn’t use the site all that much afterward. A major turning point in Angelo’s online career would come on November 2nd, 2007, when the animated show Chowder premiered on Cartoon Network.


Chowder is often cited as one of the bright spots during one of Cartoon Network’s darker eras (After CN City, but before Adventure Time). Created by ex-Spongebob writer C.H. Greenblatt, Chowder centers on the titular character working at Mung Daal’s bakery, despite him often finding himself in trouble due to his massive appetite. Chowder would serve as a major inspiration for Angelo, not just as a major source for his YouTube Poops, but also for his aspirations of being an artist & animator.

For example, Angelo had an idea for an animated series of his own, entitled Chasley.

On July 31st, 2009, Angelo would create a 2nd channel called “MustacheTangelo,” later renamed to “AngeloJFurfaro”. Unlike the TRMario channel, Angelo’s new channel would primarily focus on animations instead. Taking heavy inspiration from both Chowder, as well as the Mario franchise. It would be here where he would upload famous (or infamous) animations, such as “Mario Tells Luigi the Truth”, using audio from a Vinesauce corruption stream, or “DO THE PAIZURI.”

After MustacheTangelo’s creation, the TRMario channel would mainly be used for uploading music, specifically from Chowder, as well as various Mario games like Mario Galaxy, Superstar Baseball, and Strikers Charged. In spite of this, Angelo kept getting comments on the music uploads asking for more Chowder poops.

On June 23rd, 2012, Angelo would upload Choder to the TRMario channel, a raunchy Chowder parody fully animated by himself. At the end of the animation, Angelo poked fun at all the people asking for more Chowder poops, in spite of him choosing not to delete or close the account.

However, in 2013, Angelo would abandon the TRMario account in favor of his animation-focused one. He would later private all the videos on the channel by 2016.

In June 2012, Angelo would create his own art blog on a certain up-and-coming website that was growing popular with indie artists, where he would further establish a new audience separate from his YTP one. Angelo made sure to follow many notable artists and animators who had a presence on Tumblr, such as Sean Hicks, RubberRoss, PurpleKecleon, Ian Jones Quartey, and Shmorky.


Games Repainted

A major feature of the Dolphin emulator is its ability to dump textures in real time from any game it can run. The dumped textures can then be edited and loaded back into the game. This feature has been used to create HD texture packs for various games. Being able to load textures through the emulator itself and not through hacking the ROM made the custom texture packs more accessible compared to other forms of hacking.

Eventually, Angelo took notice of this feature and wondered, “What if we replaced a bunch of the textures with memes?” He would let the other members of the Fapping Guys know about his idea, and together, they quickly threw together a custom texture pack for the original Luigi’s Mansion.

On October 3rd, 2014, Angelo would stream the custom pack, entitled “Luigi’s Mansion Repainted,” on The Fapping Guys’ channel, with many TFG members watching and giving commentary through Skype.

As early as their first stream, TheFappingGuys were enthusiastic about the potential of repaints, and discussed plenty of games they would love to repaint along with the stream chat. Games like Super Mario Sunshine, Super Smash Bros. Melee, Paper Mario: TTYD, Pac-Man World 2, Pokemon Channel, Mario Kart: Double Dash, etc. They also talk about the idea of outsourcing textures to their community, only to then mention how /v/ would destroy the whole thing, flooding it with NSFW content.

They even talk about getting Vinny from Vinesauce to play one of their repaints, but argue that it wouldn’t really work, given they relied too heavily on Fapping Guys’ inside jokes.

Given this was a fun little Internet project created before the era of cancel culture brought upon by Tumblr taking over the Internet, Luigi’s Mansion has quite a few jokes and memes that I imagine the creators have massive troll’s remorse over. For example, the front door of the titular mansion literally has the Happy Merchant on it. Despite harboring spite against 4Chan & /v/, they clearly weren’t immune to their antisemitic rhetoric. The Toads in the game also have Stars of David on their caps.


Early the following year, they would create and stream a repaint of Super Mario Sunshine. In addition to textures, TFG also figured out how to replace the game’s pre-rendered cutscenes, leading to some particular hilarity.

When it came to what content was and wasn’t allowed in their repaints, they stated that the main thing they didn’t allow was NSFW content, or anything that would get them nuked from YT, and later Twitch. Granted, that didn’t mean they were above making what some would consider “edgy” edits, even as 2015 wore on and awareness of “those heckin’ evil Neo-Nazis” began to spread.

From my perspective, it’s pretty surprising that they censored hentai and NSFW content, but not much else, like how Jew jokes or Nazi jokes were allowed, with a few exceptions. In Mario Sunshine Repainted, the Chasley symbol on the Cataquacks was almost a Nazi swastika. One of the group’s members, Dommy, went on record saying a lot of the edgier edits were done by him.


So, why bring all this up? Well, the story of Games Repainted is the story of an underground friend group that started out as being edgy, using 4chan-inspired humor and memes in their work, in spite of their community being Tumblr-based, only to then be ratted out from the inside and be among the first sufferers of censorship and Troll’s Remorse in a post-LoveWins world, on top of them being among the first major communities to have a presence on Discord and helping set the precedent for the app’s userbase. All in all, acting as a bridge from the “Old Internet” to the “New Internet”.

With that said, it’s time to talk about someone I’ve been itching to discuss since I started this whole thing:

Alex McCree / GPM / GeePM / GeeFrodo / Gay Purple Man / U1traM4n / FlashFire9

The founder and former main streamer on the website DatStream, as well as a major collaborator with Games Repainted, as well as Vinesauce.

GeePM’s online career dates all the way back to October 2006, when he was known as U1ltraM4n on YouTube, with his early videos covering things like M.U.G.E.N. and, fittingly, Super Mario 64 texture hacks. In September of 2007, U1ltraM4n had his account hacked, with his profile having been changed to be RickRoll-themed. U1ltraM4n responded to the hack, via alt account, using some colorful language, as did his alleged hacker.


As we move out of the 2000s and into the 2010s, U1ltraM4n, under the new alias of Gay Purple Man, would enter the emerging frontier of online streaming. This would be done through DatStream, a streaming website formed by him and fellow collaborator Nostalgiachan.

DatStream / DatStrom.net / Robofantasmic


In the days before Twitch had a near-monopoly on Internet live streaming, there were plenty of livestreaming sites and groups in various corners of the Internet. One of these was DatStream. Initially, the DatStream domain name was taken, so the hosts of the site had to settle for the address name “robofantasmic” instead. They would eventually acquire the DatStream address name proper by the summer of 2010. However, in 2011, and all the way up to 2016, the “DatStream” address was taken by a French video site, so GPM and co. had to use the address name, “DatStrom.net.”

GeePM would make DatStream his go-to home for streaming going forward. Initially, their streams were hosted on Hitbox.tv, before later switching over to Twitch once it exploded in popularity.

A major stream event that helped get GPM on the Internet’s radar was Mario Retardy, a stream/drinking game popularized on 4chan’s /v/ board. In it, the streamer and his viewers watch a fully CPU-controlled game of Mario Party and take shots when certain events happen to the characters they bet on.

Later on, GPM became known for his frequent streams of the Neo Geo golf game, Neo Turf Masters. He also did Miiverse is Hell, a series of streams where GPM and friends would go through Miiverse, find the cringiest posts, and laugh at the insanity.


DatStream also had a Booru site where viewers could submit art and screencaps from the stream chat. The Booru, believe it or not, is one of the few archives of old DatStream chatlogs we have left.

