Local English man is sent to hospital after playing a video game that triggered repressed memories from the 1980s.

I feel like Jon's the type of landlord to say that a flat is perfectly fine while the bed's infested and the boiler's broken. Because he just can't see the problem.

The game automatically wins points for providing Jon an excuse to give a history lesson.

"I promise, I'll get a proper job tomorrow" How you know Jon's from the Midlands

everyone's talking about the socio-economic situation of 1980's Britain, but disregarding the direst thing of all: that 1:1:1 concrete mix Jon made

I'm pretty sure that the reason you're hygiene goes down while carrying items is meant to represent you sweating from working hard (hence the water dribbling on screen) and not meaning that the item is filthy.

Jon: Starts game Jon 8:28 minutes in: considering robbing a church.

UK and 1980 are 2 things you never want to hear within 3 words of eachother.

Such a cheerful thing like this is just the thing to take your mind off of current horrible events...economically devastated communities, ya say? Well shit

Next time Jon plays a sheep farming sim on the Falklands, and a Flower shop tycoon sit in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

"History with Jon" and "Tour a Dystopia with Jon" are some of my favorite programs

I'd love to watch Jon build a house while talking about his life growing up back during this time period.

As a construction worker I thought your terminology was hilarious, just for future reference, cement is the powder that binds everything together and makes it solid, concrete is something you can make with cement, basic concrete mix is 1,2,3. 1 part cement, 2 parts sand and 3 parts aggregate, so a stronger mix would have more cement and a basic mortar mix would be 1,4 so 1 part cement to 4 parts sand, great game so far.

Grandson of a miner here and oh boy this reminds me of him going off on one about the mines.

Margret thatcher: appears This village: why do i hear boss music

Jon: *plays a game set in a mining town in the 80s with rows of terraced housing and brutalist shops and public buildings* My unemployed self, sitting in Accrington, a derelict former textile mill town in Lancashire with high unemployment, low average income, and high rates of alcohol-related hospital admissions: It's like the lockdown never happened!

The newspaper that Jimmy was reading was a genuine front page, but from 1980 not 1983. Pretty significant as it was the introduction of Diana Spencer to the world.

*Thatcher fires dozens of shots into the chest of North UK towns and cities* "Why would the poor and Irish do this?"

I live in the north west, can confirm there's still a bunch of small towns that look like this. Like Threads with more vape shops.

I was born in Newcastle in '95, just just after, but my parents have stories of growing up in this, and my grandparents have stories of living through our. They all hate Thatcher unsurprisingly.

"I think I... I think I'm climbing the ladder I'm currently carrying..." I mean, that sounds like a pretty accurate summary of the Thatcher government plan for how people could get out of poverty to me...

>the UK >1980s >mining town >Thatcher is not a gender-neutral bathroom yet Oh no, this is gonna get dark real quick, isn’t it?

It's British "My Summer Car," so I guess it's "Me Summer Car"

In a future episode Jon will introduce the Open Concept Bathroom in the 80s.

8:13 Jon's inner midlander showed 'Nip up here, ooo ello'.

The Oasis is 100% based on the arcade that is in my North West home town, same logo and everything (9:00) its literally a copy and paste of the same building - here's the address: Oasis Entertainments Ltd, 257 Marine Rd Central, Morecambe

As someone with a background in construction, it's a pain to watch Jon mix "concrete". And I love it.

Watching Jon occasionally use more Midlands/Northern terms naturally during this video is great

The genius that is Black Adder premiered in this year

History Lessions with Jon. Nice.

My grandad was a coal miner.. He's talked about it a few times. He had to drop out of school early to go through it. He's always really supportive about me in uni and finishing my course, even if he doesn't fully understand it

This makes realize I want to hear Jon give lectures about socioeconomics

Grew up in Middlesbrough in the wake of Thatcher and from what little I've seen of the game so far seems spot on

The game was actually published by the yogscast, which I only just found out.

This is the weirdest Animal Crossing game. At least the core gameplay is still there, setting up a house with furniture you found lying around outside, selling anything not nailed down, doing chores for neighbors.

I'm a handyman and just...watching Jon figure this stuff out is so pure. Brings me lots of joy lol.

Could e set somewhere in Yorkshire, since "Sheffingham" could easily be split in to "Sheffield" and "Rotherham" which are so close together they're practically holding hands. Or well... I guess Sheffield + Birmingham could make more sense to be combined for that name, I guess. :P Let's just say... "Generic Northern/Midlands-esque" area.

