About

Gay Baby Jail, often shortened to GBJ, is a humorous term used to refer to a character or person trapped in a jail cell, box, or other punishment location. The term later began to be used by SimpleFlips and his fandom to refer to a situation in which a game becomes softlocked (a term for a game becoming stuck in a situation where progress is impossible and cannot be exited).

Origin

The origin of the phrase Gay Baby Jail comes from a Tumblr post on January 21, 2013 by user Bolto, who has since deleted all their content. The post, mirrored on the Meme Archives Tumblr^[1], shows the user's pet bird in a cage inside a shoe box with the words Gay Baby Jail written on the side (shown below).

The term began to take a new definition from the SimpleFlips video "Super Mario XD" uploaded to his YouTube channel on July 30, 2017, in which he is softlocked in a Super Mario 64 ROM hack, and users Mooshies and Foxen in his chat joked that he was in a "Gay Baby Jail" (shown below).

The term then began to be used by his fans to refer to any softlock situation^[2], and YouTube user Jet Eriksen gained notoriety for leaving a comment on every Simpleflips video recording the number of Gay Baby Jail situations in each video. At this point, users began to shorten the term to GBJ.

Spread

Shortly after the Super Mario XD stream, Romhacking.com user Rovertronic uploaded a Super Mario 64 romhack titled "Gay Baby Jail 64"^[3], uploaded to the site on November 18, 2017. SimpleFlips streamed himself playing Gay Baby Jail 64, which he uploaded to his YouTube channel on October 28, 2017 (shown below).

Search Interest

External References