The claim: Slowbeef has long claimed that he invented "let's play" and that it became popular on the Something Awful forums and then spread across the internet.
From
Slowbeef's "About" page on his twitch channel:
If you search Google for "who invented let's play" you get the following result at the top - a Wikipedia article snippet stating that Michael Sawyer (aka Slowbeef) did (as well as a claim that another delusional lolcow,
Chrischan, did):
The relevant text from the
Let's Play Wikipedia article:
And the relevant text from
the Kotaku article that is the primary citation for that paragraph:
Even Patrick Klepek, Kotaku writer and infamous spacker, is hesitant to commit to calling Slowbeef the inventor of let's play, ending the article with this:
So in summary, the claims are:
-
That Slowbeef created the first screenshot "let's play" on his own website for the MSX game Metal Gear 2 in 2004.
- That the term "let's play" originated on the Something Awful forums sometime in 2005 and comes from the community participation in threads such as the playthrough of the game Oregon Trail.
- That in 2007, Slowbeef created the first video let's play by recording himself talking over playing the game The Immortal.
- That let's play was popularized on Something Awful and spread out from there across the internet.
Debunking those claims:
A screenshot walkthrough from Bulbapedia that's basically the same as Slowbeef's MSX Metal Gear walkthrough (2005), from the same year but earlier than the Metal Gear guide:
A Pokemon walkthrough from 2004:
Another screenshot walkthrough from 2003:
The term "let's play" wasn't invented by Something Awful (or anyone, it's a normal phrase that's been around forever):
here is a BBC article, it's from all the way back in 2002 and check out the title (
article archive):
A video playthrough of an old Amiga game on Youtube from early 2006, one year before Slowbeef played The Immortal:
A video playthrough of a Mario fangame from late 2006:
A video longplay of some old strategy game, late 2006:
A Mario speedrun from 2006:
A Mario video let's play from late 2006:
Another Mario video let's play from late 2006:
Yet another Mario let's play from 2006:
A video playthrough of a Mario hack from mid 2006, and the uploader claims it was recorded in 2004:
A Dino Crisis video walkthrough from late 2006:
And the final claim was that let's play became popular because of Something Awful. Well, let's
use Google Trends to track the popularity of the search term "let's play"
Let's play started to increase rapidly in popularity around the time that Minecraft became popular, funnily enough. During Something Awful's prime LP years it was barely used more than in 2004.
If you were to start naming famous Youtube LPers, would any of them be goons/former goons? The goons that did let's plays hardly got any views or attention and that hasn't changed over the years. The people that actually popularized let's play have probably never heard of Something Awful.
Claiming that anyone "invented" either the concept of recording yourself playing videogames or the term "let's play" is dumb: videogames are one of the most popular hobbies on the planet and it was inevitable that people would make internet content where they play them. And the term "let's (verb)" is a common term that's been around forever to refer to all kinds of things. Let's bake, let's dance, let's skate.
If Slowbeef and Something Awful never existed the let's play landscape would look basically the same, just with less trannies.
Some non-videogame examples of the term "let's play"
twitter.com
twitter.com