In which Jon becomes even more British than normal, and those of us across the pond just smile, nod, and giggle at the various bits of slang.

Please please PLEASE make a series, reminds me so much of rural Ireland! This game hit the nostalgia that I didn’t know existed!

Once the game gets a bit further along in development, I wouldn't hate to see more of this one. Seems like a fun livestream candidate.

That intro took me right back to my primary school history lessons. I live in the Welsh Valleys AKA the heart of the British mining industries 90% of our local history involves mines in some way.

Actually cried with laughter when Jon couldn't close his door 😂

Jon: some of these communities still haven’t recovered DECADES later Me (an American): *cries in red-lining*

Early enough it ain't listed yet! I'm happy with that. History lesson about the UK straight away? MUCH ACCEPTED!!

Thanks Jon! I lived in former mining towns my whole life right up until I moved to Texas. Nobody outside the UK seems to know we ever had miners. Nobody outside the South East knows there was any mining going on outside the Midlands and the North, but Kent is basically wall to wall former-mining-village ghost towns that nobody ever talks about. I used to volunteer at Dover Museum and one of the things we did there was help salvage records of disappearing mining communities. They have their own cultures, they never moved on and they don't like outsiders, so now they're withering away as the miners get older and older, shrinking to nothing in the villages they used to own. They were getting invited across the iron curtain to learn about communism, their unions ran whole towns, and they fought medieval-style battles against the police, but it seems like everybody's just going to forget all of it before they're even dead.

Couple of neat Easter eggs: The newspaper ‘The Moon’ is a reference to UK paper The Sun, ironic as the Scouser holds it and that paper is REVILED in Liverpool for their coverage of the Hillsboroough disaster. Landlord’s Super is a reference to the strong cheap beer Tennants Super.

OMG, i was in my early 30s in the 80s, and I became an architect. Thanks Billions for this Video, Keep the good work. Love it.

I come from a mining town in County Durham. Thank you for bringing some education in this video, it's genuinely wonderful and very informative to those who wouldn't know what happened. Edit: £4.00 an hour in 1983? That's £13.80 an hour today which is WELL above the standard living wage.

Your statement about mining towns dying is pretty much universal. It happens in rural America all the time. I live in a town that was, at one point, promised two factories based on the surrounding resources. Neither factory is open today, but the town survived because it grew to have a working economy without them, though the only thing the town actually does now is support the population living here. Most of the jobs here just focus on the local community. Unions have never affected us too much in my state because we have right-to-work laws.

I remember coming from Wiltshire my dad lost his job in the 80's. It was an awful time. Cheers Maggie.

That equal part concrete mix is probably the most egregious thing he did all episode

Why is this the most educational video I have ever watched?

You missed one Nail in the door. It glimmers. :)

That cement mixing animation 😂 36:38

The moment you said “set in a 1980’s mining town” I winced.

That is a FANTASTIC history lesson that perfectly summarises the era. Although it says something about the British psyche. If it was any other country, the closure of the major employer in a town would mean the town gets abandoned and the people move elsewhere. There are hundreds of ghost towns dotted all over the world where the local economy collapses and people abandon it to find work somewhere else. I wonder why that doesn't happen in Britain? It could be a combination of strong community spirit, British stubbornness, loyalty to your roots and the last remnants of the class system. It could also be that each town is so close to other towns that commuting to another town entirely is relatively easy. I think it's because most British people wouldn't dream of moving away from where they grew up. But there are always exceptions to every generalisation. My family have always moved around for work. My maternal grandfather was an oil engineer, he spent a lot of time in Georgia, USA at one point, my mother grew up while they were all living in Kenya before they all moved back to the UK. My father grew up in Manchester, moved to London for work and then my family moved to Cardiff when the work moved there too. I guess that's why I always wondered why the people in those towns didn't just move to find work. I have a better understanding these days.

The Full Mounty-esque soundtrack is very on point too! I wonder if Sheffingham was disguised Sheffield...Maybe that's a bit too big. Continuity fail, that's not what a phone-box looked like in 1983, they were still all red then weren't they. Didn't change to the style depicted in the game until some-time in the 90's iirc.

40 minutes in and you’ve sold me on this game, it seems actually quite fun to play

This is exactly how i imagine John would try to build a house , start off strong and then it goes horribly wrong at lightspeed , i love it , more John , more

Can we just stop to talk about how Jon managed to lift an entire sofa on his shoulder and carry it out of town?

