About

My name's Cup and I'm a puppet cat who plays retro games on Twitch!

Here I'm going to spill all of the beans about how it all started and how I do what I do! I will hide any details that may ruin the magic of what I do behind an expandable spoiler thingy like the one below:

Click to show a spoiler! (not really, just a test)

This is what the spoilers look like! You can never unsee what you have now seen!

1. The Original Idea

In 2021 the world stopped. So many people being stuck in their homes prompted a boom in streamers and vtubers. By 2022, I decided I wanted to join the party, though a little late. This was all I thought about for many, many weeks. I felt that to truly stand out I would need to spend a lot of money on a good vtuber model. I was broke ;w;

At first, I started looking up how to make and rig my own model, but I knew I wouldn't be able to do that to a competitive standard. This is where I started thinking outside the box...

The first idea was to make a vtuber out of real-life parts like a 2D shadow puppet (but without the shadow). I started work on the first prototype with some craft foam and managed to get some pretty good eyebrow expressions going with just a T-shaped wire! I was also working on ideas for animating the eyes and mouth using paper sheets that would move around behind the main face part, as well as moving cat ears hinged from the head.

This was a lot of fun and seemed promising... but then I realised I would need a way to animate or operate this while gaming.

2. The Debut

With motivation taking a huge hit and wanting to just go live with something, I realised that puppets are already a thing and you can just buy one!

I baught a cheap orange cat puppet. Time to just do a normal hand puppet on a stream and see what happens!

Spoilers: Puppet construction

However... my hand wouldn't fit in the puppet. So! I got to work on a stick-puppet skeleton. I built it all out of balsa wood and dowel rods. The mouth mechanism was operated by a sliding rod up the front of the stick. Because I had no idea what to do about a hand control... I just kinda slid the rod up and down using my thumb. This later had dire consequences for the health of my thumb...

My first stream was on the 6th of May 2022. I played Sonic Mania and got really sad-drunk while streaming and it quickly turned into a really sad rant about how I had zero viewers and streaming is hard. No, you can't see it! XD

My official debut stream was on the 28th of May 2022 and can still be seen on my YouTube channel! From the very beginning, I wanted to show retro gaming the way it really was at the time, not upscaled or smoothed out or enhanced like many play them today. This really was to the extreme in this case, playing Pokémon Red on the first and worst version of the Gameboy, in all its washed-out, motion-blurry, low-contrast glory!

3. My Niche Slowly Emerges

Still in May 2022, I figured out how to use shaders in RetroArch and blending settings in OBS to make a realistic CRT!

It soon became apparent that people really liked the comfy nostalgia of a 16-bit game on a CRT, so I revisited this theme often.

It was also around that time that the CUPOWO brand was born, which also marked the start of me modifying my TV with extra designs and features...

4. Fragility of Wood and Flesh

The heading sounds ominous lol

Around November 2023, a year and a half after building the prototype puppet, the inevitable finally happened. I was doing some kind of dance on stream and suddenly, my heart sank as I heard the sound of spintering wood. I ignored it and continued streaming. Around the same time, during another stream, I was doing some kind of dance on stream and suddenly, I felt a searing, unbearable pain in my wrist. I took a short break and the pain went away, so I continued and ignored it.

This prompted me to rebuild the puppet to be a lot more sturdy and ergonomic.

Spoilers: Injury and rebuild details

The mechanism of sliding the rod up and down with my thumb, mentioned in the spoiler above, had taken its toll. This pushed me to redesign and rebuild the puppet skeleton to use PVC plastic and steel, as well as a trigger/squeeze hand mechanism that was much more ergonomic.

It turns out that extending your thumb against a load repeatedly for several hours at a time isn't something that thumbs are designed to do.I had given myself De Quervain's Tenosynovitis. The tendon sheath in my wrist that carries the tendon that extends my thumb was all messed up.

I started visiting a private physiotherapist for ultrasound massages, but ultimately in April 2024 I had to pay out for a cortisone injection to stop the inflammation. It worked!

After my successful treatment in April 2024 I started streaming more often again! Though, I did have to return for a second treatment in September 2024, which somehow got paid for purely by donations on ko-fi! To this day I am blown away by the generosity of my viewers :3

5. So How Puppet While Game?

Here be spoilers! Head my warning! The truth is really quite simple and disappointing to some! It's absolutely fine to end your journey here and take a look at another page, like this pixel art, perhaps? :3

Ultimate Spoiler: The Terrible Truth :3

Cup is a stick puppet operated in my right hand. He faces to my left with a green screen behind him to my right. This lets me sit comfortably with the puppet and my wrist resting on my desk.

The camera sits in the centre of my desk on a 40cm-high stand, pointing to my right at the green screen. You'd think this would obscure my vision but just like having a microphone close to your face you tune it out after a while.

I game with my left hand only! I use a Wooting Two HE keyboard with full analogue keys. The fact that it can emulate an Xbox 360 controller means I can play most console and PC games with it, even if some games require a little custom remapping.

I'm also practicing gaming with my Azeron Cyro one-handed gaming mouse. I'm right-handed, but I bought a left-hand model specifically for streaming with. It's kinda tricky and requires custom key mapping for each different game, so I haven't used it more than once or twice while streaming yet.

Most of the other puppet streamers I know use a full hand-puppet. The downside is that holding your whole forearm up like that is really tiring! I think I've nailed the endurance puppetry formula...

Now that you know... you must never tell! Especially during a live stream! Seriously, if you come into Twitch chat like "yoooo streamer games one-handed I saw it on the website" I'll ban you :3

For those who want to know, DM them a link to this page! :D

Gotta treat it like a magician's not-so-secret secrets...