Let's Play

2006video formatclassic

Published September 5, 2026

Let's Play, or LP, started as a screenshot thread about Oregon Trail on the Something Awful forums in 2006, then jumped to video in January 2007 when user slowbeef uploaded a commentated Super Metroid playthrough. That format spread from a niche subforum onto YouTube and Twitch, seeding an entire creator economy of gameplay-plus-commentary channels.

lets play memesgamingsomething awful memesyoutube culture memesstreamer memes

Overview

A Let's Play is a playthrough of a video game recorded and shared as either a screenshot-plus-text thread or a narrated video, with the author's commentary sitting on top of the raw gameplay1. The commentary is the whole point: unlike a walkthrough, which teaches you how to beat a game, an LP is closer to riffing on a movie with your friends while the movie plays, and hosts often lean toward jokes, character voices, or in-character narration rather than pure instruction5.

The format splits into a few recognizable flavors. Screenshot LPs (SSLPs) are structured like illustrated forum posts, with captioned images arranged into chapters, and the Let's Play Archive still preserves thousands of them in that shape3. Video LPs (VLPs) run as episodic YouTube series with facecam or voice-only commentary, and long-running channels package them into playlists per game2. A sub-genre called Retsupurae adds a second layer of commentary over an existing LP, usually to mock a bad player or a broken playthrough6.

Origin & Background

Platform
Something Awful forums (screenshot LPs) / YouTube (video LPs, viral spread)
Creator
Something Awful users; slowbeef
Date
2006

Let's Play as a labeled format began on the Something Awful forums in 2006, when users in the Games subforum started posting collaborative threads about the adventure game Oregon Trail, sharing screenshots of their runs alongside written commentary5. Those threads set the template that later SSLPs, like the Saiyuki: Journey West thread explicitly billed as "The Oregon Trail in China," openly copied3.

The video branch of the format has a specific starting shot. On January 19, 2007, Something Awful user slowbeef uploaded the first video LP, a playthrough of Super Metroid for the SNES, and the response on the forums pushed other posters to try the same recorded-with-commentary approach instead of screenshots2. Weeks later, on February 2, 2007, Something Awful user From Earth opened the Let's Play Archive with an announcement thread hosting only seven early LPs, including entries for Final Fantasy VIII, Silent Hill 1 & 2, Flashback and Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines7.

How It Spread

Traffic got heavy enough that Something Awful spun off a dedicated Let's Play subforum in 2007, which is where most of the early canon (Metroid Prime megathreads, HD VLPs of Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, and long-running RPG projects) lived before mirrors made it to the Archive89. A standalone community, The Let's Play Forum, spun up outside Something Awful and reported around 2,000 members, and other general-purpose forums began adding their own LP subforums to keep up5.

YouTube is where the format broke containment. slowbeef and his partner Diabetus posted their first Retsupurae video to YouTube on February 28, 2008, taking the in-forum practice of dunking on bad LPs and giving it a video-native shape6. Around the same window, Something Awful veterans and pure-YouTube creators built full channels around the format: Chuggaaconroy, who joined YouTube in 2006, started his first LP with EarthBound in 2008 and reached over 350,000 subscribers with roughly 290 million total views by 2010, while NintendoCapriSun (Timothy Bishop) crossed 150,000 subscribers and 85 million views on his own channel in the same period5. ProtonJonSA built an audience on Super Mario World ROM hack playthroughs, most famously the Japanese Kaizo Mario World, and later teamed with Chuggaaconroy and NintendoCapriSun as TheRunawayGuys, a group channel whose LP list runs from Mario Party 1 through Super Metroid5.

The Archive itself is a decent gauge of scale. By its tenth anniversary on February 2, 2017, lparchive.org was hosting 2,000 completed LPs, up from the seven it launched with a decade earlier7. From there the format continued migrating onto Twitch as live streaming took over the commentated-play niche, with commentary-plus-gameplay staying the shared DNA across every host1.

How to Use This Meme

An LP typically opens with an intro that names the game, the creator, and any format quirks (blind run, 100% run, co-op with a guest), then breaks the playthrough into episodes or chapters. The common convention is to keep gameplay uncut in the background while commentary carries the entertainment, whether that is jokes, in-character narration, historical context about the game, or a running conversation between co-hosts. Screenshot LPs often add asides between images (developer trivia, mocked-up dialogue, reader challenges), and Retsupurae-style riff videos overlay a second commentary track onto someone else's LP for comedic critique6.

