Living in Lag
Picture yourself in Ireland in 2005. Now, picture the Irish countryside and its rolling hills, green meadows and herds of cows so large they’d make the Serengeti look like a petting-zoo. Here, the 32k modem is king. Time spent on the internet – when it cares to connect, that is – is measured in minutes and never hours, whilst the bi-monthly telephone bill is a terrifying prospect.
Plant a young teen version of yours truly into this environment, a burgeoning geek whose peers ate, slept and breathed rugby and hurling (a Gaelic game which, after nine years of living here, I still don’t understand), and you’ll be able to understand why ‘a gamer’ might be disregarded or feel a little out-of-place. Although, certainly, the majority of my close friends gamed themselves, I always thought I was the most hardcore of the hardcore, digesting industry news, dissecting trailers and making my own maps and mods. It was my answer to rugby. Still, I felt like the wider world never truly acknowledged videogaming. I had no ‘role-models’ or humour to relate to, no stories or actions I felt reflected in myself. All that changed with Pure Pwnage.
I first discovered the titular internet-TV show on a demo disc glued to the front of a copy of PC Gamer. It contained episodes two and three, and an excerpt from the fourth. I must admit, I had no idea what ‘pwnage’ was, let alone the pure variety, but regardless, I was immediately hooked. Confronted by the antics of Jeremy (a.k.a. ‘teh_pwnerer’), his camera-shy brother Kyle and the hyperactive Doug (a.k.a. ‘fps_doug’), I had found the videogame humour I so desperately desired. It was homely, almost; with characters so well-founded and so easily warmed to, it was as if they were friends. They were just as geekily interested in videogames as I was, and I loved it. It was the subcultural identity I wore proudly in entertainment form.
My interest in the series blossomed from there. With my pathetic modem, I was forced to wait for my annual trip to England to download the latest episodes where I must have hogged the broadband connection at my grandparents’ all day. I added fps_doug on MSN, then felt simultaneously starstruck and struck-down when he told me not to ‘nudge’ him. It was a glorious addiction and one I fed without shame. As the show grew from its almost random sketch-like structure and slowly assumed a coherent narrative, I introduced some of my friends to its world of ‘uber-micro’ and strats. We couldn’t wait for the next instalments: how was Jeremy going to recover from his World of Warcraft addiction? Who was the ‘teh_masterer’? Was Dave really back in China?
The original cast of Pure Pwnage.
Uber Pwnage
At the end of 2006, the twelfth and final episode of the first season was released. A forty-five minute epic, it had romance, intrigue, brilliant jokes and the telltale signs of a matured, professional production crew. It was the omega to the alpha, the culmination of two years of hard-work and a new level in the relationship between the makers and their cult-like following. The project had grown from a simple, witty experiment shot shakily on a borrowed video camera in 2004 to a fully fledged internet phenomenon with its episodes premiering in theatres across its homeland of Canada, the United States and eventually the UK and Australia, not to mention the millions of total downloads.
The final episode, despite its magnificence, also deeply shocked the fanbase. The reason? It had credits. Jeremy was in fact Jarett Cale; Kyle was Geoff Lapaire; Doug was Joel Gardiner. I remember being quite put-out myself. Although it was obvious by the end of the series that they were indeed acting, I strongly believed that the characters were who they said they were. I suppose I felt a little betrayed that over my last year of viewing, Jeremy and Kyle hadn’t been brothers and Doug didn’t really yell ‘boom headshot!’ every day. Of course, it was incredibly naïve of me: why I thought Jarett’s character of a reclusive, jargon-spewing pro-gamer was, in fact, real still baffles me, but when one appreciates the gamer identity which they embodied, it is little surprise that the revealing of their true selves shattered the illusion for some.
