Game prizes
TGA
Last night at The Game Awards, as many expected, Elden Ring took home Game of the Year in the final award of the night. But when director Hidetaka Miyazaki, his translator, and his crew took the stage, something…strange was happening behind them.
A boy was hiding there. A teenager maybe. He looked out of place among the middle-aged Japanese men there, and everyone on Twitter was wondering who exactly he was. One of his children?
And then he took the microphone.
The best transcription of what he said in some sort of unidentifiable accent is “I think I want to thank everyone and say… I think I want to nominate this award to my Reform Orthodox Rabbi Bill Clinton, thank you all” .
At that point, it was clear he wasn’t supposed to be there, and he was quickly ushered off the stage. Geoff Keighley, organizer and presenter of The Game Awards, tweeted shortly after that he had been arrested. And then the internet positively exploded with Elden Ring-based memes and jokes and just… disbelief, trying to make sense of what they just saw.
Here’s what we think we know about this boy and what he was doing there, although I’ll refrain from releasing his name because he appears to be a minor.
- A Twitter account that appears to belong to the boy has posted about the outage, taking credit. It’s an old account, linked to his past online activities that mainly protest police brutality and government oppression in Hong Kong.
- This kid previously did something similar back in 2019 at BlizzCon, where he interrupted a World of Warcraft panel by yelling “Free Hong Kong.” This is documented on this very Twitter account.
- Also in 2019, he was on TV at a Clippers game holding a Hong Kong jersey that the cameraman had to move away from:
- He has a TikTok that mostly talks about Hong Kong, and at times he’s put on an accent similar to what we heard in that incoherent speech at the Game Awards.
- Perhaps strangest of all, he appeared on the conspiracy network InfoWars two years ago, which described him as “one of the young stars of the conservative movement” and had him talk about his protests in Hong Kong.
- There are unverified direct messages being released that show him claiming he was going to make this joke on stage ahead of time and posting them in the moments leading up to it.
- Turns out he follows me on Twitter, so I’ve asked him to verify his identity and comment on why he did what he did on stage, and I’ll update if I hear back.
Of course, what he said when he got up there wasn’t tied to Hong Kong, and his references to “Reformed Orthodox Rabbi Bill Clinton,” while they don’t make sense, seem like they might be tied to some kind of anti-Semitism and Clinton-. centered conspiracy of which there are a thousand variants online. Or is he just a kid trolling.
But it’s more than trolling, because for Keighley and The Game Awards, a show last seen by 85 million people in 2021, this represents a serious security breach. While the kid just got up there and talked nonsense, it’s easy to imagine a different scenario where a troubled kid took the stage in a bulky black coat during an event watched by tens of millions of people full of industry celebrities and things they could have had. he’s gone… very badly, if he had bad intentions. After that there will be security checks, as well as an examination of how he got on the show in the first place, how he was fit to walk on stage, why he was up there for so long and why was it it even allowed him to speak without cutting off his microphone.
So, this is what we know so far. He’s a kid who’s done this kind of thing before, but now, on the biggest stage in the industry. We’ll see what happens from here and I’ll update with any news.
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