Spoiler: Examples

In case the prior information didn’t tip you off, GPM and DatStream’s culture drew heavy inspiration from 4Chan, and their culture at the time. GPM himself was a frequent user on /v/, as evidenced not just by the culture that inspired his streaming style early on, but because he proudly displayed his status as a tripfag on the homepage for his Steam group, Gay Purple Man's Groupies and Streamers (GPMGAS).


Over the course of DatStream’s peak in relevance, the site would bring on other creators where they could host their content. One of these people just so happened to be an up-and-coming artist named Triple-Q. He was both a frequent viewer and streamer on the site, and he even drew art of GPM a few times. He also linked and promoted his mashups on the front page in 2013-2014.



Around the time TheFappingGuys started the Repainted fad, DatStream decided to jump on the hype, collaborating with members of TFG to make their own repaints that they would stream on their site, the first among these being a repaint of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. This would later be followed by a repaint of Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes a few months later.

Buff Riku (O'Melissokomos)

An image of a buff Riku from Kingdom Hearts, first appearing in Wind Waker Repainted, courtesy of Fred Fuchs.

The image was created by O'Melissokomos, a gay, hypnosis, and muscle fetish artist, among other things, who drew pictures of various characters as buff or muscular, and submitted them to both his blog and the website, Choose Your Own Change, a transformation fetish image site. Throughout the late 2000s, O'Melissokomos drew characters like Danny Phantom, Phoenix Wright, and even Bart Simpson as grotesquely buff, only to then move on to drawing non-descript buff people in the early 2010s.


Despite O'Melissokomos’ shift away from buff “““fan art”””, Fred Fuchs found an image of Buff Riku while searching for images to include in repaints, and decided to throw it into The Wind Waker Repainted, and future GR repaints, cementing Buff Riku as one of Games Repainted’s most prolific in-jokes. Not only that, but GPM would make “Buff Stuff” a core part of his lingo and brand, using buff imagery on his channel and in his emotes.

Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door: Repainted & Rewritten

Unlike previous repaints, GR decided to allow their community to submit their own textures and even edits to the game’s script. Given TTYD makes heavy use of textures for its character models, it was inevitable that some people would get creative or, in most cases, just make bizarre mutants.


To me, TTYD Repainted marks the point at which the cultures of both 4Chan and Tumblr began to converge, and you can see the scales tip in real time. Given the open nature of texture submissions, the userbases of both sites would learn about it and contribute. Not to mention users who frequented both sites and had already been experiencing the blurring/blending of both cultures.

For example, if you look at the average Tumblr dashboard or archive during this timeframe, early-to-mid 2015, you can pinpoint the origin of a lot of TTYD’s textures.



If we check the credits of TTYD Repainted, you may spot a familiar face or two.


Fred and Andy were in charge of moderating the textures. Just like before, NSFW wasn’t allowed, but initially, jew/nazi jokes were. To add on to that, a few “offensive” edits made it into the texture pack initially.

The most notable example of this is the “A Jew” and “Blacks” icons on the Level Up screen, which were replaced after Night 1. According to Fred and Andy during Night 3, some things, such as the “Blacks” icon on the level up select simply passed them by. Though, a juice shop in Glitzville was able to get away with being renamed to “Fresh Jews.”


Nazi swastikas were allowed, initially. However, when the completed “Director’s Cut” of TTYD repainted was released, all Swastika, Nazi, and other “problematic” textures were thrown into their own folder, with replacement textures for them being included in the base folder. This was the fault of someone I’ll get into later.

Despite their usage of /v/-level humor in LM and SMS Repainted, TheFappingGuys hated seeing their streams linked on /v/, and when they did, their chat more often than not got flooded with people spamming what they deemed the “rude word.” (The word in question being mentions of rape.) Although, given how much it was brought up in their streams, the term “rude word” became a meme amongst GR’s fanbase.

Despite its hiccups, TTYD Repainted was a success for the channel, and helped cement GR as a contender in the then-emerging online streaming space, and even greatly helped contribute to Paper Mario’s online resurgence as a whole.

TheEntireFurryFandom / gravegospel / houndsounds / smoochpooch

Another major Tumblr blog of its era. TEFF was particularly popular among the Tumblr funnymen, including YouChew refugees such as Chaofanatic. “Her” OC, GoatDog, was particularly popular amongst the furries on Tumblr, and even replaced Koops in TTYD Repainted. TEFF also used to stream on Twitch under the name, houndsounds.

Super Mario Galaxy Repainted


As part of a goal being met for that year’s Vinesauce charity stream, Vinny and GeePM streamed a collaborative repaint of Super Mario Galaxy in December of 2015. In addition to custom cutscenes and modifying Mario’s model to resemble Sponge, a character from Vinny’s Tomodachi Life streams, Mario Galaxy was also the first repaint to feature custom music.

“Fuck Bees” in particular would go on to become one of Vinesauce’s biggest memes of the mid 2010s, especially after GPM asked Vinny if he would copulate with a bee.

Throughout the stream, GPM teased Vinny about Undertale, given the game was still new and fresh at the time and was gaining in popularity. Vinny actually stood out from his peers in regard to Undertale by stating he would not play it. Despite that, GPM made subtle references to it and gave the occasional wink and nod to mess with Vinny. Dogsong even made an appearance early on in the game.

In the vast word of the Internet, with all its eCelebs and funnymen, Vinny is the one guy who refuses to play Undertale (and by extension, Deltarune), to this very day.

GPM & Vinesauce

Despite DatStream and Vinesauce being their own separate streaming groups, GPM actually helped Vinny get into streaming and helped get Vinesauce off the ground. Vinesauce actually has its origins in 4Chan’s /v/ board, which both GPM and Vinny were active on at the time.

GPM was, once upon a time, notified that someone was also doing a Mario Retardy stream of his own and went to go check on it. It just so happened that this stream was being held by a young Vinny Pizzapasta. From there, GPM helped build the website that Vinesauce would run on, and he would even use it to host his own servers for DatStream. GPM would later collaborate with some of Vinesauce’s streamers, such as Joel, Vinny, and Rev, on a few special occasions.

Eventually, GPM decided to split off from DatStream, letting them continue to exist as their own entity, and join the Vinesauce team in early 2016 in hopes of pursuing his passion for streaming. His built-up community having a massive overlap with Vinesauce’s also helped. Less than a year after he joined, GeePM left Vinesauce, mainly due to him soliciting donation money for personal stuff like arcade machines.

In early 2021, allegations would be thrown at Vinny for sexual assault of fans, with these allegations coming from an “anonymous” Twitter account, having been retweeted and backed up by people like GPM and anime YouTuber Red Bard.

Someone would later come forward with allegations that GPM associated with known pedophile and Discord groomer, DrunkWario, among other things. Not only that, but Vinny later came out and indirectly threatened his accusers with a lawsuit on a prerecorded livestream. This was enough to make GPM delete and scrub his channel, as well as his entire presence on social media, and disappear from the Internet.

Spoiler: /v/ Posts recounting the drama

Now, during my research, pretty much all of what I found simply pointed to GPM being guilty by association, rather than him doing or saying anything bad himself. That’s still a bit much to delete everything off the Internet, all things considered. At least, that’s what I initially thought, before I found something unbelievable: screencaps from the old DatStream days.

In these screencaps, not only does GPM act with the same arrested development “uwu gay baby” attitude that a lot of Discord users would adopt years later, but he also professes his love for something called “CP.”



