By Diego Higuera
Mega64 has given the internet some of the funniest, if not downright insane, videos to come out of the minds of members and creators Rocco Botte, Derrick Acosta, Shawn Chatfield, and Garrett Hunter. Many fans have literally grown up with their crazy antics, watching them prank others in real life dressed up as video game characters in random places across San Diego and beyond.
The group have become iconic figureheads of a niche genre of video game internet history and to that end have carried on a legacy for 2 decades cementing themselves as a beloved series. Coming from selling DVDs of their shows to running a YouTube channel with more than 600 thousand subscribers, Mega64 has remained popular for a very long time and for that reason had a San Diego Comic Con panel full of cheering fans.
The panel started as most Mega64 shows go, from 0 to 100 in less than 5 seconds. A monitor showed an ominous video of a man walking through the desert and finding a safe house imbedded in the ground. The man descends in and begins to file through belongings until he finds an old CD binder. Upon opening it a bunch of CDs are slotted, to the cheers and laughter of attendees, and each CD has written on it in black sharpie the names of all the projects Mega64 has worked on. The video cut and went into a tribute video of clips of all their past videos throughout the group’s 20 year history.
Then Rocko, Shawn, Derrick, and Garrett rushed in, high fiving fans and getting the crowd worked up. Rocko stood out dressed in a Tron costume, with lights blaring and arms waving.
The panel was going smoothly until alarms started blaring. The audience thought it was a bit, but as it turns out like all things in Mega64 you can never expect things to go normally. The panel had to be evacuated and even then fans were willing to stay behind. Nobody knew for sure if it was a false alarm, and to quote an attendee, “We are willing to die for this,” to the laughter of the crowd.
Eventually things were cleared up, attendees returned, and even the staff had to come back in. At that point the panel had only 15 minutes left, and in those 15 minutes Mega64 was going to make sure the fans got what they came for. The group announced their farewell tour would begin soon for the west coast, then showed a bunch of strange mini commercials they made for the 2020 movie Money Plane directed by Andrew Lawrence.
The panel then opened up to questions from fans. This went back and forth with Mega64 answering questions with jokes or continuing bits with their fans, until Botte’s father came up to the microphone to remind everyone that, “They had no help from us, they built this on their own with no one’s help.” The crowd cheered, thus ending the panel to the cheer of the fans celebrating 20 years of Mega64.
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