So, how did you get into LP?

LP General Chat
#2

Mine’s pretty recent, and therefore short. I started watching them because of retsuprae, then Voidburger, then bob. I never tried my hand while posting on SA for a varity of reasons. Lack of equipment, being incredibly intimidated by the community there, crippling depression and a general lack of self worth.

After years of being in a real shitty mental state, I’m finally at a relativly healthy and posotive mindset. I randomly one day I said to my friend John, “hey, let’s do let’s plays.” And now we’re here.

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#3

I don’t remember what specifically got me interested in attempting to do VLPs, but I do remember that my first attempt of one was a VLP of Mystic Heroes on the Gamecube. I had previously beaten the game but wanted to do the LP with a different character and ended up stopping at the first boss.

While the videos didn’t look awful, everything else was. The concept of post-commentary was foreign to me so I did everything live, which means the audio balance between my voice and the very loud gamecube controller was atrocious. I also had to speak fairly softly because if I didn’t and my pet bird heard me, it was squawk city. It didn’t help that I’m not all that great with speaking and playing at the same time.

I pretty much gave up on making any kind of LP after that for a while until I was introduced to Retsupurae and Chip & Ironicus. This was in 2014 because I’ve had Very Terrible Internet™ basically forever. Eventually I decided that I wanted to try again, and would do post commentary. Asked my buddy if he wanted to do them with me and here we are (though we started on SA). So far we’ve got one complete LP, and are a bit more than halfway through the next one.

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#4

I was doing sort of proto LP’s long ago as a kid, maybe ten or so years ago. I just wanted to show people games that I loved, this was back when I gamed on PC before I switched to consoles. Mine weren’t very good and after my PC died I just stopped until recently I saw that I could using PS4 and the Sharefactory on it edit footage and do voice over. I just really like to show people games I love and I like to use the opportunity to practice my girl voice, so LP’ing can really set off my dysphoria but can also help with it.

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#5

Okay, let’s see if I can get this straight. I don’t recall how I found him initially, but I ended up watching videos by HCBailly on Youtube. His content was honestly what nowadays I would consider to be absolute garbage, way too overfilled with references to both pop culture and his own work… not to mention being VLPs of JRPGs… but it made me aware of Let’s Play as a thing.

Then I ended up on a forum called Return of Talking Time, which had a Let’s Play Already subforum. The material there wasn’t great either, but that’s where I ended up doing my first SSLPs, both of which I would eventually redo when I ended up on Something Awful due to being kinda lackluster. The GBA game was at default resolution for one thing!

But yeah, then I lurked SA for a while to learn all the tips and tricks before joining up back in November 2011, going on to do six LPs there (including a VLP). It’s been a fun journey.

#6

Stumbled upon a link to ProtonJon’s Kaizo Mario videos on TVTropes in ‘08 and started searching for Let’s Plays from there, quickly finding LPArchive.org. I remember one of the first things I watched was Proteus’ Daikatana LP in which he asks if he should tell the girl he’s thinking of asking out that he plays video games for the internet. Just hearing that filled me with shame over how bizarre the act of watching LPs was, much less actually doing them and trying to explain that to people, so I kept my interest in them secret.

Years later, they were popular enough that it wasn’t weird when a guy at work started talking about them. We joked about doing one ourselves, which eventually lead to us doing a Banjo-Kazooie LP featuring technical difficulties, shoddy craftsmanship and literally no viewers (not technically true, found out the day I recorded the final episode that a friend of mine had been following along, but close enough). I did get the equipment and technical skill over the course of that LP to make good on my bold claim that future LPs would be posted on Something Awful, and four years later, I’m making terrible, objectively worthless videos for no reason.

#7

Oh man. So back when I was an idiot moron teenager, I found protonjon’s Kaizo mario videos via TV Tropes. Specifically, the Special Stage video. I was enamored with the idea, and eventually got bit into SSLPs. The Dark Id’s were my favorite, and were what led me to SA. I think the first thread I actively posted in and followed was TDI’s NieR thread.I eventually get it into my head that making LPs can’t be too hard, and so I try my hand at my own SSLP.

It was not to be.

A combination of coming out as trans, leaving SA, re-creating my online identity, and having a depressive breakdown led to that LP falling into the archive and never seeing the light of day again. I basically stayed away from the whole LP-making scene for a while (although ironically, somehow ended up getting to know MORE SA LP peeps than before I left). I’d basically sworn off LPs when this site launched, so I planned to just kinda observe but never get involved.

Then I found this thread.

So here I am, idiot moron adult, actively posting on the forums, and I start thinking “maybe I should give this LP thing another shot”

Anyways that’s my story.

