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Lets Play / The Rad Brad

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"Just wanna say, 'Welcome back'!"
— theRadBrad at the beginning of most of his videos

theRadBrad, known in real life as Bradley Lamar Colburn, is a Youtube Let's Play player from Atlanta, Georgia. He mostly plays the single player mode of all major console games, as well as some horror games. theRadBrad's Let's Plays are always "blind", with Brad knowing nothing about what is going to happen in the game. He has over 9 milllion YouTube subscribers and his own line of T-shirts. Brad has been interviewed by Baller Status and FMV Magazine.

theRadBrad's full Let's Play series

theRadBrad's single videos and short series

theRadBrad's Videos Provide Examples Of:

  • Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: If a game allows him to control his character while somebody else is talking, he tends to wander off to explore and loot rather than listen.
    • Sometimes he'll be talking about something only to immediatly start talking about something else. Sometimes he'll bounce right back into what he was saying before. Other times, he will ignore what he was previously saying and never bring it up again.
  • Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Despite his apparent ADHD and Captain Obvious moments, he's surprisingly good at playing the games themselves.
  • Captain Obvious: Slips into this sometimes, most noticeably when stumbling upon a gruesome scene in a survival horror game:
    "That dude's dead as fuck!"
  • Catchphrase:
  • Epic Fail: In his let's play of the remastered Resident Evil remake, Brad makes multiple mistakes despite having played the game before (however, some of it is due to the difference between the original PS1 version, which he played as a kid, and the Gamecube one the remastered version is based on):
    • He wastes valuable ammo killing zombies he doesn't need to kill, particularly shotgun shells.
    • When he kills a zombie with the handgun, he leaves them there instead of burning them, which results in the zombie coming back as a Crimson Head.
    • He carries around items that he doesn't need at the moment, and seems to compulsively pick up items that he doesn't require (such as ink ribbons), taking up precious inventory space.
    • When trying to get the poisoned Richard serum, a mission that comes with an unforgivingly-short time limit, Brad decides to instead tinker with the item box (for the first time in the entire playthrough, we might add) and give the viewers a "tour" of the mansion, going so far off the beaten path and speaking so casually that you might think he did it with the specific intent to let Richard die horribly.
    • And it's not limited to that series, either. In Dying Light, for example, he has yet to make use of the game's extensive Item Crafting mechanic to upgrade so much as a single weapon, despite having released over two dozen videos in the series at the time of this writing. It could be seen as a Self-Imposed Challenge, if not for the fact that he's frequently expressed interest in doing so (and lost interest just as quickly).
    • In his early Death Stranding videos he managed to misuse or ignore just about every single one of the game's subsystems (which are, in fairness, both plentiful and fiddly). Special place goes to his attempt to calm down BB, something you're supposed to by gently rocking him. Brad shook the poor kid like a saltshaker and then expressed confusion about why it wasn't working. There was much facepalming in the comments.
  • Failed a Spot Check: Constantly. This is one of the biggest criticisms of his playthroughs.
  • Friend to All Living Things: He frequently objects to violence against animals, even in games like the Far Cry series, where they are invariably hostile. Crocodiles are fair game, though.
  • The Generic Guy: Compared to other Let's Players. Brad's videos have far fewer gimmicks, and he himself is rather less quirky, than (say) PewDiePie or Tobuscus. However, most of his fans enjoy his more grounded personality and see it as a refreshing break from the often times scenery chewing Large Ham tendencies of other Youtubers.
  • Genre Savvy: Not very often but he does have his moments, such as in Until Dawn where he refuses to investigate what sounds like Jessica's voice because whenever someone does that in a horror movie or the like, they almost always die because of it. He was right to do so. The source of that sound was a Wendigo somehow imitating Jessica.
  • Heroes Love Dogs: Adopted a corgi puppy in late 2013 named Chubbs, and judging by his Twitter, dotes on him.
  • Hoist by His Own Petard: Brad was positively gleeful when he discovered the 'Bait' mechanic in Far Cry 4, which allows the player to attract wild animals with the intent of having them attack your enemies. More often than not, though, the wildlife turned on him.
  • Let's Play
  • Nice Guy: Very much so. He's pretty gracious with his fans and gives away a few copies of every game he plays to his followers. He also has a tendency to stick to the "good guy" options when playing a game that gives the opportunity (any of his Telltale Games series, for example). This extends to how he reacts to the quality of the games he plays. He is almost always generous to games he uploads let's plays for (at the very least he tries his best to be), even if they have poor critical/popular reception, and it is very noteworthy when he indicates he thinks they're bad (so much so when The Day Before went into early access, he titled his opening video covering it 'First Game I've Ever Refunded', so unimpressed was he by it, with the entire comment section taking note of this).
  • Obfuscating Stupidity: One interpretation of the numerous failures in his Lets Plays. Maybe he's also trying to teach the audience what not to do and what obstacles they'll encounter instead of just playing the game normally.
  • Oh, Crap!: While he mainly says this at the start of a boss fight but when he encounters Dylan Fuentes in Dead Rising 3 he says this perfectly.
  • Precision F-Strike: See Catchphrase, above.
  • Ridiculously Cute Critter: Chubbs.
  • So Much for Stealth: See With Catlike Tread, below. This trope is also, amusingly, inverted at one point during his Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor playthrough, where Brad is unaware that, to draw out a miniboss, he needs to defeat Mooks in open combat, and instead keeps stealthily picking them off one by one.
  • Tempting Fate:
    (after a car chase)
    Brad: That was intense! Well, at least we're safe now.
    (another car smashes into theirs and sends them over a bridge)
    • In Watch_Dogs, when he gets on a motorcycle he comments on how in most games he is scared of getting on a motorcycle for some reason that even he doesn't know, but in this game he loves using them because "it almost feels like you are indestructible". Almost immediately when he says this, a car crashes into him and he is sent flying off the motorcycle.
    Brad: Oh shit! (he flies off the motorcycle and begins to laugh over what just happened) Famous last words.
  • This Is for Emphasis, Bitch!: He tends to do this.
  • With Catlike Tread: Doesn't typically excel at Stealth-Based Games. Particularly noticeable in his Blacklist playthough, though he got quite a bit better by the time he did Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain a year later.

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