The original loading screen music from Jon's streams is taken from the file select screen from Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins. After 6 years of use, this was retired in 2019 in favour of an original song ("Initalize"). The song's artist, Popskyy, also made the closing song "Farewell Friends" when Jon changes to a new outro (featuring an animation from SmashToons), along with an untitled song occasionally used for intermissions.
The "ProtonCop" head logo from the loading screens is derived from an absurd-looking cutscene animation of RoboCop talking in the RoboCop NES game, which Jon discovered when he played it on his "Just Winging It - Semi-Random Game Night" stream in July 2013 (one of the earliest streams he ever did). He initially played the animation unchanged, starting with his next stream Cloudberry Kingdom - Slow Descent Into Madness, but then decided for copyright reasons to combine it with Waluigi's face (lampshading the fact that for some reason combining two copyright characters together is considered fine). The combined version was first used in the intro to "Fortune Cookie Stream - Hell If I Know What I'm Doing Edition" from October 2013. The composite character is also sometimes called "RoboWaluigi" or "Robertcop", the latter being a reference to a memetic Chinese-made Shoddy Knockoff Product of a Robocop toy that was named that.
Jon first played the first version of his 'Raid Countermeasures' video in "Super Ghouls & Ghosts Round 2" (January 2016, video played at 23:59 in). The countermeasures video is based on clips of the Rambo sequence from UHF, edited together and with Jon's emotes overlaid on the characters' faces. It also randomly ends with animations of Donkey Kong Jr angrily spinning in his kart from the original Super Mario Kart; in the first version a white pixel appeared in the corner of the animation in the final frame due to an editing error, which though taken out of later versions is often still referenced as an in-joke.
In May 2017, MasterTimeThief made an extended version of the Countermeasures video using the whole Rambo sequence from UHF, but animated the whole thing from scratch and added some graphical improvements over Jon's original video. The extended video was played in "Fortune Cookie - Time to Press Buttons Edition". After this, Jon cut MTT's enhanced video back down to the clips used in the original countermeasures video to make an improved version, first used in "Fortune Cookie: Predictable Predictions Edition" on June 24th 2017. The changes between the two versions are:
The siren at the start of the video is significantly different in terms of the footage used, the text effects applied, and the sound played.
The footage in the new version is taken from the Blu-ray release of the film rather than a low-quality rip from a 4:3 fullscreen DVD. Consequently, the new version is both in 1080p and in the film's original 1.85:1 aspect ratio.
The emote faces of RoboWaluigi and Chuggaaconroy are larger and better animated, with RoboWaluigi now facing forward while screaming in the helicopter. Contrary to popular belief, RoboWaluigi facing right in the original version was actually consistent with the source footage from UHF, but it looked incorrect out of context.
Emote faces from both Jon and other streamers have been added to the line of soldiers that RoboWaluigi shoots.
The enemy helicopter is piloted by Dr. Weird rather than Josh "Kappa" DeSeno.
When RoboWaluigi bursts into the room at the end, it no longer shows a rapidly-scrolling view of a Twitch chat being raided. Instead, we see a view of the room showing Chugga being held hostage by four Kappas.
The rotating Donkey Kong Jrs are now larger and approach from both sides at once, and no longer have the erroneous stray white pixel.
However, Jon chose not to keep one change from the extended video, that Weird Al was replaced with regular Waluigi rather than RoboWaluigi when he is "himself" when bursting into the room at the end of the video, as opposed to in the dream sequence.
Following the controversies surrounding Chuggaaconroy in January 2024, this video was altered to replace Chugga with Jon's cat Bagel (concurrent with the removal of emotes featuring Chugga), with this version first appearing in Fortune Cookie: Gaming Edition - Sponsored Apollo Justice Trilogy on January 27th, 2024.
In March 2022, PhillipDraco sumbitted a new raid video where Ryu rushes off to stop the invaders, first on the ground, then on top of a a missile, with it ending with him looking toward the sky at RoboWaluigi, who gives him a thumbs up. This video has several variants, including one where the bird enemy from Ninja Gaiden knocks Ryu off the missile, ending the attack, and another starring the bird instead of Ryu. The original variant of this video made its debut in "Fortune Cookie: Where Do We Go Tonight Edition".
