So, how did you get into LP?

LP General Chat
#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.

#22

I don’t do LPs either, both for lack of equipment and the fact that I have very little time what with all the other things I’m doing, but I still think the story of how I ended up here is sort of vaguely interesting, so here it is:

I guess it all really started out with AVGN back in like 2007 (holy shit, has that really been 10 years?). I somehow stumbled over an AVGN video and found it pretty funny (2007 was a much simpler time…), so I watched some more of his stuff. I even did a german translation of the theme song and put it up on youtube. It’s probably still there, I dunno, I haven’t used that account in years. Anyway, through AVGN also got to know stuff like the Nostalgia Critic, Linkara, and the Spoony Experiment, the whole early Channel Awesome people. Now, for all the shit Nostalgia Critic rightfully gets these days, back then that sort of thing was rather novel to me, so I stuck with it for quite a while, certainly longer than it was funny to me.

Some time in 2008, I joined the Spoony Experiment forum as a way to participate in this sort of phenomenon beyond posting in comments sections. Say about Spoony whatever you like, I’ve always felt rather comfortable in that forum, I made friends there, which is why I stayed long after shit hit the fan in numerous ways. In fact it’s absolutely safe to say that a lot of the people who are still on that forum are not there because of Spoony, but because of the forum, and it’s pretty much always been like that. Of course these days Spoony barely produces any content, so there’s more or less no influx of new people, while a lot of the older regulars have either left or barely post anymore. There’s days now where barely anything gets posted at all. It feels like the forum is slowly fading away. It’s kind of sad.

Also around 2008, after I’d joined TSE, someone one the forum linked to a retsupurae, which I watched, and at first I really didn’t understand what was going on, because I hadn’t heard of LPs at all. It took me a while to understand why these guys were yelling about someone yelling about a video game. From there, I stumbled over some of the retsupuraes Chip and Ironicus did, and that led me to their LPs. Same with Slowbeef, and then I discovered Voidburger a bit later.

I was really surprised at how much fun I was having watching other people play games. I think it’s got something to do with the fact that I’m not really a completionist at all, and I rarely tend to go though games multiple times (with a few exceptions), so seeing someone play a game really well, or play a game that I would not play myself, does have a lot of a appeal to me.

Back to the story, we jump to the present: Since TSE was sort of fading, I was looking around for other communities I could join and actually talk to people. I was interested in LPs, but hesitant to join SA for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that I don’t have a credit card and thus wouldn’t have been able to pay the $10 fee. So one day I saw on Voidburgers twitter that this forum would be opened, and that seemed like a nice thing, so I joined. It’s been pretty interesting so far. Certainly more lively than TSE is these days.

#23

Oh god, those old “SA vs. Youtube” days. IIRC it was initially based around the fact that youtube was pretty shit as a video service, so most SA LPers were using other video services. I remember the straw that broke the Deceased Crab Camel’s back was when he tried LPing Tyrian 2000, and everyone got upset that he wasn’t doing the game justice. Combine that with a lot of low-quality, low-effort stuff getting uploaded to YouTube, and you had this weird “us vs. them” mentality forming.

It’s weird to think of a time when common LP advice was “don’t upload your videos to youtube. Use anything but YouTube.”

#24

The worst part about the whole “don’t use Youtube” thing is that people insisted on doing that for way longer than it was necessary. Goons are pretty bad at going with the times sometimes.

Youtube was pretty bad compared to other hosts for a while but around 2009-2010 or so the only reason to use stuff like Viddler or blip was to make your videos harder to view for the part of your audience with mediocre internet because YT tended to have a better infrastructure and was more stable than its competitors. And I just happened to live in a more rural part of Germany then and my internet was garbage. YT loaded fine if I let it buffer, the others didn’t.

#25

I started reading SSLPs on the LP Archive sometime around 2007-08, although I honestly can’t remember why or how I ended up there in the first place. Then I watched a bunch of shitty I Wanna Be the Guy videos on Youtube, which eventually led me to Retsupurae. Sometime after that I did my actual first LP, an SSLP of Persona 4 (because a 100-hour JRPG is a fantastic choice for your first LP!) on a forum I frequented at the time. I managed to actually finish that one, although later I became ashamed of the lack of quality and asked a mod to remove the thread.