While some of these may be in reference to the theme park, Cedar Point, some of the other screencaps from around the same time paint a different picture.

Spoiler

And it wasn’t just in these screencaps that GPM had this attitude. During one of the GR streams, he straight up calls Angelo his “Sweet Baby.” Oddly prophetic, don’t you think?

Undertale Repainted

Given Undertale’s massive popularity around this time, and how easy it is to mod GameMaker games, it was only inevitable that someone would get the smart idea to repaint it. That person being PAMVLLO/SuperWiiBros08. The repaint would be streamed in early 2016 and even featured custom music.

While a Swastika was in the initial version of the repaint, being used as the symbol for the “Fight” command, it had to be taken out, with any instances of it in the first part being censored with a picture of Damien in uploads of the first stream of it.


Due to the massive push Undertale was receiving from the Internet, Tumblr especially, in late 2015/early 2016, Undertale Repainted ended up becoming one of the most popular Repaints of all time, despite not having any involvement from TFG outside of streaming it. It was during this time that TFG started accepting submissions for repaints done by fans, such as Pac-Man World 2, Pokemon Channel, Punch-Out!!, and Wario World.

SuperWiiBros08 / PAMVLLO

A video editor, Internet funnyman, artist, and content creator who got his foot in the door thanks to Undertale Repainted. WiiBros would later be hired by Vinesauce to edit highlight videos of their streams, in addition to making his own content. You may have also occasionally seen his name pop up in YT comment sections, or on TwiXer.

Mario Pissing

A series of MS Paint-made animations by Blaze the Movie Fan, uploaded in 2016. The crude graphics, and awkward accent of the voice acting made it a hit amongst GR and their fans. The video was popularized by being featured at the end of one of GR’s streams, having been sent to TFG by WiiBros. The video would later go on to become an in-joke on Vinesauce and edits of it would be posted all over Twitter by aspiring funnymen.

Blaze would disown the animations in 2019 and later delete them from YouTube.


Michael K. / VGFM / Video Game Freak Mak / MAK

An online artist who was proactive in the development of TTYD Repainted and other Repaints, such as Sonic Adventure 2 Repainted and, later on, Deltarune Repainted.

The origins of VGFM’s online presence date back to the halcyon days of DeviantArt, as he joined the site in July of 2003 after getting the necessary high-speed connections set up. That’s how long ago it was. To put that into perspective, VGFM was writing blog posts on DeviantArt when F-Zero GX was still new, and Sonic Heroes was months away. Initially submitting drawings done on paper and uploaded through his scanner, as well as recolored/edited Sonic sprites rechristened as “OCs” (as was the style at the time), VGFM eventually transitioned to doing digital drawings, and made that his go-to craft.


One thing VGFM did a lot of on DeviantArt was fill out survey template posts, which is where a lot of information about his personal life comes from. In fact, for someone who seems bent on maintaining anonymity nowadays, VGFM was very open about the happenings of his personal life in the 2000s, whether it was movies he was watching, games he was playing or getting excited about, his school woes, or his relationships with his friends and family.


Back in the day, VGFM had a very negative/cynical outlook on a lot of media, such as how he showed great disdain for then-contemporary movies like “School of Rock” and “Good Boy,” or how misogynistic beer commercials were. Keep in mind, VGFM penned these when he was 14 at the youngest. They’re arguably emblematic of the general negative culture so-called Internet iconoclasts were trying to foster around this time.


VGFM also wrote and posted about political events and news a lot, such as a massive blog ranting about the policies of then-president, George W. Bush, and his deportations. He was big on political correctness, such as how he chastised the then-newly released cartoon, Mucha Lucha, for being racist. He was also an outspoken critic of Drawn Together back when it was airing.


VGFM spent a lot of time during the 2000s writing fanfics and uploading them to FF.net, specifically Sonic ones. He was one of the many people online at the time who held a very passionate fandom for Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM), an animated series done by DiC that took the series in a darker direction and served as the basis for the Sonic comics by Archie. At one point, he tried writing his own take on the Sonic universe, Sonic Apocalypse taking the parts of each iteration of Sonic that he liked the most.


VGFM hated SheezyArt for being a DeviantArt ripoff and never bothered with it. However, given his passion for writing, he would later join LiveJournal in 2005 and eventually shift to making the site his primary host for writing blog posts during the late 2000s.



While in his writeup on The Princess and the Frog, VGFM mentions himself slightly distancing from obsessing over political correctness, he would join a certain underground Internet forum called “YouChew” in December of 2009. He would become fairly active on there, contributing things such as banner artwork and articles for the site. He also formed relationships with other site members such as MetalSocks240, YamiMario, sauceboss, and SkyBlueFox.

Even though VGFM had let go of his obsession with political correctness a little by late 2009/early 2010, when George Bush was out and Obama was now president, his entrance into YouChew may have had an effect on rekindling his political drive.

One of the things YouChew is most infamous for is its obsession with politics. It was a regular sight to see YCP’s userbase constantly whine about /pol/ during the forum's early years. So much so, that a lot of newer users actually discovered the board thanks to YCP. The political obsession of the forum was so high that even a lot of the far-left users began to feel uncomfortable, and that's to say nothing about the neutral and right-leaning folks who eventually abandoned the place outright.

Eventually, VGFM would join Tumblr in July 2012, and right away, he reblogged a few posts that would set the tone for his Internet identity going forward:


His first posts on his Tumblr related to things like feminism and LGBT safe spaces. From there, VGFM’s obsession with political correctness would go completely off the deep end, into places that he probably could never have foreseen back in the 2000s. Whether it’s arguing about the concept of free speech, gay pride, diversity in media, TERFs, “gamer culture”, and other hotbed talking points of its era.

Spoiler: Examples

He and his associates took GamerGate “pretty well” when it happened. As if he didn’t have a bone to pick with 4Chan, already.

Spoiler: Examples

He discussed South Park quite a few times on his DA blog and on LiveJournal, but a tumblr post he reblogged utterly tore it apart:


All the while he was reblogging art from fellow politically correct Tumblr artist/activist, Dave “Shmorky” Kelly, who I’m sure didn’t have any skeletons in his closet, either.


Ken Penders & Bobby Schroeder / ThanksKenPenders

One particular fixation of VGFM’s from this time period was Ken Penders, the infamous former writer and artist for Archie’s Sonic comics. Ken had begun to gain infamy amongst the Sonic fandom after he tried to sue Sega over the similarities between his characters and the ones featured in the Nintendo DS RPG, Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood.

A Tumblr blog entitled “Thanks Ken Penders” was created in December 2014 by troon furry artist Bobby Schroeder to chronicle Ken’s decent into madness, and the many bizarre things he created both during and after his tenure at Archie. The most bizarre being his attempt at an original IP featuring his Echidna (sorry, “Echyd’nya”) OCs, entitled “The Lara Su Chronciles,” which featured, to put it lightly, a very “jarring” art style.



On top of documenting the history of Archie Sonic and writing multiple articles about it, years later, Bobby would create his own game, “Super Lesbian Animal RPG.” His poodle OC would also make a cameo in the IDW Sonic comics:

Yes, really.

VGFM’s Relation with Tumblr Fandom
Like most of Tumblr’s userbase in 2015/2016, VGFM would also develop an obsession with both Steven Universe and Undertale. VGFM partook in the fandom culture of the day, with a lot of his posts either speculating about both properties, or discussion about their characters. As stated in Case I, Peridot and the arc involving her got many people into SU, and VGFM was among them. He would show his fandom for Peridot through his fair share of reblogs and later on, artwork/edits featuring the character in repaints.


