Web Video / GrayStillPlays

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More lives ruined by tropes, dammit!

GrayStillPlays is an American YouTuber known for his humorous Let's Plays of various PC and mobile games.

He focuses primarily on indie PC games on Steam, though he does return to certain games like Sims 4. His videos are usually short, usually around thirteen to sixteen minutes at best with twenty minutes at the latest.

His style ranges from wild experiments of the game's system, hoping to find some way to break it to drawn-out torture of victims in the games, hoping to cause chaos. As of late, he began taking impossible levels in various games, either customized by his fans or pre-made. Prior to his current style, he usually played out games on full with slight hints of torturing his victims.

As of September 2021, GrayStillPlays has 5.18 million subscribers and more than 2 billion views on his videos.

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Ruin lives, damn it!:

• A Day in the Limelight:
  • Ellis Dee gets two episodes of The Sims 4 with her as the star, as "I made a Mother take care of 100 Children" features her as the mother, while "i gave a woman 100 husbands and this happened" gives her two clips of 50 husbands each; Florida Man, Australia Man, and Tim Horton merely get cameos.
  • The winning husband of the "One woman with 100 husbands challenge", Evan Thorne (now renamed Kyle for simplicity) returns as the headliner for a "I gave a man 100 wives" episode along with competing challengers Florida Man and Australia Man.
• A Million Is a Statistic: His kill counts for things like destroying Earths in Universe Sandbox and various roller coaster and/or theme park simulators are staggering (and sometimes in reverse result in absolutely unfathomable negative numbers).
• A Rare Sentence:
  • Even with all the obtuse things he's done in his videos, he's still caught off-guard by the choices available to him when fielding people's questions in Dumbocalypse, when a man asks what he should do about a live wire in his home, and one of the answers is pee on the wire:
    Gray: How could I pass up the opportunity to cause horrifying urethral trauma? I never thought I'd say that in a YouTube video—(clicks "Pee on the Wire") do it!
  • The episode "i found a way to cause infinite pain and this happened" gives another one.
    Gray: Can you get your femur off of my harvester, please? ...that goes somewhere on the list of things I never thought I'd say.
  • His episode of "when SpongeBob breaks you out of a GTA 5 prison"
    Gray: Alright, we're playing the only game where you have to break into prison to rescue a man whose DNA they're trying to extract in order to make sponge super soldiers, it's GTA. I... that is the strangest intro I think I've ever had.
• Arch-Enemy: In his Grand Theft Auto V videos, Gray has one in the form of Danny and Alex, two people who make boards for the sole purpose of torturing Gray and make him want to uninstall the game.
  • In some videoes, its their apprentice Petey that's ready to cause Grey to go to an insane asylum.
• The Alleged Car: Gray played Truck and Logistics Simulator in the episode "i caused $ 25,930,110 in property damage and this happened". He accuses every single vehicle in the game of being this, and he's mostly right. The monster truck comes covered in rust, the minivan's Check Engine light is permanently on, and so on.

• Anachronism Stew:
  • During Gray's Wildlife Park 3 playthrough, he's able to drop a Tyrannosaurus rex into the same enclosure as modern-day animals. It even gets killed by a lion.
  • His Grand Theft Auto V episodes also see his bringing megalodon sharks into Los Santos. He even recreates the infamous "Helicopter Shark" hoax photo.
• Animal Motifs:
  • Not very obvious, but he has one with gray foxes. He ends every video with "Stay foxy" and his logo used to have a fox tail on the G.
• Ascended Extra:
  • Within his The Sims 4 videos, Whitley Arriagagagagag (then known as Whitley Arriaga) was initially just part of the 94 Sims that Gray randomly created for his “Forcing 100 highly contagious people to live together” experiment. However, she performed so well in the experiment that Gray decided to promote her into a full member of the Man family starting from the next video.
  • In another The Sims episode, "sentencing 100 kids to life in school prison", he made 100 kids go through the worst homeschool experience ever. The only kid to not die or get taken away by the social worker was a little girl named Stephanie, who also managed to get the worst grades and couldn't even reach level 2 in a single skill. She also ended the episode passed out face down on the floor, and stinking like garbage. Gray decided she was perfect for his family of failures, and promised to age her up and bring her back for future episodes, even offering to let his fans vote on a new name for her. As promised she returned in "i forced people to live as disgustingly as possible and this happened", renamed to Dee Minus. This was immediately shown to be a good choice, when she immediately set a record for shortest time before a Sim urinated on themselves, and then later on Colono died... and she farted on his corpse.
• Ascended Meme: When Gray was doing his series on Colony Survival, he made a rather unfortunate design for one of his video thumbnails, with a windmill blocking out the "Y" in the game's title, turning it into "Colon Survival". It became an in-joke among fans, and eventually Gray started calling the game that as well.
• Awesome Mc Cool Name: In "I Made People Drink for 181 Hours Straight - Mad Tower Tycoon", he decided he'd been giving too many Unfortunate Names, so he named one of his workers "Maxwell Manlord." Amusingly, this name actually gave that worker a brief happiness boost.
• Bad People Abuse Animals:
  • When playing Creatura Gray spends his time messing around with the settings on the aquarium props and succeeds in creating horrific-looking fish and making the water more acidic than battery acid.
  • Gray when playing The Sims 4 also frequently forgets to feed Spleens and Tonsils until they get taken away by the pet care worker, just to empathize how poorly he treats his characters.
• Battle Royale Game: How Gray treats The Sims 4, and bets on who will be the last person alive.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: Gray's sims seem to live by this motto. According to Gray, their incredible propensity for setting themselves on fire, starving, and dying in other stupid ways is actually all intentional, because urinating on themselves until they die from embarrassment is actually easier than dealing with whatever torture he has planned for them in that episode.