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#8

So this is going to sound weird, especially considering recent events, but the first thing I ever saw that would be considered Let’s Play was Pewdiepie’s LP of Amnesia The Dark Descent. No for real. at one point in my life (around 2009 probably) I was into PDP’s videos. This was during his time at Machinma where most of his other work was Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 commentaries. (Even played a few rounds with him and some other ‘bros’. It was pretty surreal.) I guess you could say I was there to see him raise to popularity to where he is today. I fell off around the point he started giving random objects names.

Anyways at the same time, I started getting into Amnesia Custom Stories which were just custom maps made in the game’s engine, and I had an idea to do videos of these maps as a way to provide feedback to the creator. Back then most of my video making experience was limited to AMVs and MUGEN videos. Well that didn’t turn out so hot and by the end of the first series of videos it had morphed from providing feedback to a straight up blind LP. And since this was during a time before all the Youtube LP tropes started happening (Facecam, SEO nonsense, what have you.), I started building a tiny following of around 300 active subscribers coming to see me play Amnesia mods in the style of “This isn’t scary at all, in fact, it’s downright stupid.” Unfortunately the videos are no longer up and that’s because of happened next.

Fast forward to about late-2011 to early-2012, I got bored of Amnesia mods, because let’s face it there were hardly any good ones to begin with, and I just started recording every game I was playing in an attempt to maintain my viewership. At this point my viewership dropped to about half of what I was getting (roughly150 per video.) I started to wonder if this would last or was it all just a flash in the pan. It’s not because I wanted to turn LPing into a career, but instead I just wanted to be loved/semi-popular or whatever. During this time I was really into League of Legends, and I started watching Totalbiscuit’s videos. And then on a random day, I looked at who he was subscribed to, and the first channel that caught my eye was Retsupurae. At a glance, I thought that it just another LP channel until I clicked on their latest upload which the Rad Brad RP. I was super confused as to what was going on. The guy playing was commentating and two other guys also commentating, but the player never responded to anything the other two were saying. It took a few more videos to get that it was Slowbeef and Diabetus roasting the LPer. My reaction to this realization was the typical “How dare they, who gives them the right to steal other people’s videos blah blah blah.” Though instead of ignoring them and continuing on about my business, my hatred for the concept made me watch more videos and eventually Retsutalk. I can’t remember the exact episode I listened to but it was the one where Diabetus mentioned something voting for something related to Alabama. Anyways, it was here where I realized that these guys weren’t so bad and they didn’t mean much harm to anyone they riff. I became a subscriber, and I even checked out Slowbeef’s Snatcher LP and liked it. However I was also worried that I might one day be RP’d, and in a panic I deleted all those blind LPs and pretty much abandoned the channel I was hosting them on.

This was also around the time I began hearing of SA and the LP subforum, and in mid-February I spent 10 bucks and made an account. Though I didn’t start posting until mid-September when I decided to start my first ‘real’ LP of Maui Mallard in Cold Shadow. And I kinda don’t wanna go any further than that because this post is get really long, so that’s my long ass tale about how I got into LP.

#9

I’d been lurking the SA forums off and on since the early 00’s, so when they began popping up in the Games forum I started following them. Eventually I registered and still mostly lurked, following mainly SSLPs at the time. For awhile I toyed with the idea of doing an LP there, even attempting a half-assed one in another forum years ago. I went through a few ideas, but eventually I remembered reading the big end-game spoiler for FF4: The After Years that made me think, “Yeah, this needs to be shown off.” Three drafts, a trip to the Tech Support Fort, and one actual playthrough later, I finally began the LP, and well, now I’ve got ten in the archive, including seven Final Fantasy games, probably just as many that I’ve abandoned, and somehow I’m now a mod of the SA LP forum while still pumping out SSLPs.

I’m still enjoying the hobby and will probably keep doing it until I’m murdered or run out of games to LP.

#10

For the longest time I thought Let’s Play was pretty boring. I’d tried reading some screenshot LPs on Something Awful, but I’d always get to around page 60, get tired of reading, bookmark the page and never come back to it.

When video LP started becoming a thing, it also didn’t seem too interesting to me. I wasn’t a fan of a lot of the personalities, they weren’t very good on mic, but then ResearchIndicates did his Trespasser LP and I fell in love. For the longest time, that was the only LP I’d ever admit was entertaining.

But, as the years wore on, the standards of Let’s Play went up and my own view on them softened a bit. The pride I had in only subscribing to one or two Let’s Players because “they were just that good” has slowly turned in to a world where 75% of the content I watch on Youtube is a Let’s Play. My cousin and I even started our own (very short lived) Let’s Play channel (that was unfortunately killed by an entire LP of ours becoming corrupted and unusable).

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#11

I used to watch Final Fantasy challenge runs for a while, and I had no idea LP was even a thing. I think the first “proper” LP I watched was by Chip and Ironicus.

