Web Video / DanAndPhilGAMES

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Dan and Phil GAMES is a collaborative channel between Phil Lester and Dan Howell launched in 2014. It is, as it says, a gaming channel where Dan and Phil play games, both popular and obscure. Popular features include "Dan vs. Phil", where the two compete for a point on the winners' board, and their long-running playthrough of The Sims, which has its own page.

The channel entered indefinite hiatus in December 2018... until a video in October 2023 finally confirmed the channel dead with a funeral sketch. A sketch which then went on to announce the channel's return.

On October 13th, 2025, the channel was renamed to simply “Dan and Phil”, to reflect the fact that they'd been uploading a lot of non-gaming joint content to the channel.

Tropes relating to their general gaming videos include:

• Aborted Arc: Dan and Phil only made a couple of episodes playing Dream Daddy, but dropped off after the third episode and never resumed it. This stands out since they have played other narrative games to completion on their channel, though they admittedly found the game a bit wordy.
• Actually Pretty Funny: Once he calms down slightly, Dan admits that The Impossible Quiz's "twist" of needing all your skips to finish the game is pretty funny.
  Dan: That's the most I've been fucked with in my entire life.
• Animal-Eared Headband: Dan and Phil own multiple pairs of these (or eared hoodies) and bring them out occasionally. Lampshaded in the third Date Everything! episode as Phil attempts to go into Cat Boy mode while they approach Timmy Timepiece:
  Dan: Those are wolf ears, they're not cat ears!
  Phil: I couldn't find the cat ears!
• Angrish: Occasionally from Dan, including "god frooking poop on a poop fook" after failures in Kinect Sports bowling.
• April Fools' Day: DanAndPhilCRAFTS videos get published on an exclusive channel as a recurring April Fool's Day event. These videos are a fictional narrative that showcases an alternate reality where a stilted, strange Dan and Phil make craft videos which increasingly turn to horrific ritual purposes, and the videos lean more into the horror genre the further they go on. The Crafts Dan and Phil repeatedly mention an exceptionally prolific output of videos which we never see, suggesting April Fool's Day itself could have a lore purpose as something of a gate where the veil thins enough for their videos to cross into our world.
• Artifact Title: The gags for Dan's channel use puns on "danisnotonfire" even though Dan has discarded the name officially.
• Ascended Meme: It became a trend over the years among the Phandom to add the prefix ph- to the start of words. For example, their house becomes the Phouse. The Phandom did this enough that Dan and Phil started doing it too.
• Aside Glance:
  • In instances when Phil's weirdness or cases of That Came Out Wrong don't provoke an apology from Dan or cause him to berate Phil, Dan tends to look knowingly at the camera, sharing the joke with the audience. After more bizarre or distressing utterances where Dan doesn't see fit to reprimand Phil, he often looks to the camera with confusion, worry, or alarm at whatever Phil has said. This trope is emphasized by these silent reactions being zoomed in on after the editing process.
  • In the video where they play Can Your Pet?, Phil gives a few guilty looks to the camera as Dan coos over their cute little baby chick. "Can Your Pet" is a Disguised Horror Story game where you're tricked into killing your pet and making it into canned food. It's very easy to tell who's played the game before and who hasn't.
• Ass Pull:invoked Parodied when playing the Stormy Ascent in the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy. Phil drops a Your Mom, and Dan goes against the joke, claiming she has nothing to do with the filming of the video. Phil then says "plot twist: she's behind the camera", and Dan accidentally says "yeah, our mum's been filming all our videos", then realizes the implication and lampshades it.
• Bait-and-Switch: "Goodbye Forever", the first video uploaded to the channel after five years of inactivity, is set up to end the lengthy hiatus state of the channel by confirming its death with a funeral sketch. Then, Dil rises from the casket and it's confirmed the channel is ending the hiatus by at long last returning.
• Berserk Button: Phil's utter incompetence in following instructions while playing Portal 2 co-op mode blindfolded drives Dan into several annoyed rages. Due to this, Dan doesn't even consider playing the second level.
• Black Comedy: Frequently from both, but it even occurs accidentally in the games, such as the times their Sims end up eating fish at the counter where their pet fish is kept in a bowl.
• Bomb Disposal: They've encountered it in Undertale and "Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes", but while things get extremely close, they end up successful in both. Subsequent visits to the latter game, however, make it clear that Dan and Phil aren't able to keep up with the higher difficulties.
• Butt-Monkey: Dan has terrible luck playing the Game of Life. It's made funnier by just about everything going right for Phil, who gets to retire early and travel the world while Dan continuously runs into taxes and other obstacles.
• Character as Himself: The credits of "Saying Goodbye Forever" say Dil Howlter played himself, and it shows up on Dil's IMDb page (though it was implied to be KickThePJ wearing the Dil mask from TATINOF).
• Christmas Episode: Every holiday season, they play festive games, and 2016 and 2017 had Gamingmas, which entailed a video every day of December leading up to Christmas. Gamingmas was later revived in 2023.
