Gatorbox in 2023

11 years ago, when I was firmly in the middle of another time in my life, I was invited to participate in a streaming project billed to me as "Vinesauce for furries". I'd never livestreamed before but I've done stand-up comedy and I've been writing about video games since 1995 so I figured I'd have something interesting to say. I took the offer to hop on board with no monetary compensation -- yet -- and hosted my own block every Friday night at 9PM. Today, little has changed. I'm still hosting my show every Friday at the same time and I've done it for over a decade. Needless to say I think I enjoyed it.

Managing Gatorbox is sometimes a handful but it's stressful in a good way if that makes any sense. I enjoy putting in the time on this project while I am fortunate and privileged enough to be able to do so. Right now my bills are covered by the part time gig I have and leaves me plenty of time to stream Mon, Wed, and Fri and hang out with you all. Someday this surely will change though and while I'm not looking forward to the eventual upheaval I'll roll with the punches and take things as they come. After all, it's worked for the past 11 years and Gatorbox is still around.

There are some things I'd like to accomplish this year so I'm going to put up my personal list of goals here for everyone to see. This is what you can hopefully expect to see from me this coming year:

--- The 100 Best Games of All Time: No wasting time, big guns first. I've been wanting to do this multi-installment project for years now and I think it's time I finally clear my schedule and work it out.

--- Off Air episodes: I have some powdered "gamer" energy drinks as well as two limited edition Mountain Dew Game Fuels that have probably gone off by now. I also have an idea to see if you can "make" soda from those little wax bottle candies.

--- [Top Secret] PC game mod: If you're a Patreon supporter you already know what this is, but I've been working on a mod for a PC game for the better part of this month. January I'll have the mod out to the tester(s) while I finalize the graphics and in February it'll be released.

--- Milon's Secret Castle marathon: This was to be the 35 subscriber special on Twitch and I kind of just idled on this one. No more though, I need to partner up with Just_Elesde and see if he wants to co-host this stream with me since he's the expert in all things Milon.

--- Swordquest marathon: This was the 50 subscriber special. Since we've waited so long Swordquest: Airworld, the unreleased 4th game, has been released in the Atari 50 collection for Switch so we'll be able to play the entire quadrilogy. This will probably take multiple streams. Also I'm kicking myself for not picking up Waterworld when I had the chance because then I'd own physical copies of all four games.

--- Fanfiction Factory season 2: Fanfiction Factory hasn't really caught on as well as I'd hoped but it's still a project I believe in and something I'm passionate about so there will be another season of the podcast in 2023. Yes that means another 9/11 episode. I've written the podcast out to a possible third season but we'll see how it goes when 2024 gets here.

--- The Sharperer Image 2.0: Another thing you know about if you're a Patreon supporter since I've posted sneak peeks of content. I've already revived this old project on both Cohost and the original Tumblr page. It's just easy snarky content for me to put out a couple times a week. Nothing major but this is another test to see if we can have something that catches on.

--- BattleBots Update season 12: BattleBots' new season is starting on January 5th meaning BBU is going to be fired back up for new articles every week. This is perhaps the most draining thing on this list because it's a LOT of writing and editing to get each article to happen. If there's anything that'll potentially disrupt Gatorbox streams this year it'll be BBU, but I'll try to prevent that from happening.

--- Gatorbox advent calendar 2023: The Extra Life marathon videos have been getting in the way of my ability to make one of these. It's been nearly five years since the last one and this is perhaps one of the most requested things on the channel so I will make an effort to record this earlier in the year so it will for sure be ready by the time December rolls around.

--- Fruit Finder for PC: This is the 2D platformer I want to learn how to make. I'm waiting until I'm done with the aforementioned PC game mod before I do anything with this idea. I designed this game when I was like 7 years old so it's special to me and hopefully I can make it a reality.

And that's about all I have on deck for Gatorbox projects this year. Looks like a lot but really many of them are just things that can be knocked out with a couple of week's worth of work (like Sharperer Image and Fanfiction Factory).

As always if you're a Patreon supporter (or Twitch subscriber, or YouTube member) you'll get access to sneak peaks and content before it is publicly available. $1 gets you in, but you'll get actual rewards at the higher tiers. If Gatorbox has been a source of entertainment for you it would be cool if you made a pledge; everything that comes through this Patreon is reinvested back into the stream so the bigger the budget we have the more cool stuff we can do!

Thank you for your support in 2022. Here's to a new year and great times!