If you have a life and don’t have time to give time to such a long-ass documentary on nerd shit, then it’s completely understandable. You don’t need to whine about it like this dweeb on my blog post on fighting game controls. It’s not like you’re violating the Geneva Convention for not doing as I say. But if you do care about nerd shit like me, then you should watch the result of two whole years of work by Fredrik Knudsen, who is known online for his Down the Rabbit Hole documentary series. It’s six hours long, so you’ll have to either hunker down or watch in multiple sittings. If you’re curious about EVE Online, it’s worth watching because it digs insanely deep.
Fredrik Knudsen is one of those YouTubers who make me want to make videos as well. My favorite video of his is the one on the Mouse Utopia Experiments — watching it still gives me chills to this day. He and LEMMiNO are my two favorite documentary creators on YouTube, with Internet Historian as a comedic third. Of course, with such research and labor-intensive content, they publish every once in a blue moon, but that’s somewhat a good thing since that provides plenty of time to consume other content in the meantime. It’s always a treat every time any one of those three publish a video, and reaction creators have a field day.
However, Fred was gone for over two years before he came out with this six-hour behemoth of a video. The point of this video is — as the name of the show suggests — to show how deep the rabbit hole goes. EVE Online is infamous for its unprecedented emergent gameplay, which is made even crazier by the fact that it was developed during the late 90s and came out in 2003. For over twenty years now, it has been fodder for sensational headlines on its galactic-scale battles and a haven for nerds who need an outlet for their space lust.
It’s six whole hours, and he apologizes at the end for it being incomplete.
Why You Should Waste Six Hours Watching This Video
The video is split into 28 sections, each tackling an era in the game’s history. Perhaps the one thing I’ll knock Fred for is not giving a name for each section, which would’ve been helpful in better understanding each part of the story. You’ll have to look at the preview thumbnails in the seekbar on YouTube and understand that it follows a chronology from the 90s to the 2020s to get your bearings. That means you have to watch the whole thing to get it.
It took me long to get through it, and even long to write this blog post because I have a life.
I recommend everyone watch the 18th section, which goes into the war that would see the Battle of B-R5RB — the largest PvP battle in gaming history (until the Fury at FWST-8 on 6 October 2020). While it has since been superseded, its scale and significance still makes it stand out as nothing like it had been seen before. It’s the stuff that other MMOs can only dream of, and it can only be possible in EVE Online.
Much of the video goes into the ill-fated side projects of CCP Games, especially Dust 514. It’s the most boneheaded move made by the company, and it seems to be a common theme among developers of space games. Somehow, both EVE Online and Star Citizen have to have first-person shooters on the side to expand their universes and make them look more exciting.
Because their spreadsheet game needs more excitement to entice the Call of Duty crowd.
Aside from not having titled sections, I also have to say that much of it is seemingly agnostic about the culture that the game fosters. You get hints to the kind of neckbeards that play this game, but their personalities are not looked into past whatever they do in the game. If you want to get a better sense of the kind of people who play this game, the EVE Online video by MandaloreGaming from 2016 hits it just right.
Mandy gets it. He understands the kind of nerds who dedicate their lives to this space game.
They’re the kind of people who get huffy when something doesn’t go their way in the game, then call it a violation of the Geneva Convention and threaten legal action or something. But at least their game was “fully released” back in 2003. Meanwhile, Star Citizen “players” are much worse. To this day, that overfunded game is still under development, yet you’ll be damned if you call that development “troubled” and “delayed” because they’ll “blacklist” your gaming news site.
Chris Roberts promised to not buy a yacht, then bought a yacht. And mods protect their lord.
Thanks to this rant on space games, I’m sure to get some juicy comments here somewhere down the line. I’ve had to deal with black people who got mad at me for shitting on 52 Blocks. Which is more dangerous, weird park dwellers who are way too serious about their African-American Wing Chun or dweebs who are way too serious about their space games?
Maybe the latter because some of them are bound to have blackhat skills.
Having written about Ted Kaczynski recently, it made me realize that if EVE Online existed during his time, he’d be playing the game. Think about that.
You Don’t Want to Watch a Six-Hour Video on a Computer Game?
But you’d binge watch Kitchen Nightmares or The Bachelor yet again. On the other hand, I used to put Top Gear, Iron Chef, Mythbusters, QI, or Terry Jones’ Medieval Lives in the background to quiet the intrusive voices in my head. Nowadays, my background noise is DankPods. Fine, you don’t need to watch this gargantuan documentary on a fucking space game.
Meanwhile, I’m now eagerly waiting for whatever Fred comes out with next since he’s now done with this two-year black hole of a project.
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