One particular set of .gifs that went viral in late 2015 was a scene from Sonic Underground featuring some rather uncanny animation. It's what brought Sonic Underground from a simple novelty to an infamous piece of animation in the eyes of this sector of the Internet.




Other examples include his reblogging about the correction of pronouns in an Undertale artbook, and, just like so much of the left-wing Internet around this time, calling people he disagreed with “Neo-Nazis.” His obsession with politics would only escalate further as election season began to rear its head in mid-to-late 2015, going into 2016.


With having said all this, you can begin to imagine what went down when VGFM caught wind of a small hobby project that was picking up steam on Tumblr called “Games Repainted.” One that was relying on “edgy humor”, shoving in swastikas everywhere, and so on.

Given his love of Steven Universe, it was only inevitable that dozens of Steven Universe references and pictures would find their way into TTYD Repainted. He was also responsible for other elaborate character edits featured in the repaint, such as a trio of waifu characters, and changing the Magikoopas to resembling Farnsworth from Futurama.


Later on, the censoring of swastikas, as well as other textures and bits of dialogue, was done by VGFM for the texture pack’s Director’s Cut. He went so far as to say in the GR stream showing off his Director’s Cut, “Look how far we’ve come in 6 months.”

These days, VGFM does safe-horny pinup art on Twitter and later on, BlueSky, featuring his waifu characters and other OCs created by him. So much for calling all those beer commercials misogynist.

Sonic Adventure 2 Repainted

This repaint was done entirely by VGFM and streamed by GPM during the 2016 Vinesauce charity stream. Other members of the GR team, like Angelo and Fred, were also in attendance for it.


What helped separate this repaint from what had come before is that instead of the placement of textures being haphazard, every stage had a specific theme, such as City Escape being changed to focus on GR-centric memes, the desert levels being themed around King of the Hill and Beavis & Butthead, and the Space Colony Ark levels being, try to act surprised, Steven Universe (and other then-contemporary cartoons).

VGFM’s fandom for Tumblr’s favorite show and game were fully on display: The Master Emerald shards were changed to being “Smol Peridots”, Rouge the Bat herself was changed to be Peridot, and the entire Chao Garden was changed to be Undertale-themed, with every major character and NPC receiving pre-made Chao edits, as well as all 3 gardens, and the Chao Kindergarten, being changed to locations from the game.

Spoiler: Examples

While some have discussed the effects Glee had on Tumblr, and how those kids grew up and worked in Hollywood, I can kind of see something similar going on here, with how VGFM very much made use of Millennial "Meta humor" in SA2 Repainted’s cutscene dialogue. Since the DeviantArt days, he had always voiced his criticisms with how shallow the writing and characterizations of Sonic characters were in the games compared to SatAM and the comics.

Here, VGFM went out of his way to pretty much grill SA2. Even if this was technically during the era when it was cool to hate on Sonic Adventure (you can thank ProJared, Jimmy Whetzel, and Game Grumps for that), the dialogue edits, and passive-aggressive jabs at SA2 in the repaint’s trailer, really show off VGFM’s cynical “style” of humor.

Spoiler: Examples

And it wouldn’t be a VGFM production without shoehorning in politics. In the case of SA2 Repainted, Shadow was changed to “Shadobama”, a hybrid of Shadow and then-president, Barack Obama. The origin of fusing the two dates back to a viral Tumblr post from April of 2015, where Obama is asked about the Chaos Emeralds at a presidential meeting. This was then followed up with a meme of Obama skating through the halls of the White House as Shadow.


On top of that, Maria was changed to Donald Trump, a notorious presidential candidate that had been gaining in popularity at the time for his bold and brash verbiage and countercultural drive compared to his contemporaries.


All in all, SA2 Repainted feels a lot more cynical compared to previous repaints, which felt more tongue-in-cheek. Part of it may be because this was during that period where Sonic Adventure was hated, or because of VGFM's own writing style, but the other reason may be because of something else that was going on at the time:

2016

VGFM had fully bought into the hype of 2016 being “the worst year ever”, a meme that had spread across the Internet for a variety of reasons, such as political events like Brexit, a bunch of celebrity deaths (I.E. Muhammad Ali, Gene Wilder, Carrie Fisher, David Bowie, etc.), people obsessing over a gorilla getting shot, and a bunch of disappointing releases/a lack of quality releases (I.E. The 2016 Powerpuff Girls Reboot, Street Fighter V, No Man's Sky, Mighty No. 9, Metroid Prime: Federation Force, Color Splash, the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot, and Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.)

Explaining why all of these games/shows/movies ended up the way they did is far out of the scope of the files but just know that it wasn’t really for any single all-encompassing reason. Just know that the year “2016” became a blight on a lot of media, even stuff that might not have deserved to be crapped on as much as it did, or in some cases, pulled themselves together and cleaned up their act. (I.E. No Man’s Sky and Street Fighter V)

However, the root of the “worst year” discourse had primarily revolved around that year’s presidential election. Not only was the left grumpy that they were losing Obama, but both primary candidates that year became divisive in their own right.

Meanwhile, 4Chan’s /pol/ board were having the time of their lives. Having discovered things like the Cult of Kek, and the song Shadilay by a band literally called “P.E.P.E.” To them, Donald Trump was “their guy”, and all the memes and events that took place on the site are quite the saga in of themselves.

The Internet had now become political, whether its users at large liked it or not. If it wasn’t GamerGate, it was LoveWins. If it wasn’t LoveWins, it was Brexit. If it wasn’t Brexit, it was diversity. If it wasn’t diversity, it was Donald Trump. Most people who were not all that interested in politics were all of a sudden witnessing a lot of discourse over the upcoming election, and the policies of the nominees, all across their social media feeds/dashboards.

And at the center of it all this discourse and negativity was the hashtag: “#Fuck2016.”




This had become especially apparent in what SA2’s final boss, the Biolizard, was changed to, a reference to both the so-bad-it’s-good indie Ghana film, “2016”, and 2016, the year that the Internet had all become so enraged and cynical towards.

If it hadn’t already, 2016 had set the precedent for the cynical, “doomer” dumpster fire the Internet would become in the years afterward. Whether VGFM took joy in pointing this all out, or if he and his buddies on Tumblr got dopamine from complaining about what they saw as the world ending, I’ll let you decide.

 

[I_Am_Not_Bruce_Willis]

Jason Citron, OpenFeint, & Hammer and Chisel, inc.

Way back in 2009, when mobile gaming was just starting to properly take off with the advent of smartphones, multiple startup development groups joined in, hoping to reap the benefits of this fresh and new “gold rush.” One of these groups was Aurora Feint, founded by Jason Citron and Danielle Cassley.


After getting their foot in the door developing a series of mobile games of the same name, Aurora Feint would introduce a platform that gave select iOS and Android games social networking features such as forums, achievements, and leaderboards. This resulted in the creation of OpenFeint.

Over the course of the app’s life between 2009 and 2012, quite a few notable mobile games would support it, such as Fruit Ninja, Pocket God, Jetpack Joyride, Bloons Tower Defense, The Moron Test, Tiny Wings, and Robot Unicorn Attack. OpenFeint also received investment from various larger companies, such as Intel and DeNA, and was later sold to Japanese company GREE in 2011.

