Psst. Hey kid, did you hear about video games?
[Screams in agony]
The dream of any artist is to take all that hard work
you've put into your art and turning it into a way to make a living.
Do you submit to laziness, easy jokes and selling your soul to a cancerous Internet publication before your redemption finally comes?
Do you use your art to profit off the sick perversions of others?
These are easy ways.
But in some cases the audiences are baffled as to how someone like this can make money.
How can someone like Tim Buckley, of Ctrl+Alt+Delete "fame"
have a webcomic successful enough for him to live off it. How can the creator of this comic have legions of fans, despite
obviously lackluster art and extremely unoriginal writing.
How did this happen? At present day, Ctrl+Alt+Delete has mostly meme appeal.
Loss may be an old meme, and the B^U phenomenon even more...
[Dubstep music]
But the comic still lives on, in the minds of all those who make fun of a day and night for its laughably low quality
And yet, as hard as it is to understand how THIS could have ever been popular,
Ctrl+Alt+Delete was a webcomic GIANT in the mid 2000s, and outlets like Joystiq, the Chicago Tribune and the Chronicle Herald
praised this abomination.
With the standards of Internet comedy so low at the time...
Yes, of course they were.
But actually CAD still received heavy criticism from readers and peers, like Penny Arcade and Zero Punctuation.
How did it all begin?
Here is the first strip of Ctrl+Alt+Delete from October 2002, over 15 years ago.
"So, it's a strip about two guys who sit around and play video games?
seems a tad cliche, doesn't it?"
"Nah, It's tried and true. Besides we have a hook"
"Oh really? what?"
"We've got a THIRD character"
"What?"
For comparison, let's grab the first ever Penny Arcade strip from 1998.
Yeah, neither of them are very funny,
especially when read in a sarcastic voice,
but at least Penny Arcade is TRYING to make a joke. Ctrl+Alt+Delete is just making a lame
observation about how derivative the comic is, all the while having static art and one completely unnecessary panel.
And it only gets worse from there.
For the first year or so, CAD at least tries to stay true to its spirit.
It's a comic strip about a wacky
manchild who plays lots and lots of vidya gains, and sure, it's never actually funny ,sure Ethan McManus is a completely unlikable protagonist,
sure the art is bad, sure it relies more on randomness and violence than actual comedy
[Gasps for air]
...Wait I forgot, was I supposed to be complimenting this comic?
Art is copy-pasted relentlessly. Blurry google images are used as backgrounds
Speech bubbles filled with lame dialogue are used in place of actual gags.
Author Tim Buckley responds to this criticism as you'd expect a mature adult like him to do... By banning all the haters from his forums.
Meanwhile his popularity goes to his head, enough for him to vandalize the Wikipedia article of a rival gaming comic, PvP.
Anyway, to get back to the story we have our hero in Ethan, our sidekick in Lucas,
and then there's some third guy named Scott who likes Linux, or something? Anyone remember this guy?
I sure didn't. But anyway, every hero needs a heroine, we need a feminine touch.
We, as gamers, need to ingest a daily dosage of gamer girl sweat, or we will die!
Enter,
Lilah.
As soon as this "professional gamer" and completely uninteresting character is introduced into the comic, the tone shifts
Video games are referenced increasingly rarely.
Instead, we waste strip after strip of Ethan's cringe-worthy attempts to get Lilah to become his girlfriend...
Which somehow end up working!
At this point, the problems REALLY begin to show.
Not that the comic was good before, but during its second and third years,
it gets even WORSE and as much as its popularity grows, so do its haters.
It's no surprise the Buckley's nature as a complete and utter cunt, transferred well into Ethan's character.
He's a selfish, dim-witted asshole to everyone, and completely unable to handle even the most basic aspects of his life.
And yet, he has a girlfriend,
friends, a job,
disposable income to throw on video games, and most importantly, he's somehow alive after everything he does.
He creates a sentient robot from an Xbox by sheer accident.
Everyone seems to like him and go along with his manchild antics, to the point of Lilah
APOLOGIZING to HIM for having a miscarriage. And yes, those are words that I just said.
"Wait a minute!", I hear no one say when mentioning 'miscarriage' in this gamer comic,
because everyone knows what happened on that infamous day,
June the 2nd, 2008. "Loss".
In a short amount of time,
parodies, mockery and memes about this strip were everywhere.
Somehow, Buckley never anticipated his "very serious attempt" at making Ethan and Lilah, like actual
relatable human beings, would be received with mockery at best, open hostility at worst
Everyone knows the memes that came thanks to Loss,
but few talk about what happened to the comic itself.
Because that's where the melodrama TRULY began. For more sappy interactions between Ethan and Lilah and
desperate attempts to make us care about them.
A few years of weak attempts to milk any kind of plausible human interaction of these characters later,
Buckley eventually tried to go back to his roots,
making Ctrl+Alt+Delete a webcomic about games, gamers, and their wacky hijinks again.
And even after that, the webcomic never became free of criticism, read, art plagiarism or racism accusations.