Once I finally registered on SA, it took me almost five years to create my first LP thread (another SSLP, which I ended up closing because a bunch of dumb shit happened). A few months after that I figured I might actually not get laughed out of the subforum when people hear my voice, so I started my recently completed VLP of GTA IV (a huge open world game where 75% of the content is padding is, again, a great idea for your first VLP and I totally recommend it).

And, uh, that’s about it, I guess. I’m sure this was fascinating to everyone.

#26

I’ll fully admit to being one of those guys who would do that as late as 2011-2012, although that’s mostly because I was an impressionable teenager and would parrot anything said by those I considered my “senior.” Eventually I grew to appreciate youtube, tho. And now I have come full circle to hating it (but using it all the same).

#27

My own story for LPing basically just began as almost a get back for a “friend” who told me I couldn’t do it. But once I started making videos, I found it to be really fun to do, and a good way to both spend my time, and improve my speech. And as time went on, I got a few people to watch my videos, and to tell me how to improve, and now…here I am.

I like doing this because I like seeing people comment, and tell me they laughed and enjoyed my videos. It’s great to see that when I upload!

#28

I don’t really know. At some point I just looked up and there was this thing called Let’s Play and I already understood in my head exactly what it was. I never really knowingly watched any popular LPers from any part of the web, although I discovered many years later that sometime in 2008 or 2009 I stumbled upon the Freelance Astronauts LP of Ocarina of Time Master Quest. I think it showed up in related Viddler videos when I tried using it to upload a 90 minute I Wanna Be The Guy video, which I think was my first time trying to record a game and commentary of any kind (double whammy: the guy I was talking to on Skype while doing it was recording Kaizo Mario on his side).

I got into making LPs sometime in 2011, I think. I had an EasyCap dongle for recording Smash Brothers games and I wanted to replay Twilight Princess, so I made that happen against all odds. After spending 2011 and mosts of 2012 doing basically worthless LPs that maybe two people watched I had stumbled across another group’s LP: the Mario Party megagame that pokecapn and co. played.

Through them I learned about the LP Archive and SA, which I’d known about since Yahtzee’s write-up on LPs, but never really looked into. My thinking at the time was that “these guys have popular videos, so I should sign up for an SA account so I can find out how to make popular videos”. And then I read the sandcastle OP, developed a much healthier attitude toward LPs, lurked for a month and did my first “real” LP.

It’s strange, I think, how naturally the term found its way into my lexicon, and that of the internet in general. I couldn’t pin my first encounter with Let’s Play if I tried, it just is.

#29

My LP history pretty much entirely belongs in the “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love When My LPs Bombed” thread, but leaving the low self-esteem aside, here’s what I remember about it.

I vaguely remember bumbling into the Games subforum of SA during a bit of downtime at work, probably back in 2003 or early 2004. I don’t even remember what I was trying to do at the time, but there were some interesting threads with screenshots from Final Fantasy VIII and Resident Evil that I read through over the course of a few days until the site told me I needed to pay for an account. I didn’t know how the paywall worked and figured I’d used up my free preview, and not used to paying for things online (and having just been through half a year of unemployment, I wasn’t too keen to spend money on frivolous things), I just quit thinking about it.

A few years later, during Christmas vacation of 2008, I once again stumbled into Let’s Plays through means I can’t remember, probably from two different directions. There were videos on Youtube by Bolt McGammar, playing through The Lost Vikings and Super Mario RPG, and I think I went searching from there for other games I wanted to see and found Malorie’s Viddler account, with The 7th Guest and an ongoing playthrough of Alone in the Dark. I was commenting on the videos through Viddler’s comment system, probably annoying the viewers with pop-ups, and I don’t remember how that led me back to Something Awful, but I finally decided to pay for an account so I could reply there directly. I got a bit of culture shock when I saw the unfiltered forum and discovered that there wasn’t some sort of inside joke about word replacement, but once I understood the culture, I decided to try my hand at making my own Let’s Plays. The fact that I’m currently redoing the first one I went forward with should tell you how well that worked.

