Compared to the likes of PEWDIEPIE, Vanoss Gaming could be thought of as cute little afterthought of a YouTube “let’s play” hub. After all, it has a mere 12 million subscribers (compared to PEW’s 38 million) and is run by the Toronto-an Gaming YouTuber Zuckerberg, precocious 22-year-old, Evan Fong. Unlike Fong, the elder statesman PEW (Felix Kjellberg) actually lived in the 1980s (for 67 whole days) and therefore carries a more thorough grounding in the 8-bit shangrila that many current gaming series pay homage to.
It was with great skepticism, then, that I undertook a viewing of Fong and his compatriots: Moo_Snuckel (Brock), WELDKAT — A Germanic flavor of Vanoss regular I AM WILDCAT (Tyler) and Daithi De Nogla — pronounced Da-HEE deh NO-gla (Daithi or David), as they narrated a playthrough of Call of Duty: Zombies, a spinoff of 2008’s Call of Duty: Worlds At War, which featured a hidden zombie level. This all happened in their video: Pot Zombies! (Call of Duty WaW Zombies Custom Maps, Mods, & Funny Moments)
The Vanoss Quartet proceed to bunker themselves as they prepare for a Nazi-Zombie Blitzkrieg of their U-Bahn-based bunker. Shortly after the first wave, Daithi goes all Billy Pilgrim on the group (it’s only a two-hour autobahn jaunt from U-Bahn to Dresden) and becomes unstuck in time. Anticipating a time-space descent to Tralfamadore and beyond, he cries “Waw! Waw!” to his compatriots, who find this amusing as he has just acronymed the game’s title — quite the meta statement for an accidental time traveler.
After succumbing to the seventh wave of Nazi-Zombies (or Nambies™) the fellas reboot just in time to notice that a deep sleep and Dorito deficiency has caused them to start speaking in tongues. They seize upon a hotkey-related mantra “Six is the BETties, four is the MONkeys.” The latter refers to the Monkey Bomb, a wonder weapon in the Waw world. The former refers to the Bouncing Betty, an ‘anti-personnel’ landmine, as opposed to all of those pro-personnel landmines we’ve become accustomed to in modern day warfare. It must be difficult for these gaming youngsters to envision a world in which landmines caused pain to those who stepped on them — though I don’t think it’s a much greater leap than taking a timeout during a hellacious onslaught of zombies to scour a Nazi-base looking desperately for five hidden teapots while the kissing cousin of the Benny Hill theme song plays in the background.
This brings us to the denouement of this Vanoss installment — the search for pot. Having nothing to do with the recording of the video in honor of 4/20 (also not-coincidentally Zombie-Hitler’s birthday), the team takes on the side-quest of finding five teapots within the structure. Stuck on the last pot, Daithi has a eureka moment and tweets @SnoopDogg:
Where is the last pot @SnoopDogg
— Daithi De Nogla (@DaithiDeNogla) April 21, 2015
Though he receives no apparent tweet reply, a sort of Rastafarian Divine Intervention occurs, allowing the quartet to divine the location of the fifth and final pot — a true 4/20 miracle.
So, they seized upon the pot and defeated the Nambies, but who are these Vanoss upstarts, anyway? The beginning of a new bro-army? A Canadian-Celtic Conglomerate set to cakewalk onto YouTube’s Top-10 channels? Time will tell. Unless you’re Billy Pilgrim, to whom time tells very little.
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