Super Best Friends Play

About

Two Best Friends Play was the name of a YouTube duo named Matt and Pat best known for their comedic Let’s Play videos, along with a number of other Let’s Play series. The pair were occasionally joined in videos by their friends Woolie and Liam. After establishing a fanbase throughout 2010, the group was contracted by Machinima to make a full series of the videos. In 2014, mostly due to the continued presence of Woolie and Liam in the videos, the name “Two Best Friends Play” was rebranded to Super Best Friends Play, to accommodate for the two and separate which videos actually featured only Matt and Pat.

Online History

Matt created his first YouTube channel “theswitcher” in 2010, where he published a variety of videos, including popular compilations of scenes from cheesy 80/90’s cartoons. That year, he uploaded a video of himself and his friend Pat playing the Wii game Kirby’s Epic Yarn, with the pair getting comedically angry with each other despite the game’s easy nature. This was followed up by a video of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. Though Matt’s account was later suspended, the videos were reuploaded to YouTube in 2011 on his new channel, TheSw1tcher.^[4] It was later featured on Halolz^[8] in November 2010, where it was given four and a half stars. As of October, the account continues to upload Let’s Play videos for games including Silent Hill Downpour, The Walking Dead, Indigo Prophecy, Heavy Rain and Deadly Premonition, in which Matt and Pat bicker about what to do next and make fun of things within the games they play. Since February 2015, TheSw1tcher has accrued more than 500,000 subscribers, uploaded more than 570 videos and averages approximately 80,000 views per day.

After being contacted by Machinima after their first 2 videos became popular, on 19th December 2010 Two Best Friends Play launched the first of their videos through a partnership with the network^[5], featuring a Donkey Kong Country Returns playthrough. As of August 2013, the show is in its eighth season with Machinima and has more than 107,000 subscribers. Also in January 2011, they launched a Facebook fan page^[3] for the show, which has gained more than 74,000 likes as of August 2013.

Throughout 2011, their videos were featured on a number of gaming sites including Kotaku^[6] and Dorkly.^[7] Parodies of their playthroughs also began to appear that year, including one dubbing Matt and Pat’s voiceovers to animations of John and Dave from Homestuck as they play Sburb (shown below). In January 2012, the Two Best Friends Wiki^[1] launched, gaining more than 330 pages in less than two years.

On the November 23rd, 2014 episode on the Machinima Respawn YouTube channel of Far Cry 4, a new intro animation was debuted as well as the official rebranding to “Super Best Friends Play” to allow fellow contributors Woolie and Liam to join the series. On TheSw1tcher, the term “Two Best Friends Play” is still used to quickly establish that it would feature only Matt and Pat while simply “Best Friends Play” is for any other combination.

Notable Episodes

Related Series

Super Best Friends Brawl

In addition to Two Best Friends Play, the crew is involved with a number of additional series, such as Super Best Friends Brawl, where Matt and Pat would play against Woolie in free-for-all sessions in fighting games including Super Smash Bros., WWF No Mercy and Perfect Dark. A running joke early on in the series was how Pat could never win a Brawl until the Anarchy Reigns Brawl (shown below), where he single-handedly defeated Matt and Woolie in a sweep.

Full Let’s Plays

Separate from the shorter joke Let’s Play video’s uploaded to the Machinima channel, the crew have worked on multiple full length Let’s Plays on their own channel TheSw1tcher. The first game to get this full LP treatment was Resident Evil 2, started on 19th December 2011. Since then they have played through a number of games, including Silent Hill: Downpour and Homecoming, The Walking Dead and Heavy Rain.

Scrublords

In Scrublords, Matt and Woolie face each other in various fighting games notorious for their mediocrity, outlandishness, or its status in video game history, such as Shaq-Fu, Deadliest Warrior Legends and Sonic the Fighters. Each episode starts with the two fighters from Street Fighter II’s opening edited to look like Matt and Woolie and ends with the loser beaten up (as a reference to most fighting games that do that) and the winner is shown giving a quote related to the game just played.

Fighterpedia

Matt and Woolie also produced a short-lived fighting game series called Fighterpedia, where the two would comically discuss various things in the fighting game genre, whether it was specific games, tropes or another related idea. For example, the first episode (shown below, left) was dedicated to rejected Street Fighter characters. The final episode of Fighterpedia (shown below, right) humorously followed Woolie’s “quest” to Evolution Champion Series (EVO) 2012, with the knowledge that he would be facing world-famous Street Fighter player Daigo “The Beast” Umehara. The video (shown below) included highlights from the match which Woolie lost.

