About

When You Skip the Game Tutorial is an image macro series featuring photographs of people incorrectly playing various real-life games along with captions joking that the subject failed to complete a video game tutorial.

Origin

The earliest known iteration of the meme was posted on Instagram on December 23rd, 2016. That day, Instagram^[1] user lutalo8 posted a picture of a man playing golf atop a pool table with the caption "When you skip the game tutorial but fail to work out how to play the game." The post (shown below) received more than 14,400 likes in 11 months.

Precursor

Before this meme, variations of this could be seen in the caption "when you skip the tutorial." The earliest known variant features a clip from the film Star Wars: Episode II --Attack of the Clones of Anakin Skywalker losing a battle (shown below), which was posted on December 1st, 2015 by Twitter user @BIGREAPS.^[6]

Spread

Several months later, on March 23rd, 2017, @lutalo8^[2] posted another version of the meme to Instram, this time of a person playing air hockey with a pool cue. The post (shown below, right) received more than 14,400 likes in eight months.

Two months later, the Twitter^[3] account @FreeMemesKids posted the meme, receiving more than 6,900 retweets and 13,000 likes in nine months.

On July 5th, 2017, Twitter^[4] user @SattelizerGames tweeted a picture of a man playing ping pong with a pool cue, captioning the post "When you skip the game tutorial." The post (shown below, right) received more than 20 retweets and 200 likes.

When posted to Instagram^[5] several months later by @ladBible, the post received more than 120,000 likes in less than a month.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References