The SiIvaGunner Condensed Experience Project

SiIvaGunner is a collaborative YouTube channel focusing on altering, remixing, rearranging, subverting and celebrating video game music and modern culture as a whole. Due to its mass amounts of collaborators, the channel uploads dozens of videos per week, each ranging in quality as well as importance in understanding and keeping up with the ongoing story, "Lore", of the channel. References and crucial details from the channel's history are lost on those who weren't there as it unfolded.The aim of the SiIvaGunner Condensed Experience Project is to trim down each Season of SiIvaGunner down to its essentials for an "ideal" watching experience. Approximately 2/3rds of the channel's total content aims to be trimmed off.Press the buttons above to navigate to each Season's page. This'll get you started right away.
Press the buttons below for further reading on the project.

Hello! I’m Mellon, an avid and long-time fan of the YouTube channel SiIvaGunner.SiIvaGunner is best described as a community-driven music comedy/storytelling channel, rooted mainly in post-modern memes and internet culture. That may sound like a lot of fancy words, but what it essentially means is that the channel tells an absurd yet heartfelt story in-between the heaps of comedy focused music experiments, and both sides of this are heavily influenced by the fanbase’s reactions and feelings.The biggest issue with the channel, however, is that it’s deceptively difficult to truly get invested in if you weren’t there since near the start. The channel back then could upload as many as 24 videos per day, and due to the bait-and-switch nature of the video titles on the channel it can be hard to truly know which videos are important for later and which are just obscure references or anti-jokes. Unless you’re willing to fully commit and watch the ENTIRE channel, consisting of over 10 000 videos as of 2019, it’s hard to truly get a grip of how influential the channel has been for so many people.That is what I intended to "fix" with this project, and I hope it'll help you get into the channel the same way I and many other old guards already are.Use the buttons above to navigate to each Season of the project, or click the button below to read more about the project's details, such as how much content is included and excluded per each season.

Feedback, Help, Criticism, Hate, etc:
Discord: Mellon#0958
Twitter: @SiivaCondensed
Reddit: /u/fsmellon

2022-04-14Hey gang, been a while. School and real life has been a big toll on me, and for some reason I thought I could manage both that, running another side blog of daily original content, playing games in my own time and taking care of myself at once. Needless to say, I took a bit of a break after Season 4: Episode 1 was finished. But, finished it is, and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I'm just about done with the 4-Season goal I set out for myself as this whole thing started.I'm not going to set any deadlines for myself, but my goal right now is to get Season 4 as a whole done no matter what. I am currently in the early stages of documenting, having made my way through about 300 rips at the time of writing. I'm aiming for something like 40% of the whole for this, but might adjust it later.Another big thing to address: Several playlists, mainly Season 1, have had videos within be affected by Copyright takedowns and other issues. Remedying this means tracking down reuploads and then reinserting these videos into both the main playlists and the month-specific playlists, and that's a time-consuming task I don't want to sink my teeth into until after I'm done with 4:2. For now, if you're watching the playlists and notice a missing video, I recommend heading to that Season's Documentation page. These are the lengthy Google Docs I use to create this project and list every single Rip featured in the playlist, even after takedowns. You can use these to look up the rips you've missed on your own if you're ever curiousThere's also stuff I wanna do beyond this site and these playlists once Season 4: Episode 2 is done. I finally have living conditions that'll allow me to record video voiceover more frequently and more confidently, and I'm hoping to be able to produce a kind of "Intro to SiIvaGunner Condensed" video sometime in the future to give something easier to link to your friends asking about the channel, an easier pill to swallow essentially.Basically: I kind of feel like I have my hands full, but I'm handling it one thing at a time in my pace. I wish you all the best going forward and will update you whenever anything else shows up.-Mel

"Documenting": The process of choosing which videos will be part of the Project and which won't, which consists of adding video titles and their links to a large Google Document. These docs can be found by pressing the "Documentation" button on each Season's page."Playlisting": Adding all of the videos chosen to YouTube playlists, then to be linked here on each Season's page. There are both playlists divided up into sub-parts (Season 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 etc.) as well as playlists for a Season in its entirety. (If you're confused, look for the playlists formatted like "The Condensed Experience Project" rather than just "CE")

Season 1

"I only upload High Quality Video Game Rips."

1 350 included (~30% of the whole)

Welcome to SiIvaGunner! While you'll probably get the jist of the channel from just watching a few videos, it's recommended to at least have skimmed the About page, which you can find a button to on the carrd's front page.While there are a lot of laughs to be had in the early days, it's important to keep in mind that 2016 was a very different time and the people running the channel have grown a lot since. You will find some edgy jokes scattered throughout the first season, including occasional slurs and generally insensitive content from time to time. As creator of the project I've done my best to curate this content and exclude it if possible, but be warned that it is sadly still there and part of the channel's early history.The people responsible for the worst offenses on the channel have all been promptly kicked from the team since and other parties have apologized and worked to improve since.

First-time Tips:
- You don’t have to listen to every rip to completion; if you feel like you’ve gotten the joke, it’s usually safe to hop to the next rip.
- It comes recommended to at least watch the ending few seconds of all rips to not miss closing teasers and/or foreshadowing.
- Try to avoid viewing the comments, as retrospective spoilers are common.
- Keep a careful eye on the like/dislike ratio, as it can often reflect important feelings within the community at that point in time, expressed in a clearer way than the comments section. Use an extension on Chrome or Firefox for this.