The second season began in 2007 and it was immediately more fantastic than the last. Jeremy branched out into console gaming; his friendship with Doug, broken in the last episodes of the first season, was reforged; and a new character was introduced, Terence ‘T-Bag’ Brown, instantly loveable for his portrayal of the cool kid with a closet-gaming habit. Unfortunately, the latter proved to be the catalyst for the show’s ultimate downfall.
AFK
Troy Dixon: gone, but most certainly not forgotten.
Tragically, in December 2008, but four episodes after his debut, Troy Dixon, the actor behind the Halo champion T-Bag, was killed in a car accident. Despite his brief appearance in Pure Pwnage, the community was shook profoundly and the event took an immense toll on the cast and crew. To this day, the second season remains in an awkward limbo, poised on a massive twist in a new story arc, completely untouched since the last episode released in August 2008 over two years ago.
Months of radio silence followed. Jarett Cale later revealed that in the immediate months after Troy’s death, another friend unrelated to the show died and he was plunged into a deep depression. Geoff Lapaire, the show’s director, expressed his disinterest in continuing the web series. Ironically, the death of Dixon doomed the now four-year-old series. Pure Pwnage’s complex narrative had made it inflexible and the absence of a main character threw an unfortunate spanner into the works.
There Are Respawn Points in RL
All hope was not gone, however. In 2009, the Pure Pwnage TV series was revealed, making its way to the Canadian channel ‘Showcase’ in March 2010 where it ran for eight episodes. A second season was planned, but later cancelled. Regardless, it was not the ‘traditional’ Pure Pwnage, nor a continuation of the web series’ story. In the TV series, the characters were reacquainted to an audience supposedly unfamiliar to them: Jeremy and Doug were dumbed down to a painfully awkward level, whilst a new love interest replaced Anastasia, Jeremy’s web series girlfriend. Strangely, a spiritual successor to Troy Dixon’s character, Tyrell, was introduced, identical in all but name. Though it was most definitely entertaining, it lacked the original’s flair. It was like getting a new dog after the old one had run away but days before.
The Pure Pwnage TV series cast.
Kicked from the Server
Since the TV series, Pure Pwnage has been lost in the ether. Cale announced that a new web episode would be released last Christmas, but fans were disappointed, though most expected as much. The community has all but completely withered away and one cannot help but feel a tinge of sorrow that such a once vibrant, thronging mass of like-minded fans has disbanded. This January, the man behind teh_pwnerer said the show was on an ‘indefinite hiatus’. Although footage has been shot for the web series’ nineteenth episode and interest has been expressed in releasing individual scenes, in a recent podcast interview Cale said that he would only release them when he knew Pure Pwnage was “100% dead” in case the series somehow came back to life. In a similar podcast, Joel Gardiner, when asked about the possibility of the continuation of the web series, told fans “not to hold their breath”. With cast members spread across the North American continent moving in new directions (Cale is now based in California, the proud father of a one-year-old son; Gardiner has his own podcast series, ‘Stuck in the Middle of Somewhere‘), it would appear that Pure Pwnage’s time has officially come to an end.
Is this worthy of despair? Perhaps. It is sad that the Pure Pwnage community will probably never discover the intended fate of the cast and that the moronic but beautifully geeky antics of Jeremy and co. will most likely forever be left to memory. But, after the TV-series moved in a completely new direction and the two-and-a-half year gap since the last web episode, is it really something we’d want back anyway? How different would it be? Pure Pwnage is best left to the realms of nostalgia. Though the show is seemingly gone now, the happy memories associated with it are not: I will forever recall the excited waits for new episodes, the chatter and theorising amongst friends, the occasional practice of one’s ‘micro’ when drunk, the incessant quoting and best of all, the overbearing sense of warmth the series provided me throughout my formative teenage years. Maybe, in the future when we’re all livin n t00bz n stuff, we’ll be pleasantly surprised. Until then, I doff my metaphorical cap to all those who made it happen: you are the pwnage, bitches.
“It’s the decisions you make, when you have no time to make them, that define who you are…”
- teh_masterer