#12

I first stumbled upon some youtune let’s plays back in late 2008. I liked the concept, but I found the personalities of the players to be mostly boring. Eventually I found Cybershell’s Sonic LPs and I was hooked on those(I don’t think they’d really hold up today though). I didn’t really discover the SA LP community until mid 2009, when I heard Raocow say he was a fan of ChipCheezum’s LPs. From there I discovered Retsuprae and the other big SA LPers of the time, and they began to dominate the majority of my leisure time spent on the internet.

#13

It’s really embarrassing to admit this but when I was in college, like 2009/2010, I read an article about Let’s Plays that “Yahtzee” wrote for his Escapist column. Found out about the LP Archive from there. Read the old FFVIII LP and laughed the entire time.

I think it was Supergreatfirend’s ILLBLEED LP that got me properly hooked though. And I lurked on SA for years after. Always wanted to try it but was intimidated by the community there. So I’m putting one together for here at the minute.

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#14

I couldn’t tell you what my first LP was, but I stumbled upon a screenshot LP of Morrowind that was so terrible I figured I could do better, despite having never beaten the game.

The rest is history.

#15

I dont remember, exactly, but I do remember Doc Roosevelt’s San Andreas LP being the one where I wanted to MAKE LP’s after I finished watching it. Plus in 2011 I was working like 12 hours a week, so I had ample free time.

#16

College! I think it was junior year. I think I was on SomethingAwful mostly for the Photoshop Phriday things and other “best of” articles on its front page. And one day, in that week’s Top Threads or whateever, was “Let’s Play Sonic 2006”. So I watched The Freelance Astronauts’ Sonic 2006 LP and was immediately enamored with it. Soon after, I found Research Indicates’ Trespasser LP and Chip and Ironicus’ No More Heroes LP and thought “This whole thing is pretty neat.” It was a great thing to have playing in the background while I worked on art projects (this was an era before everyone and their mom had a podcast).

I noticed that there was a guy on the SA forums named From Earth who was kinda “The Silent Hill Guy”, but he had only done the original Japanese-developed games, and only in screenshot format. Me, being a big nerd for Silent Hill, thought that it was kind of a shame that they weren’t VLPs, because those games have great music and sound effects in them. I sheepishly asked him via DMs if he was planning on LPing Silent Hill Origins, and if I would be stepping on any toes if I did my own VLP of it (in retrospect, this was a weird thing to do, ask for permission like that. But LP was smaller back then and I wanted to play by the rules and be polite so the SA community would accept me, so welp.) Anyway, he said basically “Do whatever, I don’t care.”

Origins was almost a voiced LP (because I didn’t really KNOW about subtitled LPs at the time), but someone in the Tech Support Fort or Sandcastle or whatever suggested subs, if I cared so much about the sound effects and music and junk. It also made sense because, at the time, being an ex-4channer, I was VERY hesitant to “be a girl online.” 4chan’s culture kinda instilled in me the expectation that I wouldn’t be taken seriously, or people would either only watch my videos out of novelty, or not watch them at all out of principle that a girl made it.

So yeah, I made Silent Hill Origins and it was a technical mess, and I put a few tiny hints here and there that I was a girl but I didn’t “come out of the closet” officially about it until the end of the LP, when it was established that people were watching my videos because they definitely liked my content.

I was not a very confident person at the time, lol. Anyway, now I’m dating an LP superstar like I planned all along from the very beginning so all’s well that ends well.*

*i’m kidding oh my god it was an accident that Chip and I got crushes on each other aaaaaa

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#17

Boatmurdered. It all started with Boatmurdered. I don’t remember where I first got the link, whether it was on /v/, some random TVTropes page, or on the Bay12 Forums, but I first found out about the archive because of Dwarf Fortress. After I read through that one, I started browsing and saw that there were a bunch of games on there. The job I had at the time had quite a lot of downtime. Enough so that I made a habit of reading LPs while at work. The boss either never caught me or didn’t care, and because the job sucked I didn’t care either.

A couple years passed and a friend kept bugging me about registering a SA account. I finally dropped the $10 and started lurking, and eventually posting, in the LP subforum.

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#18

Oh, yeah! I forgot. There’s a weird wrinkle in my story that I forgot to tell. Not long after I’d watched ResearchIndicates’ Trespasser LP and I was riding high on the wave of “Maybe LP is awesome???” vibes, I decided to try my hand at a video Let’s Play of my own for Sonic Advance 2.

It was a disaster. I was awful. Sonic Advance 2 is one of my favorite Sonic games, and I’d hoped that would come through in the LP, but I was also severely out of practice, especially in the second half of the game. I’m also generally kind of an introvert and that was my first time doing commentary, so it was a lot of “I don’t have anything to say so I’ll just make funny noises or repeat out loud that I need to keep talking without actually following that up with any meaningful topics.” Just insufferable.