Season 2
High Quality Holidays

"Why is the sky painted gray?
Has the world begun to decay?"

1095 rips included (~37% of total)

You may have noticed that this page isn’t simply titled “Season 2” as expected. The extended title is there to signify that this section contains both the rips within Season 2, as well as the two holiday events that occured inbetween the seasons.To summarize, Season 2 and the High Quality Holidays (HQH) are two separate entities that play off of each other so frequently, they are often considered part of the same season. This is why I’ve chosen to compromise in the middle for simplicity’s sake: The project will collect and trim both HQH and Season 2 individually just the same as Season 1, but they will share the same page.This is also the part of the channel when the Twitter account becomes a far bigger part of the channel, something that’s rather impossible to integrate cleanly into a YouTube playlist; especially one primarily relying on audio. For this reason (and due to my inexperience in both video editing and narrating), I’ve been able to enlist the incredible help of 123zc, who you may recognize from Season 1 as the creator of the “SiIvaGunner ARG Explained” and “Puzzle Room Explained” videos, which I chose to include in the project to explain that which is are hard to experience through just the rips available on the channel. 123zc’s help will serve to deliver the events that were happening outside of the channel through brand new videos of his own.

Season 3

"Trust Nothing - Doubt Everything"

950 rips included (~50% of total)

(The above statistic is does not account for the 108 videos that collectively make up the King For a Day Tournament,
all of which were included in the project. Counting those, ~55% of total was included at 1058 rips)

Let's address the immediate first question you may have when looking at this page: "50% of the total? But I thought your goal was to condense it down to 33%!"While yes, that was the original goal of the project, and is what I aimed to do with both Season 1 and 2, I had to approach Season 3 a bit differently. The situation can be summed up best with this quote from MAGFest 2019, where the team said that "While Season 3 had less rips than usual, we believe the rips we did make are some of the best on the channel" (Paraphrase)Essentially, due to various behind-the-scenes circumstances, Season 3 ended up with a "quality over quantity" direction, which left me with a lot less "filler" to "trim". I decided it was easiest to just increase the percentual ratio for this season in particular, to put it at around the same length as the prior two Seasons.Second question then: What's with the fine-print text about the King For A Day Tournament? Well, to keep it brief, I ruled that in order to preserve the experience of the Season's closing event - KFaD - I simply couldn't get away with trimming anything. Thus, 108 out of 108 videos from the event were included. These unique circumstances combined with how the event is largely disconnected from the channel's typical uploads, made it feel strange to consider it part of the "Condensed Experience", so I also decided to isolate it from the percentual total. As you can see below, King For a Day in its entirety is still included in the playlists, but if the event doesn't interest you, you're free to skip it.There are a good number of interesting things Season 3 did with things such as the channel icon/description, Twitter account, and so on, that were sadly too numerous to include in a satisfying way. Thus, my final recommendation until I come up with a better solution is that you read some of the comments this time around. There's next to no real spoilers in them (up until the King For A Day tournament) and they do a good job summarizing/theorizing the ongoing events.With ALL of that out of the way, please enjoy Season 3!

Season 4: Episode 1

"Persevering through fights, take one foot and step forward
If you’re here you’re the best of your kind"

578 rips included (~42% of total)

(The above statistic is does not account for the 670 videos that collectively make up the King for Another Day Tournament,
all of which were included in the project. Counting those, ~60% of total was included at 1248 rips)

Season 4 of SiIvaGunner is...weird. I’m sure you’ve already noticed the strange set-up of this season by just seeing the title: “An Episodic Season? What does that even mean?” Well, beyond just being another Sonic the Hedgehog reference to add onto the pile, this choice was very likely done to give Season 4 the time it needed to feel up to snuff with previous seasons, while still cleanly separating SiIvaGunner in 2019 from SiIvaGunner in 2020.The end of Season 3 was unfortunately set in jeopardy due to the copyright drama the channel was undergoing, and it sadly left Season 4 to start three months late. Additionally, rather than focusing on many smaller events over the years course, its very fair to say that SiIvaGunner in 2019 was hyper-focused on one specific event: The King For Another Day Tournament. As of writing, this is by far the biggest event in the channel’s history, and the excitement for it could be felt all throughout the year. Simply put: The first half of Season 4 is the King for Another Day Tournament. This is why I personally believe the SiIvaGunner team wanted to extend the season into a second part, to give them room to do more in the season than just the tournament.What we’ve ended up with, then, is a season spanning two years, with nearly twice as many rips as per usual, but with just as high of a quality standard as Season 3. This has made picking an appropriate percentage ratio for the Condensing tricky. Like with the King For A Day Tournament in Season 3, I believe you need every part of the tournament to get the best possible experience: Thus, as you can see in the above stats, all 692 videos that make up the King for Another Day Tournament were included in the project.---------------------------------------------There are plans to streamline this further, however. The KFAD Recreation Project is a work-in-progress project by the immensely talented Detour and Trevor Wilson that aims to cram all things related to the tournament, including the massive amounts of text-only posts that were posted on the KFAD website during the tournament, into one massive video, with added voice acting and visual flair. The project is a huge undertaking and will probably not be done for a while longer, but once its done it will be implemented into this project as well for the best possible experience. The project's Discord server is accessible down below for those interested!---------------------------------------------Until then, remember to vote responsibily as you watch Season 4: Episode 1! Use the "Season 4:1 Playlist" button for the Season before KFAD, and after that use the "Full Tournament" button for KFAD in its entirety!