The Game Overthinker: A Retrospective

Greetings interwebs!

I’d like to talk to you today about something my reader(s? Yeah probably not.) may be unfamiliar with: a little web show called The Game Overthinker. The show was created in 2008 by Bob (MovieBob) Chipman, who you may know of as the host of Escape to the Movies and The Big Picture. Basically the show was a platform for MovieBob to act as a video game culture commentator in a format instantly recognizable to long time Big Picture viewers. And it was AWESOME! A solid mix of insight, humour, and a strong personality, the show grew a large enough audience to propel it’s creator to the Escapist, Screw Attack, and beyond. 

All of which happened before I was even aware of the show or it’s creator. I was first introduced to MovieBob through Escape to the Movies and didn’t know about the Game Overthinker until Extra Credits plugged the show in an episode titled “Choice and Conflict in Games” in 2010. This was also around the time the show was making it’s first foray into having a framing narrative In which the Overthinker had wacky adventures in-between pontificating about game culture. It accumulated a pretty solid cast of characters over it’s run, all humorously played by Bob, and experimented with some cool special effects, though never really rising above the tech level of “Birdemic”. But that was a huge part of the charm as the show marinated itself in the kind of bonkers creativity, hammy acting, and low tech visuals that dominated video gaming in the 8 and 16 bit era’s. 

The story, and the show itself came to an end two days ago in the show’s 100th episode. In anticipation of the last episode, I took some time to re-watch the whole series and thought I’d share my take on it here, since I never seem to post anymore anyway. 

Massive spoilers for the entire series from this point on, so if the show sounds at all interesting to you, please go and check it out at http://gameoverthinker.blogspot.ca/. And if you like it, please consider contributing to Bob’s Patreon here. There’s a follow up series and some other projects in the pipe. 

The pre story era:

I’m gonna try and keep this short, since I want to focus more on the story than the cultural criticism, since that would basically take 100 miniature posts, and I don’t have that kind of time. However, there were a couple of things I found upon watching the re-watching episodes 1 to 42, so quick thoughts:

-This goes for the entire series, but it’s particularly noticeable with the older episodes. Since it spans as much time as it does, watching the show can be an interesting experiment media archeology. One can see the last 7 years pass in a few hours through 100 vertical slices. The show’s tendency to address controversies while they were relevant also means that there’s a mention of most of the small dust ups that would eventually coalesce into the HashtagWeShallNotDignifyWithAName.

-Speaking of, and I’m trying to word this very carefully, looking back on the early years, I can see how the people propping up said hashtag today would have felt at home with the early Overthinker. Don’t misunderstand, 2008 MovieBob would be just as pissed off about that shit storm as 2015 MovieBob, but the earlier episodes that mention feminism or racism are generally in a position defending games from it rather than criticizing the game. Of course said defences are given with a lot of nuance and the arguments being refuted are given a clear explanation, unlike an opinion from say, Fox News which would likely be given in straw man format. More importantly, he never argues that the discussion shouldn’t be happening. But I still find it illustrative the growth of it’s author over the better part of a decade, or even just a couple years. Compare “Pr0N,” and “Super Mario and the Sacred Feminine” from 2008 to “I Heart Bayonetta” and a Big Picture episode called “Gender Games” if you want to see what I mean.

-There’s a surprising amount of gratuitous T & A in the opening episodes. Nothing explicit obviously, but still more than you would expect.

-The sped up voice track used a lot in the early episodes bears such a resemblance to the effect that would be used for Ivan the fairy later in the series that it’s hard not to hear the episodes as Ivan and the Overthinker taking turns to speak instead of MovieBob throughout.

The Game Antithinker, and the Quest of the Overthinker:

In December of 2010, in Episode 43 “Double Trouble”, The Game Overthinker changed forever when a seemingly normal episode examining the concept of evil twins was interrupted by the Overthinker revealing that not only was “Wario’s Woods” the last game ever made for the NES, (which is true) but there was a real Wario’s Woods in Minnesota (which, so far as I can tell, is not). A Blair Witch style clip from his brother’s exploration of the forest reveals the Overthinker’s own evil twin, the Antithinker, who proceeds to take over the show and banish the Overthinker to Wario’s Woods. 

