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“ format; it’ s informational, but it’ s also entertainment. It seems that the first Let’ s Play was of the classic game Oregon Trail circa 2005 on the Something Awful forums, though people can’ t seem to find the original thread. It consisted primarily of screenshots of the game posted with text commentary, a kind of Let’ s Play that isn’ t quite as popular today, but definitely still exists. Some of the most prominent figures in the early Let’ s Play community include slowbeef, Freelance Astronauts, Psychedelic Eyeball, and Proton Jon. Eventually Let’ s Plays transitioned from forum posts to silent videos of the game with fuzzy audio commentary on top, and then videos with in-game audio and audio commentary posted on YouTube, a relatively new website in the early to mid-2000s.
Two games in particular skyrocketed Let’ s Plays to popularity: Minecraft and Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Minecraft is a simulation and building game with highly customizable worlds( akin to LEGOs) while Amnesia is a first-person survival horror game. Two of the most popular Let’ s Players I mentioned earlier, Pewdiepie and Markiplier, got their start with those games respectively.
Their first few videos use the audio-only commentary format. Pewdiepie has short clips of random glitches in Minecraft that eventually expand to an Amnesia playthrough. He began to add more games to his repertoire of videos, and put in a webcam overlay at around 2011 to add to the vlog / live reaction experience( Markiplier added webcam to his videos in 2012). This evolution of video style is common with other Let’ s Players as well: starting off with short and random videos, proceeding to add audio commentary, and then adding a webcam feed. It’ s a sort of natural progression. The more popular a Let’ s Players videos get, the more comfortable they get with sharing more of themselves and the more likely they are to invest in better equipment to make videos with.
This progression doesn’ t happen with everyone however, as some prominent Let’ s Players opt for the no-videocam format, and some Let’ s Players still use the old forum format for posting their Let’ s Plays. There’ s three reasons I can come up with as to why: it’ s a pain to invest in better equipment, especially if you have big commitments outside the Let’ s Play community; you may have reasons for not wanting to show your face; or you’ ve established an online persona that would be ruined by switching to facecam. GameGrumps and Cryaotic( more so) are good examples of the last reason: In each GameGrumps video, small cartoon versions of the
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‘ I love seeing other people have fun, and I think that’ s what a lot of people get out of these gaming videos,’ Markiplier says.