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The Completionist Hosting Preserved Play Charity Livestream

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Video games are disposable pieces of entertainment. Developers that don't focus on backward compatibility may leave titles behind as external media changes, for instance from cartridges to discs. Sometimes projects get scrapped, such as BioWare's Anthem 2.0 ; or studios shut down, such as Disintegration 's V1 Interactive. Preservation efforts for game development are important, and the upcoming Preserved Play charity event will benefit the work of the Video Game History Foundation (VGHF).

The VGHF is a non-profit organization headed by former Gamasutra news director Frank Cifaldi and Pink Gorilla Games owner Kelsey Lewin that operates a research library, archives and restores media , and hosts educational efforts like pop-up museums to advocate games preservation. This work came to the attention of Jirard "Dragon Rider" Khalil, also known as The Completionist, who said he is "really passionate about making sure video games are around for the next millennium." Game Rant spoke to Khalil about his Twitch charity livestream Preserved Play, and other events celebrating his show's tenth anniversary.

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Khalil said he has known Lewin for years and has been "obsessed" with Cifaldi's work, including his stint as the head of restoration at Digital Eclipse for the Mega Man Legacy Collection , so he reached out "on a whim" to see if he could help their cause. He is well-known in Internet circles for a YouTube show started in 2011 dedicated to completing a different game every week, as well as adjacent projects. However, while Khalil's channel currently has 1.4 million subscribers, he said when "I'm old and nobody cares about me," he sees himself as a historian or museum curator with the memorabilia he has "quietly and slowly" been amassing.

"I think it's important we start that work now, because in the 80s and 90s video games were a fad, and now they're a lifestyle...If I can be a lightning rod that supercharges the [VGHF], I'm more than happy to do so."

That "supercharge" will primarily come from his two-day livestream, which is scheduled between 10:00 a.m. PT and 6:00 p.m. PT on both March 27 and 28. Preserved Play will feature developers from studios like Yacht Club Games who have stories and historical insight from prior projects - for instance "artmancer" Nick Wozniak talking about his work as assistant director at WayForward on Thor: God of Thunder . There will also be a rotating cast of YouTubers, streamers, and other guests at the "chaotic" event that includes a Super Mario World Crowd Control segment, in which fans can donate to directly impact the game; a playthrough of Plants vs. Zombies with composer Laura Shigihara; as well as a "criss-cross" Zelda randomizer where he and another YouTuber must beat something in a synchronized way.

One major part of Preserved Play, which Khalil's company released a trailer for today, will be a playthrough of Conker's Bad Fur Day to celebrate its 20th anniversary . Director and Conker voice Chris Seavor, lead developer and engineer Shawn Pile, and Great Mighty Poo voice Chris Marlow will join him and share "possibly never-before-seen documents." "As much as we're raising money, I think the cool thing is we're showcasing what the VGHF is doing," Khalil said.

Early game builds or press releases proven incorrect by the final product are some of what the VGHF collects that Khalil highlights as rare things "nobody really knows exist" that he wants Preserved Play to show. While he acknowledges the foundation is not "struggling," he wants to give it a spotlight using the audience he has curated over 10 years. If the event is successful and continues raising money, he said he will aim to keep the "party train" going beyond its pre-planned bookends because, "That's just how I am."

Khalil said the event will be a lot looser than IndieLand, another annual charity event hosted by That One Video Gamer (TOVG) since 2018 which raises money for the dementia research non-profit The Open Hand Foundation; founded by Khalil's father Charles in honor of his wife Kaaren, who died due to complications from Frontotemporal Dementia in 2013. There's "a lot of pressure to perform" during IndieLand, Jirard said, because it emphasizes showcasing the work of independent developers .

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IndieLand 2020 shifted to being online-only due to the coronavirus pandemic, which also cancelled E3 and other major events, but Jirard said having a skeleton crew there showed him the benefits of a "less is more" approach for Preserved Play where the people can be its driving force. TOVG plans to try and host IndieLand live again in summer 2022, with Preserved Play coming back in the spring so the team can run multiple charity events similar to Games Done Quick's AGDQ and SGDQ.

However, Preserved Play is just one activity celebrating The Completionist's 10-year anniversary this September. As another part of what Jirard called his company's equivalent of Nintendo's "Year of Luigi,"  a zine is being compiled from the work of artists and fans who applied before a March 5 deadline. It aims to give fans "a way to celebrate with me" by contributing art based on any aspect of the show's history, including The Completionist Legacy live tour, collaborations with members of the YouTube creator community NormalBoots, video game parody boyband Big Bad Bosses, and more.

