GrayStillPlays

"I make bad choices in games and cause pixel people to become sad."

GrayStillPlays is a YouTube-based Let's Player who has since starting his channel branched out into videos of not just playing games, but actively trying to break them -- by pursuing bizarre and strange goals and strategies, or by hacking a game's XML data, or using over-the-top mods, or all of the above at once -- with the intent of producing unexpected but hilarious and entertaining results. He also enjoys diving into early-access games and indie simulation games of dubious quality and enjoying their inevitable malfunctions.

In early 2021 he was best known for running destruction-test scenarios (and the cast of characters he subjects to them) in The Sims 4. He is also known for accepting viewer challenges in games like Grand Theft Auto V, Happy Wheels and Guts and Glory which allow users to design boards or courses and share them with other players. Gray's persistence and ability to beat even scenarios designed to be unwinnable endears him an audience of literally millions.

In late 2020, he also began exploring smartphone games he found to be particularly bizarre, stupid, or both. And in 2022 he began specifically commissioning the creation of hilarious and outrageous GTA V challenge courses based on feedback from his viewers. By 2023, his format had evolved to focus almost exclusively on challenge boards in GTA and Happy Wheels as well as abusing mobile games, particularly those that are Pay to Win.

His YouTube channel can be found here. He also has a Twitter account and a Discord.

Compare The Spiffing Brit.


 * Arm Simulator
 * Avoid It!
 * The Baby in Yellow
 * BeamNG.Drive
 * Beware of Trains
 * Bio Inc. Redemption
 * Boxing Surgery Simulator 2000
 * Can You Steal It?
 * Car Mechanic Simulator 2018
 * Cities: Skylines
 * City Smash
 * Deadliest Catch Simulator
 * Disassembly 3D
 * Dismounting Simulator
 * Draw Story
 * Ecosystem
 * EXPERIMENT: GROCERIES
 * Farming Simulator 19
 * Fun with Ragdolls: The Game
 * Grand Theft Auto V
 * The Guild 3
 * Guts and Glory
 * Gym Simulator
 * Happy Wheels
 * It's Toilet Time
 * Lineup
 * The Long Dark
 * Metro Sim Hustle
 * Minecraft
 * My Little Blacksmith Shop
 * My Summer Car
 * One-Armed Cook
 * Papers Grade Please!
 * Planet Coaster
 * Pong Master
 * Power and Revolution 2019
 * Road Draw
 * RollerCoaster Tycoon 3
 * Room Smash
 * Sailaway
 * Short Life 2
 * Short Ride
 * The Sims 4
 * Skate 3
 * Sneak Thief 3D
 * Solar Smash
 * Stair Dismount
 * Stickman Backflip Killer 3
 * Stickman Fall Legends
 * Street Cop 3D
 * Theme Park Fun 3D
 * Tidal Tribe
 * Touch of God
 * Trailer Park Mechanic
 * Try to Fly
 * Universe Sandbox 2
 * Wildlife Park 3

