Metal Gear Scanlon saved my life

Hello, I hope everyone is having a fantastic New Years Day! I'll try to keep this as brief as I can, but I wanted to share something with this community. First off, I love you guys. I have been here since day 1 and will continue to lurk in my later years here. I was so invested in Giantbomb that I started a YouTube channel many many years back where I actually interviewed many of the crew. Drew, Dan, Patrick, Danny O'dwyer, Will Smith, and many more were so gracious to give me some of their time. It meant the world to me. At one time they even made me a moderater on the Giantbomb Facebook page, lol. I fell in love with so many series here, but the one that hit me the hardest was Metal Gear Scanlon. I watched that series no less than 10 times all the way through. Most recently I watched it while going through an incredibly difficult mental health crisis.

I recieved a concussion from my job working with kids in an intensive behavior program. These kids suffer from autism and other intellectual disabilities. The concussion took my normal anxiety and ramped it up to 11 for nearly 7 months and I'm still not fully recovered. I'm finally back at work, but am under the Americans with Disabilities Act due to my accommodations. It really messed me up. I contemplated some pretty dark things and was alone in a lot of it.

One thing that saved me was how Drew and Dan interacted in that series. It made me miss it. It made me miss creating content and doing what I'm truly passionate about. I ended up with a lot of time on my hands since getting put out of work for more than half a year. I miss the Giantbomb of old, and this isn't a slander to the newer GB, I just will always hold the original close to my heart. I wanted to do something similar. I wanted to make something in the same vein and have people who watch us feel like they are hanging out with their friends. So we "me and my 4 very close friends" created 4FramesPerSecond. While this is starting to seem like a shameless plug, I want to tie it back into why I'm relating this to GiantBomb, more specifically, Dan and Drew.

I was always jealous that Dan was fortunate enough to live vicariously through Drew's first ever playthroughs of the game. I had always wished I would have that, and fate be damned I was given the opportunity. Last year one of our crew members Cameron, aka Glitch, played through MGS1 and he knew nothing of the game whatsoever. It literally was the most fun I've had in over 7 months! Well today, New Years Day, we started MGS2! And we started it with none other than Christpher Randolph "Otacon" giving Cameron a special codec message. This series has literally brought life back into my day. I'm happier, more energetic, and it reminds me so damn much of what the crew did here. I want to share it. I am hoping and begging that I didn't just type up all this from the heart at 4:12am in my bed for nothing, and somehow the moderators will allow this one.

I'm just too excited to sleep. I want to know what you think? I hope you check it out. I appreciate you all. I'm so sorry for the long message. I just needed to get this out there. Giantbomb literally saved my life, as silly as that may sound. Thanks everyone. Here is the link to the video. I hope you all have a great day and Happy New Year!

https://youtu.be/TyzN0IeqTCU?si=Y_zb4FF4jQ5xapQZ

- Enzo

Good to hear you're doing well. Metal Gear Scanlon is what got me to finally get Premium.

Nice writeup and the codec message is very fun. Good luck friend!

Incredible story regardless of context, but it also made me think...for many of us, our first experience with a game will be our only first experience with a game. It's so easy to share albums, movies or TV shows with others but because of either the length, the interactivity or the combination of the two it's so hard to share a game with someone like that outside summers in grade school or domestic relationships in adulthood. And even then, there's always the hurdle of "why would I watch somebody else play something?" Of course, Twitch and several other formats can somewhat mitigate this, but it's so hard to find honesty there.

This was a great example of what I'm getting at. The couch and the audience...chat...were both hotly anticipating one guy's reaction to something that at the time seemed exciting as hell, but nobody played it up, least of all the guy who knew he was playing a game on a live stream because his coworkers and their audience wanted to see his reaction to it.

All to say, I totally get your description of MGS. I'm no longer premium so I can't go back to it, but in the moment it was so awesome to see someone who hadn't been with the series from the beginning as I had - and almost more notably was exposing their "guide" to things they'd never considered, whether that be gameplay flaws or political minefields - that I also wished I could share games, let alone whole series, that I loved with friends the way Dan got to with Drew.

So it's also awesome you're getting to do that as well!