The Web is a great place. It can turn two twenty-something slackers from Toronto into underground heroes. All it takes is some videos and viral word-of-mouth marketing. Meet Jeremy and Kyle, the stage names (or whatever you call them) of the guys behind the PurePwnage.com video series on what the life of a "pro" gamer is really like.

The duo, who are RL (that's real life for you noobs out there) roomies, got the idea a little more than a year ago when Kyle borrowed a camera for a film school class assignment and "was looking for stuff to film and wanted to try out some editing software." He began shooting a "pilot" with some test footage following around Jeremy and a day in his life. The video was so well received (at least, according to the duo) that they went on to make seven episodes, and more are in the works. Each episode, which last about 10 minutes, are better and more sophisticated (at least, according to my taste) than the previous one.

The shows have amazingly good production values for something done on the cheap. "We use Adobe Premiere to edit the videos, and it shows that you don't need a lot of money to make short films on the Internet. Our startup costs are only a few thousand dollars, and most of that went to buying a camera," says Kyle. And that is dollars Canadian, which is even more impressive given what you can buy there.

I spoke to the two guys, or at least two people that sounded like the guys in the videos, last week. Unlike most of the interviews I have done, the guys didn't give me their real names, phone numbers or other identifying information, but I had fun interviewing them none the less. Part of the fun was doing real-time translation of leetspeak (the gaming lingo that Jeremy uses both in the videos and for the most part in RL too) and trying to not appear like the old fart that I really am. But that is the wonder of the Internet: you can always appear to be something that you yearn to be.

The videos are entertaining slices of life, mostly following Jeremy around with a hand-held camera as he slacks off, "owns noobs" (that means trounces unsuspecting opponents) with his game of choice, Zero Hour, and his advanced "micro" (meaning keyboarding) skills. They are funny and sad at the same time. The last episode 7 sees Jeremy in some hospital ward as he tries to break out of a catatonic state, and is jump-cut with scenes from a game where his character is being interviewed by a nurse, mirroring the actual RL scene shot in the movie. Hollywood SF could do no better, and what is impressive is how these guys have accomplished some great storytelling on a less-than-shoestring budget. It helps if you are familiar with gaming lingo but you can still enjoy the flicks for what they are, a romp around a brave new world where gamers rule.

The duo has started a cottage industry to be sure. The first month they released episode 7 more than 300,000 people downloaded it, and the audience has been doubling from episode to episode. They are using a variety of technologies to distribute their videos, and are looking to get more sophisticated by using an RSS feed and other improvements. "We don't know where it is going to saturate," says Kyle. "No one has ever done this before and had a reality TV show that has been this viral and spread this quickly." And unlike the more expensive reality shows that are on broadcast TV, it is done without script doctoring or any visible writers.

Does Jeremy talk leetspeak all the time? "What are you saying?" he asked me. "If you watch the show, well, yeah. I own, and yeah. When I meet fans in RL they seem kinda shocked when they meet me - they thought the show might not be real and when they meet me and then they are in total awe of how much I own and its good." You dig?

Kyle is certainly more used to talking regular English, even though in the videos you rarely hear from him. The concept is similar to that of Penn and Teller, for those of you geeks old enough to remember them before their TV shows.

The guys are actually big Tom's readers. "It is something we read whenever we are buying new hardware pretty much," says Kyle. "But not a regular thing we read. Jeremy was looking at Tom's when he was looking to buy a new video card." Jeremy then piped up "Well, Kyle that was a year ago so it isn't exactly new, but I got my 5950 and lots of stuff thanks to Tom's."

Jeremy builds his own PCs "Because I don't have a job and like, you can get a lot better performance for your dollar if you build your own PC. If you are not a complete noob it is completely easy." He doesn't overclock that much. "I just make sure my rig is good enough to run games at like decent resolution because you don't want to be totally noobing at 800x600 or something. I keep most of my hardware kinda default."