The first episode of the series, Rejected Street Fighter Designs, also marked the first appearance of the Two Best Friends’ unofficial mascot The Baz. The Baz is a design based off one of the rejected Street Fighter characters who had the word “Zubaz” on his shirt. After being hyped up by Woolie throughout the game, The Baz has appeared in a number of other videos, usually in the form of a customized character in a fighting or wrestling game. However, thanks to several Kickstarter donations, Zubaz has appeared in One True Game Studios’ parody fighting game Divekick (shown below, left) in which he is referred to as The Baz, and Yacht Club Games’ 8-bit platformer Shovel Knight as a boss. He has yet to appear in Sunstone Games’ Japanese monster-movie inspired Kaiju Combat (shown below, right) in which he will be called Mecha-Baz,

Old School Playthroughs

Matt and Woolie also have collaborated on Let’s Plays of vintage and retro games in the series Old School Playthroughs.^[12] During an episode of this series in which the duo plays Metroid Fusion (shown below), Liam was first introduced to the Two Best Friends team. Liam’s exposure along with helping further the gameplay gave him the nickname “Rising Superstar Liam” and a following of his own within the fandom. After this video, Liam would begin to appear more often, even earning a main spot in the No More Heroes 2 playthrough.

Shitstorm of Scariness

In October 2012, Matt and Pat began a month-long series called Matt and Pat’s Shitstorm of Scariness^[13], where each day, Matt and Pat would play a video game associated with horror in some way. They played some notable games, like System Shock 2, Dead Space and Manhunt, while also including some obscure or notably bad ones such as SAW II, The Thing and Amy. The last video for Shitstorm of Scariness was the beginning of the Eternal Darkness playthrough. On October 1st, 2013, Shitstorm of Scariness began again with a new intro by PlagueOfGripes with the first episode of “Shitstorm 2” featuring a facecam but that idea was scrapped in the next episode.

Rustlemania

At the beginning of August 2013, the month-long Rustlemania series began, with Matt, Pat and Woolie all playing video games in the professional wrestling genre. Along with WWE and WCW video games, other professional wrestling games like Rumble Roses XX, TNA iMPACT and Ultimate Muscle Kinnikuman Legacy have been showcased. At the end of each video, the trio would state whether their jimmies were rustled or not. Each video begins and ends with the theme song of a notable professional wrestler, with Matt, Pat and Woolie’s heads replaced with a cutout of the Gorilla Munch Gorilla.

Rustlemania 2: SuperBrawl Saturday III was a month long series in August 2015, featuring more wrestling games as well as special guest introductions, including Jon St. John of Duke Nukem fame, MaximilianDood and YoVideogames, Takahata101 from TeamFourStar, and Zone-Tan.

Super Best Friendcast!

The first episode of the Super Best Friendcast! was recorded on August 13th, 2013 with a teaser video detailing the topics that would be covered in the first podcast along with a link to superbestfriendcast.com.^[15] New podcasts are released every Monday and are available on iTunes, Stitcher, and Zune. Fans are allowed to send the Best Friends questions at superbestfriendcast@gmail.com.

Friday Night Fisticuffs/Saturday Morning Scrublords

The first episode of Friday Night Fisticuffs was released on April 11, 2014, featuring the SNK fighting game Garou: Mark of the Wolves. Friday Night Fisticuffs features Matt, Pat, Woolie, and Liam as they casually play against one other on the specifically chosen game and they speak about fighting games in general, the game they are playing, and other relevant topics. Friday Night Fisticuffs highlights popular fighting games that are considered well-made.

Saturday Morning Scrublords is considered a spiritual continuation of the Scrublords series, with the restrictions of only Matt and Woolie in the videos lifted under the new name. S.M.S. debuted with the December 12th, 2014 episode “Battle Construction Vehicles” with a variant intro, obviously highlighting the lower quality of the game to be presented.

Cryme Tyme

Cryme Tyme (with the title partly being a reference to the former WWE tag team of the same name) is a video series featuring Woolie and Matt playing video games revolving around hip-hop and gang culture. The first video in the series, 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, was posted on February 12th, 2014 and the video has over 190,000 views as of July 2014. On the 25 to Life episode, an official introduction animation by 2snacks is featured in the video and has appeared in subsequent videos. The animation features Matt and Woolie dressed in gang outfits, engaging in criminal activity, and partying with the Skullgirls cast. The song that plays during the animation is “Baddest” by P-Money.

