| “ | Thank you very much for watching, and until next time, farewell. | ” |
―Ahoy's outro | ||
Stuart Brown, better known online as Ahoy (formerly XboxAhoy), is an English YouTuber best known for his video essays about video games, as well as the weapons that feature in them.
About[]
In the early days of the channel, Ahoy's content was focused on publishing weapon guides for the various weapons available in the Call of Duty franchise of games, with every weapon receiving an in-depth guide to its strengths and weaknesses of every weapon in the multiplayer mode for Modern Warfare 2, Black Ops and Black Ops 2. Other games like Titanfall, Euro Truck Simulator, Minecraft, and even Homefront recieved similar video guides, even if they ended up as one-off productions.
In August 2013, Ahoy uploaded Which Video Game Introduced Dual Wielding?, in which he investigated when dual wielding of weapons became so prevalent in video games, while also looking further afield at the films such as the "bullet ballet" of John Woo or The Matrix for popularizing the dual wielding of weapons in cinema. While he did continue his CoD weapon guides for Ghosts after this video was released, from this point on Ahoy's content started to broaden and video essays took hold as the primary form of content on the channel.
RetroAhoy[]
Initially started as a second channel for the non-CoD weapons videos, RetroAhoy was a series of videos discussing classic games of previous eras that were posted between 2011–12. Once the main channel pivoted away from this type of content and more towards video essays, which included new and more in-depth RetroAhoy videos, the original videos were re-uploaded to the main channel to consolidate his content, while the RetroAhoy channel currently lies dormant.
Videos reuploaded from RetroAhoy channel[]
- Ant Attack
- Pinball Dreams
- Galaxian
- Carmageddon
- Lemmings
- Road Rash
- Dizzy
- Soul Edge
- Syndicate
Videos created for Ahoy channel[]
- Half-Life
- Wolfenstein 3D
- Doom
- Quake
- The Secret of Monkey Island
- X-COM
Behind the Lines[]
Behind the Lines is a rather obscure supposed series of videos that were meant to go in depth of weapons in Call of Duty. Currently, only one video can be found, a video on the FN-FAL.
Weapons of Modern Warfare[]
Weapons of Mordern Warfare focues on historical and technical facts regarding weapons featured in the Call of Duty; Modern Warfare series of games. 10 comfirmed videos were released. Along with the aforementioned Behind the lines, it can be seen as a precursor to Iconic Arms.
Iconic Arms[]
Arguably the series where most people would get their knowledge of Ahoy. The knowledge that was picked up for the CoD weapons videos was not put to waste and was put to use with the Iconic Arms series of videos which delve into the development and service history of real-life weapons coupled with their depiction in video games and other media. To date several series of Iconic Arms have been produced, featuring weapons from a simple bow and arrow, the iconic Tommy Gun, and all the way to the ubiquitous Rocket Launcher.
A Brief History of...[]
As the channel was pivoting towards the video essay style of content, Ahoy started to post videos that offered a slice of various aspects of gaming history, ranging from video gaming itself to factors which affected the industry in other ways, be it the introduction of gore into video games that eventually led to the ESRB being introduced in the wake of controversies about Doom and Mortal Kombat in the early 1990s, to the history of how piracy (that's actual pirates, not people pirating games) has been depicted throughout the history of the games industry.
Specials[]
Outside of the channel's main themes, there are also one-off videos taking an in-depth look at a particular subject. The best-known of these, and indeed the most-viewed video on the channel, is POLYBIUS - The Video Game That Doesn't Exist which tackles the urban legend of a video game cabinet causing children in early-80s Portland to experience all manner of psychoactive effects such as seizures, hallucinations and night terrors. Delving into everything that is known about the game, with a little assistance from Larry Bundy Jr and former Official Xbox Magazine editor and Dan Amrich, every last detail is brought up, discussed, and considered before coming to the conclusion: the whole thing was a hoax cooked up by Kurt Koller to draw traffic to his site, not only creating the game's listing on his site but feeding GamePro with the details in 2003 to draw more attention to it.
Outside of debunking urban legends, other subjects discussed in specials include the North American videos games crash of 1984, while the Amiga is covered in a couple of videos, namely Doomed: The Embers of the Amiga FPS that describes the Amiga's attempts to regain the ground it was rapidly losing to the PC market by trying to create a competitor to Doom on its ageing hardware, while in FLATLINE: How The Amiga Languished takes an in-depth look at the trials and tribulations Commodore faced in trying to establish the Amiga brand in the mid-to-late 1980s.
Other channels[]
In addition to the RetroAhoy channel, which has since seen its content re-uploaded to the main channel, there are two additional Ahoy channels.
Ahoy² hosts the Bonus videos, which are a combination of games news, games reviews and viewer Q&A - all within the same video. While the intention was to post and episode of Bonus every month, due to work commitments the most recent episode of Bonus was posted in July 2017
On the other hand, DrinksAhoy can be best described as Iconic Arms...but instead of weapons, it puts the same focus on alcoholic beverages. To date only two videos have been posted to the channel, with the most recent being a video on Guinness posted in December 2014.
A relatively unknown third channel called Krush or Krush Dev Diary features, well, a diary-like video format for Ahoy's work in progress game, Krush. The latest upload was in January 2015, and little is known about the fate of the game's development.
Trivia[]
Stuart said in his video about Watchdogs, uploaded in 2014, that his age was 31, taking his word, as of 2023, he's 40, and may have been born in 1982/83.