Frequently Asked Questions

Let's Play

2006video formatclassic

Published September 5, 2026

Let's Play, or LP, started as a screenshot thread about Oregon Trail on the Something Awful forums in 2006, then jumped to video in January 2007 when user slowbeef uploaded a commentated Super Metroid playthrough. That format spread from a niche subforum onto YouTube and Twitch, seeding an entire creator economy of gameplay-plus-commentary channels.

lets play memes gaming something awful memes youtube culture memes streamer memes

Overview

A Let's Play is a playthrough of a video game recorded and shared as either a screenshot-plus-text thread or a narrated video, with the author's commentary sitting on top of the raw gameplay1. The commentary is the whole point: unlike a walkthrough, which teaches you how to beat a game, an LP is closer to riffing on a movie with your friends while the movie plays, and hosts often lean toward jokes, character voices, or in-character narration rather than pure instruction5.

The format splits into a few recognizable flavors. Screenshot LPs (SSLPs) are structured like illustrated forum posts, with captioned images arranged into chapters, and the Let's Play Archive still preserves thousands of them in that shape3. Video LPs (VLPs) run as episodic YouTube series with facecam or voice-only commentary, and long-running channels package them into playlists per game2. A sub-genre called Retsupurae adds a second layer of commentary over an existing LP, usually to mock a bad player or a broken playthrough6.

Origin & Background

Platform
Something Awful forums (screenshot LPs) / YouTube (video LPs, viral spread)
Creator
Something Awful users; slowbeef
Date
2006

Let's Play as a labeled format began on the Something Awful forums in 2006, when users in the Games subforum started posting collaborative threads about the adventure game Oregon Trail, sharing screenshots of their runs alongside written commentary5. Those threads set the template that later SSLPs, like the Saiyuki: Journey West thread explicitly billed as "The Oregon Trail in China," openly copied3.

The video branch of the format has a specific starting shot. On January 19, 2007, Something Awful user slowbeef uploaded the first video LP, a playthrough of Super Metroid for the SNES, and the response on the forums pushed other posters to try the same recorded-with-commentary approach instead of screenshots2. Weeks later, on February 2, 2007, Something Awful user From Earth opened the Let's Play Archive with an announcement thread hosting only seven early LPs, including entries for Final Fantasy VIII, Silent Hill 1 & 2, Flashback and Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines7.

How It Spread

Traffic got heavy enough that Something Awful spun off a dedicated Let's Play subforum in 2007, which is where most of the early canon (Metroid Prime megathreads, HD VLPs of Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, and long-running RPG projects) lived before mirrors made it to the Archive89. A standalone community, The Let's Play Forum, spun up outside Something Awful and reported around 2,000 members, and other general-purpose forums began adding their own LP subforums to keep up5.

YouTube is where the format broke containment. slowbeef and his partner Diabetus posted their first Retsupurae video to YouTube on February 28, 2008, taking the in-forum practice of dunking on bad LPs and giving it a video-native shape6. Around the same window, Something Awful veterans and pure-YouTube creators built full channels around the format: Chuggaaconroy, who joined YouTube in 2006, started his first LP with EarthBound in 2008 and reached over 350,000 subscribers with roughly 290 million total views by 2010, while NintendoCapriSun (Timothy Bishop) crossed 150,000 subscribers and 85 million views on his own channel in the same period5. ProtonJonSA built an audience on Super Mario World ROM hack playthroughs, most famously the Japanese Kaizo Mario World, and later teamed with Chuggaaconroy and NintendoCapriSun as TheRunawayGuys, a group channel whose LP list runs from Mario Party 1 through Super Metroid5.

The Archive itself is a decent gauge of scale. By its tenth anniversary on February 2, 2017, lparchive.org was hosting 2,000 completed LPs, up from the seven it launched with a decade earlier7. From there the format continued migrating onto Twitch as live streaming took over the commentated-play niche, with commentary-plus-gameplay staying the shared DNA across every host1.

How to Use This Meme

An LP typically opens with an intro that names the game, the creator, and any format quirks (blind run, 100% run, co-op with a guest), then breaks the playthrough into episodes or chapters. The common convention is to keep gameplay uncut in the background while commentary carries the entertainment, whether that is jokes, in-character narration, historical context about the game, or a running conversation between co-hosts. Screenshot LPs often add asides between images (developer trivia, mocked-up dialogue, reader challenges), and Retsupurae-style riff videos overlay a second commentary track onto someone else's LP for comedic critique6.

Frequently Asked Questions