• Big "OMG!": In one Universe Sandbox video, after the Earth expands and disintegrates, the framerate drops and then suddenly both Eunomia and Hebe decide to explode, resulting in Gray delivering one of these.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick:
  • Gray adds a vote to each video relating to what was done in said video with the options becoming weirder toward the bottom. More often than not, the last, weirdest option gets the majority of votes.
  • The Cold Open for his first Air Marty video:
    Gray: Ok, so we’re checking out the only game were you have to make choices so you don’t get addicted to drugs, divorced by your wife and get sniped while working out to Richard Simmons in your living room, it’s Air Marty.
    • He noted in the comments that this was the first time he had to record that opening after recording the episode.
  • He also remarks on Episode's tendency to use this, with "picking the third option in Episode" becoming close to a meme for doing something outrageous and insane.
• Breakout Character: Both from The Sims 4:
  • Florida Man. It is also how GrayStillPlays refers to his player character in all of his playthroughs.
  • Spleens the cat. Together with Florida Man, she became popular enough to get an official plush sold by Gray!
• Buffy Speak: Quite a few times Gray forgets the right word for things and ends up just calling them thingies and stuff. His series for Thief Simulator gives us "a stack of houses" for a neighborhood. "Chunklets" is another favorite of his.
• Butter Face: Beth Amphetamine, who looks like a "southern belle" from the back, according to Gray, but has an extended horse face.
  Gray: (in the "Canada Challenge") This shot of Beth Amphetamine getting out of the pool is fantastic, because it almost looks like a model shot... right up until you get to the point where it's, like, an anorexic Rod Stewart's head on top of a woman's body.
• Butt-Monkey: In any of his Let's Plays featuring planet destruction (Universe Sandbox and Solar Smash), Africa seems to almost always get unintentionally destroyed first.
• Catchphrase: Several examples of this.
  • "Alright, so we're checking out/back with the only game that (does X thing), it's (game title)." Before that, it was "Hello, everybody! GrayStillPlays and we're checking out/back with (game title)! May or may not be followed by "no time for BS."
  • "[X], dammit!" Or "More [X], dammit!" whenever booting up a save file or starting a new game. "Over to the [X] area, dammit!" is another variant when he heads over to edit or create something.
  • "(Gray states the synopsis and goal of the game to win it)...we're not going to do that. Instead, we're going to (usually do something CruelPlayerCharacterGod-esque to lose the game so horribly or break the game's physics engine in a way that Gray's GPU will become a sentient being and murder him in cold blood while he sleeps)". Another variation of this is "In [X] you (synopsis here). If you can guess, if you do [Y] incorrectly, (consequence goes here)
  • "What in the holy hell is this?"
  • "[X] is getting to be a pain in my ass."
  • "Full-liquor-bar!"
  • "[Description of how the game is actually meant to be played]. Well, that's not gonna happen."/”But, quite frankly, that's boring."
  • Every video ends with "So until next time, stay foxy and much love!"
  • "Death and sadness."
  • RookieNumbers!
  • “Yeeeees. Goooooood” in a very Palpatine way whenever something goes right enough.
  • Since he started playing impossible challenges, "Not today, Satan!"
  • "Gaaaurgh!!! I'm still alive!" Said upon his character being seriously injured.
  • "I was there!" Whenever he gets extremely close to succeeding at a challenge only to fail.
  • "We don't need physics where we're going." A phrase he often uses when doing GTA challenges.
  • "You cheaty bastard."
  • "I feel like there's a certain lack of fairness in this board." When he struggles with a particular part of a challenge.
  • "You're going to make me break out the controller, aren't you?" When Gray admits he can't complete a challenge using his keyboard.
  • "Screw You Alex!" Whenever he beats a particularly difficult challenge Alex has made for him or otherwise finds a way to cheat at part of the board.
• Clandestine Chemist: In the game The Chemist, Gray proceeds to make random concoctions of chemicals for the sole purpose of killing people (he doesn't even know what half of the chemicals are). Some of his products include "delicious bleach" and "aphrodisiac bubble bath," among other creations.
• Comedic Sociopathy: This is his brand of comedy. In simulation games, Gray always attempts to make the worst possible choices, and get people killed whenever possible, and boy, does he make it hilarious.
• Comically Inept Healing: Imagine trying to run a hospital where there are inexperienced doctors and a blatant disregard for health codes. Then factor in the "questionable medical practices" such as using a toilet plunger and an balloon air pump for surgical procedures.
• Conditioned to Accept Horror:
  • In his playthrough of Hobo Tough Life, Gray finds a dead cat in his inventory. He mentions that what disturbs him about it isn't the fact that he picked up a dead cat, but rather that it's become so normal that he managed to forget that he picked up a dead cat.
  • He quickly learns what kind of game Air Marty is in his first playthrough, so much so he becomes a Nightmare Fetishist and plays more of it just to see all of the disturbing endings the game has in store for him.
• Content Warning: Some more recent GTA levels will have areas with flashing strobe lights that could trigger epileptic seizures. To head off the issue, Gray will add an annotation warning of this right before the area, also telling people where to scrub to in the video to skip it.
• Covers Always Lie: Not early on, but most of his later videos use quite a bit of artistic license in their thumbnails, usually to highlight important elements of the game being played, but are not necessarily true to the game. For example, the thumbnail for "i became a babysitter that should be in prison" shows the baby on the stove with a button prompt to press X to "Turn on Stove"; while The Baby in Yellow does have a lot of screwed up stuff in it, turning on the stove with the baby on it is NOT something that you can do. (And Gray definitely tried.)