For the next three episodes, the Antithinker hosts the show and looks at video games, and the Megaman and Zelda franchises in particular, through the skewed lens of a man whose interest in video games consists only of Madden and Call of Duty, with all other games being the products of nerds creating a fantasy world where their lives sucked less. The caricature could get a little grating at times, in part because the gay as an insult thing is still irritating, even when done ironically, and the swipe at hardcore bro gamers was so over the top that it really only worked in small doses. I still enjoyed the character, and I wish we had gotten to see the Antithinker covers Mario episode I’m sure there was a plan for, but even I’ll admit, it could be a little much at times. The latter two Antithinker episodes we did get each contained at least a small moment in which the story humanized the Antithinker a little, and the second one, a nostalgic feeling of regret induced by Ocarina of Time, seemed to weaken the Antithinker.

Following the Zelda episode, the show went back to following the Overthinker, who had apparently felt the Antithinker’s moment of weakness and began a quest to ready himself for the time when the Antithinker would return to the woods to finish him. There was notable moment when straw man, a character from the early series who occasionally showed up to regurgitate a simplified version of an argument to be refuted on the show, voiced the complaints of a large section of the show’s audience that was angry about the new storyline. The Overthinker’s response, when asked to kill the annoying character that everyone hates, is to vaporize straw man on the spot, in an act that wouldn’t have any negative consequences what so ever. Over the next two episodes the Overthinker trains, first alone, then with the bald guy from Rygar, until the arc culminates in the 50th episode special “War of the Thinkers”, a commentary free, all action short in which the Overthinker finally defeats the Antithinker and frees himself from Wario’s Woods. 

Of the whole arc, the episode that stands out most to me is “The Zen of Grind”, which established an early prototype for what the new show could be at its best, with the framing story and the episode complementing one another. The Overthinker talks about the origins and impact of level grinding on rpgs and games in general, while he himself is grinding slimes to prep himself for fighting the Antithinker. “War of the Thinkers” is also notable for establishing the look and feel for the special effects from here until the appearance of the green screen tech used in the Robothinker arc. But we’ll get to that later. All in all the Antithinker/Quest arc was a well told, if a little rocky, story with an awesome finale.

The Ninja Saga 

With the previous storyline having demonstrated what the show wanted to be, it fell to the ninja storyline to establish the form the show would take from here on out. It starts out slowly by establishing a couple new cast members: Ivan, the Overthinker’s fairy intern straight out of the Ocarina of Time, and Police Commissioner Bunnyface, played by Dylan the rabbit. It also introduces Jack Lieberson, a ninja-American senator seen around the edges of the series, mostly just used to poke fun at the ubiquity of ninjas in the Overthinker universe. The plot picks up when Bunnyface requests the Overthinker’s help in dealing with the strange new plague of video game creatures that have begun appearing around the city. It’s explained that the events of “War of the Thinkers” created a rift between the world of video games and the real world that allowed the creatures to slip through. Meanwhile, a mysterious figure is seen destroying game stores and the Sharkcade, a favourite childhood haunt of the Overthinker. The figure is eventually revealed as the Pyrothinker, a ninja with power over fire, and the Overthinker’s investigation of him introduces his counterpart, the ice ninja Cryothinker. On top of that, the pair turn out two be the sons of straw man, out for revenge against the Overthinker. To defeat them, the Overthinker forges a sword out of the Antithinker’s medallion left over after their battle, and fights both ninjas hand to hand in “Ninjamaggedon”. When killed, each of the ninja’s bodies is found to contain an stone charged with elemental energy, the apparent source of their fire and water powers.

It has a few hiccups at the start, most notably on the first episode “Putting the Cart Before the Cloud”, where the main visual is the Overhinker staring down at the laptop with the script on it. There’s also the issue of the near two minute opening credits with inconsistent music, but by the forth episode, both of those had been ironed out. The third episode, “What we learned in the dark”, introduced an act breaks structure that saw the commentary portions broken up once or twice by the the story segments. It allowed for a clean separation of thoughts in the commentary, and neatly handled the time required for traveling, or building, or defrosting between significant action and plot moments. As discussed before, the structure worked best when the story and commentary complimented each other, which happened a couple times this arc. The Sharckade’s destruction led to discussions of the significance the arcade era to gaming, and the presence of ninjas tied into the dominance of Japanese culture in the medium and its fading influence over the modern industry. 