Transition from resource extraction economies. An issue facing West Virginia, Alberta, and other communities currently. 20:35 So in Britain the phrase is "pull yourself up by a ladder"? 46:00 Bricklaying is hard.

So so accurate even the pub floor is spot on 😆

That intro has me thinking... I'd LOVE a "history lesson" podcast from you XD

FLIPPING HECK MY BACK’S GONE?!?! Jon! I had no idea that this was actually a manner of speaking specifically related to your home in Britain! And the history lesson before hand... I mean, I’ve seen Billy Elliot, but I’m definitely an Kansan. I had no idea how ubiquitous that experience was for people. I think this is my favorite let’s play you’ve done, and I’ve watched you for YEARS! Thank you so much for sharing this bit of yourself. More than entertaining, it was enlightening and enriching. Thank you, sir.

I heard of a guy who did pretty well in the eighties. He would turn up early to the job centre, and if there was a job he fancied he would take the job card. When he turned up for an interview the employers would be surprised they had so few applicants.

All the stuff you, 'lifted', is actually for jobs you get from the job centre. The pub wall for instance uses the bricks you put into your house. The ladders you took from the church are for a job to repair the roof. Plus, all the stuff you find like sofas, TVs and cabinets can be taken to the, 'rag and bone', man, (who's situated just the other side of the bridge), and sold so you can buy the supplies you need.

Just watched Northernlion's video on this game and in the comments someone mentioned your video. Nice to see it because you know the dialect and are able to explain what the heck people are saying.

I would like to see more of the adventures of this rogue kleptomaniacle handyman capable of running at ~20kph

As a Grandchild of people who grew up around the mines and spent many childhood trips out walking around the nature reserves and disused railways that criss cross the old pits, this feels oddly nostalgic... got some family who still live in what was a mining town...And outside of the modern housing estates, theres just...nothing changed since the pits evidently shut their doors, the train station is gone... it was once a 4 track station. Now only 1 track remains that gets a single freight train everyday. In exciting developments though theres a fun chemical factory that sends its fumes down upon the town if the winds blowing the right way.

" need to toss all this off real quick" - Jon 2020

I loved that little history lesson! My mother grew up around Manchester in the 70s and 80s, and she's told me some of it, but she dipped out of the UK in the late 80s and came to America. Still, whenever she goes home to visit, just like you said, there are a lot of rural villages and what not that are still shells of what they were in the sixties.

There is a highway around London called the M-25... ledgend has it that everywhere outside it is a barren wasteland stuck in the 1970s

Oh my god, he's not even started the game yet, but he's perfectly described the town I grew up in. It used to be there were 2 industries, coal and glass, the coal is gone and the glass is going.

I'd absolutely love to see more of this game from you.

Please keep playing this. I am enjoying it.

Anyone else notice how the game's made to look like a camcorder recording from the 80s? You got chromatic abberation at the edges from the cheap lens, there are aliasing artifacts from the scanlines, and then of course the low res textures. Very interesting stylistic choice, definitely fits the game.

Funnily enough, quite possibly the most internationally recognized thing related to the miner's strikes of 1980s Britain can be found in the form of, of all things, a film about a young boy from a small mining town in the throes of a strike who wants to become a ballet dancer. It's called Billy Elliot and it first hit theatres in 2000, where it was nominated for three Academy Awards and was overall so successful, that they adapted it into a musical (with music composed by none other than Elton John) on the West End five years later and took it to Broadway another two after that. In the end, I guess you never know just how important events in history will be remembered.

I would love to see this game again! Gotta love the slightly janky my summer car type games, and this setting is fertile ground for games!

When he was giving that speech in the beginning all I could think of was "Hey, isn't that what happened Detroit?"

What a coincidence. In my area of the USA there's old mining towns as well. Events that happened were different but resulted similarly in there being majority poverty in these towns. Also something to mention. These houses were usually not very solidly built and often are hazardous in a fire and will likely engulf pretty quick. I do appreciate how we kind of share that in common.

I'd love to see a series, such a fun little game even for early access

"The safest bet for any concrete mix is four-two-one: four parts crushed rock (aggregate); two parts sand; and one part cement" ( i think you can put washing up liquid into the mix also but cant remember what its for) - another guide i see says this: "as a general guide a standard concrete mix would be 1 part cement to 2 parts sand to 4 parts aggregates. For foundations, a mix of 1 part cement to 3 parts sand to 6 parts aggregates can be used."

