Before he handled peaches, he handled controllers

You may know the American Hollywood actor from films such as Dune, Call Me By Your Name, and the upcoming Wonka.

But you may not know his history as a gamer, however. Briefly in 2010, Chalamet had a side hustle of modding Xbox 360 controllers with custom paint jobs.

This channel was first discovered by his fans in 2018, and was appropriately named ModdedController360. The channel only has three videos, his face is not visible but each one showcases a colorful paint job sprayed on by Chalamet himself. The third and final upload on the channel from March 2010 was an admittedly sick “Red Tiger” pattern that Chalamet says he sold to an online buyer for $10.

“I started it yesterday, finished it today. It looks nice. It looks sexy,” said a 15-year-old Chalamet.

His other two designs include a blue variant of the Red Tiger with a slick silver backplate and a “Christmas-themed” red/green controller.

With the fact that it is only his body being visible and not his face, how do we know that ModdedController360 was Chalamet? Vice recently conducted an investigation of the channel, examining the presenter’s voice, familiar features of the room seen in the video, and comparing finger scars to present-day Chalamet. It’s a convincing summation confirmed by a clip now making the rounds of Chalamet stating outright that ModdedController360 was, in fact, him.

“I made three,” Chalamet stated in a recent interview with Fortnite pro Nate Hill. At the tender age of 15, he earned $30 from his business, and it might have been. “My parents were like, ‘There’s paint all over the house, you can’t do this anymore.'”

Not long after his last controller mod upload, Chalamet started getting more acting gigs in film and TV. I guess that’s his thing now, but who knows where his modding skills could’ve taken him in another lifetime. Maybe he would’ve moved on to custom back paddles or Call of Duty: Warzone aim hacks. The end of his second video does include a special shoutout to “Modern Warfare 2, the best videogame right now.”

While Chalamet now has great success with the acting industry, it would be interesting to see him return to his true passion.

The post Actor Timothée Chalamet was a YouTuber who modded Xbox controllers first appeared on Get2Gaming.

The ultimate charity gaming event is just around the corner.

The purpose of this blog is largely to inform you guys, the people, of our upcoming Gameathon with Legacy Youth Zone on Saturday the 7th of August (9AM-9PM), but I will also give some background on the importance of this partnership.

It is a well-known fact that where you grow up affects your opportunities in life. Sadly, those born and raised in Croydon know this too well. Young people here can face a never-ending cycle of generational inequality, not being given equal chances to develop skills and thrive. Ultimately, people here begin the marathon of life further away from the finish line than their more affluent counterparts. Social inequality has chained Croydon natives down for years, perpetually hindering development and restricting people from reaching their full potential. Successive governments have tried to fix growing social inequality, but the social divide is widening. This emphasises the importance of non-profit organisations such as Legacy Youth Zone. Organisations with bettering the community as their focus are needed now more than ever.

What is Legacy Youth Zone?

Legacy is a safe space that aims to alleviate the issues of social injustice as best they can. They provide the young people of Croydon with positive role models and a space for them to succeed. They have state of the art facilities, all of which was built with young people at the core. Facilities of this quality are not something the young people of Croydon would easily have access to. They combine superb recreational and educational facilities with expert youth workers who support, guide and mentor members, helping to ensure they reach their full potential whilst keeping them off the streets. I have personally visited Legacy, and I was blown away by what they have put together there. Legacy is truly a great organisation and space. The environment they have created is both state of the art and incredibly safe and welcoming for all young people. I got a sense of community and family after spending little time there. If it was possible to have organisations of this calibre in all socially deprived areas, then the world would take great strides in decreasing the social divide.

Our partnership with Legacy…

To call Go2Games simply a games retailer would be doing us an injustice. I am recently employed by Go2Games, and my experiences have been positive, to say the least. Alongside the company being a generally great place to work, what really stood out to me in my first two months was their constant efforts to better the community. The vast majority of the people here at Go2Games are Croydon raised, and it is truly remarkable the company’s strides to empower the locals and provide opportunities where they are scarce. It is rare to see a games retailer actively challenging generational inequality. You would expect retailers to simply prioritise sales at all costs, but Go2Games is far from that.

In a recent interview with the Guardian, our Director Craig explained, “We’re born and bred Croydon, we’ve got a lot of energy, and we appreciate the uniqueness of Croydon and the size of it. I’ve spoken before about the term ‘legacy’, and that’s what we’re trying to work towards. We want to create a retail-learning environment…a rounded model that isn’t purely focused on hoping people buy video games”. Therefore, our ultimate goal is to transcend profit-making and become an organisation that truly makes a lasting impact on the futures of upcoming generations. Our partnership with Legacy is a step towards this.

We have partnered with Legacy to produce a charity Gameathon where our own streamers (including myself) will stream directly from Legacy Youth Zone between 9AM to 9PM from our Go2Games Twitch account. Throughout the day, we will have young people from Legacy Youth Zone play games with us, having fun and having crucial conversations about community, values, experiences, and the importance of the work that Legacy does. Those who tune in and donate (£5) will also have the opportunity to win flashy gaming-related prizes. The Just Giving page through which you donate will be clearly listed on our stream page. It goes without saying that all donations will go directly to Legacy Youth Zone and will truly go to a great cause. By donating, you yourself are bettering the community little by little.

Gameathon Schedule:

We will begin the day with Go2Game’s very own AGamingFrog, briefly introducing the event and then starting the Gameathon off with some Fall Guys gameplay from 9AM-12PM.

From 12.15PM-3.15PM, another of our streamers, R1Dre, will be playing Rocket League; then, from 3.30PM to 6.30PM, I (AP) will be playing Super Smash Bros. Ultimate with my fellow streamer AGamingFrog.

