You can watch Zafarcakes live on Twitch every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, or you can binge it from the beginning on YouTube and Twitch.
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I’ve got a new boss. He’s the slightly-too-proudly English, suit-wearing football manager of European new boys PES United. He’s a good family man, he loves a mug of boiling hot Peppsy (not Pepsi, for legal reasons), and he absolutely does not have a substance abuse problem with a brand of mouth inflammation gel. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, hundreds of viewers become his assistant managers, and we watch, applaud, berate and advise our increasingly maniacal leader. It’s the most fun I’ve ever had watching Twitch and, somehow, it’s being done through the medium of 2005 football game Pro Evolution Soccer 5.
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I won’t lie, I’m exactly the kind of person who is enticed by the idea of watching someone just play Pro Evo 5 (one of the all-time greats, I’ll have you know), but I wasn’t expecting it to become appointment viewing, week after week. That’s down to its creator, stand-up comic Bilal Zafar, who started streaming the game because the COVID-19 pandemic had essentially snatched his primary source of income away overnight. But this wasn’t some hastily slapped-together way to pass the time – he chose exactly the kind of niche-but-nostalgic game that could bring in a curious audience, but his real brilliance was in the presentation.
Zafar uses his green screen to not just show the game, but conduct team talks in a dressing room, give post-match interviews against a sponsor wall, and talk to his players from a frankly enormous chair in his well-appointed office. His star players become characters too, with crude cutouts regularly appearing onscreen for a chat (with Zafar giving each one a voice, a personality, and stories that extend over multiple episodes). These two-hour streams are as much about solo improv comedy as they are a look back at the golden era of Japanese football sims.
It began by just playing with the visual and actual language of televised football, Zafar skewering self-important managers and self-interested players, but the jokes have become steadily more insane and elaborate. One episode involves a magnificently clumsy fight between the manager and his insubordinate first-choice defensive midfielder, Dodo. Real-life striker Peter Crouch was recently brought in as a new star player but, in this version of reality, speaks like cricketer-turned-Prime Minister of Pakistan Imran Khan. At the peak of its weirdness, after a recent cup win, the entire stream was dedicated to a karaoke party (with Zafar performing every song in his players’ various voices). On Wednesdays, Zafar invites other comedians on to play various peripheral members of the club, from its mercurial billionaire owner to the furious head of the club’s fan-run TV channel. All of this started as a series of disconnected jokes over a football game, but it’s beginning to feel like a universe. There’ll be a Wiki soon, guaranteed.
You might think that’d make the already… insular premise more insular, but the stranger it’s become, the more viewers – sorry, assistant managers – have entered the dressing room each week. And the more I watch it, the more I’m convinced that Zafar’s changing the parameters of what streaming can be. With no more than a streamdeck and what I imagine is a significant amount of time in Photoshop, he’s turned watching a 15-year-old game into long-form improv taking place over the course of weeks. You could jump in now, but I’d urge you to start from the beginning, and see how this little idea grew into something utterly bizarre – you can binge it all on YouTube and Twitch. I’ve never seen anything like it – you haven’t either, I promise you that.
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Source: IGN.com Zafarcakes Is Reinventing What Twitch Can Be… With a 15-Year-Old Sports Game