Streamer Vinesauce was surfing a parade of trucks in the new physics platformer Clustertruck when, on screen, these words appeared: “Hello Vinesauce. We are in control now.”
Since Clustertruck’s Tuesday release, its developers over at Landfall Games have been pranking the game’s Twitch streamers live, on-air. They enter their Twitch chats, to the surprise and joy of viewers, and use a back door to troll streamers. On-screen messages, color-changes and other little adjustments are hilariously derailing the streams.
“Oh, that’s what’s happening! You sons of bitches,” Vinesauce said.
Twitch streamer TomFawkes noticed Landfall Games in his Twitch chat two days ago. “Hello?” he said. A minute later, the words “speedrunning time” materialized overtop the game. Clustertruck’s gameplay sped up to an impossible pace. The chat went wild. “Landfall, why!?” TomFawkes yelled. At the end of his stream, after all the trucks were recolored black, the developers said, “We have had enough.”
Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” then played.
Last night, Clustertruck’s developers went on Reddit to explain their trollish antics. All they can do is change colors, affect gravity, manipulate time, write text on-screen and Rickroll, although they stopped Rickrolling because they realized it could mute stremers’ Vods.
Here’s how they’re doing it:
“The game has twitch integration which let’s a streamer connect their game to their twitch chat. The game then reads the chat and let’s their users vote for events in the game. We also added a couple of special commands that are only accepted if the chat message comes from the Landfall twitch account.”
Landfall did not respond to requests for comment. Hopefully, their tricksy antics will continue. Troll on.