It surprises me every time someone says they admire me for doing what I do, or that they like my videos, and I’ve had a Patreon page with the “Kick Off” button staring me in the face for well over a month, unpressed, because I’m afraid there might be people out there who would give me money even if I tell them not to. But I like playing games to comment over them and show off all the subtle, interesting parts as much as I like playing them just to have fun, and I don’t think I’ll ever stop doing it.

#30

I’m definitely gonna be in the minority, since my inspirations / reasons for starting are not linked at all to SA or any of its associated people or those who branched from it.

I started 'cause I loved Game Grumps, Markiplier, and Jacksepticeye. I was introduced to Game Grumps through a close friend I met in the Homestuck fandom, and from there I branched outward. It was Jack’s series on The Wolf Among Us that made me start LPing for myself, actually - with The Wolf Among Us. (Stopped watching his so I could do it myself, and then came back later.) And once I started, it became one of my hobby projects and became easy to maintain. Well… “easy”. I like doing it, I want to do it, but time constraints are never easy to deal with.

I still like those guys, but I watch less of Mark and Jack now. I still watch everything Game Grumps. I’ve also found Beard Bros, and met ProtonJon / Lucahjin at a local tourney in Edmonton AB I was helping to run, so I started watching their stuff as well. Plus a bunch of other people, of course, who I watch more spottily.

I keep it up because it’s one of the most fun things in my life now. I really, reeeeally enjoy having a reason / excuse to play games I likely wouldn’t otherwise try. I would never have discovered the Shantae series if one of my early followers from my comic work hadn’t suggested I do Risky’s Revenge for a stream and picked it up for $2. Further, I love love LOVE that it also gives me a reason / excuse to play games with friends, either online or dragging someone to my couch and recording us - playing games socially is probably my single favourite activity in the world.

I’ve been going for about 3 years now, trying to keep an upload schedule of like … 3-5 videos a week and a few streams weekly in the past year. I have been loving every second of it and have no regrets about starting.

#31

Huh…so how I got into LP. Well my route is a bit…convoluted, and probably involves a bunch of people who don’t remember much, maybe even less about who I even am.

Anyway, I got into the term “Let’s Play” from Achievement Hunter (that Rooster Teeth company that does nothing but play games now), though long before they booked the term on Youtube. At the time, they were still doing achievement guides and a mess of other stuff, so we’re talking about 2010/2011. At some point in that time I started following a guy who was streaming content with their permission as a part of “AHTV” as it was back then, Axnollouse (aka Fragger). I ended up joining a bit of a crowd and made a few friends from that entire thing, some I am still close to even today, so I have a lot to thank him for. So here you go, man, if you see this. :+1:

Over time, I started following him and other people he communicated with, watched content he would throw at me (and sometimes at others that I’d end up seeing, because that’s how Twitter was back then) and saw some other things that he ultimately introduced me to over the years (I also think he was responsible for getting me into Chip Cheezum’s content, Retsupurae and TeamFourStar). So it wasn’t so much that I ended up looking for Let’s Play content, more that it ended up finding me. Not that I’m complaining, even this many years since those days. While I might not follow the stuff from the Rooster anymore for my own reasons, I doubt I’d even be into what I am now without that connection.

At the time, I had limited knowledge of what a Let’s Play even was, or how to do it right. Despite all of this, I started an attempt in January 2012 with a Let’s Play of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine (solely on Youtube, because I didn’t know about SA at the time). Also had an attempt at game critique about the same time (an old Battlefield friend of mine wanted my opinions on Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning) which I kinda enjoyed. But eventually I got pulled over into SA at the time of “the Great Dangan Ronpa wave” that forced the paywall up more times than it used to ever go up before.

It’s then how I got a little more involved with the LP community in general then, from Elentor’s legendary FF7 LP to LizardWizard’s LP of Oblivion and even Axnollouse’s LP of the Transformers Cybertron games (I’m the one with the shitty video source in the Fall multiplayer stuff). Having seen how they were done properly, I then attempted to make one on Arc: Twilight of the Spirits…which fell through when my capture device died (and thus began the LPer’s Curse for me). I still want to do LP’s of games thanks to all of this, though I do kinda wish I would stop aiming high with my choices (like doing a streamed LP of FFXIV, which is a BAD IDEA OH MY GOD).

