Behind the Emote: "2cents" (GB2cents) (Patreon)

Wow that preview picture looks awful. I guess that's what happens when you take a 32x32 (approximately) image and blow it up 10 times its normal size. Kinda hard to tell that those are pennies, eh?

"2cents" is not the best or prettiest Gatorbox emote, but it holds the distinction of being the oldest one on the channel. Not only because 2cents was among the inaugural set of 25 emotes for the channel (of which only 10 are still in use today) but because the creation of this emote actually predates Gatorbox entirely.

Created in approximately 2006, 2cents is tied with the original "scary face" (which we mention in this Patreon post regarding its updated version: https://www.patreon.com/posts/behind-emote-11684873 ). Both 2cents and the Scary Face emote can be traced back to a low-traffic comedy blog that existed from 2004-2008 and eventually became TrackMill Gaming, one of Gatorbox's early sponsors.

The original use of the 2cents emote should be fairly obvious, it's an emote to represent the phrase "just my two cents" when someone is sharing a potentially unsolicited opinion. These days however the emote has become a tongue-in-cheek reference to Twitch Bits which have been nicknamed "Twitch Pennies" by Draco.

When we were looking for emotes to kick off Gatorbox's official use of them in 2015 we didn't really have a lot in-house jokes and memes like we do today. We didn't have a forum, a proper website, or anything that would have an existing catalog of emoticons for us to pick from. We instead turned to the projects that we were involved with before Gatorbox and this is where almost all of the original 25 emotes on the channel came from, 2cents included. (Perhaps in the future we can make a post about these first 25, since most of them have been retired. But that's another story for another day.)

The icon used for the 2cents emote is the exact same PNG file that was created upwards of a decade ago for the comedy site it was borrowed from. Many of these older "vintage" emotes have since been redone and updated to improve their quality, but 2cents has stayed the same. This wasn't exactly an intentional choice, we just never got around to updating it. But we just might leave this one alone so that it can continue to quietly continue the legacy of the community that originally created it.