Fan Pranks That Caused These Streamers To Lose It

Streaming can be a tough enterprise. Demanding hours with few breaks, technical issues, and a host of trolls awaiting a slip-up can make for a hard environment. Even the thought of public speaking, for many people, is enough to induce anxiety. 

The anonymity of participating in Twitch chats paired with being in-the-know about internet culture trends can come together to create substantial opportunities for playing pranks on out-of-the-know Twitch streamers. Many streamers encourage interaction with their fan communities through means like text-to-speech donations and mediashare queues, which allow viewers to pay to have their messages read aloud or their recommended video clip watched by the entire audience.

Predictably, this is exactly where many pranksters strike. In the margins between harassment and hilarity, many of these pranks have the ability to eject streamers from their element, changing the momentum of the stream with a hearty laugh, frightful spook, or a respectful nod towards an elaborate and well-executed ruse.

Like-minded folks tend to gravitate towards each other, and Aplfisher and his community surely proved to be linked during an extended storyline that played out on one of Aplfisher's Twitch streams.

The clip and chain of messages started with a fan posting to Aplfisher, "I got hit by a car on the way to work today. My 500 Euro bike is beyond repair, my neck is stiff, and I can barely raise my arm. But my boss made me go to the doctors and I got the morning off, that's a win in my book." While the statement is not that funny it its own right, it certainly contains meme potential, and what arrived after from the chat left Aplfisher in tears of laughter.

Minutes later, a different viewer chimed in, "Crazy story, some dumba** biker pulled out in front of me, so naturally I ran him over. These bicyclists think they own the road or something!" A few more similar iterations of the hypothetical driver's POV got Aplfisher to remark, "So many accidents with bikes today, all around the same time."

The chain of messages devolved further and further to include Jar Jar Binks' POV and even a seagull's POV of the accident. As the bit revealed itself, like many of its viewers, Aplfisher couldn't contain his bellowing laughter during any of these more advanced versions of the original story.

Arriving at a checkpoint in a game typically serves to safeguard player progress. "Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy" eschews such notions, with progress serving only as temporarily gained ground that can, at any moment, be given entirely back.

The virality of "Getting Over It" comes from its wonky and skill-intensive premise of climbing to the top of a garbage heap using only a physics-defying hammer to grapple up a man in a cauldron. Falling from wild heights and all the back down to a starting zone is incredibly frustrating, but what's even more frustrating is falling for a prank that completely resets the game.

Streamer Nerdoutgaming naively trusted his stream's chat when they told him to "Press CTRL + R to see how big the map is." This was after climbing a decent way past the start, by the way. Against his better instincts — and even after warning himself aloud — he followed the chat's suggestion and immediately paid the price by getting sent to the starting line.

In uetter disbelief, Nerdoutgaming took a deep breath and walked away briefly, eventually putting his headset back on and letting out a frustrated scream. He followed up by shouting through his laughter at chat, "I hate you!" He eventually calmed down enough to retry, but the prank clearly left him on edge. Nerdoutgaming decided soon after to set down "Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy" for the day.

In 2021, popular Twitch streamer MOONMOON hosted a community Game Jam which he sponsored with $20,000 of his own money. Game Jams are rapid game-building exercises that yield projects in many shapes and sizes with different time, team, and game-type constraints. MOONMOON's particular self-funded Game Jam was successful enough to potentially snag him a deal with Twitch that would see Twitch sponsoring upcoming "MoonJams" (per Dot Esports). But one submission from MOONMOON's June 2020 Game Jam stands out amongst the rest, as it managed to illicit a close-to-home reaction from MOONMOON himself.

Intended to poke gentle fun at MOONMOON, the game roasts its main character and describes the doldrums of their depressing lives through a side-scrolling story set in a crusty apartment. The game's tone is epitomized by the shower scene, during which the main character mopes about his life, saying, "Hotter still. You realize you hate your job. You hate the people who pay you. You hate the senselessness of it, the intangibility, the subservience."

In a clip of his playthrough, MOONMOON didn't pick up right away on the fact that the main character he is playing represents him. That is, until the minutes-long experience came to an end when the protagonist arrived at MOONMOON's streaming set-up, complete with his neon nameplate on the wall and his cat next to the virtual desk. Bursting into laughter, MOONMOON admitted, "I actually did not see that coming." 

The time and mental investment required for a good run in "The Binding of Isaac" is so great that some trolls see it as a valid opening when sabotaging streamers. In "The Binding of Isaac," runs can be reset at any point by holding down the 'R' key — after all, the game is designed for the player to fail often, so why not add a shortcut there to make the experience more fluid for players? It turns out, however, that many streamers listen to whatever advice their backseat-gaming chat gives them during new experiences with games, and popular streamers like Sodapoppin have fallen victim to this exact trick.

In this clip, Sodapoppin was told by his chat to "Hold R to change the resolution," which he immediately did without question. Deep into a run at that point, as soon as Soda realized that the chat pulled a fast one on him, he angrily jumped up in his chair, and ripped his headset off while yelling expletives. He further lamented hating his chat and hating himself for listening to them before getting back to the game.

Amazingly enough, this wasn't the only time Sodapoppin got pranked with the exact same method. Many years later, Soda again listened to his chat telling him to "Hold R" while playing "The Binding of Isaac." Apparently Soda's memory of this troll failed him again, but this latest time didn't get quite the same explosive reaction.