In the special effects department, the frozen effect is my favourite in the series. While the dynamic fire and lighting effects always stood out, frozen people always managed to look like part of they were in the scene while maintaining the artificially coloured look. Ivan likewise usually didn’t look terribly out of place, though, it’s likely because as a light emitter, there’s no expectation for him to have a shadow.

Probably the best idea in the run was to make final showdown with the ninja’s into a mailbag show, where between action clips, the Overthinker would answer viewer questions. This allowed the action scene to jump from cool moment to cool moment without worrying too much connecting fight choreography or consistent scene geography. This would be the format for most of the big battles throughout the rest of the show.

The Retrothinker and the Necrothinker

After finding a VHS tape in the ruins of the Sharkcade, Ivan and the Overthinker discover that a gaming TV host calling himself the Retrothinker froze himself in 1990 building’s basement and was released during its destruction. The Overthinker manages to talk the Retrothinker out of of a suicide attempt, but all progress is lost when the Retrothinker goes to check up on the Sonic franchise. In a moment of grief, a shadowy figure abducts him and grants him the earth stone, with power to raise the dead game characters from his era back to life, turning him into the Necrothinker. The Necrothinker sets his minions loose upon Activision and Zynga, and creates a tower fortress out of the ruins of the Sharkcade. After defending the Activision and Zynga from the zombie hordes, the Overthinker leads a selection quality modern game icons in an assault on the Necrothinker’s tower. After a sword fight with the Necrothinker himself, the Overthinker uses the water and fire stones to seperate the Necrothinker from the earth stone, turning him back into the Retrothinker. He then hides the Retrothinker from the police and assures them that while they won't find a body, the Necrothinker is definitely dead.

This was hands down the best arc of the show. Not only did the episode topics like zombies, preservation of the medium, and retro gaming tie in beautifully with the Retrothinker storyline, but the Necrothinker was the deepest villain in the show. The best villains are have a little bit of the hero in themselves, and the Necrothinker was a reflection of the Overthinker’s own fondness for the golden age. We can sympathize with his sense of loss and his desire to see the characters he loved restored. His whole transformation works as a perversion of what the Overthinker said to talk him our of suicide: that he has to live to share what he remembered with the world. Meanwhile the fight forced the Overthinker to defend aspects of gaming that he wasn’t as attached to and fight a person he really didn’t want to kill. He had to confront his own beliefs about modern gaming and find the good in the games of today. 

This arc also revealed the biggest flaw in the show’s new format. The Game Overthinker wanted to be topical, have a well shot, well written story, and have the story and commentary tie into each other whenever possible. But writing and shooting take along time and being topical depends on being able to air at the time rather than several weeks later. This was best shown in “Seeing Red” where a discussion of Dizzy and other retro characters and their prospects for modern revival was replaced by talk about the reaction to some concerns regarding Call of Duty’s complete omission of the Geneva Convention raised by the Red Cross. It was an unfortunate loss of what would have been a nicely themed episode. The solution taken here was the one used throughout the series, namely dropping more thematic tie ins in favour of being topical.

The show made format adjustment to the teaser - commentary - epilogue setup that would be used for most of the remaining episodes. While the change was made official in episode 46 “Beyond Sopa” a number of preceding episodes had already wound up with most of their story at the beginning and end. With the commentary crossing the narrative less often, the theming became less noticeable but also easier to ignore when it didn’t work out, and the move also helped to placate the more vocal members of the audience who didn’t care for the story, allowing them to easily skip it. 

But despite the flaws, I still maintain that this was the high water mark the show.

