This whole “@IAmDeathGun” stunt was the brainchild of Sword Art Online’s mixer, Mike Brooks and “The Beater” himself, Bryce Papenbrook.

Alex Von David, our voice director for the show, wanted me to live-tweet for the Death Gun episodes until it was brought to our attention that I’d be credited as “??????” We had to find a way to let me live-tweet without revealing who I was and that’s when Mike and Bryce came to Alex with their plan.

The original plan was simple enough: create a twitter handle and let me live-tweet using it. That would have been enough, really, but I was concerned that my identity would be discovered. Knowing how clever anime fans can get, I knew someone was bound to try and reverse engineer the sound filters on Death Gun’s dialogue from the show and see if they could recognize the voice actor.

I sent the following message to Alex:
OH MY GOD. Dude. I just had a wickedly brilliant plan. Tell me if you're down for this. I’ll do the live tweets this weekend. While I’m at Anime Conji next weekend, I’ll create an alibi. I’ll give YOU the password to the IAmDeathGun twitter account and YOU live tweet in my place. That way, if some sneaky anime fan tries raising the pitch of the Death Gun lines and thinks they sound like me, I’ll be able to have documented evidence of me partying at Conji while “IAmDeathGun” is live-tweeting again. It’ll confuse the heck out of even the most die-hard fan! What do you think?

Alex loved the idea and we set to work. I made sure to use an easily-duplicable way of tweeting:
1) No capitalizing.
2) No punctuations.
3) Break up sentences with ellipses.

While I was at Anime Conji, performing terrible karaoke in front of a live audience, Alex was manning the @IAmDeathGun account. He was easily able to duplicate my style of tweets and kept the act up.

Then, it was all a matter of waiting for someone to try and mess with the audio for the next phase to go into effect. Michael “@skeletonkng1234” Edwards (who’s interviewed me for his YouTube channel) was the first person to play right into our diabolical hands! He posted up a soundcloud file of the pitch raised for Death Gun’s voice and correctly deduced that it was me.

I had to wait until someone actually confronted me about it, though, and that honor fell to @BioZero216. When asked online if I played Death Gun, I played dumb and told him he was the fourth person to ask me about it. I mentioned my time at Conji and it was enough to convince him that I couldn’t be @IAmDeathGun. For good measure, I also tweeted back and forth between the @IAmDeathGun account and my @BenjaminDiskin account. On the Behind the Voice Actors page for Death Gun, BioZero had a conversation with another user named Ichigo341578926 in which he mentioned how inconceivable it would be that I’d be able to log back and forth between the two accounts so quickly. It’s not so difficult when you’re logged into one account on your phone and a different account on your PC. ;-)

Finally, I was free and clear, exonerated by three unwitting pawns who I couldn’t possibly have been on the take. MWAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!!! XD

For good measure, while I was visiting my girlfriend in Georgia last weekend, I made sure to tweet a picture of us in front of a “Six Flags Over Georgia” banner as proof that I was on the other side of the country with my sweetheart. I mean, who on earth would ever live-tweet some anime when he SHOULD be spending time with his girl? ... THIS GUY! XD My girlfriend was in on the whole scheme too and allowed me to stay up late and live-tweet from the hotel room. The Best Western sadly didn’t get the west coast feed, so Alex once again took control of the @IAmDeathGun twitter handle and did the live-tweets at 1AM PT.

Only ONE person saw through the plan. Steve “@SAOFollower” Dorian was the only person to tweet “Technically he didn't say no, so BUSTED!” He was the only person on twitter to notice that I was dodging the “Are you Death Gun?” question. So, props, Steve! You did it!!! Oh, and to those of you who were guessing it was Alex Von David.... well... he DID help me run the twitter account so.... <shrugs> Give yourself HALF a pat on the back? You weren't entirely wrong.

Oh, and to all you guys who were SPOILING THE SHOW by telling people which CHARACTER is secretly Death Gun: OH MY GOD!!!! The F*CK is wrong with you???? ლ(ಠ益ಠლ The whole goal was to figure out which VOICE ACTOR plays the character in the English dub, not RUIN THE SHOW FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVEN'T SEEN IT IN JAPANESE! SHEESH!!!!

Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed all the mystery and craziness from @IAmDeathGun. It's been a blast being a sneaky, sneaky bastard to you all. XD Oh! And feel free to follow me at my ACTUAL twitter account, @BenjaminDiskin or like my Facebook Fanpage.

Enjoy the rest of Sword Art Online II!!! :)