Whatever happened to Timberwolf, eh?

Remember that guy who used to put out these monthly videos covering old games, the experience of using a PC in the '90s, and other related subjects? Whatever happened to him?

Not to hint that 2024 was a bit of a crap year, but come late December I looked at what had gone on the channel and found myself thinking, "five? I thought it was even less than that."

What makes this worse is two of those were big hits, with Dungeon Keeper in particular being, "wow, this channel can hang with the big boys" numbers. I really wanted to capitalise on that momentum. I tried to capitalise on that momentum - I have a whole cache of in-progress or complete-but-unfilmed scripts, and it seems I can barely turn a corner in the house without encountering some thing I got hold of because it felt like it'd make a cool video idea.

Unfortunately, it seemed the year had other ideas.

Dungeon Studio

A longstanding consequence of the COVID years is that our house has existed for far too long as a part-finished project. 2024 was supposed to be the year which ended the "you can't have tradespeople round because they might give you lurgy" of lockdown followed by the "you can't have tradespeople round because they're all booked a year in advance and even simple jobs cost as much as a decent secondhand car now" of the mad scramble to add extra space to your house so you could work from it.

So I thought I'd get things rolling by having the front bedroom finished.

Now, getting a room skimmed and decorated and all of that means taking my study out of commission, because it's the obvious place to store all the stuff which can't stay in a room that's being actively worked on. I had a plan for this, which was to do the Sherlock Holmes video where I'd be out and about in London, then record the M25 Racer video on the way to my regular LAN party, then have a backup script where I could do something about Network Q RAC Rally Championship from a forest because, y'know, forests... rallying happens in them. I'm not a man of sophisticated humour.

Anyway, a room's worth of junk got decanted into my study, quotes were obtained, then we got a recommendation for someone who was supposed to be brilliant... then the recommended person turned out to be incredibly unreliable where something would go catastrophically wrong on another job and they'd go offline for weeks, then eventually I found someone else but by this point it was August, I hadn't had a stable recording space for over half a year and the rest of 2024's programme of constant low-level unpleasantness was in full flow.

Employment

My day job is software development. A certain macroeconomic trend of the year was a punishing number of layoffs at name after name of high profile technology companies. I did not work at a high profile technology company but the temporary reversal of software engineering's supply:demand ratio quickly rippled through private equity and out into the wider software world. "Companies have over-hired, and software developers have taken advantage of the resultant scarcity of job candidates to make unreasonable demands of their employers".

I worked for a VC-funded startup which means being highly exposed to these market trends. (You won't believe how many times I had the, "no, LLMs aren't suitable for that" conversation over the course of 2023). I saw my industry sector gleefully erase 15 years of progress in sustainable, predictable and high-quality software development out of spiteful determination that if software engineers wanted it, it must therefore be unreasonable. Why shouldn't salespeople promise whatever they feel like with whatever deadline closes the deal? Why can't executives change the #1 priority every single day of the week? Why do we have to go through this nonsense of explaining what we actually want to achieve rather than saying, "I don't care, just build it"? And why should we do all this nonsense about measuring outcomes and evaluating success when we can gaslight our engineering team about their performance, with the constant threat of us firing them and gambling on getting a better replacement for less money in a depressed market keeping them on edge?

Now, I did not experience the worst of this but I did experience enough to remember an old adage about employers - "how they treat you when they think they can get away with anything is how they wanted to treat you all along". I also knew that I had an escape route which was a massive gamble, but perhaps less of a gamble than staying where I was and riding out whatever trajectory that was on.

The point we're eventually getting to here is that when your job is making you miserable, your creativity suffers. It suffers even more when you go from dealing with a software product you know inside-out because you wrote half of it and made 80% of the architectural decisions, to dealing with a complex and mature product which also involves learning a new programming language and a new front end framework. There's only so much brain a man's brains can brain in a day!

Ending this on a positive note, where I'm at now is much better for me. The work is more demanding, but assuming things in motion currently pay off I will also have more free time overall, some of which might reasonably be expected to go into video production.

And so on

I don't want to turn this into one of those extended sob stories because I know many people have had a much worse 2024, but those two major elements are just the base spirit and modifier in a year that's been a cocktail of constant bullshit. I've never felt so much like the channel is on the cusp of becoming something if I just get a few more hits and a few more people who follow me not for a particular game or genre of video but for me, and yet every time it's been within reach something else has come along to knock me off balance or lose faith in my creative ability, whether it's spending my "free afternoon for scriptwriting" draining down the central heating system and finding an emergency plumber or writing what I think is a fun joke only to have it found by the most literal-minded people in the world who then proceed to explain in detail why the premise of my observation is nonsensical. Thanks, I genuinely believed different laws of physics were in effect in Bracknell, I am glad someone was available to correct me.

2025?

There was going to be a part here leading on from that about me feeling a sense of alienation from too many online spaces, but it feels like a bad combination of being mean-spirited and railing at situations which aren't going to change so - yes, I am generally around less and trying to concentrate on places where interactions feel positive and I'm not getting drawn into the trap of, "hey, let's all be angry about stuff together" which is short-term addictive but long term a horrible mental grind.

