If you watch a TikTok video by @dem_bruddaz, you might experience a strange mix of recognition and disorientation. You’ll see someone running down a street, but there’s something off about it. Why do they turn at perfect 45-degree angles? Why are their gestures so exaggerated? And is that the Grand Theft Auto theme song playing in the background? It’s almost like watching a video game. But @dem_bruddaz are actually real people, brothers Orlando Murayire, Fernando Shami, Freddy Sheja, and Aristide Shema from western France. They have gained a large following by imitating the movements of characters from the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas with uncanny accuracy. As dancers, they have a knack for identifying and replicating the subtle nuances of movement, which makes their videos so unsettling.
While some commenters may doubt it, @dem_bruddaz are indeed human. They grew up immersed in hip-hop, Afrobeat, and dancehall, which explains their comfort with capturing the distinct animations of the game. Even though the clips may seem unreal, creating them feels natural to the brothers; it feels like dancing.
In a world where our screens resemble video games and video games seem more lifelike, social media savants have found success in creating content that blurs the line between the two. Over the summer, NPC streamers gained attention for repeating phrases commonly heard from video game characters, earning real money in the process. However, dancers are uniquely skilled at mimicking the robotic movements of video game characters, which allows creators like @dem_bruddaz and Polish dancers Nicole Hoff and Oskar Szymkowski (@loczniki) to capture the distinct, weird, and funny essence of video games. While NPC streaming may confuse non-gamers, game parody videos by dancers are more relatable and entertaining to a wider audience.
Dance has always been central to TikTok, and the culture on the platform has recently shifted towards a more fun and silly aesthetic. Dr. Jessica Maddox of the University of Alabama believes that these game parody videos align with the desire to return to the earlier aesthetic of TikTok. They blend silliness with the finesse of a dancer, offering a unique combination of entertainment.
Hoff and Szymkowski, who specialize in a style of popping called animation, were inspired by dance, not video games, to create their first game parodies. Their most popular videos imagine what it would be like to have an NPC girlfriend, capturing the quirks of non-player characters from Skyrim. Hoff and Szymkowski stumbled upon the game while searching for video game glitches on YouTube. The odd movements in video games often arise from the limitations of gameplay animation. Animators try to keep up with players’ button inputs, resulting in characters performing actions that real people wouldn’t do. Additionally, motion-capture sessions with human actors can introduce a floaty quality to the movements. These are challenges that dancers, with their expertise in analyzing movement, can help solve. Game studios sometimes bring in dancers for motion-capture sessions, and animators may refer to dance videos when choreographing complex movements.
The success of these videos can be attributed to both nostalgia and the appeal of the nostalgia-driven content on TikTok. As video game animation improves over time, the glitches and pecularities that made earlier games strange are disappearing. The choice to parody Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas instead of the more recent Grand Theft Auto V was a deliberate one for @dem_bruddaz. They wanted to connect with a wider age range, from older people who played the game as kids to younger audiences who find it funny.
The popularity of these videos has opened up opportunities for the creators. @dem_bruddaz have created ads for Kia and Gucci, while Hoff and Szymkowski have created a course on how to move like an NPC and have appeared in a music video. They are also working on longer scripted NPC films for YouTube. These video game imitation videos continue to gain millions of views and hundreds of thousands of likes, catering to the internet’s insatiable appetite for content that blurs the line between reality and the digital world. Dancers excel at blurring this line, and their videos succeed when viewers initially mistake them for real people before realizing they’re from a game.