• Cruel and Unusual Death: This is quite common for Gray to do.
  • This is his entire goal in most episodes involving the Sims 4. After quickly running out of legitimate ways to kill people, he started doing things like filling up an entire house with nothing to sleep on except Murphy Beds and having his sims slowing die via the Murphy beds, or making everyone elderly and having them whoohoo until they all die of heart attacks.
  • In Plague Inc instead of using the normal viruses to kill everyone he uses the ridiculous ones like Entitlement, Poor Life Choices and Adult Websites.
  • In Bio Inc he spends over two (in-game) years torturing the character to death by giving her random nonlethal conditions. Eventually, he manages to kill her with hemorrhoids.
• Curse Cut Short: Gray runs on this. In order to keep his episodes more friendly than they would otherwise be, most of his cursing is semi-obscured with comedic sound effects or he self-censors by morphing a definite curse into at least an ambiguous (and usually novel) one.
• Death by Ambulance: Playing Stickman Annihilation 4, Gray mentioned that the ambulance is actually one of the less good vehicles for killing stickmen with, but that he enjoyed using it purely because of the irony.
• Death by Materialism: In his series on Thief Simulator, most of the times that he got caught by the police or private security, it was because he got distracted by loot and stayed longer than he knew he should have. On one memorable occasion he went through Hell to finally escape from a difficult house only to decide he wanted to go back for more, at which point he was immediately caught.
  Gray: I can't believe it. Tenants leave their entire frickin' life savings on the counter and that's what does me in, because some random power walking lady was trying to get her cardio on on the sidewalk.
• Death Is Not Permanent: No matter how many times Gray kills his Sims they will always be back for the next episode.
• Death of a Child: Even kids are not immune to the Comedic Sociopathy. His playthrough of Kindergarten sees a lot of this, what with that being a brutally violent game all about kindergarten kids. He also racks up quite a body count in his The Sims 4 episodes "sentencing 100 kids to life in school prison" and "I made a Mother take care of 100 children - The Sims 4". Quite an achievement, considering kids in The Sims 4 are immune to most of the deaths that adults can get. Naturally, it is Played for Laughs every time. Oddly enough, his first child character from The Sims, Jimmy Mumps, seemed to have Improbable Infant Survival and never managed to die no matter what Gray did.
• Death World: Gray turns Los Santos into one in "i built a stairway to hell in GTA 5". After first building a giant stairway down from his Fluffy Cloud Heaven full of strippers, he decides to turn the surface world into Hell, and creates a world of nonstop thunderstorms, meteor strikes, tornado force winds, flying megalodons, and clones of his own super-powered GTA avatar, causing endless mayhem.
• Determinator: Give him an impossible challenge and he will make it his goal to complete it. Though not without pained sounds and saying it wiped off years of his life.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • As his LPs of "peaceful" simulation games can attest, such as Farming Simulator 19, going into the game's files and messing with the values of certain features can and will make the game virtually to completely unplayable, if not just crash the game outright. Just look at what he did when he wanted to plow all of the snow on the map at once...
  • In "I found a water slide that goes to space", Gray showed off a Grand Theft Auto V board that was sent to him through an email. In the next episode, "$1 vs $1000 Roller Coasters in GTA 5", Gray's email has become flooded with messages, with Gray saying that it was the worst decision he ever made.
• Didn't See That Coming: Quite frequently:
  • In Universe Sandbox ², he often gets surprised by the results of his mad experiments. One of the best examples was when he destroyed Earth with a grain of sand going at 100 million times the speed of light. He was underwhelmed by the lack of destruction at first before the game finally calculated the damage and showed that the Earth was completely destroyed.
  • His reaction to the Plot Twist of Car Hazard is a mix of this and I Need a Freaking Drink due to the main character being revealed to be an insane killer who uses her own friends' skin and blood to make her "art".
  • His reaction to realizing that Graveyard Keeper allows the gravedigger to harvest corpses for flesh and sell it to the tavern for beer.
  • While playing Air Marty, he manages to turn off the oven in time to keep it from burrowing into the Earth and destroying the world. The game then pans over...to his sink as it overflows and floods the world's land masses. Gray laments that the game is "really good at dropping the other shoe..."
  • In his Let's Play of Silly Killing, even after seeing all the ridiculous ways the stick figure characters can die, he was still completely caught off guard by a scene where a man and the toilet stall he was in are both blown completely away by an explosive release of feces. The scene was so much that Gray decided to end the episode then and there, saying that nothing better could possibly happen afterward.
  • Also, in his video for Let's Mischief to Couple 4, even with as ridiculous as the rest of the game's Moon Logic Puzzles could get, it's nothing compared to the scene where a little homeless girl uses a bomb filled with flowers to summon an image of an old woman (presumably her grandmother), and then disappear into the image, leaving behind a basket of bombs for the player to take. This sequence actually left Gray completely speechless for several seconds, and afterward he admitted that he no longer had any idea what he was doing in the game.
• Dirty Cop: Gray plays Police Simulator: Patrol Duty the way most people play Grand Theft Auto. He shoots suspects. He shoots civilians. He shoots his captain. By the end of it, he gets about 20 times more arrests on himself than he gets on the bad guys.
  Gray: Whenever I don't want to work night shift, I just shoot rounds at my captain and get moved over to day shift.
• Distinction Without a Difference: In "i took school bullying to UNREALISTIC extremes" Gray plays a Happy Wheels level specifically designed for him, which refers to him as a "video game sadist." He insists that he's not a sadist, he just likes testing the boundaries of the physics of the human body. Through dismemberment and torture.