The first official Cryme Tyme Let’s Play was Def Jam: Fight For NY, which was featured in a previous “Super Best Friends Brawl” video. Woolie and Matt, in lieu of creating The Baz with Def Jam’s character creation feature for Story Mode, opted to create a character called “Rage”. The core idea of Rage was talked about by Matt in the finale of the “Man vs. Wild” LP but it was in the Def Jam LP that Rage was officially given life as a character in relations to the Best Friends fandom. Woolie simply describes Rage’s backstory as “There was a big black man. He was really angry.” The LP also expanded upon Matt’s disdain for Canadian born rapper Bless (as they have some history as well as Bless being a playable character) and the rapper Comp’s song that is named after him.

The Amazing Superfriends!

The Amazing Superfriends! is a month long event that started on July 1, 2014, which all the games featured are all based around the theme of superheroes. Throughout the month, the episodes feature different combinations of the Zaibatsu, with all four of them playing the first game Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, and then just Matt, Pat, and Woolie in the next episode Judge Dredd: Dredd vs Death. Several opening animations have been made for The Amazing Superfriends videos by Plague of Gripes and CrankyConstruct, with Plague of Gripe’s openings featuring the Zaibatsu as different superheroes and supervillains, while CrankyConstruct’s featuring Matt as the Punisher, Pat as Sinestro, Woolie as a Hulk hybrid, and Liam as Squirrel Girl.

Super Best Friends Boxing: THEFIGHTING

Super Best Friends Boxing: THEFIGHTING was a week long video series from December 26th, 2014 to January 2nd, 2015 of various boxing games, including the Wii version of “Punch Out!!”, “Ready to Rumble Boxing”, and “Hajime no Ippo: The Fighting”. The name of the series is a play on words in association with Boxing Day, a holiday that is celebrated in Canada among other countries on December 26th. Matt was the only contributor to appear in all the videos prior to the “Punch Out!!” edition of Friday Night Fisticuffs.

Mystery Box

On February 24th, 2015, the first episode of the Mystery Box premiered on the channel. As the title would suggest, a game is chosen at random that is kept secret from the rest of the Best Friends featured in the video. The nature of the series is to be able to play games that wouldn’t fit a Let’s Play, covering a variety of genres. No hints about the games featured are given in the description for the videos as well, maintaining the anonymity until viewing the video.

Creepy Anime Bullshit

Creepy Anime Bullshit is a series helmed by Matt and Liam that focuses on games that prominently feature Japanese games that depict attractive female characters in a fashion meant to be serviceable to the player. The first official episode of Creepy Anime Bullshit premiered on January 8th, 2014 with Dead or Alive Xtreme 2, a spin-off of the popular Dead or Alive series featuring only the female characters on Zack Island. The series explores different genres with the same theme, each with varying results.

Mechaweek/Mechaweek 2

From March 15th to March 28th in 2015, two whole weeks were dedicated to various video games based around mecha, a science fiction genre that centers on robots or machines controlled by people. The games featured included the popular Gundam series, Hawken, Titanfall, and Neon Genesis Evangelion. The first intro animation for Mechaweek was done by Dashxzero, while Mechaweek 2’s was handled by Cranky Construct.

Box Art Critique

The first edition of the Box Art Critique, where Woolie and Matt analyze the cover art of different video game series, was uploaded on April 17th, 2016. The first series was “Double Dragon,” which not only covered separate entries into the franchise but different box art due to a different region or game system. The two give their honest thoughts on each cover while showing what makes one cover work and one doesn’t. Contributer StarExorcist joined Woolie and Matt in the “Mega Man” video.

Collaborators

Woolie

The most frequently appearing collaborator, Woolie is Matt and Pat’s fighting-game loving friend who often appears in Let’s Plays with Matt and other larger projects, such as Super Best Friends Brawl. Woolie introduced the two friends to each other, and was Matt’s original choice for the Best Friend in the original Kirby’s Epic Yarn video. After turning it down, Matt and Woolie later went on to create the fighting game-focused Machinima show Fighterpedia.

Woolie is best known for both his loss against Street Fighter professional gamer Daigo Umehara (shown above, left) at the fighting game tournament Evo 2012 (for which he is frequently mocked by Matt and Pat using the announcers advice “Now you’ve established you know how to play, don’t get too reckless”) and for infamously turning down sex with two women so he could buy Marvel vs Capcom 3 (shown above, right). A running joke with Woolie was his frequent inquiries of “WHEN’S MAHVEL” much to Matt and Pat’s annoyance until the Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 edition of Friday Night Fisticuffs.

Liam

Liam was the last to join the team and is known for his love of anime and Japanese games. Mentioned often by the Best Friends in videos before his debut, Liam joins the group for playthroughs of 4-player Beat ‘Em Ups and makes appearances in other Let’s Plays, including No More Heroes 2, Streets of Rage, and Viewtiful Joe. Liam made his debut in the Metroid Fusion playthrough with Matt and Woolie, easily completing parts of the game Matt and Woolie found difficult, which helped build his fanbase. A running gag with Liam is his connection (and possible double life) to WWE professional wrestler, John Cena.