The official TOVG zine is partially inspired by "Super Zine Bros," a 2017 fan-driven zine supporting dementia research based on the YouTube show Super Beard Bros. hosted by Jirard, Alex Faciane, and Brett Bayonne. It will donate all its proceeds to the VGHF; alongside all the money raised by Preserved Play on Twitch .

Ultimately Jirard wants the world to know that the tenth anniversary of The Completionist is less about celebrating the show as much as its community and the people who helped build it. "It's about honoring the team that makes the show, my brother who has invested time and money, my producers, the people who have collaborated with me, the guys at Normal Boots and beyond, the friends I've made along the way."

With Preserved Play, he hopes people take away an understanding of how important video games are to them. The YouTuber and CEO pushes for positivity in a medium many people stigmatize and want to regulate - as seen with Illinois state representative Marcus Evans Jr. attempting to ban violent games  via an amendment to a state law filed last month. Jirard believes wider education and preservation efforts can help combat this, and said if anyone feels inspired to create a game or content based around one after watching the stream, "I don't care how much money I raised."

"I think video games can educate, inspire, tell stories, create things, destroy things...I'm hoping people who come by and watch the stream walk away with a sense of wonder in what could be."

Preserved Play  takes place March 27 and 28, 2021 from 10:00 a.m. PT to 6:00 p.m. PT on Twitch channel TheCompletionist.

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Yacht Club Games finds there’s more retro life after ‘Shovel Knight’

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There’s a difference between a love letter to a genre and a complete re-creation.

To avoid tackling ground already covered when making video games that reference the 8- and 16-bit eras of the 1980s and ‘90s, Yacht Club Games co-founder David D’Angelo says one of his go-to references is “You’ve Got Mail.” Yes, the 1998 Nora Ephron-directed rom-com starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. Or, specifically, its relationship to the 1940 Ernst Lubitsch-directed film that inspired it, “The Shop Around the Corner.”

“It’s the same thing,” D’Angelo says in discussing how the West Los Angeles team behind the retro hit game “Shovel Knight” developed the mission statement for Yacht Club. Viewing “You’ve Got Mail” alongside the original “The Shop Around the Corner,” he says, can at times be a challenge for audiences weaned on more recent acting and filmmaking techniques.

“In watching ‘The Shop Around the Corner,’ I could see why someone would want to remake it,” he says. “There are so many good things in it. A lot of them translate directly to ‘You’ve Got Mail,’ but ‘You’ve Got Mail’ was modern. And yet there are so many parts of the original movie that transcend time. That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re putting it in a new box that helps you understand why it’s important,” he says of each game.

Since 2013, when “Shovel Knight” became an early Kickstarter sensation, Yacht Club has been hyper-focused on games starring the hit’s titular hero — a knight, of course, armed with, well, a shovel. Sales reached 2.6 million across multiple consoles and iterations as he swung, dug and pounced his way through ghostly kingdoms filled with colorful characters, a conniving alchemist and the occasional exploding rat.

While the 24-person team isn’t abandoning its armored digger, Yacht Club is looking ahead to new projects and this year took on publishing duties, releasing “Cyber Shadow,” a title that nods to vintage Nintendo Entertainment System works such as “Ninja Gaiden” and “Shadow of the Ninja.”

The creation of Finnish developer Aarne Hunziker, “Cyber Shadow” (available for home computers and all major consoles) appealed to Yacht Club because it allowed the studio to continue mining history while attempting to refresh it.

“Cyber Shadow,” like 2018 Sabotage Studio revivalist title “The Messenger,” celebrates the quick sword-slash action of the vintage video game genre that keyed in on America’s pop-culture fascination with ninja films and ninja-inspired characters in the ‘80s. Protagonists, for instance, who operate mostly on their own but largely on the side of good. They are outsider heroes with smarts who tapped into an individualist ideal while exploring the tension between a belief in and a mistrust of institutions.

D’Angelo, now 35, doesn’t get too academic, however, when discussing his love of a genre he came to through “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” noting that the sci-fi-inspired mechanical world of “Cyber Shadow” also owes a heavy debt to “The Terminator.” The goal was a game that captured the instant approachability of NES titles, but was more forgiving to players while using varied, unexpected level design while gradually layering on abilities, all while staying true to a two-button control scheme.

D’Angelo even laughs a bit at the difficulty in explaining the addictive appeal of the works that influenced “Cyber Shadow.”

“The gameplay of it is so unbelievable simple,” D’Angelo says. “It’s sort of hard to say why it would be fun. Like, I jump and I hit an enemy and it’s dead in one slash. That’s all there is to it.”

But when it’s responsive, that frenetic energy, says D’Angelo, “really puts you in the mood of being a ninja.”

