Macaw45

Macaw45 isn’t high-concept. He’s not playing a character or doing a bit. He’s just an Australian dude who really loves games. He especially loves older games, and one of the pleasures of watching his stream is getting to see him do a kind of cultural anthropology, bringing super-obscure old DOS games and games for machines like the PC-88 into the spotlight and often sharing details on the people who made them and the history surrounding them. But what makes watching all this so entertaining—and very often funny—is his sincere, intense enthusiasm for these games, and the very real, off-the-cuff reactions of appreciation, awe, disbelief, exasperation, and rage that occur as he makes his way through them, encountering whatever surprises they have in store. Just watch him react to the presence of a BIG JOHN LITHGOW SPRITE in the SNES game Cliffhanger and you’ll have an idea of what I mean.

Macaw45 has developed a modest but devoted following, myself included, who love watching him play games that are totally “ULTIMATE,” which can mean games featuring BARBARIANS (or sometimes games that are just called BARBARIAN), or games with art inspired by H.R. Giger, or whatever defining principle or whim he might be organizing his stream around on any given day. If you also want to see old games given the appreciation they deserve, you won’t find a better, more entertaining place to do it than on Macaw’s stream. —Carolyn Petit