Not too long after OpenFeint came out, it would be overshadowed by Apple’s own attempt at an online mobile ecosystem in Game Center, which even allowed for online multiplayer in select games. With that, Jason Citron decided to start another venture for mobile, and founded Hammer And Chisel, Inc. in 2012. The game they would become known for would be Fates Forever, a 2014 League of Legends-inspired MOBA for the iPad.


During the development of Fates Forever, Jason and his team developed their own voice chat software because of how difficult it was for his testers to communicate during gaming sessions. When Fates Forever didn’t do well enough to keep H&C’s lights on, Jason decided to take the voice chat software his team created, and flesh it out.

This software would be developed with the intent of competing with similar platforms such as TeamSpeak and Skype, with an emphasis on user friendliness. This platform would become known as Discord.

Discord

An Internet messaging and chatting program released in late 2015. Discord has become particularly infamous for its userbase, and drama-mongering that has occurred on its many servers, as well as through its direct messaging system.

At the time, Jason saw an opportunity to penetrate the slowly rising eSports market with a tool that helps gamers communicate with each other better than competing platforms like Skype could. In Jason’s own words, “We all love games. A lot of the most important relationships with my wife and best friends are built around games. A lot of our best memories we have are about playing games together. That’s what motivates me. I want to make things that help people become closer together through games.”

From the perspective of Jason and his team, voice chat/texting programs hadn’t progressed much on mobile, and they hoped to use Discord to remedy that. Right away, Discord marketed itself as the best way for gamers to communicate with each other. It’s tagline, and message to the Internet at large, was “It’s Time to Ditch Skype and TeamSpeak.”



What was also apparent right away is that, unlike its contemporaries, Discord had, to put it lightly, “a sense of humor.” This wasn’t just a shiny, new voice & chat app, it was a shiny, new voice & chat app being built by millennials, and if there’s one thing the millennial generation has become infamous for, it’s their need to be “funny” at all times, adopting the “Joss Whedon” rhetoric of always needing to tell a joke. Discord also had a variety of quippy messages that displayed while the app was loading, some of which were submitted by its users.

This was apparent as early as the first interviews/articles about the platform: “If you think Skype and Teamspeak had a baby and it had all sorts of super powers that its parents didn’t have,” Citron said. “What was basically a skunkworks project appears to be the most promising product we’ve built.”

Even Discord’s own logo had a secret “joke” in it. One that a few sleezy Tumblr users were able to figure out:


The inclusion of tongue-in-cheek, or casual verbiage in system messages, descriptions, etc. is something that not only Discord fostered, but other websites, such as Tumblr, and applications would adopt in the coming years, for better or for worse, to appeal to the hip youth culture of the day, and by “hip youth”, I mean the millennials that were now entering the workforce.

Following its launch, Discord would explode in popularity all throughout 2016, and into 2017, with new features like screensharing and rich presence being added. People were more than happy to ditch Skype in favor of a program that ran better while also catering more to their “quirky millennial” tastes, at the cost of the chaos that its userbase would bring to the Internet’s culture going forward.


Joining Discord was relatively easy. People technically didn’t have to make accounts right away to use the platform, as all they needed to join a server was use a link and then type in a username. The Discord team wanted to ensure that joining their platform was really easy to get into.

Just like with Jason’s previous ventures, his new company, now renamed to Discord Inc., received an investment from a big conglomerate, this time TimeWarner/WarnerMedia, in January 2016. They would later receive an investment from Sony Interactive Entertainment, who wanted to bring Discord and its services to PlayStation Network.

The Games Repainted Discord

In March of 2016, Games Repainted would be among the first in-vogue gaming communities to open their own Discord server. Right away, people from TFG, avid fans who had already submitted custom repaints, such as SuperWiiBros., and fans who were frequent guests in the stream chat, such as KamekSans, all joined the server.

GR would also use Discord as their primary method of speaking to each other during streams from mid-2016 and onwards, ditching Skype and Rabb.it, another program designed for streaming/screen-sharing content online.

GR Discord’s Userbase
Eventually, the Games Repainted Discord began to foster a culture of its own, succeeding the culture and memes that had defined the Fapping Guys era of GR. People like Starfyrox became notable for uploading drawings that became memes, such as “Don’t Touch the Child”, a reference to Sr Pelo’s Underpants videos. People also talked about wanting to kill themselves. A lot.

It was 2016, so the general vibes that persisted in the chat revolved around cynicism, being LGBT, and making fun of drama that was happening online at the time, such as the big YouTube drama war between major names like Keemstar, H3H3, Leafy, and iDubbz. You had what was essentially a mixture of kids and teens congregating in a then-new communication application, as their culture began to devolve into madness.

Furries in GR
Furries had a major presence in GR’s community, acting as a microcosm of the early signs of the presence and effect they would have on Discord as a whole. Besides KamekSans, this also included names like Matt Frostpaws, Bluemurderguitarbunny and Whistler420.


Furaffinity user oob uploaded a furry character maker in March of 2016, and many of the furries on both GR’s Discord and adjacent groups would use characters made in it as profile pictures. As it just so happens, the artstyle present in the character creator, and oob’s art as a whole, isn’t too far off from the kimono-based fetish art that would spread through the Internet in the following years thanks to furry fetish games like Changed.

Spoiler: Examples

FaaF / GR Fans

A few months into the GR Discord’s existence, a group of users created an offshoot of the GR Discord, entitled “GR Fans,” primarily to act as a hugbox/autonomous zone, separate from the GR server’s mods. They would also create a Steam group. At the request of TFG, the server was eventually renamed to “GR FaaF”, and later just “Faaf”, in an attempt to separate themselves from the GR brand.

Faaf also had a series of satellite servers, such as FaaF movies, which was essentially their answer to v4c: A channel where users would watch movies/shows/YT videos together on Rabb.it. There was also a dedicated server for art, and, important to our story, Faaf Private, a Something Sensitive-style server for users to lay out their personal life stories/troubles.

Some examples included users who had to contend with abusive family members who often stole her stuff and sold it on eBay to fuel his alcohol/drug addiction, or were driven to near-suicide by mental health issues or depression.

Faaf was one of those communities that prided itself on being closely knit and “there for each other.” For better or for worse, this also meant that they harbored grudges against anyone who seemingly wronged one of their own. The most prominent example of this being:


Albert Softie

A member of SoundClown that tried to ride Triple-Q’s coattails, much like his contemporaries. He was an early contributor to GiIvaSunner, only for him to be treated poorly by the channel’s backroom when he tried to join it, and eventually being ousted from contributing to the channel altogether.

Albert Softie would later become a small running joke on the SiIvaGunner channel, often being associated with Careless Whisper by George Michael, and a scene from the horror anime, Pupa. (WARNING: NSFW)

Albert had also been planned to be included in a folder of Big Boss-themed pfps found in The Phantom Rips: the first album to be released following GiIvaSunner’s termination and the creation of the SiIvaGunner channel, but his picture was only included as a stand-in for Triple-Q, who by that point had retired from contributing to the channel in a major capacity.


As for why SiIva felt the need to belittle and mock him, my guess is that it was either A) his age, B) the quality of his mashups, C) him trying the hardest to ride Triple-Q's coattails, or D) all of the above.

After his rejection and bad breakup with the SiIva team, Albert would attempt to rally his troops (specifically his friends on FaaF) against SiIva for how they mistreated him. Games Repainted as a whole gained a passive-aggressive attitude towards SiIvaGunner and their reoccurring jokes & memes, such as Grand Dad.



