AstralPhaser

AstralPhaser

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Overview

Created

9/1/2012

Discontinued

2/28/2018 (officially)

Creator

Philip Adams

Participants

Philip Adams

Subscribers

3.87K

Videos

196

Views

~523K

Channel

@AstralPhaser

AstralPhaser, originally named RSI Gamer, was a YouTube channel created by Philip Adams on September 1, 2012. According to "The Complete History Of OSFirstTimer", Philip created the channel after he was diagnosed with repetitive strain injury (RSI) earlier in 2012. Originally, the channel was called "RSI Gamer", but he quickly changed the name to "AstralPhaser" due to wanting to further distract himself from his RSI in order to help cure it.

Philip would announce the discontinuation of the AstralPhaser channel on February 28, 2018 during episode 13 of YouTube Millionaire, due to the Gaming Through the Ages series, his only active series on that channel, garnering a much smaller audience than OSFirstTimer while requiring more editing work than the OSFirstTimer videos did.

History

Original Let's Plays (2012-2015)

Philip playing the Minecraft mod "Minecraft Equivalent Exchange 2" in one of his original let's-play videos in 2012.

Philip created the AstralPhaser YouTube channel on September 1, 2012. The original goal of the channel was to help Philip cure his RSI by distracting himself from the pain by making let's-play style videos, such as his original series of the Minecraft mod "Equivalent Exchange 2", published soon after the channel's creation. According to Philip in "The Complete History Of OSFirstTimer", much of the symptoms of RSI are caused by the "nocebo effect", described by a study by the U.S. National Institute of Health (NIH) as a condition in which "information disclosure about potential side effects can itself contribute to producing adverse effects". By instead focusing on doing something fun, this seemed to help Philip cure his RSI quite quickly, as he describes being able to use the computer normally without pain in just a few months.

After curing his case of RSI, he took a break from publishing AstralPhaser videos on December 24, 2012. The channel would then be revived by Philip on November 4, 2014 in order to post gameplay videos of him trying various virtual-reality (VR) games and experiences, such as the first video of this series, "AstralPhaser Plays UE4 Rollercoaster | Oculus Rift DK2". He would publish 11 total VR videos before switching to creating a seven-part series on the game "Dig or Die" on March 12, 2015.

Gaming Through the Ages (2015-2017)

Philip would then create the series "Gaming Through the Ages" on December 4, 2015 which focused on Philip trying one game from one random console through each year in gaming history, starting in 1975 and ending in 2015, which was the current year at the time that the series was created.

On October 5, 2016, Philip would upload the final episode of "Phase 1" of the series, focusing on the game Battlefield Hardline on the PlayStation 3 console. At the end of this video, it was revealed that Philip would make a second season or "phase" of the Gaming Through the Ages series, which focused on the history of video games on home computers rather than home video game consoles. Phase 2 was scheduled to go from 1975 to 2017, as the new phase would start being produced in 2017. He had only promised to create the second phase of the series if the first phase reached 2,000+ views per video. Additionally, the video promised a third phase titled the "Handheld Phase" in which Philip would focus on the history of portable video game consoles and games from 1979-2017, but this never came to fruition.

In between Phase 1 and 2 of the Gaming Through the Ages series, Philip uploaded a 38-part let's-play of Super Mario 64, widely considered to be a renowned classic for the Nintendo 64.

Philip playing the game Virus for MS-DOS PCs during an episode of Phase 2 of the Gaming Through The Ages series.

Several months after the completion of Phase 1, on March 15, 2017, Philip uploaded the first episode of Phase 2 of Gaming Through the Ages, focused on the game Pirate Adventure for the Apple II line of computers. Other than the focus shifting to computer games, the other main difference would be Philip playing a character named Jason who was made to represent a gamer from whichever year the episode focused on, framed through the device that his time-traveling friend was bringing him games to try throughout history.