Been trying to get back into it though, and hope to keep my ears and eyes open for stuff I might be interested in.

#32

I’m not exactly who I saw LP first, but I was actually introduced to Let’s Play via Retsupurae. I saw a couple of videos and thought they were funny, despite not really getting what was going on.

A bit later I found Chip Cheezum’s stuff while he was doing MGS2 and I decided to give it a whirl. I originally was going to do Uncharted but then Chip did Uncharted and he had an HD capture card, which I hadn’t bought right away (I originally had a Dazzle which I never used for anything that I managed to put on the internet). Then I was going to do Resistance: Fall of Man, before Ape and I got three videos into it before deciding we were tired of looking at the color brown. After that we settled on Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction, and we’ve been going ever since.

Lately I’ve taken more to streaming than LPs. I just don’t have the time or energy to really consistently put out videos as often as I would like anymore. Streams are much more relaxed and fun, if you ask me.

#33

It all started with ProtonJon’s Mario games and DeceasedCrab’s Monster Party LPs.

Then I looked up Dwarf Fortress and found Boatmurdered and the LP Archive.

And then about 3 years later I realized that these LPs were coming from somewhere and joined SA.

#34

I first heard about LPs in 2010 from seeing them on YouTube. Most of the LPs I saw were done by the more well-known LPers around the time such as Chuggaaconry, since IIRC his Super Mario RPG VLP was the first LP I ever watched. This was way before I knew or even heard about SA, Retsuprae, etc.

So around 2011, I decided to try it myself, although I couldn’t decide what game I could LP first. Somehow I ended up playing the GBA port of the first Sonic game and well… things didn’t turn out as expected.

The game itself is pretty bad, but savestate abuse, barely any video editing or knowledge about the game, as well as in-jokes only some of my friend would only get didn’t make good videos. I did end up beating the game but it was a complete trainwreck.

After that I attempted to LP the GBA port of Rayman 1 as well since I figured “eh, why not”, and it ended up with me cancelling it mid-way through due to technical issues. Since then I took a break from trying to anything LP related, and it was around this time I found Retsuprae and learned about SA.

In 2012, I decided to jump back in with a bit more knowledge and experience under my belt and decided to LP a Kirby game. It was definitely an improvement compared to the old videos but overall they still had many issues.

That was the last time I did anything solo LPs, as the last thing I did LP wise was playthrough Streets of Rage with a friend which took nearly 3 years to finish due to living in different parts of the world, technical issues, and losing interest overtime.

Over the years I’ve wanted to jump back in having better equipment and having a computer that could run games properly, but in the end I would never get around to doing so. I have actually recorded footage of games I’ve wanted to LP just to get back in just laying around but many times do I end up scrapping them due to the footage not being that great, but mainly the commentary ends up not turning out how I want it or is not good enough.

In the end, I’m just stuck in “LP limbo” when it comes to producing anything.

#35

I first watched a Dead Rising LP by oatmeal raisin, then Trespasser by Research Indicates, I honestly can’t remember exactly how I found them but it was definitely the SA forums which I’d been a member of for a while. I was in a bad place emotionally and waiting for and watching new episodes of dead rising was a highlight of my week.

I’ve considered doing the odd LP but I never really got past the stage of recording some footage of Betrayer and forgetting about it.

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#36

Nothing horribly special, I just found Retsupurae’s cover of King’s Quest V while I was looking for video’s of the King’s Quest II fan remake and ended up watching and liking them. That eventually led me to other peoples Let’s Plays and here I am.

I’ve never actually done Let’s Plays myself due to a combination of a lack of technical expertise and being unable to talk to myself for any length of time.

#37

Hello, I’m RealBlue and this happens to be my first ever post here. Wish me luck!.. Or not, it’s cool.

I can’t remember the exact time when I first heard the term “Let’s Play” but it was probably not long after I started up my second YouTube Channel. The first was a (now long gone) typical teen Vlog type thing I started up in late 2007, where I would post short videos about what games I was currently playing and/or new games I had just bought.