Right around this time, there was a weird divide in the Let’s Play community. There was a degree of animosity between Something Awful and the “Youtube Let’s Play Community.” A lot of people on Something Awful’s LP subforum felt like the video let’s play was their thing. Like they “owned it.” People on Youtube, outside of SA, had started doing their own video LPs, and they were considered outsiders. It was kind of a battle over the fact that a lot of Youtube LPs were by people doing it “wrong.” Hence, the birth of Retsupurae

I remember getting a Youtube PM from someone. My poor memory wants to say it was Slowbeef, but I don’t know if I believe my own memory on that, but it was somebody from Something Awful and they asked if it was okay if they used my Sonic Advance 2 LP as an example of a Youtube Let’s Play in something. I think I remember it being a little weird because they never specifically told me what it was for, just that they wanted to use it as an example of something

Years later, when I learned what Retsupurae was, I fully expected to see my Sonic Advance 2 LP turn up in there somewhere. It never did. I don’t know if I’m thankful for that or not.

Never did find out what my LP was an example of.

#19

If I remember correctly, I got into them around 2011 - 2012 or so?

I’d always thought speed running was really cool, and watched a lot of videos on speeddemosarchive.com in college between classes. Then in mid-2010 I graduated and found a job, which was great, but it was in another city so due to the distance I lost a lot of friends and my girlfriend of several years, and all that threw me into a pretty long-term depressive episode. I couldn’t bring myself to play games because I didn’t have the motivation, but Twitch was starting to make some noise on social media so I was watching and it was kind of the next best thing.

Twitch resulted in me re-kindling that old interest in speed runs, which meant I’d spend lots of sleepless nights searching out speed runs on YouTube, usually of games I didn’t have the patience/nerves to play, like stealth and survival horror games. I forget whether YouTube recommended @ChipCheezum’s videos first, or @Voidburger’s, but they were pretty soon after each other. I distinctly remember hearing VB tell Chip to “peep that poop pipe” and “sneak that snake snack” in an MGS1 video and laughing so hard I had to pause so I could look up who the hell she was, then realizing “OH! She’s that Silent Hill runner I watch (since her vids were subtitled)!”

Either way they both made really funny, interesting, and enjoyable videos, and when they got going with co-commentators the chemistry was always so good it felt like I was hanging out with my college friends again, which was a very welcome feeling given my mental state at the time. I pretty quickly worked through every video they had on their YT accounts (several times over for some games), and then started googling to figure out if they had any other videos I might be able to watch, which is how I found LPArchive.org and stuff from all the other LP’ers who I now watch regularly. It also gave me something new and exciting to get into as a hobby, and I spent quite a few years streaming on Twitch and learning the in’s and out’s of game recording and whatnot, and that was probably the biggest help I could’ve asked for.

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#20

God, I remember debating getting into LP’s around the time of SA vs. YT LP’ers, and since I realistically would have to use YT I was having daily anxious nightmares about “oh god what if my videos show up in a Retsupurae!?!”

Those Retsupurae videos almost always had at least one of my LP’er idols in them, so the idea that I’d finally try my hand at it and the only response from the community that I’d see was those same people who motivated me to try LP’ing in the first place, tearing my efforts to shreds… Probably delayed any LP’ing I did by several years until I was confident enough in my AV recording & editing quality.

#21

I forgot how long ago it must have been, but I was on GameFAQs, browsing my usual hangout (don’t @ me), when I saw a thread about some Super Mario World romhack. I forget what it was, but I know for sure it wasn’t Kaizo. Anyway, the OP included a link to a video of the hack, and it was a raocow video. I thought it was funny, so I kept looking through the series he did. In fact, I’m still subscribed to him and I still watch him every day.

But after that, things get a little fuzzy. I don’t remember how I encountered anyone else for a while. I want to say it was Retsupurae, because I’m sure people would make threads about them when a new one popped up. I think I picked up on the names of some of the guests involved and went to check out their Youtube channels to see what else they had done. I’m sure that’s how I came across Chip and Ironicus, anyway. After that, I came across the LP Archive, where I started looking up anything listed as funny and in video format and found more people that way, and here I am!

Also, this is just an aside, but since I was never part of SA, I had no idea who slowbeef was outside of Retsupurae. I didn’t even find out that he had done his own LPs until the Retsupurae channel posted a video of a boss fight from Metroid Prime 3 and the description had a link to slowbeef’s own (and possibly worse) video of that same fight.

I think that’s the long and short of it. I’m more of the “audience member” type, so I’ve never made any LPs of my own and don’t foresee myself starting up any time soon.