"It is really hard to do a human tightrope. [ Beat] That's a sentence I really never thought I would end up saying."
 * Angrish: Is given to inarticulate verbalizations when dealing with a particularly frustrating part of a game or board.
 * Blind Idiot Translation: Never fails to Lampshade what he calls "Google Translate dialogue" in the games he plays.
 * Catch Phrases:
 * "All right, we're checking out the only game where (outrageous thing here), 'Game Name'."
 * "Rookie numbers!"
 * "More X, dammit!"
 * "More zeroes!"
 * "Not today, Satan!"
 * "I.... caaaaan doooooo thiiiiis..."
 * "Oh, penis."
 * "This board lacks fairness!"
 * "It's entirely likely this board is.... impossible."
 * "Okay, here's the plan..."
 * "Screw you, game!"
 * "...a full liquor bar!"
 * "We don't need X where we're going!"
 * "And we have a Check Point!"
 * "Baaaaaaaack to the beginning!"
 * "'Til next time, stay foxy and much love."
 * Cats Are Snarkers: The dialogue he provides for Spleens the Cat in his Sims videos frequently paints her this way.
 * Chirping Crickets: He sometimes underlines his less successful efforts at humor with a "chirping crickets" sound effect.
 * Cool Cat: His alternate characterization for Spleens.
 * Creepy Child: Never fails to quietly freak out over them when he encounters one in a badly-made simulation game.  And then there was The Baby in Yellow -- an alleged "babysitting simulator" where the child was actually.
 * Enforced Plug: Played with.  Gray occasionally is required to present a product from whose manufacturer he's accepted sponsorship; he almost always does so by trying to destroy the product with various garden tools and melee weapons.
 * Evil Laugh: Has a really resonant one that has been heard frequently in his Spring 2021 Minecraft videos.
 * Florida: Where he lives, and the inspiration for "Florida Man", a recurring character whom he uses in multiple games, most notably The Sims.  It is also one of his most frequent targets for death from space, and where he locates most of his Cities: Skylines scenarios.
 * For Science!: An increasingly common excuse (as of 2023) to justify trying to do unexpected things that games still permit.
 * Fruit Cart: Apparently considers it an imperative to deliberately run into any fruit stand he encounters on a Grand Theft Auto V challenge course, if it's at all possible.
 * Game-Breaking Bugs and Good Bad Bugs: If they do something funny, he will find them.  For instance, Trailer Park Mechanic.
 * Incendiary Exponent: His Minecraft videos from Spring 2021 feature Reginald the Duck, who is invulnerable and given to bathing in lava, after which he wanders around at the base of a column of flame.
 * A Minecraft video from May 2021 features modded, minionized wolves which are not only immune to fire, but reproduce when exposed to it.
 * Joisey: Former resident of New Jersey, and still prone to Jersey jokes.
 * Let's Play: Before he transitioned into twisting and breaking games, GrayStillPlays made more conventional Let's Play content, often spending several hours over multiple videos exploring various wide-open sandbox, survival and simulation games.  He still turns out the occasional straight "let's play" video, but they are by far outnumbered by his custom courses, "let's break the game" and "torment my sims" videos.
 * The Merch: Has an online store where one can buy T-shirts, sweatshirts, hoodies and other gear. He has also worked with Makeship.com to create limited runs of custom plushies -- as of this writing, Florida Man and Spleens the Cat from his Sims videos.  And as of 2022 he's started hawking his own brand of coffee.
 * Nice Hat: Reginald the Duck who has begun accompanying him in his Minecraft videos as of Spring 2021.  He wears a small top hat.
 * Non-Human Sidekick: Reginald the Duck from his 2021 Minecraft videos, who wears a top hat and is nigh invulnerable, and addresses Gray as "Dad" when Gray provides dialogue for him.
 * Normally I Would Be Dead Now: Frequently makes comments to this effect when his character is wounded while playing Happy Wheels boards -- usually a moment or so before they actually die.
 * Not the Way It Is Meant to Be Played: A common feature of his play-throughs, growing even more common through 2021 and 2022 with the advent of Grand Theft Auto content designed especially for him which ignores the game's plot entirely to challenge him with stunt racing courses and storylines with bizarre comedy plots.
 * Old Shame: He apparently regards some of his earliest videos -- like his extended multi-episode (semi-)serious playthrough of the game My Summer Car -- as embarrassing or crude in comparison to his current style of video.
 * Only in Florida: He constantly lampshades this trope, while selecting Florida as the location for endless simulation games like Cities: Skylines or as the target of cosmic bombardment in games like Solar Smash
 * Pay to Win: Gray frequently drops large amounts of money on games that allow you to buy resources, just so he can see what happens when you completely max things out.
 * The Power of X Compels You!:
 * In his May 31, 2021 video in which he attacks a parkour course in Grand Theft Auto V with a pink clone of the Mach 5, he activates the jump jets while intoning, "The power of rockets compels you!"
 * In August 30, 2023's "Cars vs. Custom Speedbumps in GTA 5", while driving a rustbucket of a truck: "The power of tetanus compels you!"
 * A Rare Sentence: Occasionally finds himself uttering one thanks to the circumstances of the game or board he's playing, and then immediately lampshades it:

