I don’t know why, but for some reason I’ve been pondering that question earlier today. I tried to think back, what it was that actually gave me the idea to do Let’s Play. I then thought “Hey, that’d be a cool thread idea!”. That’s why we’re here now.
For me it’s kind of weird, because I first saw LP on a Forum that has nothing to do with LP. Some guy did an SSLP of Final Fantasy VI. That must have been at some point between 2007 and 2009. can’t find that one anymore, though and I don’t really remember anything specific about it anymore. Then someone linked the Princess Maker LP from SA to me, which I enjoyed.
So I basically just thought “Hey, this is a cool idea!” and decided to make my own at the end of 2009: It was a Blind SSLP of Earthbound. I posted it on a forum but used a Wordpress blog to host it. I made a typo in my url and everything. It was quite bad, honestly. I didn’t really put a lot of thought into it. I’m not gonna read it now because I know I’d be embarassed and there’s probably missing screenshots. I later made a Hybrid LP of Terraria which wasn’t very good either.
The first video LP that I remember seeing was actually Chip’s and Ironicus’ playthrough of Metal Gear Solid 2 and I was amazed at how entertaining that shit was. I was on a shitty internet connection back then and had to download the videos to even watch them. It was through here that I found out about lparchive.org. I made a few very bad VLPs of my own. Live commentated, poor technical quality, no idea how to make commentary engaging even in the slightest. One of the worst things that I did was recording Devil May Cry 3 without the sound, so I played music over the footage while I talked. Since the cutscenes didn’t have sound either I fucking dubbed them myself like a champ. Of course I didn’t do that very well. I also made up my own story. I’m watching an old video of that right now debating whether or not I should post it. I choose not to. OKAY FUCK IT! Here it is (Posted in 2014 here but actually originally posted much earlier in probably 2010, I just re-uploaded it to show it to a friend). But be aware that this is kinda hard for me so please don’t judge me. Feel free to retsupurae it with me, though. Holy crap… was that really me?
My next couple projects were actually better but if I had joined SA at that point I might have been told to lurk more. But thankfully, since credit cards are rather uncommon here, and SA only took credit cards I instead set my sights on other communities. There’s plenty of LP forums, most of them bad. I’m glad I found LPF, a forum basically made by goons who just wanted to have a more open platform. It’s essentially dead now, but it helped me a lot to become a much better LPer. You should have seen my first draft for Dark Souls. Maybe if I still have it I’ll upload it sometime. But it’s not very good.
Anyway, that’s my LP-Story. Share your own. Like, comment, subscribe, motherfuckers! And please post your embarassing first attempts. Very please do. If you don’t make LPs but watch/read them feel free to tell us your tale too.