UPDATE: Despite competing directly against Games Done Quick, the TRG Colosseum blew away its previous records, and raised $231,400 for Direct Relief.
(original article below)
This coming weekend, the collaborative Let’s Players/Streamers known as The Runaway Guys(or TRG) will gather with several of their fellow content creators to run a charity stream benefiting Direct Relief. This will be the third such gathering, with last year’s pulling in over $180,000 after a fourth day bonus stream. The initial offering two years ago also topped $100,000. This year, the stream was originally scheduled for the party to assemble from April 17-20, but the Coronavirus outbreak necessitated a change that will instead bring the streamers together from their own environments, as well as a precautionary cancellation of all other panels TRG usually runs at gaming conventions until 2021.
In a mildly missed opportunity, it is now being called TRG Colosseum Direct. The day Jon announced it on stream, he revealed that people had immediately suggested that it should have instead been called TRG Colosseum Indirect. I guess you can’t win them all.
TRG consists of Let’s Players Chuggaaconroy, Proton Jon, and NintendoCapriSun. Its creation dates to approximately 2010; Chugga had long been an admirer of Proton Jon going back to the latter’s Something Awful days (around 2007). At that time, Jon was known as a player of Super Mario World ROM hacks, including the infamous Kaizo Mario World, which is an exercise in pinpoint Mario play while dodging more insane traps than Nintendo would ever devise.
Chugga was a rising star in YouTube at the time, and he is still very popular with over 1.2 million subscribers, and the two decided they should collaborate. They brought in JoshJepson and NintendoCapriSun, but NCS was the one that stuck, though Jepson has guested on several projects since. Over time, the group’s following grew, and currently holds at just under 500k subscribers. Chugga still runs his solo channel, as does NCS, and NCS and Jon both have very active Twitch accounts. Both are verified users, and Jon’s subscriber base is nearly 80k. (likely putting him in the partner category)
TRG is light-hearted and loaded with self-deprecating humor, and they primarily focus on Nintendo games; they have played the first eight Mario Parties, Super Metroid, several New Super Mario games, and more. They have angled more recently into featuring games that one of the team has never played before, and are currently running NCS’s first playthrough of Luigi’s Mansion as such. Chugga became noteworthy from his playthrough of Pikmin, and his designating of a red leaf Pikmin that was trying to perform a difficult task by itself as Steve, a trooper. So last year, Jon was made to play it for the first time with Chugga and NCS as his guides. Esteban was a trooper like Steve.
In 2018, the group premiered their first collaborative charity effort. Jon, as a more popular and recognized Twitch streamer, has done several charity streams over time, but the TRG Colosseum, as it was dubbed, was much more ambitious. It required more than a dozen disparate streamers to gather in one place, and multiple days’ worth of content to sustain the stream. The team had by that time been running a game show panel called Thrown Controllers at conventions like PAX and Momocon, since 2011. Thrown Controllers consists of trivia questions and gaming challenges which can net players prizes up to and including a Nintendo Switch for the big winner. Coming up with challenges for that show no doubt aided the content development for Colosseum, as did the recruitment of musical acts FamilyJules, Adrisaurus, ToxicXEternity, SabIrene, and InsaneintheRain.
A running theme that is sure to continue is the evil overlord Lord Dona’tor, who may or may not be the alter ego of TomFawkes. Though Dona’tor was struck down by Jedi-NCS last year, he surely will return to wreak some form of havoc despite not being physically present.
The stream is not as bland as simply playing box standard video games for donations. Rather, donation goals can range from spraying someone in the face with water, to changing who is playing, or to get different lyrics and riffs out of the musicians. There has also been an occasion of live roleplaying built into both streams, and donations can influence those as well. Last year, there was a tic tac toe board of Mario 64 challenges that donations could screw with, as well as a Mario World groupthink(wherein four players controlled Mario and if they didn’t do the same thing simultaneously he would surely die). The8BitDrummer hit a stretch goal during his performance and had to perform Through the Fire and the Flames by Dragonforce as a result. And at every $10k milestone, the group pauses and does the “Hiker Dance,” a goofy dance Chugga debuted during his playthrough of Pokemon Black & White. It remains to be seen how these goals will be adjusted in the new format, but certainly a solution has been devised.
These days, gamers and streamers seem to make news for all the wrong reasons. It can be the Twitch audience’s harassment of women, Dr. Disrespect’s infamous bathroom broadcast, PewDiePie’s inability to disavow anti-Semitism, swatting, or the guy who fired off a gun during a stream. The list is long and infamous. It is worth it to remember that gamers are good people by and large, no matter the loud minority of idiots. The TRG crew are the middle class of streamers and YouTubers, not making crazy money like Ninja or PewDiePie, but carving out a solid living and making a difference in a positive way.
The stream will run on Proton Jon’s Twitch channel throughout the broadcast. Tune in if you would like to see some funny shenanigans, and don’t forget to donate. www.twich.tv/protonjon
Chugga: www.youtube.com/chuggaaconroy
NCS: www.youtube.com/nintendocaprisun; www.twitch.tv/nintendocaprisun
Proton Jon: www.youtube.com/protonjonsa
Masae Anela: www.youtube.com/masaeanela; www.twitch.tv/masaeanela
Lucahjin: www.youtube.come/lucahjin; www.twitch.tv/lucahjins
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