The Robothinker Saga

This arc took the form of an extended parody of the Cell saga from Dragon Ball Z. The Antithinker reapears, but is killed immediately by a pink haired time traveller with a sword called the Omegathinker. The Omagathinker had come from the past to both to prevent the Antithinker from killing the Overthinker, and stop the Robothinker, an air stone powered military drone AI that had been plugged into Xbox live before turning on its creators, from destroying the world. After the Overthinker and Cobalt Core, Senator Lieberson’s hitherto unknown private army, are unable to stop the Robothinker, the Omegathinker begins fighting him in a battle that gets periodically cut to during the next several episodes. The Overthinker stays at home and hosts the show as usual allowing some world building to happen in the background. The key point is the introduction of Mr. Phibb (a.k.a. the Devil), who allows the previously killed Pyrothinker and Cryothinker to return from the dead and freeze the Overthinker before moving to interfere with the Omegathinker/Robothinker battle. The Overthinker is saved by Dr. Beardo, the creator of the Robothinker, who still hopes to stop him. Meanwhile the Retrothinker goes to fight the Robothinker, but finds himself completely outmatched until the Mr. Phibb convinces him to use the Earth stone to change himself into the Necrothinker. The Overthinker and the ninjas arrivee just in time to witness the transformation and battle ensues. The Overthinker and Omegathinker keep the ninjas in check while the Necrothinker and Robothinker duke it out, and Ivan is sent to have Dr. Beardo unveil the Overthinker’s new teleporter use it to save get the good guys out of the fight. Using the teleporter, they move themselves from the battle to their apartment, move the ninjas to the apartment while accidentally fusing them into the Plasmathinker, remove the air stone from the Robothinker, and move the Plasmathinker into prison. Finally they teleport the now power deprived Robothinker to the apartment where the Omegathinker finally kills him.

The first thing to note about this arc is, as you may have guessed from that monster of a paragraph, that this was where the plot started to become much more complicated than the usual "guy wreaks havoc, Overthinker fights back" setup that the previous arcs employed. In the 12 episode context of the series it’s not that difficult to follow, but it definitely lacks the relative cleanliness of the previous arcs. Admittedly some of that is par for the course when you’re doing a Dragon Ball Z parody, but after Phibb resurrects the ninjas, there starts to be too many balls in the air.

The bigger issue is the ending. My feelings on it are kind of mixed. The use of the teleporter is clever and the last moments of the Robothinker still have suitable gravitas, but the introduction of the teleporter isn’t telegraphed at all. I don’t know that it’s quite a deus ex machina, since the teleport continues to be used as a teleporter through the rest of the series and it never does anything unexpected for a teleporter, but… well… 

Consider the Oversword, the weapon the Overthinker makes from the Antithinker’s medallion. Ivan informed us that the ninja’s could only be harmed by anti-metal. The Overthinker then says that he has some and pulls out the medallion. We saw in “War of the Thinkers” that the medallion was all that remained of the Antithinker after the battle, and we saw Overthinker pick it up. Then an entire episode is detected to making the sword. By contrast, there isn’t a single mention of having a teleporter, working on a teleporter, or even to the Overthinker working on a mysterious “Protocol Erricson”. The first mention of the protocol is when the Overthinker tells Ivan to activate it at the beginning of “The Next Crash” and it’s revealed to be a teleporter and used the first time in the epilogue of the same episode. Again, I liked the use of the teleporter once it's established, but it bugs me that it basically gets conjured out of thin air.

Time was another interesting thing in this arc. A few jokes are made pointing out the inconsistencies in the Omegathinker’s knowledge of things that shouldn’t have happened in his reality due to the Robothinker destroying everything before they could happen. The show’s solution was to just ignore the question, but it does expose unique problem with combining the narrative and commentary portions of the show which I think is worth discussing. Obviously the commentary portions of the show take place in unique moment in time at which they were filmed, but the story segments tended to have a more flexible relationship with time. Way back in the Antithinker saga, all the time between episodes was assumed to have passed normally. We saw snapshots of the Overthinker’s exile, but it was assumed that he continued to survive, train and explore the forest off screen between episodes. But if the same view of time were held in the ninja saga, we would have to conclude that the Overthinker’s time as a popsicle, and the accompanying ninja dance party, lasted nearly a month. However, the show never explicitly gives out a date for the story events, which provides a neat way around this inconsistency using a sort of temporal doublethink. Multi episode character interactions can be thought of as events displaced in time so that the events of the previous episode always happened just prior to the events of the current one. In this case of the Omegathinker’s recorded history, everything that happened in our reality also happened in his because he always got here yesterday morning and the Robothinker always showed up last night. 