• Don't Fear the Reaper: Gray's The Sims 4 homes get so many visits from Death that he's practically part of the very dysfunctional family. He's also kind of a dick. Sometimes, he decides to hang out while waiting for the next death. Sometimes, he eats the sims' food, then complains about how bad it is. Sometimes, Gray's absurd builds make his job unreasonably difficult. Sometimes, he gets annoyed by cats and decides to just not do his job at all. In "forcing 100 people to party for 168 hours straight" Death got so distracted with narcotics that he missed a death happening right behind him.
• Driven to Suicide: According to Gray, his many game crashes are the result of the games committing suicide, so that he'll stop trying to break them.
• Drives Like Crazy: Gray whenever a game puts him in a car. It's usually on purpose for comedic effect, but not always.
• Dual Wielding: In one GTA video, he comes across a part of the board that's so difficult he has to use the controller and the keyboard, specifically referring to it as dual wielding.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • Gray's videos from before 2019 were different until recently. It used to be that he would play and test games (occasionally through pre-release keys given to him by the developers) while games like Brick Rigs had him showing off various workshop creations or setting up blockade and chase scenarios in BeamNG.drive, he also used an older intro Catchphrase and had an outro portion with music.
  • While Gray has been torturing the Sims ever since he started playing The Sims 4, the first three videos didn't have a sense of continuity in the Sims featured. Instead, a completely new set of Sim family was used in the first three videos. It wasn't until the fourth video, the 1000 mile long hallway experiment, that Florida Man and the concept of recurring characters was introduced to his Sims 4 videos. Even then, his first recurring family was the Leg Day Family. (Named because they all had skinny chicken legs.) The "main character" of the group was ClaireDanes LovesPudding, who he even referred to as "the matriarch of the family" but who hasn't even appeared in several episodes now. When Florida Man became a Breakout Character, it changed to the Man Family. Spleens The Cat made her debut in the seventh video, while both Australian Man and Ellis Dee only made theirs in the eleventh video.
  • Gray had an anthropomorphic fox mascot for his channel in his early days, his logo also used to incorporate a fox tail making the shape of a 'G'. This is possibly where "stay foxy" came from. For reasons unknown, Gray dropped the mascot before his channel got really big and hasn't been seen since.
  • The first time a GTA level had an epilepsy-triggering segment, he just edited it out of the final video. Subsequent examples are left in with a Content Warning telling people where to skip to in order to avoid it.
• Easily Forgiven: In his Subway Simulator playthrough, Gray crashes a subway train into another one. He gets let off the hook by writing a one-line explanatory letter. Even better, his letter is literally just "I'm a dumbass, sorry." Justified!
• Epic Fail: Quite often, especially in physics engine games. A notable example in "i became a terrible father and this happened" in which he played Happy Wheels. On the board in question, he has to throw swords at his people. He has three swords left and three targets. He throws his first sword... it falls limply into the pit, flips up another sword in the process, and that second sword drops directly into his own head.
• Establishing Series Moment: Sure, he's been around for a while, but his entire modus operandi can be summarized in the intro to his first Minecraft video:
  Gray: I don't want to play the game, I just want to break the game. (clicks on Play Game) Break game, damn it!
• Even Evil Has Standards: Enough for its own page.
• Family-Unfriendly Violence: Literally anything he does to the Titan models in his Brick Rigs series, including but not limited to, blasting one’s cranium open with a rocket launcher, blending another one into a giant puddle of mush with a giant sword, and destroying another one into pieces with an apocalyptic octopus thing.
• Fan Disservice: The exotic dancers who the player can hire in Toilet Management Simulator were probably supposed to be Fanservice, but Gray (rightly) insists they're this. He describes his first girl as "a mix between Raggedy Ann and Michael Jackson" and laughs hysterically as her stripper dance starts with twerking then goes through every stock Unity dance animation there is, including The Robot.
• Felony Misdemeanor:
  • In the episode "Hacking Through New Security Systems - Thief Simulator" Gray gets the police called on him for holding a pair of binoculars, with the game insists he was "holding a thief's tool." He complains about it over the course of the next several episodes, arguing that he could have just been bird-watching and it's insane to think he would be arrested for holding binoculars, and he points out all the other, far more suspicious things he's done in the game that no one cared about at all.
  • He also mentions in one of his Disassembly 3D videos, while taking apart a hellfire missile, that for some reason any video in which he uses the word "bleach" will invariably get de-monetized by YouTube.
• Flat "What": In Air Marty, after Marty pees himself because he couldn't undo his seat belt in time to get to the bathroom, Gray is in hysterics at Marty's predicament, when the three bald, fat men show up and start commenting on Marty's predicament. Gray goes from hysterics to speaking flatly.
  Gray: Why is there a trio of Christmas ornaments intently staring at my groin? I don't suppose I could pass this off as ball sweat...?
• Formula-Breaking Episode:
  • Normally, when he plays Nirvana, he tries his hardest to get himself killed as fast as possible. When, in one playthrough, he gets himself a roll in a gang, he tries to survive as long as possible (as well as trying to kill anyone in his path).
  • In his roller coaster tycoon videos, he normally creates coasters that go millions of miles per hour. But in It Takes 11 Years To Ride This Roller Coaster - Planet Coaster he makes the slowest roller coaster ever.
  • Almost all of his The Sims videos are all about torturing sims until they all die:
    • Then there are the videos "i gave a woman 100 husbands" and "i gave a man 100 wives" which are both about competing to see which sims can whoohoo the most. Of course, this being The Sims, plenty of death still happens, but it's not the point this time.
