An Internet of Checkpoints

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Bijan Stephen | Longreads | February 26, 2026 | 1,573 words (7 minutes)

I stumbled across the videos the same way many other people did: in search of something else, something I can’t remember now, years later. As I scrolled through YouTube, my attention caught on a spray of Japanese characters in the sidebar, and above it a thumbnail image I half-remembered from a childhood spent in front of cathode ray televisions. It was a pixelated thicket of forest green brambles in front of a pure cerulean sky, peppered with pillowy white clouds—the kind of perfect scene you only find in video games. 

My search was derailed; I had to click. The clouds scrolled across the screen as the music began to play, an ambient synth track called “Stickerbush Symphony (Bramble Blast),” composed by David Wise for the game Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest, released in 1995. The song is wistful and calm, like something you would hear in a movie while a character floats dreamily underwater. But the real magic was happening below, in the comments. 

“I’m not sure where the algorithm is taking me but words cannot describe the feeling I get just sitting here reading comments while this strangely familiar song plays.”

“Did we all find this at the same time? What could it mean. Regardless, we’re all here together.”

“This feels like the end credits for life itself. It could be the end, but I hope it’s just a checkpoint. There are still so many things I have left to do. I hope I find my way home. I hope you all do too.”

For seemingly no reason at all, thousands of people were telling stories about themselves, unguarded even against the background toxicity of internet comment sections. Many of them used the word “checkpoint.” In video games, a checkpoint is a safe space: a place to save your game, where the danger can’t reach you. It’s a place to breathe, in other words. A relief; a respite. They’re also places to marshal your bravery, because they’re not the end of the game. That comes later, after more struggle. One of the better ways to get through something difficult—whether a video game or the general unpredictability of life—is to feel connected with other people, like you’re not alone. I saw it again and again. 

“Checkpoint: Turns out life ain’t how you want even if you have your goal in mind, times were hard these past four years, I was so close to throwing the towel. I don’t know if I can reach my goal of owning a house, having a career I love, or having a love interest. Nothing seems to work and lost my way. I keep going and keep trying different ways around this obstacle. Doesn’t matter if my past choices were mistakes, or if other paths could of taken me to my goal, I keep moving forward.” 

I couldn’t tell you how long I spent scrolling that day, paging through the unguarded mysteries of other lives. It’s stuck with me ever since. Lately, I’ve found myself thinking of all these people and wondering what happened to them. Where did they go next? Did they find what they were looking for? 

The video—titled “とげとげタルめいろ’スーパードンキーコング2,’” or “Spiky Barrel Maze ‘Super Donkey Kong 2’”—was uploaded to YouTube on April 26, 2012, by an anonymous user named Taia777. It was the first video on their channel. Whoever Taia was, they never shared anything personal; they just sporadically uploaded similar videos of pixelated animations and music from retro games. There were five videos in 2012, more than a dozen in 2013, nine in 2014, one in September 2017, then silence. The channel quietly sat with a few thousand subscribers. Taia posted nothing new for years. 

Then one day, as 2019 slid into 2020, something happened. (No, not that.) Something switched in YouTube’s recommendation algorithms, and almost overnight thousands of new users were directed to Taia’s first video. 

A recommendation for a nearly decade-old video with a title in another language was a genuinely uncanny experience, especially if your browsing history had nothing to do with early ’90s video games. People migrated to the comments section to wonder what was going on. Many described finding the channel in quasi-spiritual terms; they felt that the YouTube algorithm brought them there for a reason. 

Maybe all the video game imagery put commenters in a certain mindset. They began to make jokes about being the main character of, well, life. As one commenter explained to another, “Legends say, if you find this video in your recommended, you are truly a main character in your world. Not an NPC [non-player character]. Thus, this is a place to write a ‘checkpoint’ to ‘save your game.’” And people started posting—at first ironically, and then with total sincerity. Which is how Taia’s first video became the internet checkpoint. 

The widening pandemic brought a firehose of new comments, burying many of the older, rougher ones under a shower of emotional vulnerability: “Checkpoint November 1st, 2020. I’m in confinement again. I hope this time won’t be as hard. This time, I won’t be alone. 15:59 Game saved.”

