Super Best Friends Play

» see youtube.com/user/TheSw1tcher as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Super Best Friends Play was two men from Montreal arguing about a video game while playing it badly, recorded in long takes and uploaded whole. Matt Kowalewski had worked as a quality assurance tester at studios including Eidos-Montréal. Pat Boivin had a psychology degree and a job bagging groceries. They called themselves Two Best Friends Play as a joke about their own dynamic.

It came out of a Kirby's Epic Yarn session. Kowalewski invited Boivin over to play a cheerful children's platformer, and the recording of two adults taking it far too seriously was the thing that worked. Machinima picked them up, and from 2011 the series ran as part of that network on its own account, TheSw1tcher. Woolie Madden and Liam Allen-Miller came in later, and Allen-Miller left in 2016.

By the end the channel had passed 750,000 subscribers and 600 million views, which put it among the biggest Let's Play operations on YouTube with no hit game attached to it. The influence ran the other direction. After their Yakuza 4 playthrough, Boivin said sales of the game on Amazon went up 700 percent, and their series on Metal Wolf Chaos is a real part of why a Japan-only Xbox title from 2004 eventually got a Western release.

There was a podcast, the Super Best Friendcast, and around it the kind of audience that writes its own vocabulary. It had a name for itself, the Best Friends Zaibatsu, taken from the group and then kept by the people watching.

~ the record ~

~ what the format was ~

The Let's Play had two modes in those years. One was instructional, somebody showing you how to get through a game. The other was company: a recording of people in a room reacting to something, where the game is the excuse for the room. Super Best Friends was entirely the second kind, and the appeal rested on two specific people liking each other on camera for eight years.

What is being sold there is something I had in a physical room rather than on a screen. Between 2002 and 2005 the internet cafes in Turkey were where anything multiplayer happened, mostly Counter-Strike, and the argument about the game was most of the entertainment: the shouting, and somebody getting up to look at another monitor. By 2011 the cafe years were over for me, the machine and the connection were at home, and the room had quietly stopped existing. Being offered a recording of other people's version of it is a strange trade.

Machinima was dying through the same years. The network that signed them went through layoffs and a sale to Warner Bros. in 2016, and most of the people it had put under contract either went independent or went away. Super Best Friends had already moved to running their own account, so the archive outlived the network that had built the audience.

~ the last video ~

On Sunday 16 December 2018 a video called "Super Best Friends (FINAL)" went up on TheSw1tcher. Madden, Kowalewski and Boivin each recorded a separate segment. Madden said "Matt and Pat are no longer friends" and put it down to the business side eating the friendship the whole operation had been made out of. Nobody was bought out and nothing was taken down.

The channel was left up as an archive and is still there, at around 700,000 subscribers and 751 million views in the middle of 2026. Each of them kept working: Madden as Woolie Versus, Kowalewski as Matt McMuscles, who also shipped a beat 'em up called The TakeOver in 2019, and Boivin on Twitch. The podcast continued under a new name. The subreddit passed 80,000 members in 2021, three years after the last upload.

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