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Early Access: Game Man, the Lost Media that Never Was
🕑 Added 2025-03-24 22:45:55 +0000 UTCThe year is 2014. Gatorbox is part of the way through its third season on the air, a season rife with production delays and problems as I was in a prolonged process of moving from Hollywood Park, TX to Alamo Heights, TX and was essentially maintaining two apartments because I was itching to move out of the former but for credit score reasons didn't want to break lease. Most of my time was filled by the full-time IT job I'd landed after spending much of 2013 in a managerial role at this absolute shithole of a hobby & collectibles store.
The internet was a different landscape back then, especially YouTube. In order to pad out runtime and view count for optimal ad revenue creators would often draw out their projects to as many videos as possible and break them up into 10-15 minute chunks due to the length restrictions on the website for everyone except the premium creators in YouTube's partnership program. One day I decided to make a joke video thumbnail making fun of the type of content creator who fit that archetype, a no-name let's player known only as "GAME MAN". The thumbnail consisted of me making a weird face and all around the edges of the image were things like the box art to Super Mario Bros 2, "Doki Doki Panic?!", "1 Like = 1 Mario Star", and "PART 8" emblazoned across the upper corner.
The gag was obvious, and to my surprise the Game Man photo made the rounds in the niche little gaming-centric corners of the pre-Gamergate online world. As quickly as the joke appeared however, it faded and was replaced by other gaming memes.
It has been 11 years since I made the original Game Man joke picture. I never made a follow-up and never really even acknowledged it as part of Gatorbox. It was just something I did as a joke, posted it, and moved on. But now for April Fool's Day, Game Man makes his return to the web. That so-called "Part 8" of Game Man's review / playthrough of Super Mario Bros 2? Yeah, that video now exists. It's going up on April 1, but as Patreon supporters you can see the video here a week early.
The Game Man mythos I wrote for this video establishes the alleged channel as having existed in 2007-2008 during the height of the let's play boom. I went through a significant amount of effort creating a video in 2025 that looks like it was filmed and uploaded to YouTube 17 years prior. The crux of making this video was securing a digital camera of the era and I managed to get a Kodak EasyShare from 2007 which was perfect. (The second challenge was finding an SD memory card that was small enough and in the right format to be compatible with this ancient camera, thankfully I could just reformat the one in my Wii.) From there I plopped the camera onto one of my tripods and pointed it directly at the television to record the video game as well as Game Man's commentary because just like a cut-rate let's player that's the setup I imitated. I even had to go as far as to animate my own Windows Movie Maker opening titles because the alternative was trying to generate that within a virtual machine and extracting the resulting clip (which was too hard to do). I also had to intentionally kneecap my modern rendering software to output the video in genuine 360p to compress the hell out of the already fuzzy video.
The performance in this video was not easy to do. This is a one take video and it's exactly 10 minutes long, also adding to the fake authenticity of when this video was supposedly made. Playing Super Mario Bros 2 this badly on purpose but also doing so CONSISTENTLY was frustrating in a way that I don't think I can succinctly put into words. There are many layers to the Game Man act, so many that I feel like I may have actually overdone it to the point where most of this will be lost on the average viewer. For example, Game Man certainly knows enough about the game to tell the viewer where certain hidden items are, but fails at actually getting anything substantial out of it. He points out two locations of the magic potions that take the player to Subspace ("shadow world") where you can collect coins for the slot machine but every time Game Man finds the potion it's always in the very last root he digs up meaning he doesn't actually get anything for his trouble. He also correctly identifies the location of the mushroom in World 2-2 but doesn't account for the placement of the item having changed during localization, referencing back to his implied connection to Doki Doki Panic.
There are a number of other small gags peppered throughout the video such as Game Man knowing there's a door at the bottom of the sand in 2-2 but choosing the wrong direction at the fork. Additionally, he gets grazed by one of the Sniffit's bullets after it has bounced off the wall and points out that the bullets do not hurt you once they ricochet; in the next room he mistakenly does the same thing with Birdo's eggs but unlike the Sniffit bullets the rebounded eggs do hurt the player. At the beginning of 2-3 Game Man knows about the little door that only Luigi can reach but completely misses the other mushroom to the left of the ladder than any player can get. I also wanted Game Man to be ambivalent, but not offensive, about Birdo's gender. He genuinely does not know whether to say "he" or "she" because he's just trying to go by whatever is written in the game's manual even though it seems incorrect. This video was allegedly filmed in 2008 so this predates all of that dumb Tumblr shit and the ongoing Current Year culture war nonsense by almost a decade. This video was filmed in a more innocent time and I wanted to make sure that cluelessness was reflected in Game Man's mannerisms.
Some of the things that I actually had to practice on to intentionally suck at included messing up the jump over the Cobrat ("cobra-rat") at the start of 2-2 enough times for Game Man to hammer out all of the lines I'd written for him to be said specifically at the start of the level, but do so in a way that looked like a natural mistake. I did mess up on the bit with Pokey where I accidentally killed him in one go because Game Man mentions how you have to hit each of Pokey's segments to defeat him, that's the only slip-up. I spent an entire afternoon doing this and I figured that was as close as I was going to get to a perfect take so I went with it.
The biggest reference in the video that's staring everyone in the face is that I used a clip of the song "Starbound" from Overclocked Remix for the opening of the video. The usage of this specific song was intentional because it is a direct reference to the first episode of Gamelife, a YouTube series from the same era that Game Man is meant to exist. Gamelife is... a rabbit hole, that's for sure. Guru Larry did a video about the show that does a good job of explaining the main points, but I was there when Gamelife was new and I remember that shitshow unfolding in real time. Nobody involved with Gamelife was very tech literate and of all the content creators who did the "filming the video game running on your television" routine they were perhaps the most notorious. The entire Game Man act and mythos is based largely around Andrew Rosenblum's performance in Gamelife.
The release of the Game Man video coincides with a hokey misinformation campaign to establish Game Man as a real YouTube channel that existed at one point in time. A page with a fake backstory for the YouTuber is set to go up on the Lost Media Wiki establishing Game Man as an early let's player who fell victim to extensive online harassment (by Retsupurae et al., though they are not directly named) over things such as his apparent speech impediment and lack of skill at the games he played. As the story goes, Game Man did not take the trolling well and in response to it he deleted his YouTube channel and all of its videos and to anyone's knowledge has never resurfaced online to this day. This "part 8" of his Super Mario Bros 2 playthrough is the only surviving video of Game Man's legacy. I don't really expect anyone to fall for this because I am doing things like openly telling Patreon supporters "this is not real, this is a joke" but it would be funny if even for a little while people on the outside took this seriously.
Anyways, as always thank you so much for your continued support. I am still working hard on getting our back catalog of VOD's mirrored on MEGA and designing the page on gator.co to go with it, as well as knocking out an entry in the 100 Best Games project whenever I get a chance. Lots of cool stuff on the horizon, I hope to see you there. :)