I grew up and still live in swadlincote, a lovely area South of Derby in Derbyshire. From my understanding as I was born after the Thatcher years, is that it had a rich mining industry, but also pottery as clay and the likes were a secondary export. I live on the outskirts so people pretty much only travel through to get to places like Burton, a much bigger town/mini city straddling the Trent, but also to get to bigger cities like derby, Nottingham, Leicester, and Birmingham. Burton has a rich history of being a market town, and as such many railways pass through there. There are also a lot of active quarries as well as inactive ones, with the closest being Albert village and Albert village lake, which was a man-made lake converted from an old quarry. Similarly, there are a lot of lakes and nature reserves, as I sit right in the heart of the national forest. If you look at pictures from the 70s of the national forest, dusty old abandoned mines and barren hillsides have been turned into green, luscious fields and forests. There are even Victorian era monuments and things left behind, like strips of dissused rails and old iron, rusty lamp posts. Even old pottery houses and brick buildings from the 1700s. In a way, you could call the shutting down of the mines a good thing, given the beauty it has now transformed into. Towns have had to adapt to this change also, focusing on commercial industries and services primarily, while also relying on trade and private businesses. If you take a walk down the lower and middle class areas in election season, you will always find lots of labour and UKIP posters. Some green party too. On the upper side along the main roads with fancy private gated estates and communities, there are obviously more conservative voters. Considering that our current MP is a conservative member of parliament, I'd imagine that the area has amassed a considerable amount of wealth since the 80s, something that you would possibly laugh at at the time. Within three to four decades, people are now more well off than they ever were. Obviously before the technology that exists now, mining and manual labour was the dominant career path. my mum worked in a bank and had to learn to use a typewriter, which was about as high as you could climb back then. you couldn't exactly make it big as a nationally respected photographer or artist either unless you lived in a big city like london, let alone being recognised outside the county. But as new job prospects opened up, it becomes clear that the mining industry and poverty was what was holding the area back all along. It also used to be quite rough, and I can't even imagine counting the amount of pubs. My dad could tell you many stories of how leaving school at 14 and a job at 15 was the norm, or the local ruffian families, or even the countless amounts of fist fights night after night. He even told me once that back in his day, "people fought with their fists". But whenever you see a stabbing on the news, he comments on how cowardly people are these days, as if fist fights were honest and a manly way of settling an argument. That says a lot about the background he comes from. But, you'd be there all day. Sorry it's long but thank you for reading, just thought I'd put my two pence in on the subject of the video :)

i spend like 20 minutes trying to figure out where that weird beeping is coming from.... it'S the watch in game o.O

Please do more, this is marvellous

I can not wait to see more of this game one day. I am not British, but something about this game is charming in an eerie way.

Oh damn, as soon as Jon walked into the unfinished house, I got flashbacks to the Windows maze screensaver.

Is jon secretly Northern? i assume they beat the accent out of him at oxbridge but there are hints...

As someone who grew up in rural eastern Kentucky (incidentally, quite near where Fallout 76 is set; visited the IRL Camden Park many times!) I can relate to the history lesson at the start, Jon. Coal mining was the foundation of the local economy there for decades. Entire towns were built, thrived, and died based on the profitability of the mines there. Now that industry in general has and continues to move away from coal, the mining industry here is like a slowly dying patient on life support. Having seen firsthand the terrible things mining has done to the land and people there (including my coal miner grandfather, who died from black lung), I say we can't pull the plug fast enough.

Wonderful game and charming introduction to it. Cheers Jon.

ROFL, brilliant mate, and your coal summary was incredible. Humour, and education all in a nice package. Brit humor once again, just freaking brilliance in a bottle. Mate could you do a series on this, or have you done the whole hog?

Please make this a series!! When it becomes fully available, of course...

Beautiful live stream oppitunity and very satisfying to watch

While this was a great video, I think my favorite part was that it actually taught me about hey the Thatcher era was so bad.

'Hammer: A Brummie Screwdriver'.

Thanks Jon.. Greetings from Barnsley. This is wonderful ❤

This takes me back to being a kid growing up in Ireland and breaking into abandoned houses and flats and gutting them for copper wire , legal ? No , Fun? Yes . Dangerous , abso fucing lutely

This is so weirdly addicting to watch, hoping for a pt 2

This game is awesome! Would love to see more of it!

From across the pond, thanks for the great history lesson intro!