The community spread outside of YouTube, too. In January 2020, someone started a subreddit called r/taia777, which billed itself as “the premier community for discussing the internet checkpoint, as well as its uploader.” That February, a Discord—the Taia777 Sanctuary—was founded as a haven for those emotionally vulnerable commenters. Immediately, more than 450 people joined; today it has over 5,000 members.

“We get people from all over the world,” said the Sanctuary’s founder, who goes by Izeezus. Izeezus appreciates places like YouTube and Discord, where you can still be semi-anonymous online. “The Sanctuary Discord is in a cool middle ground, where we can befriend people online and share troubles and things in our lives, but it’s never extremely deep or consequential enough where it takes over your real life,” Izeezus said. “And that was a hard transition to make for people coming out of quarantine and post-pandemic, understanding that this space is not supposed to be your number one source of social energy.” 

Taia777 started uploading videos again in 2021, after a four-year hiatus. Their popularity, however, soon brought unwanted attention. By that summer, YouTube had started removing Taia777’s videos over copyright infringement claims. On March 14, 2022, Taia777’s channel was deleted from YouTube altogether. By then, the channel had published 29 videos and had amassed more than 28 million views. When it disappeared, everything—the videos, the memories, the well-wishes—was gone. Presumably for good. 

Then a funny thing happened. The channel came back online—sort of. Back in 2021, as the takedowns were heating up, a person named Rebane posted on the Taia777 subreddit. “Hey,” she began, “I’m an internet archivist and I archived the taia777 channel and also the comments on it. Now that Nintendo has struck down many of the videos, I’m going to share my archives.” What she shared was a fully functioning dump of all 29 videos and every comment—up until April 7, 2021, when she’d grabbed the data. 

Speaking with me years later, Rebane explained that she runs a large private archive of internet culture, of which the Taia777 archive is one very small part. (Her archival software, called Hobune, is open source.) Rebane came across the Taia777 videos the same way everyone else did—as a random YouTube recommendation. “I like the music. I thought the visuals were cool,” she said. “But I didn’t think too much of it.” 

Even so, Rebane archived it—just because. Her archive has 1.2 million videos in it so far; of that, she said, 300,000 of those videos have since been removed from YouTube. To Rebane, Taia777’s videos aren’t any more special just because there was a community around them. “If you feel the loss of internet culture every single day for years and you see every day . . . like, I don’t know, 50 videos just disappear,” she said. “After years, it’s just not gonna feel as impactful anymore.” 

Maybe not to Rebane, but the checkpoint community appreciated it. On Reddit, users hailed Rebane as a “legend” and a “hero.” Another member of the Sanctuary created a website that uses Rebane’s archive as a database to let people find their old comments easily. That’s how I was able to revisit the comments that grabbed my attention years ago.

Now, of course, there are also imitators: channels creating their own checkpoints. Some feature reuploads of Taia777’s original videos (which haven’t yet been taken down, for whatever reason); others publish their own. There’s even a new Taia777 channel, though I suspect it isn’t the original creator’s, whoever they are. 

Below the videos in Rebane’s archive, there is a chorus of voices doing their best to leave a permanent mark in the ephemerality of the internet. “Checkpoint: Teaching my daughter to read. I couldn’t be prouder,” says one person. “Checkpoint: started cleaning my room after two years of depression,” writes another. “Checkpoint: Went through brain surgery due to removal of a tumor four months ago. Currently relearning how to walk, can breathe, eat and talk again, trying to get through all this,” says someone. “Checkpoint: I’m trying one more time,” says another. 

And isn’t that it? All of it, I mean. The future is as unknowable as the past is inaccessible. Time, for us, flows one way. All we can do—all I can do—is keep trying, and remember to save our progress along the way.

Bijan Stephen is a music critic at The Nation and a writer at Compulsion Games. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Esquire, and elsewhere.

You can find more of Rebane’s work on Bluesky and at her site.

Editor: Brendan Fitzgerald
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens