ATLANTIC OCEAN – A small group of Sea of Thieves streamers have decided to put their doubloons where their mouths are and put aside their keyboards and Xbox controllers to join a Somali pirate fleet for an IRL (in real life) swashbuckling adventure.

Twitch streamers defstat20, JemmaFoxsong, Mobillionaire, and ChaseBeyond decided to abandon the safer seas of the popular online action-adventure game for the high-risk expanse of the ocean after the group reached max level in the game’s various trading factions and felt their pirating skills were being wasted on cartoonish skeletons and sweaty adolescent gamers.

“Sea of Thieves is one of my favorite games and it’s given me thousands of hours of enjoyment over the years,” said defstat20. “But even though they’re always adding more content to the game to keep it fresh, I’ve reached the point where sinking other players isn’t a challenge and I have so much gold that money has lost all meaning in the game.”

Defstat20 also said he’s tried turning his attention to other games, like Helldivers2 and Supermarket Simulator, in an attempt to attain a margin of the dopamine Sea of Thieves gave him when he first set sail, but the urge to pillage and plunder has become so engrained within him that he couldn’t help himself from abandoning those games and returning to pledge himself to the Pirate Lord once again.

Despite his status as a pirate legend, dropping sail and stealing loot from unsuspecting crews has become a stale endeavor. That’s why, after stacking loot from their sixth Fort of the Damned and defending it with relative ease from rival crews, defstat20 proposed the idea of becoming real life pirates.

“I thought it was a really bad idea,” said JemmaFoxsong. “I told him we’re gamers, not real pirates, but then he explained how it’s not really any different than a Call of Duty player joining the military. And that made a lot more sense at the time than it does now, so that’s when we all agreed to go along with it.”

With everyone in agreement, the four streamers began planning their adventure—everything from how they planned to pay for their boat, weapons, and tools, to researching how to sell pirated loot on the black market. In the end, each streamer hosted a sub-a-thon on their respective channels with the promise of “something special and exciting coming soon.”

After a few weeks of streaming, they secured the necessary funds and hopped on an airplane and flew to Mogadishu where they were met in a dark, suspicious alleyway with an intermediary they met online.

“He called himself Pirate Steve, which I’m starting to think wasn’t his real name,” said Mobillionaire. “But he took our money without question and led us to the docks where our boat, and future privateer enterprise, awaited.”

“You know, I was expecting an extravagant galleon for our four-person crew that we could customize with trinkets we earned from our voyages,” said ChaseBeyond. “So, I was a little disappointed when we found ourselves standing on a rickety old dock looking at a 1971 Crestliner Buccaneer. I think that was the moment I started questioning our decision.”

The crew opted to name their newly christened (old) boat Booty and the Beast, after their mutual love of piracy and Disney movies, and set sail (with their single onboard motor) for the island of Chovaye to conduct an introductory voyage.

“We used some of our funds to buy metal detectors and shovels,” said defstat20. “We didn’t expect to find any maps in a bottle or anything like that, but figured we might find some long-lost booty left behind by other pirates or one of the black-market merchants we were hoping to get more lucrative voyages from later.”

They found 12 rusty fishing hooks.

Not to be discouraged, the crew began sailing toward the mainland when they encountered another ship of pirates who were staging for an assault on a larger vessel they said would have a large bounty of valuable loot (no one on the crew actually spoke Arabic or Somali so they were basing this off tone and body language). Despite promising their chats they’d end the livestream when they returned to the mainland, the persuasive viewers convinced the crew to remain online for this next leg of their adventure.

The team’s lack of understanding the local language would quickly come to pass as a major oversight as the ship their pirate brethren chose to attack was none other than the USS Thomas Hudner (DDG 116), an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer named after U.S. naval aviator Thomas J. Hudner, who was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions in the Battle of Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War.

“I thought we’d have the advantage given the fact we were two boats against their one,” said Mobillionaire. “As it turns out, their boat was a wee bit bigger than ours.”

In addition to the larger boat, the Hudner’s compliment of 380 well-trained officers and enlisted vastly outnumbered the ragtag crew of pirates. However, the crew of the Booty and the Beast is not one to shy away from a challenge and rallied the other boat with an invigorating war cry.

“Ram strat, best strat,” shouted JemmaFoxsong and they revved the engines and sailed full-Leeroy Jenkins toward the military vessel.

As it turns out, ram strat (a Sea of Thieves strategy where players ram their boat into an opponent’s boat at full speed in order to damage it) is not the best strat, especially when your 1970s vintage boat is going up against a $663 million death machine.

“One minute our boat was there, the next minute it wasn’t,” said ChaseBeyond. “We didn’t even have enough time to bilge water or make any reps. The ship was splintered in seconds and sinking to the bottom of the ocean. I wasted all that money on planks of wood.”

Using the ship’s state-of-the-art radar technology, the crew of the Hudner was able to identify the pirate vessels approaching from miles away and was capable of destroying both ships with two single shots from one of its Mark 38 25mm machine gun systems.

“The funny thing is that a lot of our crew loves playing Sea of Thieves and had these guys streams up the entire time,” said Petty Officer 1st Class Brian Jiminez. “We didn’t actually think they would try it, but we appreciated the live intel they fed us about the other boat of pirates. It made good target practice.”

Following the sinking of their ship, everyone from the crew clung to shards of debris and started the long swim back to land. Except ChaseBeyond. He was determined not to give up.

“We may have lost our boat, but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t attempt a tuck on their ship and try to sneak away with some of their treasure,” he said. A tuck is when a player hides on another player’s boat and attempts to steal loot or cause shenanigans while the other isn’t looking.

ChaseBeyond swam through the cold waters and managed to climb aboard the vessel. However, when he reached the deck and flung his exhausted body to the floor, he was met with a small group of sailors armed with semi-automatic rifles aimed toward him.

“I had a pineapple in my pocket and thought I could at least make this interesting PvP battle,” he said. “But as it turns out, being a pirate in real life is a lot more work than being a video game pirate. So, all I could manage was a wheezing, ‘GG’s gamers’ before they hauled me off to the brig.”

After a lengthy interrogation, the streamers were allowed to return to the United States under the promise that they would never indulge in acts of piracy ever again.

“I know we almost died,” said defstat20. “But I think the whole experience really opened my eyes to how fun pirating really is. I can’t wait for the next season of Sea of Thieves to drop. I feel like we have some real sea cred now.”

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