A year later, PhillipDraco, using leftover voice clips of Jon screaming that he gave to him to use for the CAB bumper for that year's Colosseum, created another new raid video where, after reading the script given to him, Jon, wielding a lightsaber, goes inside NOVA from Kirby Super Star and destroys the heart, gets blasted outside, and gets redirected by Rosa back into NOVA, destroying it, after which Jon is sent back to Earth, with Rosa following him. This version made its debut in "Fortune Cookie: Back to the Cookies Edition"
Other, similar raid videos have also been submitted for specific purposes (such as reflecting the time of the year or the specific person who is raiding). The only ones of these which have appeared regularly (rather than one-off gags) are a Hallowe'en 'Spooky Scary Skeletons' one (incorporating some other footage from UHF), a 'one-man raid' version with the clip being shrunk to 20% as in Superman 64, a 'fake raid' one which cuts to Lakitu saying 'Nice Try' from Mario Kart8, and a Tom Fawkes raid one, which instead uses edited footage from Hot Shots! Part Deux (which, also being a Rambo parody, blends surprisingly well into The 'Verse).
In 2018 the "20%" one-man raid video was replaced by a new video based on a different part of the UHF Rambo sequence, showing RoboWaluigi being ineffectually shot at by a lone Kappa with a machine gun (accompanied by 'pew pew pew' voice clip), then RoboWaluigi blowing him up with a bow and arrow. This one ends with a rotating Koopa Troopa rather than Donkey Kong Jr, and the Koopa Troopa collides with a large white square (in reference to the old white pixel) and explodes.
Later in 2018, in part due to a large number of one-man raids, Jon also introduced an alternative brief animation that overlays his stream footage rather than cutting away to a clip—showing RoboWaluigi bombing the line of targets from the full video using his helicopter.
Another new one-man raid video was created by PuppetMaster9 in 2019 and replaced the previous one-man raid video in 2020, this one using footage from the ending of Blood Debts.
Jon's use of a wall of gifs as a Funny Background Event on his Intermission screen comes from "Random Game Night - The Fortune Cookie Strikes Back With A Vengeance" broadcast in August 2013, when he started showing off his gif collection and happened to put them on his existing Intermission screen. Prior to this he had just had a blank black screen with "Intermission" on. The music he used to accompany this was originally "Summer Samba" by Walter Wanderley, but after Twitch started muting portions of VODs containing copyrighted audio (or more specifically audio registered with copyright claimant bots on sites like YouTube), the song was replaced with the track "Pizza Time" from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Back from the Sewers for the Game Boy.
The same stream was also the first appearance of Bomberman: Act Zero and the first use of the 'Stream Over' animation at the end, which shows RoboCopshooting at the viewer accompanied by "Jet Set Groove #4" (the Game Over theme) from Jet Set RadioFuture and finishing with the 'DIS! APP! OIN! TED!' shout from (an out-take from) Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. As of March 14, 2020, this has been replaced with a new animation and original song ("Farewell Friends"), though the 'DIS! APP! OIN! TED!' remains.
And to clarify the rest of the music typically used on Jon's streams, the theme for Fortune Cookie rolls is "Smile Game" from Tamagotchi for the Game Boy, the Strawpoll theme is the online results screen theme from Bomberman Online, and the silly trumpet muzak that sometimes replaces the standard intermission theme or gets used for general dumbfuckery is the lobby theme from Fibbage. In 2018-19 he used two tracks from Battletoads and Double Dragon to play in the background when he is showing what fanart has been posted on Twitter. When Twitter was replaced with a Booru the music also changed.
Trivia Tropes
Author Appeal: Jon admits at the end of the Donkey Kong Country LP that the unconventional format of the playthrough (heavily inspired by Sonic the Hedgehog 2: Special Edition) was something that he personally enjoyed and that he understood from the beginning that it would not appeal to everyone.
Bury Your Art: Jon's first LP was of Kirby Super Star, and like his other early content, it was uploaded to Google Videos rather than YouTube. Jon ended up disliking the playthrough so much that when Google Videos was shut down, he only reuploaded the first part, refusing to put the rest up as well. Consequently, the other videos only survive through fan reuploads.