    • Another example is in the episode "i made 100 kids spend 50 years underground." Where he tries to see how many sims can make it to elder while living in an underground bunker for 50 years. For once, Gray intentionally tries to help his sims survive as long as possible. Most of the Sims die anyway, despite this, but one manages to make it to elder.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: Most notable in Universe Sandbox 2, when he renames planets (frequently, Earth) into things the planet might be thinking as it is subjected to Gray's destructive whimsies. For example, he named a asteroid plummeting toward Earth "Hi Mom!"
• Game-Breaking Bug: If there's anything he loves to do and is good at (outside of ruining virtual lives), it's breaking games, be it setting values extremely high or performing bizarre experiments.
• Gone Horribly Right: Gray's reaction when his experiments in destruction create even more chaos than he imagined possible.
  • When he broke Minecraft the first time, he broke it so hard—with the help of a fireball with a ton of zeroes added to its base power—the game crashed completely.
    Gray: I'm sorry, Minecraft, some people just wanna watch the world burn. (launches fireball) See You in Hell—(Record Needle Scratch as he gets a Windows error message saying that the game has crashed) Wow, broke the game first try! Okay, maybe a few less zeroes...(test pattern)
  • Gray wanted to break Farming Simulator '19, alright. And when he did, after going in and blindly changing numerical values on a snow plow in an attempt to plow all the snow on the map at once, the game crashed so hard it went straight to desktop, bypassing any error window entirely.
    Gray: Not gonna lie, that was the first time I crashed Farming Simulator '19 so hard that it disappeared off my computer. (ominously) Farming Simulator '19 finally has the appropriate amount of fear.
  • Gray wanted to find a way to break the game Break Me Totally and gain infinite points. He found it in the episode "i got shot with 1,754,567,862 arrows and this happened", when he got a piece of his zombie stickman stuck in a moving bit of the stage, racking up points rapidly as it spun around and around, and because it couldn't touch the ground the stage wouldn't end. It was at around 1.5 billion points when he realized that, because the stage would never end, there was no way for him to actually claim all of those points. The sense of disappointment was real.
• Hanging Judge: The entirety of his playthrough of Blind Justice is him executing people for just about anything, no matter how minor. Some of the crimes and defenses were quite ridiculous, but the hilarious part is that there are a few people who legitimately deserved to die. One of which a woman who was accused of shooting her two children and her defense was: "they bled like pigs!" Gray was horrified and immediately had her shot.
  • Amid all of the antics, there was one man who Gray actually felt pity for. The man was accused of siphoning grain to feed his family. He said that "the money his family would receive for his death would be more than he could ever provide." Gray still killed him, but it's clear he was a bit hesitant.
• Hello, [Insert Name Here]: Has a running theme of giving his characters quite bizarre surnames with relatively normal first names.
• Homicide Machines: The majority of Gray's "People Playground" videos are using a poor understanding of engineering to create machines that slaughter all his "test subjects." The deaths get progressively more violent (i.e. running over people with a car to electrocution to full-on immolation with generator-powered rockets and eventually turning people into railgun projectiles).
• Instantly Proven Wrong: If Grey ever says any variation of "I can save this", expect him to immediately fail and have to reset at a previous save/checkpoint.
• Humiliating Wager: Gray accepted a challenge (from the same person who provided the Laughing Mad source video below) to play another map. The twist was that for each time Gray died, he would have to pay the creator $100 in actual cash. And since Gray is prone to Yet Another Stupid Death, he wound up owing a humiliating $2600 by the end.
• Irony: In an attempt to make a lawless pit of anarchy and crime in City-State, where people riot in the streets and shoot each other on a whim for the most basic survival, he accidentally managed to make a libertarian utopia.
• Laser-Guided Karma: He (or rather, his player character) gets hit hard with karma when he plays Headliner. After spreading propaganda that incites violent riots, reacting with joy at these riots, and being a jerkass to his wife and daughter, Gray's game ends when his character is beaten to death by a lynch mob. Since it's just a game he's playing, though, Gray's reaction is only mild disappointment.
• Last Lousy Point: Playing Disassembly 3D, Gray was constantly running into situations where he had to find one last piece somewhere in the mess of disassembled items. Made worse because the game is kind of glitchy. Sometimes items don't disconnect, or just fall through the floor and vanish forever. And, of course, sometimes Gray is just dumb and can't find them.
• Lethal Chef: Gray's questionable cooking abilities are on full display in Cooking Simulator where he proceeds to screw up various dishes by deep-frying everything, adding excessive amounts of ingredients and frequently throwing in shards of broken plates for "taste." Even the title of the video hints at what the people (in-game) will be potentially ingesting.
• Made of Explodium: Happens several times in his Brick Rigs videos, where random buildings in the background explode with no provocation whatsoever.
• Mad Scientist/Evilutionary Biologist: When playing Species, He takes evolution to its (il)logical extremes by forcing the game's creatures to evolve into horrible abominations. Also, his episodes involving The Sims 4 are referred to not as playthroughs, but as experiments. Most experiments boil down to "who dies last when we torture everyone?" ^note  He seems to actually run them as experiments, as he rarely commands his sims more than he needs, usually only telling them to get in the experiment area. The sims' autonomy does the rest.
• Mascot: Three games have their different mascots that have endeared themselves to Gray:
  • His Sims 4 playthroughs involve a cat named Spleens, who seems to be the result of a lab experiment gone wrong, but is the only one who consistently lives through every experiment (to the point of being cloned in one playthrough eighteen times). Her kittens are appropriately named after other body parts including Kidneys and Testes, with Tonsils around as a love interest to Spleens. Gray has even started selling Spleens t-shirts.
  • Nugget from Kindergarten is his breakthrough character, and the one he loves voicing the most.
  • The BeamNG.drive videos were introduced by father and son crash dummies against a haystack, where the son inevitably wants to be anywhere but near the track as his father drones on and on, waxing philosophical about some topic or another before they are inevitably slammed into by a vehicle at 150+ mph.
