A Hundred Episodes and They Made a Movie

Game Two is a German YouTube gaming show—imagine a weekly video magazine run by people who genuinely love games and aren’t afraid to be ridiculous about it, produced by the indie studio Rocket Beans TV. It grew out of Game One, which had run on MTV Germany before the channel pivoted away from anything worth watching. The new version launched in late 2016 with public broadcasting support, kept the same irreverent format, and built a loyal enough following that it hit its hundredth episode with the team still visibly having fun.

For the milestone, they didn’t do a clip show. They made a film. A short dystopian action movie featuring the hosts—Budi, Simon, Etienne, Nils—set in a near-future where a YouTube monopoly has tightened its grip on everything, and one objectively unfortunate-looking young man has to fight his way through it. The premise sounds like an inside joke, and it mostly is, packed with references that reward regular viewers. But it’s also executed well enough to work on its own terms. The action sequences are committed. The production value is higher than it has any right to be for a YouTube channel celebrating episode one hundred.

What I like about it is the ambition—the refusal to phone in a milestone. A hundred episodes is a real number in internet years, where the attrition rate is brutal and most channels dissolve quietly after losing steam. Making a short film instead of a retrospective montage says something about people who still find the format interesting enough to push it somewhere new. The team announced it with the line we made it to three digits, which has exactly the right amount of understatement for something they clearly poured real effort into. Here’s to the next hundred.