There’s the elaborate performance art, and then there’s any famous Twitch buffoon that Jerma made over the weekend. In a truly inspired broadcast, he parodied the recent Pokémon booster pack craze by heading out into the Nevada desert and pretending to excavate a chest seemingly full of unopened Pokémon cards from 1997. It turned out to be something different: Grotto Beasts. Spoiler: Grotto Beasts is not and never has been a real series, but that hasn’t stopped the Jerma community from taking the joke and running with it to the farthest reaches of the internet.
The broadcast, which took place on Saturday, set a new high bar for the phrase “commitment to a little.” Jerma went out into the Nevada desert with a bulldozer, a production crew, and a paleontologist from the Nevada Science Center. Dressed in an archaeologist outfit that was definitely just a Poe Dameron Halloween costume and scarf, he unearthed a wooden chest that his grandfather had apparently left behind. It contained a treasure trove of ’90s snacks, which Jerma joked were disappointing because Dunkaroos, Surge sodas and the like returned after “a lot of people complained on Twitter,” and a box of “collectible monster card packs” 1997. Jerma, who never broke character, lost his shit. After all, old Pokémon cards can sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars now.
He proceeded to delicately open the box, only to find booster packs for something called Grotto Beasts.
“Grandpa, you chose…” he said in a tone of false perplexity. “This shit didn’t even get a full season on TV.”
However, once he started opening the packages, he came across some legitimately interesting creature designs, like Veggiroo, a kangaroo made of vegetables, and Meowdy, the cowboy cat. “These are really fucking cool,” he said.
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Of course, everyone in the chat already knew it was a joke; that was the fun of it. Additionally, evidence of the true origin of the letters was hidden from view, with each letter displaying the Twitter username of the artist who drew it. On Twitter, artists were delighted at how well their work was being received.
“I’m so overwhelmed with the response on Grotto Beasts from the @ Jerma985 broadcast!” Hollulu, one of the artists who worked on the project, said on Twitter. “It was an honor to work on them, and couldn’t have been done without the other fantastic artists, @Sturnerart, @melscribbles, @BellymouthArt, who took your breath away !!”
That’s an understatement, given the time frame they were working with. In a DM, Melscribbles told Kotaku that “we managed to get it all done in just over a week.”
The stream felt like it had been planned for much longer, with a full second segment in which Jerma and a legitimate paleontologist, Joshua Bonde of the Nevada Science Center, opened geodes and examined the crystal formations within. Bonde patiently explained the air and water combinations that had caused unique patterns to form over the course of thousands of years, even as Jerma occasionally produced gag geodes that contained things like Minecraft plastic diamonds and a Stardew Valley seed packet. Jerma, meanwhile, reacted to Bonde’s explanations with real enthusiasm, saying that if he had been able to do this when he was 20 years old, he would now be a paleontologist and not a streamer. It was fun, healthy, and strangely educational entertainment, and it was completely unlike anything anyone had done before on Twitch.
After the broadcast ended, fans immediately latched onto Grotto Beasts. It didn’t take them long to discover an official website (apparently created by Jerma) that looks like a 1997 Geocities page, with a registration information form promising a “mid-1997” launch. If you dig into the code on the page, you can even find the email address of a webmaster, which some fans have reached out to in an attempt to get a job. Others took matters into their own hands, continuing the idea that Grotto Beasts was definitely a true ’90s Poké-wannabe with their own art and period-appropriate musical themes, which they’ found ‘in cupboards and on tape tapes. cassette, as well as a full Discord and subreddit where users create monsters and mechanics to pretend they’re nostalgic in real time.
For example, a user on the subreddit posted about a card called “Sk-8-ter Shroom” with an ability that allows him to “Take his opponent’s Grotto Beast and shred it in front of his face.”
“I took this card from my friend, but he continued to use the skill,” said another user, with a false sense of nostalgia.
All of this came incredibly fast, with songs and full cards materializing within hours of Jerma’s broadcast ended on Saturday. If you weren’t aware of the joke, you could fool yourself into believing that people have actually been sitting on hazy memories of an unlucky Pokémon clone for over two decades. All this from a stream of parodies that he taught people about the rocks. These days it’s as rare as a holographic Razzleposs, but sometimes the internet is fine.
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