Still, the general hatred of the comic was beginning to dissipate, even if Buckley himself was considered the Antichrist of comedy
In November of 2012, after 10 long years of CAD, after what seemed like another terrible
Melodramatic plot began to conclude, readers were shocked when Ethan was seemingly killed off,
dying in a valiant effort to save the future from a bad timeline or, some... crap. His friends mourn their "loss",
Lucas names his son after Ethan, and Ethan himself even gets a goddamn Church of gaming named after him.
This is so absurd, but still. Looking at Ethan tearing up as he remembers his true
love, his wife, and the mother of his chi-... Uhh, I mean his wife and his best friend Lilah...
I felt something. An end of an era. A comic I mocked for years coming to an end,
killing off its unlikable asshole of a hero... I was THIS close to shedding a tear for Ethan.
But this comic is Tim Buckley's bread-and-butter after all, so... Reboot!
The comic continued as normal, but this time it returned to its roots FOR REAL this time, and focused on
viedogame gags, with the recurring characters being these weird guys in primary colors or something...
Honestly,
no one gave a damn anymore, and the comics velocity slowed to a crawl,
with Buckley sometimes cranking out only one or two comics a month.
You may notice from the last strips featuring Ethan, however, that his art had gotten significantly better,
and as 2012 slowly turned to 2017, he kept improving.
In January 2017,
he surprised his patrons, and later other readers, with the unexpected return of "the King of Wintery Mess", Ethan's stupid, made-up
christmas replacement holiday.
So basically, Ethan and Lucas are back, albeit not appearing as frequently as before.
But the comic has gone from being a rich fountain of solid mockery,
to just being lifeless and dull, with the writing remaining as forgettable as it was in 2002 or 2012.
It's been a long recap of taking a steamy dump on this webcomic,
but let's not forget that in 2009, CAD was getting 1.8. MILLION monthly unique visitors.
I'm guessing a combination of ad revenue,
patreon, sales of prints, and a successful Kickstarter to fund the creation of a book,
have allowed Buckley to live pretty comfortably.
Even though he rebooted the comic and pretended its flaws didn't exist,
even Buckley would probably admit that the animated adaptation of the comic, launched in 2006,
was the most god-awful creation to ever grace the Internet.
And this is coming from someone who has watched even the new Nostalgia Critic installments.
Remember when I mentioned Buckley's revenue sources? One of them was CAD Premium, a
subscription-based service where you would get exclusive Ctrl+Alt+Delete content, in exchange for money
I can only hope that one of the highest tier perks was a real replica of Ethan's stupid mini controller
he wanted to give his unborn baby. Ctrl+Alt+Delete: The Animated Series was released through this channel.
Now let's reiterate, you had to PAY to watch this veritable
miscarriage of animated content. The show that BEGINS with Ethan being an unsympathetic
annoying jackass.
"... Can my PS2 play Xbox games?"
[No response]
"Um... Excuse me! I need to know, Halo will play on my PS2?"
"I'm sorry, I don't speak stupid. And our trends that are called out 'sick' today".
And it gets a lot worse.
You could get better animation from Newgrounds hentai parodies for free!
The voice acting could sound like... it was recorded over
Skype on a cheap headset mic during a snowstorm, and the humor, already coming from a bad
webcomic, was sank even to lower depths in animated form,
thanks to terrible delivery.
Episodes were only a few minutes in length and, not counting the intro and the end credits, there was barely 2 to 3 minutes of
original animation in one single episode.
One episode had NO background music or voice acting, just stuck sound effects and gags that only made you depressed and wishing you were spending
your time watching better shows.
[Cartoony fall sound effect]
There was a whole trilogy that was a...
"""parody""" of Star Wars, and featured Ethan practically committing terrorist acts "in the name of Gamers".
And somehow, this show got a second season!
Edgier than ever, looking considerably worse, and with the voice actors mysteriously replaced by even WORSE performers.
And Buckley payed with... I'm assuming, crack and shiny bottle caps...
This whole atrocity was partly produced by Blind Ferret Entertainment, and alongside Buckley, guess who else was helping the project...?
Ryan Sommer, creator of my all-time favorite waste of bandwidth, "Least I Could Do",
A webcomic I named as the worst of all time in my earlier video.
Looking at this, you can probably imagine why this failed, and almost
bankrupted the... studio involved when no TV network picked up this masterpiece!
By the way, I kind of want to do a stream, where I watch these horrible episodes of the series and comment on it,
but, I'm afraid I might shoot myself at the end of it. Still, let me know if that's something you'd want to see...
So yes, Ctrl+Alt+Delete is shit.
Just like Adam Ellis before his departure from BuzzFeed, and just like Least I Could Do or Sonichu.
Just making this video was hard enough, considering how badly this website is designed,
but I can't help but to think that there's a weird charm to these stupid comics.
After being introduced to things like Jay Nailers,
furry sex slash right-wing propaganda mouthpiece better days,
and Javis Ray's disturbing Legacy Control, and a slew of other awful comics you guys have suggested to me.
Thanks by the way.
I feel affection to Ctrl+Alt+Delete.
Especially all the memes, and not just Loss,
but everything cringy and unfunny this coming is spawned.
So, thank you Tim Buckley for making us all laugh!
Even if it wasn't in the ways that you intended.