One such positive place is spending time in the real world with other people in the creator community. I got chance to meet up in Cambridge with other members of the Big Red Arrow Club in November and that was probably the bit of the year which felt most like a turning point where things were starting to look up again.

This is something I feel I should do more of, and try to get further afield, and maybe start recording a bit of footage from the events or finding a reason to chat to people about something as some sort of, "hey, if you like watching my channel you might also like this person I'm talking with about old games and computers..."

As mentioned, the house is teeming with stuff that'd make some interesting videos, and I'm hoping for some stability where I can capitalise on those. It also feels like I'm no longer constantly wrestling with stuff - 2024 did do a number on my physical health, and I feel like that's something I should fix before I do any more of the big "me" videos because I really noticed it editing the Transport Tycoon retrospective, but there's nothing stopping me doing some more low-key stuff over the early part of the year, some of which is already cooking away in the script oven.

Where it all began

So there's a decision here, and I'm going to put it into the public realm because then I'll be held to it. (Like all those promises of many simpler, smaller videos in 2024, you mean?)

Let's Play is coming back in some form. I don't know exactly what form yet, but I miss those lower-stakes, more emergent videos. I'd also like to think I've made my peace with the reasons for moving away from it in the first place:

• I don't have a desire to prove anything with it. If I have some fun with something that maybe only a couple of dozen people ever watch but those people enjoy it, mission accomplished.
• I know better than to do 130 straight videos of OpenTTD and then complain about feeling typecast to just one single game.
• But there also must be OpenTTD and other transport games and other Chris Sawyer games, because there is a sizeable contingent of people who know me for that and have always wanted me to bring it back.
• I heard a lot of disdain for the Let's Play format, some of it from people I respected. I think that's been tempered from having more experience of what is "easy" or "hard" in video (and how hypocritical some of that derision was!), but also people I respect talking about it in more positive terms about how comforting it is watching someone play a game you know.

This is part of a resolve to do more with my online presence - whatever form the return of "I just pick a game and play it" takes, and it is likely to be more polished/edited than just an hour of straight gameplay recorded off the screen, it will be in addition to the please-more-than-5-this-year main channel videos.

Since writing this initial manifesto I'm thinking along the lines of recording a small batch of things so I can launch a second channel with "this is the range of games I'm going to play" and then dipping in and out of them in turn, but as ever with me that all could be subject to a sudden change of mind... I don't know, tomorrow.

Farewell

I debated putting this in the review at all, because it felt like milking that "I haven't had a great year" point and I'm not even sure it fits into that theme. But we are also talking about a fixture of the channel as old as Let's Play videos, and one I never paid tribute to.

The large male greyhound of our original two developed bone cancer earlier in the year and had to be put to sleep after a tumour rendered him unable to walk.

I debated putting a small memorial at the end of a video, but decided against it as a bit of a mood whiplash and also liable to be a magnet for the 3rd-worst type of commenter.

It was sudden, but I think I prefer that to having months or even years of knowing the time is coming, wondering whether a dog's quality of life is worth it or if you're making them suffer for your own desire to keep them around. He was happy for his entire retirement, and I feel much better knowing he was still going on long walks, chasing balls and looking out the window on car rides right to the end.

There's a bittersweet element to losing a pet in this way because you do always hope to have them around for longer, but also knowing they enjoyed their time and didn't suffer years of pain from late life ailments is a relief. With greyhounds there is also the knowledge that a death means an opportunity for another ex-racer to experience home life - we underlined this by picking a "difficult adoption" who had been waiting two years in kennels because he needed owners with previous greyhound experience.

(And made his debut by unexpectedly photobombing the Transport Tycoon video)

Dogs

I'm going to start letting the dogs be "around" more when I'm filming even if it does mean all sorts of uncontrolled noise and disruption - as I wrote back in early 2024 I'm realising that things are at their best when I just allow stuff to happen and throw it in; the entire running gag about the records in the Transport Tycoon video was something I improvised because I genuinely didn't expect them to turn up that day, and yet I can't imagine the video without that narrative structure. Watch them (or rather don't watch them) decide that me having said that, they will now want to spend every filming session asleep upstairs.

Something I reinforced to myself by watching a video which covered very similar ground to one of mine is that retro computing is a crowded space and there are some very professional people whose standards of polish I'm never going to match - but the janky charm of it being just some guy in a room who drinks too much tea, makes terrible puns and collects bad music is something I can make my own, where none of the filming working out as planned and me being pretty rubbish at the games I claim to love (or indeed, the ones I create) is what people come here to watch.

One of the my favourite compliments I get when talking to people at events is, "my [partner/friend/cat] has no interest in [obscure simulation games/old programming languages/point and click adventures] but they absolutely loved your video on [relevant item from list]" - I love the idea of making these incredibly nerdy and niche topics accessible and entertaining for a broad audience. Especially as someone completely untrained doing this as a hobby.

Hopefully 2025 will see a bit more of it.