Academy Award winner Al Pacino may have unlocked the 2022 Game Awards, a night of industry praise and expensive marketing for the biggest games around, but it was a new kind of internet celebrity who closed it out. I like to nominate this award to my reformed Orthodox Rabbi Bill Clinton, declared an immature kid with long hair who appeared onstage unexpectedly after Elden Ring was crowned Game of the Year. He was wearing an ill-proper coat, creeping up on stage behind the Elden Ring development team.
Security followed, and chaos followed online as everyone tested to figure out what the hell had just happened during host Geoff Keighley’s otherwise heavily produced three-hour event. But this was outlying from the first time the young guy, whose name Kotaku believes to be Matan Even, had sprung to fast internet stardom through internet-pilled trolling, even if it might have been his most bizarre.
After the ritual finished, Keighley tweeted that the individual who interrupted the occasion had been arrested. Five hours after, yet, Even was already tweeting. Today there is a mess of talks, and beliefs, he wrote. More information will be released on all fronts preferably than later.
When questioned about what occurred after the incident, the LAPD media relations office disputed Keighley’s account, saying a report had been taken but no arrest was made. When asked to square that, a spokesperson for The Game Awards trolling delivered a more detailed account.
They said Even was taken to a “secure area” inside the Microsoft Theater by TGA security staff where he was then asked by venue security as well as TGA-hired onsite LAPD officers. They stated he was then taken into custody and shifted to a local police station for booking by the TGA-hired LAPD officers in their patrol vehicle. When questioned about that version of events, a representative from the LAPD would only ensure that the individual had been transported to a station. Since no arrest was made, it’s not clear how long he was held for investigation.
While this may be the first time Even threatened arrest, it was far from his first publicity stunt. Before stealing his way on stage at one of the gaming industry’s largest events of the year in front of an audience of over a million people, Even crashed a BlizzCon board, went viral for pranking the L.A. Clippers fan cam, and appeared on right-wing plot show Infowars at least twice.
The Clippers stunt came in October 2019. Amid the Hong Kong protests, Even momentarily appeared on the fan cam at the team’s home stadium, only to instantly hold up a black t-shirt that read, Battle for Freedom Stand with Hong Kong. China had blacklisted the Houston Rockets after their general manager tweeted out a picture of the exact t-shirt exclusively a couple of weeks before.
The next month, Even interrupted a BlizzCon 2019 panel with a matching message with help of the Hong Kong protests. Blizzard had suspended Overwatch pro-Chung “Blitzchung” Ng Wai the earlier month for doing the same, and along with the NBA and other organizations, came under fire at the point of its loss to stand up for Hong Kong’s democratic protesters.
As Motherboard points out, this made Actually a ripe target to be co-opted by right-wing political actors who noticed the opportunity to attack seeming liberal hypocrisy on the issue. But Actual was also clearly already a great fan of at least one of Infowars’ hosts, Owen Shroyer. He said as greatly in a 2019 appearance, calling Shroyer his “favorite person on Infowars,” while in the second appearance in 2020 Shroyer called Even one of the young stars of the conservative movement.
Earlier to last night, Even’s last tweets were from March 2021 and were about worries over the rise in hate crimes toward Asian Americans. Infowars, meanwhile, has caught founder Alex Jones successfully sued for hundreds of millions by the parents of the Sandy Hook school shooting marks. Most newly, however, the site attempted to hold court with Ye, the rapper once known as Kanye West, who used the appearance to praise Hitler, a heel turn that comes amid a greater wave of antisemitism in traditional circles.
It was in front of that backdrop that some worried Even’s stunt was privately some racist 4Chan deep cut. But that does not arise to be the problem. Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, who interviewed Even prematurely today, said he seemed to understand Hebrew, and called him “almost certainly a Jewish prankster.
He’s also disavowing his earlier Infowars appearances, even while continuing his search in messages with other journalists. I never was an avid watcher nor am I now,” he pointed to Motherboard. He reportedly moved on to call Clinton “a true inspiration, particularly in the gaming space.”
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