- Which cursed ramp gives you the highest jump in GTA 5?, February 8, 2023

"Listen -- it's red. That means it's fast."
 * Red Ones Go Faster: On purchasing a new car in Avoid It!:

- When you have to drive through Ohio, April 14, 2023


 * And sometimes you just have to wear something red:

"See, now I have a helmet that's red. And as we all know, red means the vehicle will go faster. That's how physics works."

- Cars vs 1000 Speedbumps in GTA 5, September 16, 2023

"Wait. Can you cook the rat? Oh no. Oh, I feel so bad about this. But I have to do it for science, because you guys would ask if it's possible."
 * Sound Effect Bleep: Has an assortment of ... idiosyncratic ... sound effects which he uses to bleep out his occasional curse, such as porpoise chatter and squeaks.
 * Standard Snippets: In addition to the sound effects he uses, you will also hear bits of appropriate (public-domain) music like "Ride of the Valkyries".
 * Stock Sound Effects : Gray has a small library of sound effects and musical stings he uses to emphasize key moments in his videos -- or censor his language. Included among them are a male Japanese voice shouting "Nani?", Steve Carell's memetastic Big No from The Office, porpoise chatter and squeaks, the memetastic "Why are we still here? Just to suffer?" from Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, and the famous "dunk-dunk" sound effect from Law & Order.
 * Suspiciously Specific Denial: During his 2021 Minecraft videos, his frequent start-of-video claim that a nearby village was "completely legitimately" placed or spawned.
 * Talking to Himself: For many games, such as The Sims and Minecraft, Gray will frequently provide dialogue for various (non-speaking) characters.  He will also vocalize (with various audio filters) questions he presumes his viewers are asking so he can remark on what he's doing or planning.
 * There Is No Kill Like Overkill: If he can find a way to dial up the power of a weapon or tool, he will, laughing all the way.  For instance, see his series of videos for Farming Simulator 19 where he modifies various tractors and attachments to travel at the speed of sound or plow the entire game map in one pass.
 * Unusual Euphemism: Frequently blurts "oh, penis" when something goes wrong.
 * Vanity License Plate: "Danny", "Alex" and "Petey", who have been creating custom GTA V courses for him starting in 2021, have frequently been adding snide and sarcastic comments on the license plates for the various vehicles in them.
 * Video Game Cheats:
 * In 2021, he played a large number of Minecraft games with mods that gave him outrageous advantages, mostly to see how immensely he could overpower the endgame.
 * As of late 2021-early 2022, someone has been providing Gray with custom-made cheat consoles for games like City Smash, Solar Smash, and The Baby in Yellow which allow him to crank them up to ridiculous levels and add his trademark "more zeroes" to just about any variable and constant he chooses.
 * Video Game Cruelty Potential: The driving force behind his infamous Sims 4 videos, where he repeatedly subjects a common cast of characters to some nightmare scenario, just to see who will or won't survive -- or how quickly they all die.
 * To a lesser degree his delight in the virtual deaths he causes in games like Solar Smash.
 * Or any game that allows him to crash trains.
 * He also takes a delight in running over anyone in his way in the various Grand Theft Auto courses designed for him.
 * NPCs in Minecraft are lucky if he just ignores them.
 * In his April 2023 video for One-Armed Cook, when he suddenly wonders what would happen if he put the rat he found in his restaurant on the grill:


 * The Voice: Gray himself on almost all of his videos. Averted in his early playthroughs of various Virtual Reality games, where we do occasionally get to see him superimposed on the game at its end.  He has also made the occasional vlog-like videos, in which he appears on-camera to reassure viewers that he and his family are okay in the wake of various natural disasters to hit Florida.  He also makes appearances in Enforced Plugs.