Part of the appeal is the inherent absurdity of the spectacle. "I'm a big sucker for crossovers," says Bazza. "Marvel vs. Capcom, Smash Bros.; people just like to see characters from different franchises cross over and beat the crap out of each other."

Bazza himself is a big pro wrestling fan, beginning in the era of Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage. "Everyone had over-the-top personalities in those days," he says. "With their brightly colored clothes, their general design, they kind of looked like superheroes, like video game characters.

"In today's wrestling, everyone's sort of the same, just kind of an angry badass. There's more character, there's all kinds of people in video games — you'll never get time travel in the WWE. We all know wrestling is fake, and it doesn't get more fake than watching a video game version of it. So why take it seriously at all?"

But there's a crowd component to it, too, so much so that archived shows always include the stream's livechat speeding alongside it. Some of it is comparable to the excitement that's generated simply by being part of a crowd, even if that crowd exists only in the form of a fast-scrolling chatroom or forum thread; members of the fighting game community or the various eSports audiences are probably familiar with the concept. It's fun to cheer for your favorites, jeer the villains and be outraged when a match doesn't go your way.

It's also the knowledge that you're invested in the fiction of a shared universe, a kind of group madness, a wiki-built emergent world. Everybody watching knows that the show is, ultimately, nothing more than a bunch of dressed-up robots fighting one another according to preset character statistics and the whims of the combat intelligence. But they pretend that it's not. They pretend it's all "real"; they project a layer of emotions and histories onto characters that have no way of actually holding them — but since everyone agrees that they have them, for the purposes of the show, they do.

"Some fans like to analyze things like wrestler stats and their movesets and stuff like that," says Bazza. "Others prefer to pretend that it's all real, that some wrestlers are stronger than others. You could call 'em the marks, and the other guys the smarks. I kinda think, you know, have fun with it."

The show's kayfabe — fake reality, in wrestling parlance, comparable to the fourth wall of fiction — encompasses all. Losses and victories, actions in the ring or out of it, even glitches; everything feeds into the crowd, who add it to what they already know of the characters, recontextualize it, rationalize the absurd bits and add it to the community wiki. In this world, Red (Pokemon) is a nigh-undefeatable kid with a lot of heart, literally fighting to be the very best there ever was; Vegeta (Dragon Ball Z) a power-hungry, self-important fighter who nonetheless can't seem to actually win a match.

In a key move, Bazza tends to take this community-built mythos and incorporate it into the show. Not only is he, as in real-life wrestling, gauging character popularity when determining which wrestlers to promote and which characters to bury, he's also adopting storyline ideas from the crowd as well.

"It was just going to be a one-off, a way to mark Dracula as a bit of an asshole."

Some are matters of practicality: an extremely good custom wrestler design for Dracula (Castlevania) ended up replacing a prospective third season antagonist who Bazza had privately felt was overexposed — and, coincidentally, let him name the season "WrestleVania." Others are more direct; at one point, a temporary team-up between two unwilling partners, Gabe Newell (head of Valve) and Adam Jensen (from Deus Ex: Human Revolution) became permanent due almost entirely to fan pressure.

"It was just going to be a one-off, a way to mark [then general manager] Dracula as a bit of an asshole," says Bazza. "But everyone was like, they're Safety Valve; they're a tag-team now. They started making pages on the wiki ... and I was fighting it for a while, deleting the pages, telling people they weren't a tag team at all."

"And that's basically the relationship I wrote between the two. Jensen's me. He's telling Gabe, 'No, we're not a tag team, this is absolutely ridiculous.' And the chat [members], well ... they're Gabe Newell."