One of the rare cases where the bumper considers this to be a bad thing, Jon expresses shame at himself for his Superman 64 let's play encouraging people to go out and buy the game.
It happened again with Bomberman Act:Zero. Whenever he streamed, there were full 8-person rooms in a matter of seconds, and the game reached the top 16 most viewed at the time.
Jon did genuinely enjoy playing ROM hacks of Super Mario World sent in by his viewers, but he eventually got sick of them, as most of the hacks contained poor level designs and gimmicks. This is especially shown in his LP of Super Mario TKO, where he expects a lot of nonsense he encountered before in other hacks, and is not used to TKO having level designs that almost mirrors the quality found in official Mario games. Combined with the fact that Jon wanted to LP other games, he dropped ROM hacks entirely except for one that was sent in to him by a person who wanted someone to LP it since he was dying of cancer. note Except the person was totally lying about having cancer, as Jon later discovered and pointed out.
Jon also got so angry and frustrated with people that sent him ROM hacks that abuse invisible blocks that he created an entire level made out of nothing but the invisible coin blocks. The level forces the player to reveal each and every hidden block to build platforms to the top, and they also have to use a springboard to reach the higher blocks. The player must then get the switch at the top and use it at the very bottom of the level to get access to the exit.
Jon is starting to lean towards his Superman 64 let's play, mostly due to the jokes involving its Development Hell. During one of his Twitch streams, a viewer asked when the next part would be out (said stream occurred a few days after Stage 9 was released). Jon made it perfectly clear that working on the LP is becoming more of a chore to him at this point and he was slowly becoming reluctant to even work on it at all.Heisgoing to finish it, don't get him wrong, although it's more to spite the people who say he won't finish it, it's just that it's a chore at this point.
Jon has stated that this was why he shifted his main focus from Let's Plays to streaming, as he did not at all enjoy the stress and pressure that came with releasing a Let's Play despite his high level of care and quality and found streaming a much more enjoyable endeavor. That being said, he is still an active Let's Player and produces new projects on the side but has stated that he will never go back to Let's Playing as his main content.
Development Hell: Superman 64 test video: December 1, 2007. Trailer for the LP: January 26, 2008. Part 1 of the LP: June 17, 2010. As of February 2017, he is on Stage 9, only slightly more than halfway through the game. Before that, Stage 6: May 26, 2012. Stage 7: January 31, 2013. Stage 8: July 23, 2016.Stage 9: February 25th, 2017. Stage 10: April 1st, 2021.
His Yoshi's Island LP also suffered from this to a lesser degree. The first 6 episodes all released within one month. Episode 7 came out 3 and a half months later, episode 9 was 2 and a half months after episode 8, and finally, episode 17 released 4 months after episode 16.
YouTubeLPers probably owe more to him than anyone else.
A few years later he did the same for Twitch livestreams, establishing a format for them that has inspired many other LPers.
He Also Did: Jon lent his voice to Scott Pilgrim: The Audiobook (playing Scott himself) before the series was cancelled after the third book.
As of 2018, Jon has a writing project on the side involving a story setting loosely inspired by Power Rangers.
In Memoriam: The Twitch stream for February 24, 2018 was done in honor of BlueChoco, one of his moderators, who had died of surgical complications a couple weeks prior. The games played were those BlueChoco liked and/or have gifted to Jon during the years.
Marth Debuted in "Smash Bros.": Four-player Battletoads races were an LP idea first used on Something Awful as early as 2007, which Jon (as one of the original SomethingAwful LP-ers) revived and brought to YouTube. The race Jon had with Super Jeenius, Pcull44444 and NintendoCapriSun had far more exposure and has become very popular, to the point that when some of the older SA races have been transferred over to YouTube, some accuse them of being ripoffs.
Jon played through the entirety of Superman 64 on Twitch to celebrate 15 years of producing content online.
A special Fortune Cookie stream was done for Jon's 1000th Twitch stream. The first cookie used the first cookie stream's options as poll options, while two options to spend points were offered on that day: a Giga Cookie and a Million-Point pick.