Lastly, our fourth streamer, Rooki, will be playing PES from 6.45PM-9PM to bring the event to a close. For each of these streams, we will be accompanied by some of the young people from Legacy.

I am also told that we could also be visited by some of Crystal Palace Football Club’s players at some point throughout the day so make sure you tune in and join us for the ride. We are expecting to have a lot of fun and hopefully help the community of Croydon in the process.

To keep updated with the shop activities and weekly competitions, follow Go2Games on social media:

Instagram: Go2Gamesshop

Twitter: Go2Games

YouTube: Go2games.com

Facebook: Go2Games.com

The post Go2Games X Legacy Youth Zone Gameathon! first appeared on Get2Gaming.

As I start writing this, Summer Solstice is upon us and I am surrounded by my comrades here at Go2Games, many of whom have been brought together by the one cataclysmic event that, whether we like it or not, unites each and every one of us – the global Covid-19 pandemic. We are all human and we are all beset by worries on a good day. Throw into the mix a global pandemic and those worries are magnified tenfold, with an added sense of existential dread. Will things ever be the same again? Probably not. Will my job still be there when all this is over? Who knows? Why do I feel weird about venturing out to see people who I’ve known for years? What am I even doing with my life right now? For many people – myself included – these are the questions that have beset every waking hour since the before times became, well, the before times.

Dealing with things over the last year has taken many forms – from Tiger King to Tik Tok, working from home to home workouts, banana bread to Dalgona, people have re-found themselves through new experiences that have helped while away the days, the weeks, the months and indeed the last year. However, there has been one thing above all else that has dominated time spent during lockdown that is not simply a lockdown fad, but rather a lifestyle choice – video gaming.

2020 saw an exponential rise in sales for video games, with an estimated £7bn spent on gaming last year. This was played out by the fact that almost two-thirds of adults here in the UK turned to gaming to help them get through lockdown and amongst the younger demographic of 16-24 year olds, 92% played video games during the pandemic. The key takeaway from all of this was that half of all gamers stated that playing video games helped them get through lockdown. As Coronavirus drew the curtain down on life as we knew it, it also made mincemeat of the one thread that holds most people’s lives together – structure.

Yet in a strange way, video games have given many people that structure to their lives, in a way that say, recorded music or films and TV shows are unable to. Turning your Ultimate Team on FIFA 21 into a world-beating outfit capable of taking any gamer in the world, figuring out how to eliminate Urias Strajer in Resident Evil Village on that brand-new PS5 you managed to somehow get yourself or reconnecting with your youth by picking up where you left off all those years ago on a Nintendo Switch with Mario Kart 8 have given spiritual sustenance, mental salvation and emotional fortitude to many worrying about whether they’ll ever be able to work again, or if their mum and dad might get Covid – or worse.

my local, smyth's, is coming along nicely. there's even some lad standing on a table next to the jukebox pic.twitter.com/Y5SECG08bo

— cian maher (@cianmaher0) March 19, 2020

I remember a time when video games were denounced as the next coming of Satan, the inspiration for school shootings – a claim that even Donald Trump made in casting blame in the wake of the Parkland shootings (nothing to do with social atomisation, gun culture and racism obvs) – and that “If you were Mario and you jumped on turtles, you were more likely to kill turtles in real life”. Yet the reality is altogether different. Video games have been the ointment to soothe and calm the worries and stresses that lockdown life has brought upon us, a way to connect with our friends in times of isolation and in some cases, a way to raise our glasses together to that most hallowed of British institutions – the local pub, recreated via Minecraft! As they say, if you can’t bring Mohammed to the mountain, you gotta bring that mountain to Mohammed! And this is just the thing – while building your local pub on Minecraft might seem like just a bit of a laugh, there are organisational skills, attention to detail, selectiveness and creativity all rolled into one task here, all of which are skills and abilities one might use in the workplace, in the classroom – in real life.

Of course, apart from our immune systems, the biggest assault launched by the pandemic was on our mental health. My personal happy place is creating/playing music, something which has been with me ever since my days as a toddler. Like video gaming, it is a place where one can operate solo, or collaborate with others. It is often said that politicians and politics are always well behind technology and the speed at which it advances (this may well be by design, as this writer anticipates the soon-to-be incontrovertible need for an egalitarian-like-Star Trek future of fully automated luxury communism in a world tended to by machines of loving grace). The social advances made by video gaming during the pandemic vis a vis the positive effect of gaming on mental health may well have helped to write a different narrative around the place of video games in modern society. No longer should video games be blamed for the ills of society when the research and evidence is there right in front of us that gaming has had a positive effect on the well-being of people during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here at Go2Games, we have done our best to ensure that people do not miss out on this, partnering with Crystal Palace Football Club to get games and consoles out to those disadvantaged families and places in need.

In the coming decades, we shall soon become a world that knows nothing other than the digital age, a world where gaming was either for some of us, always present and for others like me, something that began when we did. Where once video games were a lightening rod for everything seemingly wrong with the world, they are now increasingly becoming recognised as a force for good in this world (watch this space however for a stinging critique of sexism, racism and homophobia in the gaming universe – Incels, I am coming for you). Gaming has been proven to help stave off the early onset of dementia amongst the elderly (who knew Super Mario had it in him, eh mum?) and is now being credited with playing a major role in the combat against Coronavirus and its resultant social symptoms. It is now down to us to ensure that gaming grows from this point in history, that it remains a unifying force socially and culturally and that we learn from the part it has played in the fightback against COVID-19, the biggest of all bosses.

No turtles were harmed in the writing of this article.

The post Gaming in the time of Coronavirus first appeared on Get2Gaming.