Many years ago I subscribed to a Youtube channel. On this channel, a person calling himself ‘Malefact‘ played various games, as Let’s Players tend to do. The first game, and the one that led me to Malefact’s channel, was Tower of the Sorcerer, an obscure puzzle-rpg hybrid game. I’d found myself watching this LP after being pointed there from the CaravelNet forums, as Tower of the Sorcerer had inspired Caravel’s DROD RPG, a spin off of the puzzle game series Deadly Rooms of Death.
Several Tower of the Sorcerer videos came out, but then the uploads stopped. Now, this was back in 2008, so the concept of spotty update schedules wasn’t that bizarre. And after a few months, Malefact returned. Tower of the Sorcerer was not continued immediately, but instead he played Assassin Blue, which was one of those freeware platforming games that existed back then. Once that was completed, he uploaded his first video of The Way.
The Way played by Malefact is an episodic RPG Maker 2000 game, about a man named Rhue, and his quest to find his lost love, Serena. Sort of. It gets... complicated. Episode One went by in 11 videos, and once that was complete, Malefact continued his Tower of the Sorcerer LP. It didn’t go to completion from there, as he played Episode Two of The Way between the fourth and final areas of Tower of the Sorcerer. Games were being played, and videos were occurring daily. But Tower of the Sorcerer was finished, and Episode Three of The Way began.
The videos continued, alternating between episodes of The Way and other games. Specifically Sylvan Tale, a Zelda-eqse game, and Soviet Unterzoegersdorf, a weird point and click adventure game that was really weird. But again, I digress. Soon, Episode Five of The Way was completed. Only one part remained. After proving he could jump anything in CAN YOU JUMP IT?, Malefact moved onto Operation Neptune, an educational game from the time when those were good. He posted a single video for it, then vanished.
This was in 2009, which isn’t a year I really remember much of. Can anyone name an actual world event from 2009? By then the economy had already fallen over, and we had Obama. Anyhow, sometime in 2010 a World of Goo video appeared, but mostly, the vanishing continued. During this time, I eventually downloaded the sixth and final episode of The Way, and played through it to the ‘main‘ ending. The story gets rather confusing and mind-screwy as it approaches it’s conclusion, and I doubt the other endings would provide much clarity. But you do find Serena. Sort of. Anyway, I am digressing once again.
Two years later, Malefact unvanished. With a Minecraft video, no less. Back in 2011 Minecraft was a big thing, not just a pile of broken dreams and broken promises. But this didn’t herald a sudden change of channel direction - soon Malefact was uploading videos for Resonance, a pointy clicky adventure, and Valhalla and The Lords of Infinity, a kind of odd top down puzzle/adventure game. The LP of Episode Six of The Way followed soon after. Would it finally be finished?
No. Would I even be asking if it was? After video 150 of The Way, Malefact vanished once again. That was in 2013. Skip ahead five years, and now it’s 2018. In that time I completed my degree, got a full time job, started contributing code to Deadly Rooms of Death, and I started I blog that I mostly use to complain about Hearthstone. In this time, I had also come to accept the fact that Malefact would not return. Such is the nature of the internet - content creators come and go, and sometimes they go without finishing things. Five years. That’s quite a while.
So why I am I writing about a Let’s Player who stopped Let’s Playing five years ago? Well, I never unsubscribed from Malefact’s channel. I have so few subscriptions it hardly mattered. So I’d see his Youtube avatar, sometimes daily (since raocow puts out three videos a day). And yesterday I noticed that it had changed. And I didn’t really know how to react, so I wrote a whole Tumblr post to try and work through it all. I’m not expecting any more activity, really. I’ve mostly moved on. But maybe something unexpected will happen. Something that might be positive. And that would nice.
Ultimately, I’ve written a whole lot because of one small change. It’s not a case that someone needs to note this down, lest it be forgotten. Malefact’s channel is still there. But now it’s slightly different once again. Sometimes, things aren’t as finished as they seem.
