About

"You Hear About Video Games?" is a series of parodies based on a cartoon strip from the popular webcomic series Ctrl+Alt+Del in which Ethan, the protagonist character and the owner of the video game store GameHaven, pretentiously lectures a customer on the negative consequences of unconfirmed rumors about video games in development. The photoshopped parodies, which typically begin with a customer trying to strike up a conversation about video games with Ethan and ends with him holding up his arms out of frustration, can be seen as a mockery of the protagonist's obsession with video games.

Origin

The original comic, titled Misinformationalized, was posted on the Ctrl+Alt+Del website on November 19th, 2010. While the source of the earliest known edit remains unknown, it has been speculated that the parody phenomenon began on 4chan. On January 16th, 2012, the earliest archived post featuring the two-panel edition of the original cartoon strip was posted on the British forum Overclockers.^[2]

Spread

In the following years, the two-panel edition of the original comic was used on numerous occassions as a situational reaction image. On December 2nd, 2015, Tumblr user acedefectiveinvestigations uploaded an image of Shovel Knight character Plague Knight mimicking Ethan's "arms in the air" gesture (shownbelow), gaining over 2,400 notes within the next 6 months.^[3] Since then, additional parodies based on Misinformationalized began to surface on Tumblr

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References