On the technical side, this is when the show introduced the green screen tech that would be used for the rest of the series to handle multiple Bobs being on screen at once (except in the apartment scenes where the lighting could be carefully controlled). While it often surrounded the characters with a fidgety green aura, it made up for that by allowing much greater variety and complexity in the interactions between characters. Ariel fight scenes, characters moving while being shown at a distance or in exotic locations, characters appearing in groups of 5-8 instead of two, all were only achievable with the green screen. The show also settled on the version of the intro it would use for the rest of the series and the long battle over act breaks finally ended in a draw: they’re there when they are, and they’re not when they’re not. 

Despite the somewhat anticlimactic ending, the Robothinker arc was still an enjoyable one. As complex as my synopsis made it sound, the changes are spread out over enough time that they’re not overwhelming, and the fact that the game was always changing meant the story never got bogged down. I also really liked the unexpected turn in the parody, with the Overthinker going from the Goku analogue to that of the minor characters hiding and watching the fight on tv. It’s also worth noting that this was the only arc not to handle the big battle with the mailbag show setup, and while that did take away from the ending a bit, it’s impact would have been undermined in this arc simply because the Omegathinker/Robothinker fight was cut to in almost every episode. 

The Ultrathinker, the Second Quest, and the End of All Things

Remember when I said the Robothinker arc put too many balls in the air. This was where they became a problem. It’s definitely the most convoluted storyline and is riddled with sudden changes in direction and plot points hastily happening off screen. So for this one, I’m just going to cover it in a point form summary. Here we go!

- The Necrothinker turns back to normal

- The Omegathinker returns to the future

- Senator Lieberson and Commissioner Bunnyface have the Retrothinker arrested for his crimes as the Necrothinker, and place the Overthinker under house arrest

- The Antithinker re-appears, released from hell by Mr. Phibb, and busts the Retrothinker out

- The Plasmathinker turns back into the two ninjas off screen

- Lieberson appears on TV, flanked by the ninjas, introducing himself as the leader of the Oolong Tea Party which is now in control of the government with the help of their new cybernatetic army, the Justice Iron Shadow Militia (J.I.S.M.)

- The Antithinker delivers Retrothinker back to the apartment and explains himself, revealing the mysterious shadowy stranger as the Ultrathinker, and setting him as the puppet master behind all the Overthinkers prior enemies

- He also remembers that the Ultrathinker needed something called Lost Cross to find the ultimate weapon

- The heroes investigate a mountain cave looking for information about the cross and find Dr. Beardo inside

- The J.I.S.M. troopers are revealed to be powered by the video game creatures (now dubbed vidspawn)

- Dr. Beardo finds the Lost Cross… in his car…

- The Ultrathinker teleports the Overthinker into his weird inter dimensional limbo place

- Retrothinker uses the stones and the lost cross to go through the Gamer’s Gate and claim the ultimate weapon: the Golden Axe

- The Ultrathinker reveals that he was a monkey that interacted with the predecessors of video games in the 70’s before being shot into space where cosmic radiation transformed him into a trans-dimensional being

- Lieberson imprisons Bunnyface and unmasks himself to reveal that he was Dr. Beardo all along, and he possesses the Golden Axe’s counter part, the Master Sword

- Omegathinker reappears and joins the team as they fight the J.I.S.M. troopers and the ninjas

- The heroes kill the ninjas

- Retrothinker runs inside to fight Dr. Beardo

- The Robothinker reappears and joins the fight against the heroes

- The Ultrathinker kills the Overthinker and enters the real world

- The lead J.I.S.M. guy kills the Omegathinker in a flashback

- The Antithinker kills the J.I.S.M. leader

- Ivan possesses the Robothinker and uses him weapon to steal the Master Sword from Dr. Beardo, allowing Retrothinker to kill him.

