"LP" stands for "Let's Play". Still clear as mud, right? Basically, imagine going round to your friend's house after school and watching them run and jump around madly in Sonic 2 for a while.

LPs show a video game being played while the player talks about what they're doing in commentary with video, screenshots or both. Rarely some sections are done "off screen" or sped up, but in most cases the playthrough is a complete run of the game done in informative or humourous style so as to keep your attention. You know how you are.

All the LP threads on this website were originally posted on the Something Awful forums, in their dedicated Let's Play subforum.

After the LP is finished everything is bundled together and copied over here to be kept safe from the whims and vagaries of the internet. The archive started up in 2007, but the earliest LPs you'll see in here might be from as far back as 2006!

Hey, calm down! The archive is intended to be a repository of all LP threads from Something Awful. We won't disallow an LP entry into the archive based on quality.

The only reason that we might disallow an LP entry into the archive is if the author didn't want their thread to be archived. Don't worry, we completely understand you not wanting your boss to find a video of you shouting at Megaman a couple of years from now.

Oh, well someone's pleased with themselves! In general, threads are archived as and when they're submitted by their author, with the only requirement being that the LP has actually finished and the author requests it to be archived.

If you are the author of a thread that you want to be added to the archive, you can check out the instructions in the Sandcastle thread OP. Please bear in mind that there'll be a few threads that need archiving at any one time, however, so your favourite thread might not get archived immediately.

Damn! Okay, you caught us: the archives of the Something Awful forums have a nasty habit of permanently deleting random posts, which means that some of the older threads can end up with holes in them. Unfortunately, Let's Play threads are no exception.

These days we tend to archive the threads when they're still fresh and we can contact the author—meaning that we'll be able to get the whole thing—but a lot of the older LPs in the archive (cast your minds way back into the mists of 2006-2007) might be missing a fair few things.

If you notice that an LP seems to be missing parts, please give us a shout; it's helpful just for us to know. If you happen to know where we can get the missing content as well, then we're massively in your debt and you're legally entitled to ask us to come round to your house and do a tiny bit of DIY/tidying up. But don't actually ask us to do that.

Backup videos are a bit of a mixed bag, and we can't really guarantee exactly what format they're going to come in—what to encode your video as wasn't even nearly as clear-cut back in 2007 as it is these days!

Try downloading the CCCP codec pack or banging the video into VLC player and that'll hopefully cure what's ailing you. If you still can't view the video after this, the video itself is probably broken in some way and we've messed up again—you know what to do by now if this is the case.

The Archive doesn't have a direct relationship with many authors and, as such, we probably couldn't put you in contact with the person you're after. Even if we had their contact details, it's not for us to say whether or not they'd like that information to be publicly available!

If you really need to speak to them, we'd suggest visiting the LP's original thread on the SA forums (to which a link is available from the index of every LP) and trying to locate the author through there. If they don't post anymore or don't have details listed on their profile you might be plain out of luck. Sorry!