Albert’s big break in the SoundClown scene was actually a mashup of Macintosh Plus’ リサフランク420 with Whitewoods’ Beach Walk: the song featured at the end of Pyrocynical’s videos. Pyrocynical even gave this mashup a shoutout in one of his videos:

As it just so happens, Albert also had a giantess fetish and commissioned a few pieces of artwork showcasing it.

Spoiler: Examples

Rhythm Heaven

A series of rhythm games created by Nintendo, with the first entry released in 2006 for the GameBoy Advance. The series would gain in popularity with the release of Rhythm Heaven for the Nintendo DS, and Rhythm Heaven Fever for the Wii in 2012. The series is, fittingly, popular in YTPMV, MAD, and SoundClown circles.

The series experienced a boom in popularity in 2016, with music being prominently featured on SiIvaGunner and SoundCloud as a whole. Part of this was due to the release of the Nintendo 3DS entry, Rhythm Heaven Megamix, dropping that summer. Fandom for the series was one of the things both SiIvaGunner and GR/Faaf had in common, despite their differences and held grudges.

Rhythm Heaven Fever Repainted

A collaborative Repaint of Rhythm Heaven Fever, the Wii entry in the series and arguably the most popular, primarily handled by the Games Repainted Discord, streamed in early 2017. Due in part to the Rhythm Heaven community, the GR community, and Faaf’s overlap with Soundclown, RH Fever’s entire soundtrack was remixed/mashed up for the Repaint, with it being handled by Turretbot, Albert, Megaminerzero, Chocolate2890, Serena Strawberry, Rainbow Lizard, and others.

A few members of Faaf can actually still be found in certain parts of the Internet, as long as you know where to look. For example, Chocolate2890 would later troon out and rename himself to “SalanPlainZone.” Other examples of people who would troon out (or already had by that point) include Rainbow Lizard, SerenaStrawberry, and Whistler420.

The credits song from RH Fever, Dreams of our Generation, was even sung together by the Repaint’s team, whether this is heartwarming or cringe, especially with Grand Dad (the main meme of that one channel FaaF hated) replacing Marshal, I’ll let you decide.

 

[I_Am_Not_Bruce_Willis]

Blizzard Entertainment

An American video game developer based in Irvine, California. Founded in 1991 under the name, “Silicon & Synapse,” they got their start developing games such as The Lost Vikings and Rock ‘n Roll Racing for SNES and Sega Genesis. In 1994, the company would rename itself to Blizzard and released Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, the first in their series of strategy RPGs. This would then be followed up by other iconic RPGs and strategy games such as Diablo and StarCraft.

After the release of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos in 2002, Blizzard released World of Warcraft, the game that started the MMORPG boom of the 2000s. While other MMORPGs, such as Ultima Online and EverQuest existed, and were popular in their own right, WoW would be the game that catapulted MMORPGs into the mainstream, with many companies attempting to cash in on the hype, such as Star Wars Galaxies, City of Heroes, and FireFall, the latter of which was developed by former Blizzard and WoW designer, Mark Kern.

Jeffery Kaplan / Tigole Bitties

A former game designer and vice president at Blizzard, active at the company from 2002 to 2021.

In the days before he joined Blizzard, Jeff was a big fan of iD Software and their games, such as Doom and Quake. Jeff was also a huge fan of the original Half-Life. Using the map editor that came pre-packaged with HL1, entitled WorldCraft, Jeff made many of his own custom maps. Map editors were a common sight in old first-person shooters, as games like Duke Nukem 3D (which Jeff also made levels for) also came pre-packaged with them. Not only that, but Jeff was also into Deathmatching, with Half Life 1 Deathmatch and the Quake 2 mod, “Action Quake”, being his favorites.

Eventually, Jeff got into MMORPGs with a humble little game called EverQuest. In it, Jeff headed up an in-game guild entitled Legacy of Steel. It’s also the era where Jeff demonstrated the kind of passion and toxicity common of an early 20-something who played video games at the time.

Jeff often posted on the Legacy of Steel website under the username, “Tigole Bitties.” One thing Jeff became especially infamous for is how he ranted about changes he wanted to see implemented into the game. Given how he and his guild were on top at the time, it only made sense that he would act as entitled as he did. All the while, the players beneath them had to suffer for it.


Jeff would join Blizzard in May 2002, just as Warcraft III was wrapping up, but it would be World of Warcraft that would end up being his first major contribution at the company. Even after he joined, Jeff would continue writing blog posts for Legacy of Steel until June, where the mantle would be passed to fellow guild member Tork.

Using the knowledge and experience gained from all of his EverQuest grinding, Jeff would help build WoW into the monolithic MMO it would become. Jeff’s main role was a quest designer. At the time, there was no framework for how quests worked in WoW, so Blizzard experimented across the board. One of these experiments was the Green Hills of Stranglethorn, which Jeff cites as the quest he enjoyed making the most, despite being widely considered one of WoW’s worst quests.

In 2003, Blizzard Entertainment was still relatively small at just about 200 employees, yet as the company began to rapidly grow in size due to the success of both WoW and future titles such as Starcraft II and Hearthstone, according to Jeff, the company climate remained the same, with the company being driven by people proud of their geekdom, and a general sense of laissez-faire and camaraderie.

Titan


In 2007, Blizzard began work on a brand-new MMORPG, in hopes of getting a head start on any publishers that sought to dethrone WoW. This led to the creation of Titan, headed up by Jeff Kaplan.

The information available about Titan has always been relatively scarce, given just how many articles and videos I could find on Titan talk less about the game itself, and moreso the other game it would lead to. The game was planned to incorporate sci-fi themes to set it apart from Warcraft and was used as an internal recruitment tool.

After 6-7 years of development hell, the game was cancelled. What made Titan’s failure such a big deal for the team is that up to that point, none of Blizzard's games had tanked critically or financially. Given just how much of a success their other big IPs were, they were under a lot of stress to follow them up in a big way.

What led to Titan languishing was it succumbing to scope creep. As Jeff Kaplan put it, a game like World of Warcraft was “10 games in one”, and Titan was going to be no different. Some have described it as “TF2 meets Destiny meets The Sims meets WoW,” with elements also being taken from the MoBA genre, which was gaining in popularity at the time due to games like League of Legends.

When discussing Titan and what it would later become, Jeff Kaplan stated "In the post World of Warcraft-era of Blizzard, something we had to learn, and it took us awhile to learn was that not every game is going to be World of Warcraft. What I mean by that is a game that enjoys 10 million subscriptions; a game that lasts 10 years. Sometimes it is OK to have a smaller, self-contained game."

But the failure of Titan wasn’t for nothing, as a new game would begin development soon after, being made with a smaller team of 80 people compared to Titan’s 150. Inspired by the success of Hearthstone, Jeff Kaplan and his team decided to make a game that was significantly smaller in scope than another massive, sprawling MMO.

Another lesson learned from Titan’s development hell was to “Unshackle the team.” The Titan crew was suffused with tension because of frustrating constraints, including, for example, a ban on flying cars. In response to this, Jeff imposed a new rule: “Every car must fly.”

In November of 2014, their new project would be formally announced at that year’s BlizzCon:

Overwatch

A team-based 6v6 multiplayer FPS released on PC, PS4, and Xbox One on May 24th, 2016.

While Overwatch began as its own project almost simultaneous to Titan's cancellation, it wasn't until a small team assessed the fallout of Titan that Overwatch’s development truly kicked into high gear.