His six-part LP of stage 3 from Enigmatic Mario, the second SMW romhack he did, was deleted from YouTube because they muted the audio. It can still be found there, because several people have uploaded mirror copies.
A lot of his old collaboration and challenge videos, which were never uploaded to YouTube in the first place, can be found on Google Video.
With rumours that Google Video is going to purge their archive, he finally began uploading some of these older videos, and he started off with a bang.
During streams, Jon used to play a clip of Wesker from Resident Evil 5 saying "You will give me an egg!" Now, he instead plays edited sounds from the viewers (or occasionally the mods).
When Jon did Jet Set Radio for Game Clearing 2019, he accepted submissions for graffiti art that he would then insert into the game. This was an extension of his intentions for the then-planned Jet Set Radio Future LP, which finally came to fruition in 2021.
Sometime after the Twitter segment was replaced by Booru. Jon began accepting animated gifs send by viewers for his intermission screen.
His old catchphrases also qualify; he's repeatedly said he hates it when people reference his old stuff. Which is likely why the other Runaway Guys do it constantly.
There's also a somewhat goofy looking photo of him when he was 18 (around 2003-2004) that keeps popping up. His fans on Twitch have a tendency to refer to "18-Year-Old Jon" as though he has his own separate existence to regular Jon, much like Mario and Baby Mario.
Referenced by...: His name appears as a bit of graffiti in Kaizo Trap (fitting, given his play-through of Kaizo).
Schedule Slip: Ever since he graduated from university in mid-2008, his updates have been erratic at best. He eventually declared the longest of these hiccups (summer 2009 to spring 2010) to be a full-fledged hiatus. By Jon's own admission, he much more prefers streaming to let's plays these days, which is another factor for his long disappearances on YouTube.
When Jon started his Yoshi's Island LP, the universe proved that it wouldn't stand for Jon posting videos regularly and frequently. Jon returned from a trip to a convention only to find that his recording and editing computer was mysteriously unable to start. Part 6 of the LP went up on October 15, 2014, before he left. Part 7 finally went up on February 3, 2015. Part 8 was delayed due to various technical problems like his laptop dying, the recording stuttering, and the recording crashing his editing software. With many conventions in the summer, it would not be surprising to see uploads slow down. He also had to move towards the end of 2015 and lost the cartridge, delaying it again and then he found it before ending up sick after posting a single episode.
Really any time he goes to a con expect videos and streams to take a break for the next couple of weeks, and he goes to a lot of cons.
And now The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes is the victim of this due to Josh's computer having issues and losing some of the recordings. While Jon and Tom still have theirs, they decided to just re-record it out of fairness to Josh's viewers which isn't going to happen until sometime in January.
This would finally be subverted, as after years of having delays, he finally gets a Let's Play out with zero hiatuses or delays, in the form of Wario Land.
Averted with his streaming schedules, which while spontaneous never really had a large gap between them, save Con trips and illnesses. After creating an official schedule in 2017 he's managed to hold firm to it except for said exceptions of travel or sickness.
When Jon returned to posting solo LPs in March 2021 after a 4-year hiatus, he decided to counteract his tendency for schedule slippage by following the release plan of The Runaway Guys: record several series in bulk, then release them gradually on a set schedule. To wit, when he made the announcement of his return, he had either fully recorded or partially recorded six whole series for his own channel.
The Donkey Kong Country LP was planned to be the playthrough that kicked off Jon's comeback, which was set for 2019, when the first episode was recorded. The comeback itself wouldn't start until March of 2021, as noted above, and the DKC LP itself wound up being the third of the full LP series to debut, starting roughly 4 months later at the start of July 2021.
Similarly, the first part of the two-part Vice: Project Doom LP was recorded in either August or September of 2019, with the second part being recorded not long before its release in June 2021.
Some of his old Mario ROM hack videos from 2008 were hit with copyright claims due to the music tracks he played in the background. This resulted in the offending videos being completely muted, basically destroying the let's play of those videos entirely.