• Megaton Punch: In Farming Simulator 19, he set the speed of the NPCs driving their cars around the map so high that they only occasionally appear as one-frame blips. Getting hit by one of these while they're still technically driving around sends his gigantic farming vehicles clear out of the map.
  Gray: Welllllll...it was only a matter of time before I got hit by a meteorite vehicle going ten billion miles an hour...
• Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds: He ends up being this very often in Universe Sandbox ² and other games.
• Mind Screw:
  • When playing Power And Revolution 2019, he played a mod where the Earth's population was 171 billion. When he points out a cold wave affecting Canada, the number of victims reads -4294967296. Not only is Gray completely dumbstruck, but after he suspects he may have broken the game, he surmises that he either killed everyone in Canada, or that the negative number means that new Canadians emerged fully formed from the snow.
  • And then, when making an insanely slow roller coaster in Planet Coaster, he made an underground section...that suddenly shot the camera into space. He has no idea how it happened.
  • While glitches in The Sims 4 are not unheard of, Gray's most glitch-tastical Sims 4 video is by far "the sims 4 but their house shrinks every hour". Gray started with a huge house and reduced its size every in-game hour, while also replacing the lost house with swimming pool. The result was an absolute mess of floating furniture and glitchy AI behavior. The final subject managed to survive by walking on water and eating frozen peas. It was so surreal that Gray brought her back for his next episode, with the name Peasus Christ.
• Motor Mouth: How he usually fires off his Signing-Off Catchphrase.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: The episode "cheating death by utilizing terrible life hacks" in which he plays "Save The Girl". He tries as hard as he can to get the girl killed, but keeps saving her because the game is insane and all the obviously stupid answers end up being the right ones.
  Gray: You saved the girl... I didn't want to save the girl! I unlocked a new pair of shoes? I've never struggled so hard to kill someone in my life!
• No Celebrities Were Harmed:
  • The episode "I Made People Run On Treadmills Until They Died" features the character Bill Cosplay, a dead ringer for the actor whose name he shares.
  • Also, Bab Ross.
• No OSHA Compliance: If Gray builds a roller coaster, there's a one-to-one chance that he's going to use it to plow roller coaster trains into huge crowds of people or launch them at speeds that makes both the game and Gray's CPU sad and depressed.
• Not Afraid to Die: Gray questions why one would be afraid of dying, in "I Created A House that Causes Repeated Heart Attacks - The Sims 4".
  Gray: Looking at how mundane the life of a ghost is... why even bother? Why even fear death? They get scared at... at the same damn pranks that all the normal sims get scared at!
• Number of the Beast: In his playthrough of "Seven Days in Purgatory", he gets 22/33 judgements correct, which he comments on the irony:
  Gray: Wow, I had a 66% accuracy! Starts to crack up The funny thing is, I got a 66.6% accuracy!
• Older Than They Look: Could easily pass for his late 20s / early 30s, but claims to be much older. He actually claims to have retired from his old (and classified) job to focus on Youtube.
• Omnicidal Maniac: In any game, Gray plays involving messing around with earth (more specifically Universe Sandbox and Solar Smash) He ends up frequently killing everyone on earth or flat out completely destroying it either on purpose or by accident. Subverted in Solar Smash, though, where his goal is usually to see how much damage he can cause to the Earth while still leaving some people alive.
• Once per Episode: His series on House Flipper had "Storytime With Gray", a once-an-episode segment in which he would share stories from his childhood or earlier work experiences, in order to pass time during boring painting, tiling, etc.
• Only in Florida:
  • Be on the lookout for Florida Man to appear as a namesake to at least one Sim when he's playing. Various incarnations of Florida Man also appear in his playthroughs of Episode, including FloridaMcMann, Floridamanchild, and Floridaman Spanks. Also, as Gray himself is from Florida, he's privy to a lot of Florida related nonsense. Secondarily, he'll invoke his birthplace of New Jersey.
  • In "taking bad life choices to unrealistic extremes" Gray plays more of Save The Girl, and encounters a scene where the girl has to cross a pond, the answer to which is to throw a hunk of meat into the pond to cause an alligator to appear, and drive her Flintstones-style prehistoric car over the alligator's back. Gray laughingly calls this "Florida as Hell."
• Only in It for the Money: Expect "making phat staxx" to be mentioned as the main goal for any tycoon or shop game.
• Overly Long Name: Whenever Gray is presented with the option to type in a character's name, he often tries to see just how many characters the game allows, often to... rather unfortunate ends.
  • In Bio Inc. Gray created a character named "Karen Bloodystool." However, her full name was printed as "Karen Bloodystoolspewagehowfarcanyougoapparentlythereisnoendingtothenamethatyoucouldgiveyourtortureesorrykarenyouwillbespewingrectalfireuntilyoudie." He then claimed it was an Italian name.
• Pet the Dog:
  • Gray played Idol Manager the same way he plays most games, outright stating that he was going to work his idol group to death for money and try to put members down like horses if they got injured. However, there were moments where he was surprisingly kind to the girls; he didn't restrict them when it came to their social media presence or dating life, he publicly defended them if they got caught up in scandals, and when one of the girls asked if he could attend their dance practice, he accepted (though he stated that this was because he was wondering how they'd perform a dance routine when most of them were injured). One commenter went as far as to say that Gray was more humane towards his stars than the actual idol industry.
  • Danny's $500 board.
    • Gray started paying people on Fiverr to make GTA boards for five different price points; the lowest-price board (a measly US$1) was made by a kid named Danny.