The Overwatch team wanted to portray an optimistic future, rather than a dystopic or postapocalyptic one. As stated earlier, the 2000s saw mainstream gaming shift towards a more grungy, “western” focus, with an emphasis being placed on military shooters, inspired by the breakout success of the Call of Duty franchise. The game’s artstyle, almost resembling a Pixar or Dreamworks movie, was chosen in response to the rise of grungy, brown-and-bloom first person shooters that were released during the 2000s and early 2010s, specifically Call of Duty.

The team was influenced by Action Quake when it came to implementing abilities, movement and fluidity for the game, while the team aspect of Overwatch stemmed from the earlier versions of Team Fortress (the original Quake mod, and TF Classic). Blizzard especially wanted to place more emphasis on teamwork in the moment-to-moment gameplay, which is why a traditional deathmatch mode was foregone.

Unlike some of the PC FPSes that inspired the team, Overwatch was planned to launch on both PC and consoles at the same time. This decision was influenced by the largest FPS communities at the time being console-based instead of PC. With that in mind, designing for both platforms influenced a lot of decisions made involving Overwatch’s gameplay, such as the controls.

Jeff mentioned in interviews that he wanted to make Overwatch approachable to people who had never picked up FPSes before. Yet when asked about it, Jeff denied that he and his team were catering to casuals, or that the lack of things like a kill-death scoreboard (that was present in earlier versions of the game) were not due to them trying to prevent toxic behavior.


In the multiplayer FPS space, Valve’s Team Fortress 2 had been a juggernaut in the near decade since its release, so comparisons to it were inevitable. Plenty of Overwatch’s characters were also compared to TF2’s classes, and how could they not? People compared Tracer to the Scout, Pharah to Soldier, and Torbjörn was a dead-wringer for the Engineer with his ability to build turrets.

When it came to maintaining parity between the console and PCs of the game, it also meant that Overwatch would end up being one of the games to spearhead the regulation of FPSes on PC, with the game being significantly harder to mod compared to games made with Valve’s Source engine, or how servers could only be hosted by Blizzard themselves.

Similar to Team Fortress 2, multiple animated shorts and graphic novels were released in the buildup to release, announcing new playable heroes, or elaborating on the game’s world and story.


A quote from the short, “Recall”, became a go-to quote for the ethos behind Overwatch’s world: “Never accept the world as it appears to be, dare to see it for what it could be.”

Overwatch’s Diversity

Similar to Capcom’s Street Fighter series, Overwatch featured a cast of characters that spanned multiple countries, ethnicities, and backgrounds. For example, Tracer, the character on the game’s cover, hails from the UK. Jesse McCree and Soldier 76 are American, Mei is Chinese, Pharah is half Canadian/half-Egyptian, Torbjörn is Swedish, D.Va is Korean, Reinhardt is German, and so on.

When being interviewed about it, Jeff Kaplan stated that diversity was not the goal, but rather “inclusivity and open-mindedness,” with diversity simply being the “beautiful end result” of said goals.

In an interview, Jeff stated “We very much believe in inclusivity at Blizzard, and I like to talk about inclusivity even more than diversity. We want Overwatch to be this bright, positive universe, where everybody feels like they could be a hero. That’s our most basic goal. It’s to say, ‘It doesn’t matter what my walk in life is, or the dice roll I got. Did Blizzard make my exact situation an Overwatch hero? Maybe, maybe not, but I could absolutely see how it could be included in that universe.’”

The Overwatch team also factored diversity into how the characters played, such as how they didn’t want to have two characters with rocket launchers, for example. Yet soon enough, that also extended to things like character’s genders, body types, personalities, etc.

Jeff stated, “The funniest part about Overwatch from the get-go is that what excited us creatively was this cast of heroes who were epic and unique, where no hero was like another... …But it started to permeate every decision we made, how these characters look, what gender, what body type and how they associate themselves. This may sound bizarre, but the great diversity in Overwatch is more a byproduct of us wanting to make really unique, awesome heroes that spoke to the team creatively.”

Blizzard also wanted to use Overwatch’s roster as an opportunity to challenge stereotypes, as was the trend at the time. To me, the standout example of this is Zarya, this game’s answer to TF2’s Heavy. Unlike most of the other female characters in Overwatch, or gaming as whole, Zarya is muscular, and her hair is a pink, spunky haircut, almost reminiscent of the one seen in the infamous “Animator’s guide to appealing to Tumblr” image, and Tumblr definitely expressed their excitement over this, seeing designs like this in a major AAA video game instead of a niche, underground indie game.
[]

While, according to Jeff, diversity was not the goal of Overwatch’s character designs, but inclusivity; diversity, inclusion, as well as equity, would all eventually become intrinsically linked years down the line.

Tracer’s Victory Pose

In early versions of Overwatch, one of Tracer’s possible victory poses was one where her back was turned to the camera, and with it, her tight buttocks. This attracted a lot of negative attention from the ever-increasingly feminist gaming journalism scene, plenty of articles and angry tweets being written about the pose being misogynist.


The pose was later changed to Tracer lifting one of her legs up and balancing on the other. When talking about the pose change, Jeff Kaplan stated that the team was never really happy with it to begin with, and he felt the new pose better matched Tracer’s personality, though many fans protested the change simply on the grounds that they hated any and all forms of censorship with a burning passion.

Games journalists in particular saw the pose change as a win, with GameSpot’s Danny O’Dwyer saying the following:


Gremlin D.Va

While many of Overwatch’s characters would spawn plenty of memes, special mention should be given to D.Va, the Korean eSports player who fights in a mech. Not unlike what happened to Steven Universe's Peridot the prior year, plenty of memes were made that portrayed her as a Dorito-munching, Mountain Dew-guzzling gremlin. This all happened hot off the heals of the peak of MLG montage parodies, where things like “elite gaming” and sponsorships from Doritos were poked fun at, or overexaggerated.

This interpretation of the character would be referenced in videos by YouTubers such as OnlyAfro, and a reference to it was snuck into the game itself through the form of an emote.

Overwatch’s Popularity with Smashtubers
Since DLC and updates for Super Smash Bros. 4 had ended by February 2016, many Smashtubers needed other things to make videos about during the 2-year gap between Smash 4’s ending and the announcement of the next entry in 2018.

A lot of people who were finding out about Overwatch in the lead up to its launch began comparing it to Smash Bros., not only because it was an approachable, combat-focused game with an emphasis on its diverse roster of characters, but also because all of their favorite SmashTubers were jumping over to it at the time.

Almost right away, people like Alpharad, Etika, InfernoOmni, and RelaxAlax hopped on the Overwatch hype train right away, streaming the game, making highlight videos, or making videos analyzing its gameplay & characters in a similar manner to how they would for Smash’s roster.

Loot Boxes

Another divisive element that Overwatch would foster would be the loot box. While TF2 had a similar system where players could buy Mann Co. keys to open supply crates and earn cosmetics and new weapons from them, Overwatch introduced a system where players earned a Loot box, either from playing the game a certain number of times a day or purchasing them through microtransactions.

It would be through the loot box system that players would earn things such as new costumes, win screen poses, animations, even sprays. In TF2 or Counter Strike, you could upload your own images to spray onto walls. In Overwatch, you can only use sprays included in the game, and they were part of the loot box system.

Given the success of this model, other companies, such as Electronic Arts, would adopt it in their multiplayer games and take it a step further, with the loot boxes/rewards present in EA’s Star Wars Battlefront II representing the peak of this backlash. Before long, loot boxes were the next representation of the gaming industry’s shady business practices that faced mass amounts of mockery:

It even got to the point where Blizzard, EA, and other companies were being sued by world governments due to violating gambling laws.