“When I press a button, I’m immediately six feet in the air, and when I press that button again, I’ve completely disintegrated a robot,” he says. “Giving that power to someone who’s even 4 years old is not something you can experience any other way.”

So what then makes “Cyber Shadow” a 2021 game rather than a 1990 one? “The main reason is just this starts really simple, and slowly over time the complexity of the character grows. It’s still a two-button game, but the number of actions you can do is 12 or something like that.”

Adds studio producer Sunni Pavlovic, “I don’t think it’s so much about capturing the retro nostalgia one for one. When I think of older games, it’s about capturing the feeling. How did that feel when you were 8 or 10? But making it still have the modern sensibilities we’re used to, whether it’s the color scheme or fonts we’re used to.”

Or more diverse characters and a broader understanding of the cultural role games can play. And while some studios and players gravitate toward retro-styled games because they crave the sometimes punishing difficulty of titles of that era, when save points were uncommon and grueling challenges were seen more as a badge of honor, D’Angelo and Pavlovic stress the Yacht Club thesis is to show that play is approachable and joyful.

“Shovel Knight,” for instance, kept things interesting with updates and new playable characters, necessitating a rethinking of the level design to respond to different abilities rather than trying to make a piece fit where it didn’t belong. While “Cyber Shadow” isn’t as vast a game — and it also isn’t exactly easy — players will discover a rhythm as new moves and interactions are learned. And while there are hidden paths and plenty of traversal, “Cyber Shadow” varies the pace with relatively intimately framed boss battles, requiring a more nuanced focus.

Above all else, however, Yacht Club’s core goal is to distill games down to a base language. It isn’t currently interested, for instance, in taking full advantage of today’s controllers with their multiple triggers and joysticks.

“It’s really complicated,” D’Angelo says. “The games are using all those buttons and using them in context-specific situations. You get in a helicopter and that controls differently than when you’re in a plane and that controls differently than when you’re walking on the ground. That could be cool, in that the complexity of the interactions leads to variety, but we were really thrilled how you could get the same level of depth out of just maybe three things.”

And while the “Shovel Knight” story is finished for now — “We’re exhausted,” D’Angelo says, referencing the eight-year focus on the brand — the studio likely won’t stay away forever. Someday, says D’Angelo, the team dreams of seeing a “Shovel Knight” cartoon become a reality, and Pavlovic succinctly sums up the Yacht Club mindset when it comes to in-house developed, non-”Shovel Knight” games.

“Something that’s really important to us is that it should be heartwarming,” Pavlovic says. “It should be uplifting. It should be positive. That’s something we need. There are world events happening around us, and I know for myself I don’t want to play a game where it’s a dystopia.”

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Todd Martens is a features columnist at the Los Angeles Times who writes about theme parks and West Coast Experiences, among other topics. Martens joined the Los Angeles Times in 2007 and has covered a mix of interactive entertainment as its game critic and pop music as a reporter and editor. Previously, he reported on the music business for Billboard Magazine. Martens has contributed to numerous books, including “The Big Lebowski: An Illustrated, Annotated History of the Greatest Cult Film of All Time.” He continues to torture himself by rooting for the Chicago Cubs and, while he likes dogs, he is more of a cat person.

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Shovel Knight: King of Cards

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• See how the royal saga begins! Encounter some familiar faces, meet some new ones, and learn how King Knight came to sit upon the throne at Pridemoor Keep in the most ridiculous Shovel Knight adventure yet!
• Smash enemies and obstacles head-on with your Shoulder Bash! King Knight’s showy play style is all about crashing, bouncing, and throwing his heft around.
• Take part in Joustus, a brand new collectible card game created specifically for King of Cards! Build a deck, search for over 120 unique cards, defeat challengers, and become the Champion of each House of Joustus.
• Collect tons of treasure, heirlooms, armors, abilities, and followers as you sail the skies in your quest for the Joustus Crown.
• Test your skills with new Feats and Challenge Stages featuring boss rematches, custom-created platforming challenges, and more.
• Enjoy Yacht Club Games’ finest visual presentation ever! The beautiful, 8-bit inspired style bridges the gap between yesterday and today.
• Another masterful soundtrack by Jake “Virt” Kaufman!
• Balanced gameplay is a warm welcome to newcomers and an old embrace for experts.
• Take on a new challenge and multiply your wealth with New Game+!

Shovel Knight™, the Shovel Knight logo, and the Shovel Knight characters are trademarks of Yacht Club Games™ and are registered in certain jurisdictions, including in the United States. ©2019 Yacht Club Games L.L.C. All Rights Reserved.

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