- The Overthinker is raised from the dead into some kind of ascendance where he speaks with a being called The Captain

- The heroes fight the Ultrathinker from the top of a Boston skyscraper 

- The Overthinker appears to the heroes and gives the Captain’s power to the Retrothinker allowing him to finally slay the Ultrathinker

And then theres a final resolution scene and the end.

It was no secret that the show was always making up the story as it went along, but this was the only arc that really showed it. The Second Quest is talked up as this big event in the show, but it boils down to only two scenes and the “it was in my car” reveal of the Lost Cross. The show bent over backwards to work every character into the finale, then killed the Omegathinker a flashback so he wouldn’t interfere with the fight with the Ultrathinker. Meanwhile some episodes basically had no story whatsoever, though one of them, “Pink Rising,” made up for it by being narrated by Commissioner Bunnyface. Basically the show alternated between cramming in major reveals and changes to the situation, and marking time till the final fight. 

But while the story was kind of a mess, a lot of care was taken to ensure that every plot thread was resolved, however haphazardly, and went somewhere, even if they didn’t really affect the plot at all. Despite the lack of a plan, the series as a whole actually managed to finish with very few real continuity flaws. I think I found two, but they’re both pretty tenuous. Over episodes 95 and 96, Liberson appears with the ninjas and some J.I.S.M. guys at the foot of the Ultrathinker when he had just kidnapped the Overthinker, then at the end of episode 96, Dr. Beardo is in the apartment helping with the quest with no indication that he had left at any point. There was enough time with him simply not in the shot that he might have snuck out, but it’s definitely ambiguous. 

The other goes way back to Episode 47, “Farm Team,” which contained the very first tease of the Ultrathinker as his voice was heard monologuing over a control panel playing videos of the Overthinker and Antithinker. The camera zoomed out to show the panel was on some form of spacecraft orbiting the Earth. This seems to show just how early a rough idea of the space monkey back story had been dreamed up, but it ship in orbit contradicts the “trans-dimensional being that evolved in deal space and can only subtly influence the real world” version of the character. Given the time between the two versions though, this one’s easily forgivable.

I guess there’s a small problem with the ninjas still having their powers when they come back from the dead without the stones, but it seems like in this universe, characters who go to gel maintain the state and abilities they had at the moment they died. This also helps explain why the Antithinker had only limited use his alternate form after coming back since he died in human form. At least I think it does.

But enough about the flaws, what worked? 

Well the characters for one thing.  The Antithinker was much more fleshed out and interesting this time around, and the banter between all the characters in the apartment kept things funny and enjoyable. Most of the time. The only joke that really got tired was the Overthinker, the author insert character, sighing with irritation at the story segment and asking Ivan to just roll the credits, but only because it was used for about five episodes in a row. I also liked the little touches in each character's weapon in the final battle. The Retrothinker goes from his yellow Necrothinker sword to the Golden Axe. Ivan, the OOT fairy wields the OOT Master Sword (via Robothinker of course). And the Antithinker is seen using the Oversword that had been made from his own medallion.

And for all the times it interfered, the show’s topical nature ultimately helped it to tie the finale together. The lead up focused on explaining the HashtagWeShallNotDignifyWithAName, and the topic occurred as a running theme in the mailbag questions during the first two final fight episodes. In the final episode, the Overthinker arrived at his final thesis on the subject. 

The show ended with the promise of two new spinoff series: A back to basics Overthinker reboot, and an adventure series with the side characters. I’m anxiously looking forward to both of them. It’s a little ironic that after all the backlash over the framing story, the reboot really will be dropping it. But it isn’t dropping it to be popular.  The story is going away because it was finished, and it was well worth the telling.

Thank you Bob.

That reminds me,  BOB, IF YOU’RE READING THIS: In re-watching the series, I came across “Who’s Your Daddy Megaman” and “I Heart Bayonetta,” both of witch seemed like the first instances of recurring segments that were never followed up on. If you’re still taking suggestions, I would love to see more episodes like those, doing design and aesthetic breakdowns of a character or stage.

Thank’s again.

And rest in peace Door Guy. You will always be remembered.