Overwatch and eSports

By May 2016, Overwatch had 10 million players across all platforms, and 25 million by January 2017.

Blizzard already had experience with making their games, such as StarCraft 2 and HearthStone, “eSports friendly”, so while Jeff mentioned that it would be dangerous to commit to making Overwatch an eSport so soon or forcing a competitive environment on the game as a whole, he felt that a game’s approachability helps it grow into an eSport more naturally. Not long after the game’s launch, in November, Blizzard formally announced the Overwatch League.

This was during a time when eSports were beginning to explode in popularity across the board, with a big push to have them featured on major sports networks like ESPN. Blizzard especially hoped to have viewer numbers comparable to real-life sporting leagues like the NBA or NFL.



The Rise of the Hero Shooter & the eSports Aesthetic

At the 2016 Game Awards, the Game of the Year award went to none other than Overwatch, beating contenders like Titanfall 2, Uncharted 4, and Doom (2016). If Overwatch’s explosive popularity with gamers, people who played casually, YouTubers, streamers, etc. weren’t indicative enough of the game’s sharp rise in popularity all throughout 2016, this was it: Overwatch had officially made it.

Overwatch popularized the concept of both “Hero Shooters” and “Games as a Service”, something the gaming community would collectively grow tired of over the years. It is not the first time Blizzard created something that gamers felt bankrupt the industry creatively, as the 2000s saw the rise of dozens of MMORPGs that tried to ride the wave of success World of Warcraft was experiencing at its peak, with the most infamous example being Star Wars: The Old Republic. Likewise, imitators of Overwatch began to pop up following its breakout success.


Around the same Overwatch was being worked on, Gearbox Software, best known for the Borderlands series, was working on a new entry in their Medal of Honor series. This game would be retooled into a MoBA-inspired FPS, entitled Battleborn. Battleborn’s comparisons to Overwatch, and failure to catch on, made it a laughingstock online, to the point where greasy ol’ Randy Pitchford had to resort to retweeting Battleborn porn to convince people to check his game out.



Unreal and Gears of War designer Cliff Bleszinski would go through similar turmoil the following year when he and his studio, Boss Key Productions, debuted their own team-based FPS in Lawbreakers, which came out to even less fanfare, and only led to embarrassment on Cliffy B’s end.


And it didn’t just stop at hero shooters; the explosive popularity of Overwatch would have an effect on the aesthetics of a lot of competitive or multiplayer-focused video games going forward. All of a sudden, every game had to be “eSports ready,” and they all shared an aesthetic that either resembled or outright aped Overwatch.


For example, after development on the Smash Bros. Brawl mod Project M had ended, members of the PM dev team joined development on a new platform fighter using original characters, entitled “Icons: Combat Arena.” It just so happened that its characters and aesthetics looked just like Overwatch. Not only did Smashboards founder and admin, and one of the leads on the project, Warchamp7, state that he’s a massive fan of Blizzard, but the studio was founded by former Blizzard, EA, and even Riot Games employees.


Epic Games’s Fortnite also followed in Overwatch’s footsteps by making its character models look more plasticky or look like they came from a Dreamworks movie.

Tracer Kiss

On December 20th, 2016, Blizzard released the Overwatch comic, “Reflections.” The comic is all about the various members of Overwatch celebrating the holidays, while Tracer rushes home to celebrate Christmas with her girlfriend, Emily.


The comic is most famous for confirming Tracer’s sexuality as lesbian, meaning that the face of Overwatch, the character on the front cover and prominently featured in promotional materials more than most of the cast, was gay. In the eyes of the progressives, this was the biggest development in pop culture LGBT representation since Steven Universe’s Jailbreak episode and caused a massive amount of discourse online.


Even in the buildup to the reveal, Tumblr was already obsessively claiming that certain Overwatch characters were gay, as was typical of the site.


Jeff Kaplan himself would talk about Tracer’s sexuality in both interviews and at a DICE Summit the following year, stating “Famously, the character Tracer was recently portrayed in a spin-off comic enjoying some home time with her girlfriend.” “It's important to show normal things that are normal,” he said. “Tracer is first and foremost a time-traveling bad-ass. But it is different to have an LGBT character on the cover and it's something we're proud of.”

Jeff concluded by saying that Overwatch was an attempt to “imagine a bright and hopeful world,” adding that, in games, “there is room for positivity and inclusiveness.” To put this into perspective, this all happened a year and a half after Obergfell v. Hodges had been decided.

As it turns out, Tracer being a lesbian was just the beginning of Blizzard’s internal push for diversity.

Blizzard’s Diversity Pulls


Years later, Blizzard Entertainment would be investigated by the state of California for workplace harassment, including sexism against female employees. This also included the discovery of an internal “Bill Cosby Suite” where employees would consume large amounts of alcohol and bring in female fans to get them drunk and rape them.

Any time Blizzard found themselves in hot water due to company politics, workplace harassment, or other issues, all they had to do to get on the good side of the gaming press was out-of-the-blue confirm that a character in Overwatch, or any of their other games, was secretly some flavor of LGBT the whole time, or introduce a new LGBT character.

It was a strategy reminiscent of Disney announcing that a character from their newest film or remake was “their first gay character”, which would make rounds in the industry only for it to not amount to anything substantial.

Such examples include Soldier 76 and Pharah being confirmed as gay, and non-human characters like Bastion being referred to with gender-neutral pronouns, or alternatively, the character Chromie from World of Warcraft being retconned to be transgender.


“Everything’s Gay”

On December 26th, 2016, Alpharad uploaded a video discussing Tracer’s sexuality as it was revealed in the comic. In it, he goes beyond the boundaries of Overwatch to say, and I quote, “Everything’s gay. It’s 2016, almost 2017, everything’s gay. Get used to it.”

To Jacob, it may have seemed like just a harmless joke, or typical millennial tongue-in-cheek rambling, but in a roundabout way, it wasn’t far from the truth. This was the world Tumblr had been working towards ever since Cartoon Network and Rebecca Sugar released Jailbreak, or to go further back than that, the world Fullbright wanted when they released Gone Home, or Anita when she released her Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series, or even people like Auntie Pixelante or JDR when they released their stuff.

A World Driven by the Progressive
The world millennials were promised, and the push against it, began to enter the conversation once the Internet at large had become political. And yet, a counterculture was forming in response to the frog-boiling that had been taking place up to that point.

People like Alpharad, Saberspark, and even Etika were talking about the election and politics when it had almost never been discussed, or even joked about, in most places. And to put it lightly, the millennial progressives knew that something wasn’t right, they had a reason to be upset.

Whether it was Rebecca Sugar and her show challenging sexuality norms on a channel aimed at younger audiences, Toby and his game inadvertently leading to further discussion of gender norms, multiple Internet forums and groups attempting to claim and upend niche hobby groups by ousting those they deemed problematic, Blizzard and their game bringing LGBT representation and cultural/ethnic diversity to the mainstream, or even the excitement over a new culture defined by female-led media, and potentially a female US president, the foundation was being laid for a world that would be driven by progressivism, the biggest advancement in social progress since the 1960s, with its emphasis on civil rights, feminism, and the sexual revolution.


The past two years in internet history and pop culture, with everything that had taken place in so many different corners, were about to reach an event horizon; a point of no return.

Eventually, something was bound to break…

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