    • Danny then proceeded to make another $1 board in Gray's next multi-price video, followed by three $10 boards in the next sets. At the end of the third $10 board, he asks Gray to let him do a $50 board, and then later emails Gray elaborating that he's doing Gray's Fiverr jobs to get himself a BMX bike.
    • Despite the multi-price videos previously having sets of $1/$10/$100/$500/$1000, Gray takes him up on the offer, and lets him make a $50 board. However, that particular video only ends up being a set of four as Gray ends Danny's $50 board with the following:
      Gray: This is not a $50 board. Danny, I'm treating this as a $500 board! Get yourself a nice bike!
• Planetary Core Manipulation: When he plays Solar Smash gray will often dig to the core of the Earth. Sometimes he will do this to plant a bunch of bombs or black holes in the center, which ends very predictably.
• Poor Man's Substitute: Invoked by Gray as he uses a Minecraft character as a replacement for a Cyberpunk 2077 experience.
  Gray: You know Johnny Silverhand? I'm the discount version of that. (crickets) I'm Johnny Dollarstorehand.
• Product Placement:
  • Once from Manscape, of all things, where he jokingly made it look like he was going to shave his cat, Loki, before he gave him a threatening meow ("I swear to god, I will cut you"). Again, by Dollar Shave Club, where he shaved a cactus. Another one had him sponsored by LG for their monitors with Loki giving his opinion on it.
  • When he got sponsored by Raycon earbuds, he had lots of fun with testing their durability. He froze them in a block of ice, put them in a food processor, and even ran them over with his truck. They survived every time.
    Gray: Thanks for continuing to sponsor my crazy ass, Raycon!
• Psycho Lesbian: in the video where he makes 100 elderly sims WooHoo until they die, the last woman alive WooHoos another woman to death and is mentioned to have done it to several other women.
• Public Domain Soundtrack: Gray's videos often have music in the background that is independent from the actual game. Most of it consists of music by famous classical composers such as Mozart, Grieg, Wagner, Bizet, Satie and Orff. However, he also frequently uses other music such as the Mii Theme and The X-Files.
• Random Events Plot: When using Adam Daniel King's "Talk to Transformer" (which has since become a paid service due to King being unable to maintain the neural network), Gray plugged in various "Florida Man" headlines into the generator. Most of the stories end up way worse than the original.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: In the episode "i let only the worst people live and this happened" he plays Field Hospital. One of the characters who ends up in the titular military field hospital is Daniel White, whose criminal history includes "juvenile rape charge." Cue Gray's response: an incredibly disturbed "Oooooooh..." and promptly refusing treatment. He did save Daniel on his second playthrough, making good on his promise to "save all the dicks." He still insults the man several times, though, and isn't the least bit bothered by Daniel's obituary saying he committed suicide, even commenting happily that Daniel's suicide was said to have been performed with an award weapon, which Gray suggests probably wasn't sharpened and therefore the suicide was slow and painful. Keep in mind he admitted to being depressed by all the other characters' sad fates, all except this one.
• Rapid-Fire Comedy: His lampshade hanging of his sociopathic behaviors and the moral event horizons being passed in the content he makes happens right before a mood swing to sadomasochistic neutrality.
• Real Men Wear Pink: Gray regularly puts characters in pink, especially in his Grand Theft Auto V videos, saying that "pink is the color of the gods."
• Recurring Character: Florida Man and the two cats, Spleens and Tonsils, in Gray's The Sims 4 experiment videos. Other Sims generally would return as well, but unlike Florida Man, they would eventually get rotated out by the newer Sims that Gray created.
  • There's also Elis Dee and Australia Man who, while not having been around for as long as Florida Man, have been consistently featured among the starting six Sims ever since their introduction, even as other Sims come and go.
• Running Gag:
  • He seems to have a fascination with indoor plants. If a simulator offers them, they will be spammed.
  • He has a tendency to anthropomorphise his CPU, often stating how much it hates him and/or wants to murder him when performing processor intensive actions such as Wreaking Havok.
  • Mentioning "Florida Man" is another thing he likes doing quite a bit, especially in Universe Sandbox ² whenever he's doing experiments that end with Earth's destruction.
  • He has a soft side for America's most maligned light beer, Natural Light (affectionately referred to by its common nickname of "Natty Light").
  • Within the The Sims 4 videos, expect this stuff to happen:
    • Someone set themselves on fire when cooking.
    • Rotten/spoiled foods will be scattered all over the house where the "experiment" took place. They still did this even if the house had a trash can, as proven in the "I Built a House That Kills People for Food" experiment.
      Gray: My Sims are the only people that can make a glass of water rot.
    • Spleens gets pregnant after she runs away from the house.
  • When games give him a chance for cannibalism, there is a one-to-one chance that he is going to go for it.
  • If there's a sponsored item, more often than not, he will try to destroy it, and more often than not, the item will survive.
  • "Always be sure to save often," he says as his Wreaking Havok ruins the game he's playing to the point of possibly crashing and forces him to redo things off-camera.
  • One specific to Thief Simulator: giving an extreme close-up to pawn shop owner Hugo whenever he receives the enthusiastic "velcome back!" line.
  • "Satan" for whenever things don't go right, and especially claiming games or levels were made by Satan. This is especially common in his LP of My Summer Car, because of how common the name is in that game.^note My Summer Car has a button to make your character shout procedurally generated curses, and "Satan" is a common word in those curses.
  • Searching Google for innocuous questions via "Hey Google" voice command, which results in Google readihg aloud the first result (which may or may not even contain what he wanted to know), usually leading to a test screen
  • Any time he has an choice between going left or right, Gray will go left and it always ends up being the wrong decision.
  • Whenever a game allows Gray to name things, he'll almost always wonder how long they allow the name to go, resulting in an Overly Long Name.
