17776: A Guide to Jon Bois

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So, I see a ton of people getting into 17776, and for good reason it’s fuckin awesome.  I’ve been a fan of jon bois since I first discovered breaking madden years ago, and at this point I’ve read way too much of his stuff, so I’m gonna write up a quick guide to his most well known stuff.

If you’ve heard of him, it’s probably due to his series Breaking Madden, in which he takes the Madden video game and plays it in ways it was never meant to be played.  What happens if you score a touchdown every single in game second?  What happens if you try to score a touchdown using only glitches in the game that allow you to throw the players downfield instead of the ball?  What happens if you put a team of superhuman monsters against a team of impossibly low stat children?  It’s a beautiful series.  This link has most of the episodes, check out anything with BEEFTANK, either of the super bowls, or the Mark Sanchez century, some of my favorites.

He later followed up Breaking Madden with NBA-Y2K, which does a similar thing to the NBA 2K video games.  The best parts of this are when he simulated the death of the NBA in two different directions, through it never getting a single good player ever again, and through it only ever getting absolutely perfect players.  

His more recent writing has been mostly confined to 2 youtube series, Pretty Good and Chart Party.  Both are basically vague formats for him to talk about “stories that are pretty good” and anything involving Charts.  Check out 222-0, a story about the most horrifyingly malicious sports game to ever happen, Troy State 253, DeVry 141, a story about something more beautiful then terrifying, or Every NFL Score Ever, a tutorial on the art of Scoragami, watching for football games with scores never been scored before.

For stuff that’s more similar to 17776, we have “What the heck is a catch in the NFL, anyway? An explainer

“, which you can see start of the weird format and “pretending to be a normal article” base 17776 uses.  And then, of course, there is the Tim Tebow CFL Chronicles, a 45000 word absurdist sports fanfiction about an imaginary football play that takes place across the ENTIRETY of Canada, and then some.  If you’re looking for a long fictional story to read while you wait for the next update, check this out.

He’s written a ton of others stuff, if you know of something add it to this!