Hello everybody, how are your summers going? The weather has been pretty bad today so I stayed inside and played Shenmue, what better way to spend a day when you've got lots of time on your hands. Anyhow, on the subject of games, I want to bring your attention to a bunch of awesome dudes on YouTube called 'Lucky Hit'. These guys run a comedy and review channel focused around gaming and they have supported Alt:Mag for as long as I can remember. I interviewed founder Tommy Pope so you can learn what they are all about.
So, how would you describe/summarise your channel to somebody who didn't know about it?
Tommy Pope: Lucky
Hit is a comedy, review show. Something a little different from a
standard review channel. We throw sketches, animation, musical silliness
and more into the mix. We always try to remain positive about our
passion, after all, we all love games.
What made you want to start the channel?
Tommy: I actually wanted to start a very long time ago, something like 13-14 years ago when I was in high school. The original concept was more of a story driven thing. A sit com about exaggerated versions of myself and a few friends called "Angry Gamers" The concept changed many times over the years. It was going to be a flash animation series at one point, a full on sketch show and other revisions and then eventually dropped altogether. I did start up the project again a few years back with some close friends, still under the name Angry Gamers and we re-wrote the format as a review show with sketches thrown in to keep it fresh. We soon decided however to change the name to get away from the whole "angry" thing that over the years has now been very much done to death. Hence the channel now. I have always wanted to make films from a very early age and at the same time gaming has been my passion from as early as I can remember. To get to combine the two, and have a laugh with mates while doing it, and even making a few others laugh, well that's just the best!
Who is involved?
Tommy: Our group is expanding. We started with myself and brother Philip Pope and teamed up with a great friend Aaron Foster aka thegagaman. From then we've added Rob Shaw, Kyle Springford, Jools Barnet, Jonathan Edmunds, Ed pond. And with talks with a new member joining in! Also want to give a shout out to Luthar "Leks" Wyatt who helped me a lot with the technical stuff during the early stages of Angry Gamers and Lucky Hit.
Tommy: Again, that has also changed throughout the project. We first started by each writing up our own stuff and throwing it all into the mix if we liked it. Lately however we have become far more structured. We have regular meets, whether it's at our local pub or around one of our members place with games on the go during. We have found that dedicating a week, or a month to a particular theme has started to work well. I find that when you have that focus it can really help with your writing. We also plan on continuing with the full episodes very soon and they are more driven by trying to keep up with recent events and games. However, some of our best writing has been very spontaneous as well! Me and my brother work very well as writing partners and bounce ideas off one other. In fact some of the stuff we love started out as nothing to do with games at all, rather the mad ramblings that come from long sessions trying to come up with something. A little frustration and lack of sleep can work wonders for your creativity!
What are your plans for the future?
Tommy: For now we plan to continue to put out plenty of content. Avoiding the pitfall of making content for the sake of content. We have been improving the quality of the show. We feel very proud of the writing on the early videos on the channel but feel that the low quality made it look more homemade than professional. So indeed we need to continue to build the channel in content as well as promote to get us out there. We have some incredibly exciting plans underway with a few examples being animations, music and music videos and a few more we'd like to keep under our hat for now.
Tommy: Speaking for most of us is tricky. We have such a broad taste across the group. I myself am predominantly a retro gamer. Mostly platform adventure games with Castlevania, Megaman and Metroid being my top series. I might also point out the the majority of the group very much like myself have somewhat of a Sega bias as well. But I love such a wide spectrum of games much like the group. From RPGs (action or turn-based) to Sim games and everything in between really. What we are mostly looking forward to in this new generation is actually more of the Indie developers. In recent years the indies have really hit the nail on the head with a perfect mix of classic retro like gameplay and fresh, creative ideas. Just the right dose of old and new. That and more from the Wii U of course!
And finally, because I've been dying to ask, is your name 'Lucky Hit' a reference to Shenmue?
Tommy: You are correct! We needed a name change but had no idea. We discussed it for hours. Then thegagaman threw that name out there and we all looked at each other in excitement. Shenmue is my favourite game of all time and Shenmue II is very close behind in my opinion. The name sounds good to us and it's our little way of referencing the Dreamcast masterpiece!