Liam’s Departure

On December 23rd, 2016, Liam announced via a post on the Super Best Friends subreddit^[17] that he would be leaving the channel to focus on his mental health. The decision was announced shortly after Matt announced he would be taking a break from the channel for similar reasons, though he returned shortly after.

2snacks

Animator and My Little Pony fan 2snacks came to the attention of the Two Best Friends after he launched a video series titled Two Best Sisters Play. The animated series uses the original audio from the Two Best Friends Play episodes, but Matt and Pat have been replaced by the characters Luna and Celestia from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. The videos became very popular, with a number of episodes gaining more views than the original Two Best Friends ones, namely the Portal 2 episode (shown below, left) which has more than 150% of the views of the original Two Best Friends version (shown below, right). Highly impressed by the quality of his videos and the animation, Matt and Pat contacted 2snacks and partnered up with him to animate the episode intros for season 6 onwards and the Two Best Friends Funtime Adventures series.

PlagueOfGripes

PlagueOfGripes, much like 2snacks, is a animator known for his YouTube videos set to audio from Two Best Friends episodes. Unlike 2snacks however, Plague’s videos depict Matt, Pat and sometimes Woolie in the game’s they’re playing with visual gags added. The first Two Best Friends Play animation by PlagueOfGripes was uploaded on November 16th, 2012, based on dialogue from their Silent Hill: Downpour Let’s Play. He has since made numerous other videos based on the series, including ones based on the Game of Thrones and L.A. Noire episodes, and has worked with Matt on a video about the Call of Duty Dog.

CrankyConstruct

CrankyConstruct is another YouTube animator who has created fan videos based off of Two Best Friends videos and podcasts. Cranky’s first video, titled “The Tauros Dilemma” which Pat, Woolie, and Liam talk about eating Pokemon on the Super Best Friendcast, was uploaded on November 16th, 2013, and currently has over 120,000 views. Cranky has also animated the introduction to the Pokemon LeafGreen Nuzlocke series and three introductions to the Amazing Superfriends theme month.

Game Grumps

Matt and Pat attended E3 2013, in a series of videos chronicling their reactions to various game booths and displays around the expo. The first video included a very brief scene of Matt walking past Egoraptor nonchalantly, both exchanging a short greeting as they walked past one another. The moment brought about many requests for a Two Best Friends/Game Grumps crossover. The Game Grumps Twitter posted a very interesting tweet on December 3rd, 2015

Matt & Woolie from @2BFOfficial dropped by the office yesterday. Awesome guys -- episodes with them coming soon! pic.twitter.com/5zRpWJYESe
— Game Grumps (@GameGrumps) December 3, 2015

In January 2016, two videos were uploaded, with one video on TheSw1tcher channel and one on Game Grumps for the spin-off series “Grumpcade.” Matt, Woolie, Egoraptor, and DannySexBang played “Dinotopia” and “Spider-Man 3.”

Running Gags

America

Matt, despite his Canadian heritage, has a tendency to shout the word “America” whenever anything patriotic appears in a game. The joke originates from the first Machinima episode, Donkey Kong Country Returns, and was first used according to Matt simply as a random joke for no reason.^[9] Although the gag has been used less in later seasons due to a fear of overuse, it remains a famous trope within the series (shown below), being featured prominently in the opening and in fan art.

Throwing the Fire Axe

In part 10 of the full length Silent Hill: Downpour Let’s Play^[10], Matt, unfamiliar with the controls, accidentally throws the most powerful weapon in the game down a bottomless chasm (shown below, left). The stupidity of the action combined with their disbelief and at what happened has lead to it become one of the most popular moments in any episode, with the video having 20,000 more views than the previous video in the series, which is rare for a Let’s Play. The axe frequently appears in video introductions and fan works, including a Brodyquest-style tribute (shown below, right).

Woolie The Liar Stole My Pie

In Part 25 of the Deadly Premonition Let’s Play^[16], at 9:40 in the video, Matt and Pat tell a story about “Wendell” and Woolie having an argument over McDonald’s pies. Wendell apparently received a pie he did not want out of a group of them and claimed, “Woolie cheated and stole all the good pies” leading Pat to proclaim, “Woolie the liar stole my pie.” Matt then requested for fans to post on their Facebook page photoshops and pictures of Woolie the Liar Stole My Pie. It has become Headcanon that Woolie is a habitual liar and that he is always out to steal someone’s pie.