Streisand Effect: Several games that Jon does an LP of that are bad usually has him telling people not to play said bad games because... well, they're bad and are not good or fun to play (he's playing the games to showcase just how bad they are). The most infamous example is with Superman 64, where there was a spike of people that wanted to try the game (with many actually playing it) because they wanted to experience the laughably broken game in the same way Jon did.
Throw It In!: Jon's livestream of Super Mario Bros. 3 was supposed to be a typical normal run of the game. However, he accidentally kicked the game cartridge when he turned on the Retron, causing the game to be displayed with horribly glitchy graphics. Rather than fix the game, Jon decides to play the entire game in its broken state. He managed to finish it too.
One has to wonder what would've happened if Jon and The Jewker actually entered the Bomberman Act:Zerotournament. Would Dan still have been able to win the entire thing? If the climax of the second tournament is anything to go by, Dan would've been destroyed if he faced Jon in the tournament.
In Episode 12 of The Runaway Guys's LP of Super Mario Bros. 3, Jon explains that he was going to produce a second episode of "What Not to Do in a Super Mario World ROM Hack" following his "invisible blocks" tirade, but it eventually got too elaborate and he cancelled it.
One stream has him mention that he was going to do a WWE game where a custom story mode enabled him to pit Batman versus Superman, but ultimately didn't do it since he discovered another Let's Player had already done it (and did it better than he could). He also mentions that he was going to play an "deadly Ultimate Frisbee" video game where his Career Mode decisions would be decided by his audience, but he also ultimately cancelled that.
Game Clearing 2019 has Jon run through the alphabet and clear one game per letter. However, the original plans don't always come to fruition:
He had to change the game he did for F due to a trip with the Runaway Guys as the original game may be a little long. What he did instead was BS F-Zero Grand Prix, which was cleared in less than an hour. Jon has yet to reveal the originally planned game for F.
He also changed the planned game for G due to copyright issues; originally he'd do Gungrave Overdose, which had claims on YouTube that would block sounds or the whole video for many countries including the United States. Eventually he settled for Guacamelee!.
Jon started X-Men: Children of the Atom for X, only for the game to crash. He moves on to a new game for X: Xardion.
Jon was originally not going to do Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night for Game Clearing; instead he intended to play it during con travels during 2020 (after some major glitches were patched). That plan was derailed due to travel restrictions caused by the COVID-19 Pandemic, so it was chosen in a vote for November's game.
Jon almost didn't upload the iconic "Move Faster, Pokey" video because he felt it was too whiny. Somebody convinced him otherwise.
The stream for October 20, 2021 was planned to be a UNO tournament between himself and three stream mods. That plan was shelved when Gex, one of the participants, contracted appendicitis. Jon ended up doing a High-Risk Fortune Cookie stream instead.
At the finale of Jon's LP of Notte Luminosa, he expresses his disappointment at ROM hack creator lying about having leukemia. Jon explicitly told people to not harass the person since it would not solve anything and repeats it again after the ROM hack creator apologized for his actions. Naturally, people refused to forgive the guy and went out of their way to post the person's personal information so that others could punish him. Jon closed the comments section in the video as a result.
As of June 24, 2018, Jon has announced his intention to implement heavier restrictions on the kinds of eggs viewers can submit, due to him receiving a collective deluge of 3+ minute eggs that contain copyrighted content (namely audio) prone to muting the VOD over the past couple of years or so.
As of October 30, 2018, it seems that Jon will start implementing tighter restrictions for what players can and cannot do when participating in Jackbox Party Pack games, following an incident during the "Patently Stupid" game where a troll got in and started submitting jokes about the then-recent Pittsburgh synagogue shooting and the n-word in their creations, which understandably disgusted everyone else participating and watching.
Very close on his streams of Final Fantasy V due to backseating, so much so he only kept one of his regular mods on as a mod through sheer chance after they couldn't stop accidentally backseating. It also almost happened with Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night by his own admission, noting only his desire to play it mix with a lack of free time to do so pushing him to even try streaming it. This time his mods were warned and clear boundries were set well beforehand which helped him want to keep streaming it.
" stream in July 2013 (one of the earliest streams he ever did). He initially played the animation unchanged, starting with his next stream Cloudberry Kingdom - Slow Descent Into Madness