Ultimately, Phase 2, and the series as a whole, would be discontinued before completion, with the final video being uploaded on October 27, 2017, set in 1995 and focused on a port of the board game Monopoly to computers running Windows 95. About three years later, the series would be given a reboot on the OSFirstTimer YouTube channel, with the first episode being published on June 4, 2020. The main difference between the AstralPhaser and OSFirstTimer versions of the series is that in the reboot, Philip's mother, Diana Adams, plays each game rather than Philip himself or his character Jason, and the series would no longer have a storyline.

The Victor Tran Song (2017)

The thumbnail of the full version of The Victor Tran Song, published on April 17, 2017.

During the Gaming Through the Ages series, which was the main focus of the channel during this time, some other videos were occasionally uploaded to the channel. The most popular of these other videos was "The Victor Tran Song", with the original short version being uploaded to the channel on April 10, 2017. The song was originally part of the April Fools episode of YouTube Millionaire, published on April 1, 2017 in Philip's timezone. The original song was a parody of the song "Kiss You" by the English-Irish boy band One Direction, which describes Philip being chased by the blue smiley face profile picture of Victor Tran, a heavily influential member of the OSFirstTimer community in this era.

After various requests during his "AstralPhaser Weekly Chats" sessions and in the comment section of the first upload, Philip set a goal of 250 likes in order to create a full version of The Victor Tran Song. The video would reach this goal within just a few days, and Philip would produce and upload the full version of the song on April 18, 2017, just 8 days after the AstralPhaser upload of the original version. The new song would retain the original "Kiss You" parody, but would also feature new sections, which were parodies of the songs "Live While We're Young", also by One Direction; "I Knew You Were Trouble" by American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift; and "Pokémon Theme" by American singer Jason Paige. The full version of The Victor Tran Song is the third most popular video on the AstralPhaser channel, reaching over 43,000 views as of June 16, 2026, only surpassed by the full review of Gaming Through the Ages Phase 1 (>55,000 views) and a VR let's play video of Euro Truck Simulator 2 (>45,000 views).

AstralPhaser Weekly Chats (c. 2017)

Additionally, during the Gaming Through the Ages series, Philip would hold a weekly livestream show titled "AstralPhaser Weekly Chats", that were held on the AstralPhaser Central Discord server (now called bits & Bytes), where Philip's fans would join the Discord voice chat and participate in various discussions and ask questions to Philip. Initially, the episodes were edited to cut awkward pauses and speed up the pacing, however, these videos ended up stopped being edited starting with Episode 11. The AstralPhaser Weekly Chats series was officially discontinued on September 6, 2017 after 22 episodes. The entire series and its videos were deleted from the channel a few years after the discontinuation of AstralPhaser Weekly Chats. The reasons that the weekly chats got discontinued was that the chats were becoming repetitive, and banned members were angry about being banned from the Discord, leaving dislikes on the weekly chat videos.

Discontinuation (February 28, 2018)

Philip would formally announce the discontinuation of the AstralPhaser channel on February 28, 2018 during episode 13 of YouTube Millionaire, although the channel was discontinued quietly soon after the upload of the final episode of Phase 2 of Gaming Through the Ages. During this announcement, Philip stated that the main reason for the channel's discontinuation was due to the Gaming Through the Ages series, his only active series on that channel left, garnering a much smaller audience than OSFirstTimer while requiring more editing work than the OSFirstTimer videos did.

He has published two videos to the channel since it was discontinued. The first video is titled "Motherload Unlimited 1 AND 2 - Download Links!", published on December 15, 2017, which provides a download link in the description to the obscure mining games Motherload Unlimited 1 and 2, the latter of which Philip had previously played on the channel during it's original let's-play focus in 2012. The second video is titled "Gaming Through the Ages Reboot Coming To OSFirstTimer", published on May 27, 2020, in which Philip would announce the reboot of the Gaming Through the Ages series on his OSFirstTimer YouTube channel, encouraging his previous viewers on AstralPhaser to go to OSFirstTimer in order to watch the new series.