• Sanity Slippage: A good portion of his Disassembly 3D videos often involve him devolving into sadness and despair as he tries to find the Last Lousy Piece of the object in question.
• Self-Deprecation: After Gray got into Happy Wheels he asked users to design levels in the game for him to play. A lot of these include a part where he can choose to answer something to the tune of "Does Gray Suck? Yes, No". He always chooses to say that he sucks.
• Shout-Out: The Running Gag about shoving a Frisbee into his mouth, is a reference to Real Ultimate Power, in which this is described as the way to commit seppuku.
• Special Guest: "only 1% of people can defeat me in this impossible snipers vs runners challenge" includes CallMeKevin and DF.
• Standard Snippet: Usually in the form of light classical music for when things on screen are going horribly, horribly awry.
• Stock Sound Effects: Dings, crashing sounds, Record Needle Scratch, the occasional Windows error message sound, the Wilhelm Scream, and the Tim Taylor grunt of confusion. Later to be joined by generic sounding screams, Michael Scott screaming "GOD, PLEASE, NO!", angry sounding gibberish, the "Bruh..." sound byte, a "YEET!" scream, the ROBLOX (or rather, the Messiah) "oof", the "Old Man Laughs" video and even the "order complete" jingle from House Flipper. He also uses the "Why are we still here? Just to suffer?" meme in his 99.9% impossible challenge videos. More recently, he's added "HEY, PHRASING!" for when he says something unfortunate.
• Stupid Evil: Gray, quite often. His only goal in any game that allows him to make money is to make as much as possible as fast as possible, even if it means ultimately losing the game. He's often willing to forego even that in order to make the lives of the characters in the game harder.
• Succubi and Incubi: Discussed. When Gray played smartphone idle clicker Hell Party in the episode "experiencing all 9 circles of hell" he kept expecting these to make an appearance, even looking up The Divine Comedy off camera to see what level lust was on and where he could expect them. They never showed up. At the end he said that the lack of any busty cartoon succubi was by far his biggest disappointment with the game. (For reference, lust in Hell Party is represented by burly teddy bear demons giving people crushing bear hugs.)
• That Came Out Wrong: Sometimes, Gray says things accidentally suggestive and backtracked it once he quickly realized what he said.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Any and all values that can be expressed numerically, either in the game proper or in the game's files, will inevitably be given the gift of numerous zeroes at the end of it.
  Gray: "Speed limit"? (derisive laughter)
• Take a Third Option: No matter what game Gray is playing he will always pick the dumbest option the developers probably didn't intend for you to pick.
• Tempting Fate: If Gray ever remarks on how well he's doing, expect him to fail instantly.
• Terrible Artist: Whenever Gray plays a game that involves drawing in some way expect there to be a lot of poorly-drawn images and some rather... florid descriptions of said terrible drawings.
  Gray, during Impeached: "This is supposed to a bottle of [maple] syrup with, like, a pancake on the front... it came out looking like a salt shaker that was drawn by somebody riding a washing machine..."
• Theme Naming: All the cats and kittens (except Coke and Bleach) are named after body parts and in I Infected People with Ebola Until They Died - The Sims 4 all the rodents are named after various diseases.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: invokedDiscussed. When Gray was playing Thief Simulator, he mentioned that he would have liked it if there were drug houses or houses with dark secrets that you could find.
• Those Two Guys: The two Stig dummies featured in the cold open of his BeamNG.drive videos. They are a father and son duo with the father constantly describing the upcoming madness as "fun and exciting" while the Genre Savvy son wants none of it.
  Father: So let me ask you something son...
  Son: Oh god no.
• Unfortunate Name: Any time a game lets Gray name a character, they're almost certainly going to get one of these. Some of the worse examples include Ellis Dee, Colono Scopy, Iforgot Mypants, and every twisted variation on Floridaman from his Episode series (Floridaman Spanks, Floridamanchild, etc).
• Useless Spleen: Invoked with the name of Spleens the Cat, Gray's derpy-looking, Cloudcuckoolander virtual cat in The Sims 4.
• Verbal Tic: His tendency to use sad or sadness to describe something that was killed, destroyed or otherwise rendered unpleasant, such as turning the earth into a molten fireball of sadness and regret in Universe Sandbox ²
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: His whole channel seems to revolve around this trope.
• Villain Protagonist: Gray is the one we see playing the games, and the one torturing the characters in the games.
• Vocal Evolution: In his earlier days, Gray spoke with a high and screamy voice, but his register gradually became smoother, softer, and lower. In fact, viewing his Farming Simulator 19 videos from around the beginning of 2019 shows his voice and speech gradually changing each episode into the how he sounds today.
• Wacky Racing: The GTA boards are a series of increasingly ridiculous, physics-defying challenges where wall rides are perhaps the most mundane challenge Gray may face.
• Wreaking Havok: Physics engines the world over have nightmares about his LPs.
• Your Tomcat Is Pregnant: In the first Sims 4 video with Spleens the cat, he admits he forgets whether he made the cat male or female, and proceeds to refer to Spleens as "he" (though sharp-eyed viewers can see that in-game messages about Spleens identify her as female). Later that episode, Spleens runs away from home, and after returning, gives birth to a kitten. The next several episodes all include Spleens getting pregnant again and again, giving birth to no less than 11 kittens by the end of it all. After all this, Gray finally managed to get her gender right.
• Zerg Rush: Invoked in his first Minecraft video, where he starts endlessly spawning animals...usually to kill in a variety of ways.
  Gray: (to an NPC village) Real quick, I figured I'd ask: you boys like llamas? (puts a llama spawner atop a switch, causing an infinite recursion of llamas to spawn)

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