View source for Game Man (April Fool's Joke)

[[File:Game man.jpg|thumb|300px|right|The original Game Man image from 2014.]]
'''Game Man''' (stylized as '''GAME MAN''') is a character portrayed by [[Draco]]. He is a YouTuber known for making documentary playlists where he takes an extremely long time explaining the most inane trivia that most fans of video games already know. The Game Man character was created in 2014 and consisted of a single photo of Draco making an awkward face. The photo was then edited to look like a low effort "clickbait" thumbnail of the era making it out to be a video about the widely known history of ''Super Mario Bros. 2'' being an adaptation of the Famicom game ''Yume Kojo: Doki Doki Panic''. The thumbnail stated that the video was the eighth part in the playlist playing into the trope of people who made YouTube content at the time stretching out explanations as long as possible to pad out their channel's total watch time and ad revenue. Game Man is one of the earliest jokes from Gatorbox to have reached some amount of widespread notoriety.

According to the metadata of the unedited Game Man image the persona's name was originally meant to be '''Game Helper Man''', a reference to Cody Johnston's ''Game Helpin' Squad'' web series from Cracked.com. "Helper" was dropped from the name because including it made the length of the name too long and not as easy to remember or identify at a glance.

==April Fool's 2025==
In 2025, eleven years after the creation of the original Game Man image, Draco uploaded a video to the main Gatorbox channel titled "GAME MAN: SUPER MARIO BROS. 2 NES REVIEW PART #8 (Found Lost Media)" on April Fool's Day using the original Game Man meme image as the video thumbnail. In the video Draco assumes the role of Game Man (in voice only) as he narrates gameplay of ''Super Mario Bros. 2''. Because the video is meant to be the eighth one in the playlist it starts on level 2-2, part of the way into the game. Game Man struggles to make it through the level and dies multiple times, though as revealed at the beginning of the video when the game is paused he suspiciously has 17 lives coming into the stage. It is later revealed that Game Man is aware of the trick to game the slot machine bonus round at the end of each level, though he is not particularly good at doing said trick successfully.

The video was filmed with an era-appropriate Kodak EasyShare CD82 digital camera manufactured in 2007 making it a piece of equipment consistent when Game Man is meant to exist. There is no line-in audio or post-production sound mixing, the entirety of Draco's narration is done on the camera with it also picking up the game itself as the footage was recorded by pointing the camera at the television, again consistent with early era YouTube content. The EasyShare camera's maximum recording resolution was 480p which was further compressed artificially to 360p to make the resulting output look more authentic. The video also opens with a clip of "Starbound" by chthonic, an OverClocked Remix composition notable as also having been used as the opening for the first video of the online series ''Gamelife'' which the ''Game Man'' act is a loose caricature of.

The description of the April Fool's video includes a fictional account of the alleged "real" Game Man channel that existed "some time around 2008". The description tells a story about how Game Man was bullied off of the platform by trolls who made fun of his mannerisms and lack of skill at games resulting in the complete deletion of his channel and all of its videos going on to state that all of Game Man's content with the exception of this singular video is "lost media". The video description was written in this manner as a way to lure media archivists onto a wild goose chase for something that does not actually exist. To further add credence to the myth, Draco created a page for Game Man on the Lost Media Wiki using an account he'd registered years prior and made genuine contributions with.

==External Links==
* [https://youtu.be/Brh6LuW-joc The April Fool's 2025 Game Man video]
* [https://lostmediawiki.com/Game_Man_(partially_found_videos_of_Let%27s_Play_YouTube_channel;_2007-2008) Game Man on Lost Media Wiki] ([https://archive.is/tRM8E Archive])

[[Category:Memes]]
[[Category:Shows]]
[[Category:Personas]]