Time to Penis / TTP

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About

Time to Penis, abbreviated to TTP, is a video game development metric and slang term for the time it takes players to generate a penis-shaped object via any available means. Coined by the Spore development team and popularized by a GDC 2009 panel, the term has been an inspiration for humorous posts online since.

Origin

During the development of the 2008 simulation real-time strategy video game Spore, developers working at Maxis came up with a metric to measure the amount of time in which a player was able to create a penis using in-game tools (excerpt seen below).^[1]

The first public mention of the metric occurred during the "Spore's Wake: What Seriously Happened?" at Game Developers Conference 2009. Participants of the panel defined the metric as the amount of time it will take children to make something rude out of a set of tools they've been given. On March 24th, 2009, the day when the panel took place, video game developer Evan Berman^[2] and Engadget^[3] contributor Kevin Kelly made the earliest public posts about the metric (shown below, left and right).

Spread

The term began to achieve acknowledgment on social media in 2015, with posts mentioning the metric often accompanying screenshots of phallic objects created by players in various video games^[4]^[5] (examples shown below).

The term achieved larger recognition online after being described in an episode of season one of the comedy series Mythic Quest, released in February 2020 (clip shown below).^[6]

- I don't want the shovel to kill people, I just want it to dig.
- Dig? Do you have any idea what the TTP on an item like this is going to be? […]
- They are not going to make dicks!
- You give public a shovel – they dig dicks. You give them a pen – they draw dicks. You give them some clay…
- Definitely gonna sculpt dicks.

On November 16th, 2020, Redditor^[7] elpinko made an Animal Crossing meme based on the clip that gained over 18,400 upvotes in /r/HighQualityGifs in one year (YouTube^[8] reupload shown below).