Trust is a fickle thing online. Everyone typically learns early into their internet careers to stay away from shady websites and untrustworthy links. However, properly vetting everything one clicks online is nearly impossible, so even the most experienced internet personalities can fall victim to clicking bad links.

Streamer Konzn learned this lesson the hard way when he heard his personal Reddit community had made a game for him to play. Shared through Reddit and uploaded to MediaFire at the time, Konzn's fans had supposedly created a game called "konzn and the babies part 1," which his followers were eager to watch him play. 

Checking other peoples' comments to vet links is smart, but even those can be manipulated. At the time, Konzn's Reddit community (now a banned page) were posting comments assuring Konzn of the legitimacy of the fan project. Upon downloading the game, however, Konzn soon learned that he had instead downloaded a Hydra Virus that brought up a text box featuring an image of the Pokémon Rayquaza and stated, "Cut off a head, two more will take its place." True to its form, when Konzn started trying to exit out of the text boxes, more and more of them appeared and began flooding his screen.

In the clip, Konzn figured out as soon as he saw the virus box that his fans had pranked him. But not only did they trick Konzn into downloading a tame virus, they also created fraudulent comments that would only serve to further increase the chance that he would download the Hydra Virus.

Over the years, Twitch streamer Sodapoppin has remained popular, despite a few setbacks related to Twitch policies. In fact, Sodapoppin had been streaming on Twitch with considerable viewership relative to others on the platform for over a year before he ever received a subscriber button on his page. As the streamer explained by in a popular video on his YouTube channel, this lack of a subscriber button became something of a meme among Soda's fan community. The streamer's history of suspensions on the platform seemingly precluded any notions that he would eventually obtain one.

During a "Minecraft" stream with nmplol back in 2013, Sodapoppin came upon a sight he did not wish to see in his carefully crafted world. A towering sign had been constructed in Creative Mode: a Twitch subscribe button with a red X crossing it out, representing Sodapoppin's longstanding lack of this basic functionality. Incensed by the sight, Sodapoppin demanded to know who made it. After searching around, nmplol soon found a smaller sign at the base of the monument, which featured a signature from two of his chat moderators.

Quick to action, Sodapoppin removed modding privileges from one of the mods and planted TNT all over the sign while cussing out the perpetrators. After layering almost the entire sign with TNT, it was set alight and the monument to Soda's lack of a Subscribe button crumbled to dust.

Some streaming fans are more dedicated than others, with some going as far to even impersonate the streamers they watch. That was the case for popular Twitch streamer Pokelawls — better known to fans as Poke — when he heard a very familiar voice across from him in a "Fortnite" duos lobby.

Poke joined a "Fortnite" duos lobby and was immediately greeted with a "hello" from a voice sounding exactly like himself. Apparently already privy to this act, Poke surmised this was a fan with a soundboard of clips from his streams. The comedian in Pokelawls immediately started prying to see how good of a soundboard the imitator had made.

After being asked a few yes or no questions, Poke started to catch on to one of the imitator's soundboard deficiencies: They only had one "yes" to respond with. Poke asked, "Do you only have one 'yes'?" 

When the same "yes" came through as before, Poke immediately started cracking up. Adding onto the contagious laughter, the imitator started blaring more of Poke's iconic wheezing laugh into the stream. Building upon itself, the laughter intensified, proving the impersonator succeeded in their efforts to get noticed by the streamer. 

"Counter Strike: Global Offensive" is widely known for being one of the most hardcore competitive titles in not just the FPS sphere, but across gaming as a whole. This inherent competitiveness leads to players trying outside-of-the-box options to give them any slight advantage over other players. One way this is done is through changing the color, size, and shape of the aiming reticle in the game's console commands. Surprisingly, this is not considered to be an illegal cheat, so many advanced players often change these settings to their personal liking.

EsfandTV, a popular Twitch streamer and co-founding member of the streaming organization OTK, was toying around with these reticle settings to improve his performance when chat suggested a reticle preset for him to try out. One chat member told Esfand, "This is the crosshair that most pros recommend," which was enough to convince him to copy and paste the reticle into the game's console commands.

An obvious bait in retrospect, Esfand's crosshairs changed from small incisive marks in the dead center of his screen to a huge, opaque green square that covered most of his screen. His aim and game rendered useless by this un-erasable green blob, Esfand accepted his fate and could contain his contagious laughter any longer. Turns out that allowing Twitch chat to modify your console commands or source code is not a good idea, but it can be very funny.

One of the oldest tricks in the book for pranking streamers is to emulate the sound of a knocking door through donation messages. This prank has spooked many victims in the past, including Alinty (per Dexerto). Even more advanced methods of delivering knocking sounds have cropped up in recent years, with innocent-looking videos featuring the startling knocking sound concealed within their otherwise normal runtimes.

Twitch star Pokimane has been the focus of many pranks over the years from fans and housemates alike. Viewers have previously tricked her into opening inappropriate videos while streaming, which has landed her in hot water with her platform. One fan pranks utilized the advanced method of recommending a video of cute pangolin rolling around in the mud (original video here). Little did she know, this video was all a ruse.

Not expecting to experience anything other than a cute animal clip, Pokimane instantly seized up with fear upon hearing the binaural knocking embedded in the video. Surprised from the sound, she was visibly shaken and exclaimed, "Oh my god, I hate it, stop!"

Gathering herself together, she explained that her streaming set-up is right next to a window, which is why she gets extra spooked every time she gets pranked by this knocking sound.