I had a video capture card since 2005 and was already familiar with the concept of capturing game footage directly to the PC using Windows Movie Maker but never had the skill or imagination to add commentary to the footage at that time. At most I would capture Short segments of gameplay or cutscenes and upload them to YouTube and I never considered the idea of recording full playthroughs back then, because the capture preview window in WMM was about the size of a postage stamp and trying to play a game skillfully with a window that small was nigh impossible. I wouldn’t think of splitting the video to the TV at the same time for at least a couple of years yet and consequently, I wouldn’t make anything using captured gameplay footage for that first channel more ambitious than a few ‘top 10’ videos.

In late 2008 I grew despondent about my channel and it’s seeming lack of any real direction or purpose. I wanted a fresh start and I had some ideas! I was a huge Sega fanboy, still am in some ways. I grew up with Sega systems and so they were the platforms I adored most and still have the most affection for. I wanted to make a channel that championed the best games that Sega had made, from the Master System up to the present day. I named it “therealbluedragon”; a reference to the blue dragon from the Panzer Dragoon games and my first project to inaugurate the new channel was a full play-through of Panzer Dragoon Saga for the Sega Saturn. I didn’t really have the equipment or know-how to capture footage from real hardware for such a massive undertaking; so I captured all of my footage for that game from an emulator using a licenced copy of Hypercam2 (Yes that’s right, I was probably one of only nine people on earth at the time who actually bothered buying a full licence for that shitty software. HA!) I uploaded the first video on the same day I made the channel, the 19th of October 2008. It was the very first ever full playthrough of Panzer Dragoon Saga uploaded to YouTube and i’m still very proud of it. It doesn’t count as a Let’s Play as there’s no commentary, so that makes it just a Long Play.

(This year will be the channel’s 10th anniversary! Damn I’m old.)

Not long after finishing that Long Play I started working on my “Battle of the Ports” videos. A long running series of videos that compared footage of two versions of the same game for different systems side by side. I was probably the first person (or at least one of the first) to do that kind of thing on YouTube. Occasionally I did a few more Long Plays including: Myst, Deep Fear (yes, THAT Deep Fear.), D , Shining Force III, Tomb Raider and Riven.

I definitely knew about Let’s Plays by this time (mainly because of people like Chip Cheezum and Slowbeef) but I didn’t like the idea of adding my commentary to my videos, firstly because I liked to think the games could speak for themselves and didn’t need me to explain to people why they were good or bad but mainly because I was a very shy person and lacked confidence in myself to be interesting enough for people to listen to. But the idea kept nagging at me and slowly over time I began to build confidence and the very first project I released that could undeniably be considered a Let’s Play was Gekka Mugentan Torico in 2014 with fellow youtuber SteelBall Jack. Having someone else there doing the commentary with me helped a lot and really broke me out of my shell.

It’s a bit awkward to listen to now; lot’s of umm-ing and stammering but it finally allowed me to break though the confidence barrier that had been holding me back. I’ve since done three more Let’s Plays in recent years: Oxenfree, Broken Sword and Shining in the Darkness. They’re all my precious children.

I’m not much of a showman and I don’t crave attention. I don’t monetise my videos or advertise them on other websites. (and it shows, nearly 10 years and only 2400 subs.) It’s ok that not many people watch them, because I have fun making them and for me that was always the goal, to have fun.

Thank you for putting up with this horribly boring and drawn out story. You can ban me now. X

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#38

No bans, only fans.

The new motto of LP.Zone

1 Like
#39

For me, it was originally rather simple. I love video games and I like making YouTube videos, so why not combine them? However as time has passed I have come up with newer reasons to try to return to it after I lost a lot of my passion for video making: one is to try to improve my speaking ability and get more comfortable putting myself out there again, the other is to tackle my backlog that has grown immensely in the last few years!

#40

In my case, more than anything I feel LPing is really just a side-product of a general love of editing videos combined with the usual love of video games. I took a TV programming class in my junior and senior years of high school and I think it was the one class I really, truly enjoyed (that and the cooking class), so I looked up some good video editing software and started doing stuff with that. Let’s Play in general happened to still be in that upswing of its initial popularity, when everybody was doing it but nobody outside of SA had gotten really big yet, so I saw that happening and thought “I could do that too”, and unlike most other times I’ve done something for that exact reason the results have been pretty good, probably because my main inspirations have been things like Jurassic Park: Trespasser or the works of Giragast with a touch of Sonic 2: Special Edition.