Website / KoopaTV

KoopaTV's KoopaTV.org logo.

"When I want hard hitting social commentary, I turn to Ludwig Von Koopa. The Von Koopa's come from a long, reputable line of political commentators. I'm surprised I hadn't heard about his work until now."

— a fan

www.KoopaTV.org was an innovative videogame commentary story that politicized the videogame industry and treated it similar to how a partisan politics blog would treat its industry. It was ran by alumni of the Nintendo NSider Forums. It started in May 2013 and had five staff members and 2,710 published articles, ending in July 2023 after ten years.

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This website provides examples of:

• Accentuate the Negative: Despite nominally being a site for videogame fans, most articles are negative in tone and bash videogame companies, culture, people, games, characters, or more. After Satoru Iwata's death, Ludwig swore to be more positive, but he seems to have disregarded that.
• Accidentally-Correct Writing: "Be careful: He may show up in the most unlikely of places and take the most unlikely of formes!" Skip forward a year later to Super Mario Odyssey's E3 trailer.
• Advertising Disguised as News: But only for Ace Attorney. ...And a few other things.
• Affectionate Parody: According to the staff, the whole website is a parody of Herman Cain's political blog CainTV, it's just the authors (or at least Ludwig) usually agree with what they're parodying. The very first article was nearly a direct rip of Cain's introduction article. The affection continued upon Herman Cain's death.
• All Issues Are Political Issues: You had best believe it. Basically one of the whole points of the site.
• Alliterative Title: Occasionally, article titles like Momentary Memetic Messes don't Mosey in Memory and Kamala's Continuous Californian Corrupt Cop Culture surface.
• April Fools' Day: They do something interesting with this every year.
  • In 2014, they announced they would be more tolerant, left-leaning, and Sony-supporting, and then published an article bashing Nintendo and George W. Bush complete with a Trigger Warning.
  • For 2015, they had to cover Nintendo Directs that were on the same day, but also announced they made a Myspace account as a parody of KoopaTV's increasingly obscure social media ventures. They actually posted some stuff on that Myspace account for a little while.
  • In 2016, it was Subverted when Ludwig announced that the members of the staff who were in Mario & Sonic at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games all caught Zika and they wouldn't be posting anything. He wasn't joking, and KoopaTV actually had a hiatus.
  • For 2017, they cited “sources” and the ESRB that MOTHER 3 was making an imminent release on Nintendo Switch and Wii U's Virtual Console, and has acted like Mother 3 has been released in English ever since.
  • In 2018, Trojan Bowser (from Paper Mario) took over the site to announce LaboTV, a Nintendo Labo community website. As a result, KoopaTV was to shut down. It was later explained that the staff thought LaboTV would be an actually good idea and a great way to get traffic, but no one on the staff cares about the Labo so the project couldn't move forward. KoopaTV later declared war on the Labo.
  • In 2019, they wrote that Phoenix Wright was announced as the second DLC Fighters Pass character in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate at PAX East over the weekend (occurring March 30), presenting an opening from the latest Ace Attorney Anime season as evidence that had several Super Smash Bros. references. However, KoopaTV later published an article stating Nintendo rescinded that choice when Phoenix Wright presented false evidence on April 19, 2019.
  • In 2020, KoopaTV announced the KoopaTV Loyalty Cruise Program, as an extension of the KoopaTV Loyalty Rewards Program. This was cancelled due to geopolitical conditions making it an impossibility.
  • In 2021, the site claimed to be added to the list of Nintendo products that were end-of-saled on March 31, 2021, joining Super Mario All-Stars and Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light. KoopaTV returned a week later on the basis that Koopas were not cancelled due to being featured in Mario Kart Tour as new content.
  • In 2022, KoopaTV announced that it set up a KoopaTV cryptocurrency wallet. This wasn't a joke in the sense that it did exist for a year, but it was not renewed or promoted after the fact. It was also the one way in the site's history that you could legitimately donate to the site.
  • In 2023, the site published an AI-generated article from TEC-XX, the super-computer from Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, on why Mario is evil, a common site theme.
• Arch-Enemy: At first, NeoGAF, but after Chrom's betrayal it's been NeoGAF and NSider2 meshed into one. Other enemies include Electronic Arts, ISIS, Cappy from Super Mario Odyssey, and Nintendo Labo.
• Audience Participation: Commenting on articles is heavily encouraged through the site's Loyalty Rewards Program. They also accept submissions for guest articles, with some regular commenters submitting articles fairly often.
• Award Show: Holds one at the end of each year for video games, amongst other things. "Best PC Game" being a joke category should give you some indication as to how seriously the whole thing's treated.
• Character Blog
• Convenient Replacement Character: Vortex, following Chrom's betrayal.
• Defying the Censors: A year after a certain site banned links to KoopaTV, koopatv.blogspot.com became www.koopatv.org (with real life money being exchanged in the process) literally just so Rawk could defy the censors in a Moment of Awesome account suicide.
• Double Entendre: Vortex's article on Konami's Castlevania pachinko game Erotic Violence is an amazing display of this.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Several things happened early on that don't occur today, including the practice of hotlinking images and publishing multiple articles per day. There are some articles classified as General back then that would be classified as Gaming Commentary today.
• Leitmotif: Discussed as an article topic, but averted in terms of the staffers. There is nothing shared between any of the songs KoopaTV has produced, besides lyrical content. This is probably because they're parodies of existing songs.
• The Musical: "Ain't No Koopa High Enough", among others.
• Mystery of the Week: A new The Wonderful 1237 minigame every Wonderful Wednesday. (Complete as of September 2017.)
• Overly Long Gag: Every video game developed by KoopaTV, notably the credits of Defend Anita Sarkeesian.
• Overused Running Gag: Writing an article on George Zimmerman's life whenever he's in the news, to the point where it's referred to as "ZimmermanTV". George Zimmerman has actually interrupted important videogame-related news on multiple occasions, to the point where it's pissing Ludwig off.
• Photo Comic: Vortex was producing KoopaTV Adventures under the Tea Storm Studios name. Here's the first episode.
• Propaganda Machine KoopaTV's stated purpose, writing propaganda to make Koopa Kingdom look good, and Mario look evil. (The Enlightenment Movement.)
• Recruiters Always Lie: Former staffer Noxial was convinced that joining ISIS would make for a fun and rewarding life.
• Single-Issue Wonk: Rawk over the videogame company Rare. Most of his few articles are on the Rare universe, and it's his expertise niche.
• The Scottish Trope: The names Mario and Luigi are taboo to be mentioned on the site, any articles that make reference to them referring to them as plumbers, or murderers/war criminals and similar when Ludwig wants to insult them when a reference is necessary, which is most of such times. To be fair, he is among their notable mortal enemies.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Trope name-dropped by Ludwig to describe how usually mild-mannered Kamek was torturing a mook in Spiderman PS 4 with electric webs.
• Written-In Absence: Even though Kamek has been with the staff since KoopaTV's founding, he doesn't contribute and is rarely seen in Reaction Logs. Many excuses are used to explain this, including that Kamek got kidnapped by the Taliban in France, was knocked unconscious or killed, got arrested for streaking, or actually did attend E3 2015 in-person but was stuck on a shelf. It leaves one wondering if he's still on the staff just to have this trope.
  • Due to an uptick in English terrorism, this trope has lately trended more towards Vortex. The other staffers hold a mini-eulogy for him not just when the bombs go off but also when the country undergoes literally anything. Vortexica was finally declared deceased by June 2018.