• Companion Cube: Dan and Phil have a seal plushie they bought on their 2019 Japan trip that began casually appearing in 2024 gaming videos, either in the background or on Phil's lap/in his arms as a sort of Security Blanket (he has referred to the plushie as the Security Seal, while Dan has called it the Pheal).
  Phil [hovering the seal in front of Dan's face]: Look at your son in the eyes. Look at him.
• Couch Gag: After annotations were discontinued in favor of the weird bubble things YouTube uses now, the descriptions for Dan and Phil's individual channels have been using puns related to their channel names, like "Cupisnotonfire" and "AmazingMug" in the episode where they played Cuphead.
• Cringe Comedy: Their April Fool's- exclusive parody offshoot channel, DanAndPhilCRAFTS, features very spacey, awkward, and personality-devoid versions of Dan and Phil making craft videos to this effect, with plenty of weird old-fashioned values being taught. But then there's the creepy stuff on top of that, turning surreal cringe into horror.
• Deadpan Snarker: Dan, often at Phil's expense. Though Phil can give as good as he gets.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The early DanAndPhilGAMES videos from 2014, such as Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, are structured more like serious game reviews. In addition, many of the quirks and gags that would become a key feature of the channel are not present.
• Epic Fail: Their attempt at playing Yandere Simulator goes spectacularly awry, even by Dan and Phil's standards. As one comment put it, "I expected them to fuck it up, but they actually managed to fuck up the fuck up."
• Gosh Dang It to Heck!: Phil averts this more here, although it's still mild compared to Dan's language (which is -usually- censored like in Phil's videos). Since the channel returned, he's dropped his no swearing rule. It still can feel a bit surprising when he drops an F-bomb though. Viewers pointed out that he dropped more when playing Chained Together than Dan did!
• Halloween Episode: "Spooky Week", where they play horror games every day for the week leading up to Halloween.
• Hope Spot: In their Spooky Week livestream of Friday the 13th: The Game. The first round they play, someone calls the police and they manage to survive long enough to not only evade Jason twice, but make it to the camp exit. Unfortunately, Jason is already waiting for them.
• Instant Expert: Dan tends to pick up new games very quickly, and often wins at them in cases where Phil has played before.
• Irony: Dan occasionally brings out a sexy nun costume he bought while on tour in 2022 and performs as the character Sister Daniel with clear allusions to Catholic aesthetics, but Dan was actually raised Protestant.
• I Think You Broke Him: Phil comments that he may have broken Dan after he sends him into a particularly long bout of Stunned Silence in their fourth time playing "The Impossible Quiz."
• Line-of-Sight Name: Dan and Phil name the Fallen Child in Undertale Toto, because Dan was wearing a Totoro shirt. They realize the Wizard of Oz connotations too late, to say nothing about the character who receives the name.
• Mad Libs Catch Phrase: Phil starts videos welcoming the audience with, "Hello, Dan and Phil Games [plural relevant object]"^note i.e. "Hello, Dan and Phil Games faces!" when messing around with FaceApp since the channel's first Christmas season introduced the trend.
• Network Decay: Upon returning in 2023, Dan and Phil suggested the channel would no longer just be for gaming, and broadened/shifted the content to become the space for any dedicated videos of the two as a full duo, such as their baking content, behind-the-scenes footage of projects, and reactions and retrospectives of things they did together—"collab" features which would have usually been posted to one or the other's channels previously. By October 2025, Dan and Phil rebranded the gaming channel as just "Dan and Phil" to serve as a hub for all of their shared content while not abandoning gaming content together.
• Never Say That Again: Dan to Phil, frequently, since Phil seems to be a treasure trove of Accidental Innuendos.
• Once per Episode:
  • After the first video, Golf With Your Friends had a pretty reliable streak of crashing well into the game, forcing them to recreate their stroke totals in a new game, so they took this as a once-an-episode occurrence when starting their fifth episode. This time, the game works perfectly.
  • Every Gamingmas, one of the episodes is devoted to the virtual version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, due to said game being a Christmas tradition in the Lester household, yet one that Phil has never seen won during his childhood or the channel's own attempts.
• Parallel Universe: DanAndPhilCRAFTS, with installments published on April Fool's Day, is strongly implied to be a window into one, with awkward, creepy alternate versions of Dan and Phil and a developing horror aesthetic that increases with each entry. The Crafts Dan and Phil have mentioned that their videos total in the thousands, but evidently very few have crossed over to be viewed in the real world...a number for which viewers might be very grateful.
• Product Placement: They've occasionally worn or shown off their Dan and Phil clothes and other assorted merch on this channel for sales pitches, intentionally playing up the advertisement until it gets too stupid to continue.
• Rage Quit: Dan does this at the end of Bean Boozled BETRAYAL because he ate a jelly bean that tasted like skunk spray.
• Refuge in Audacity: In "Dumber Ways to Die", instead of being a Dan vs Phil, the pair compete for a cookie. Dan wins, but Phil – known Sweet Tooth – wants the cookie so badly, he licks the packaging. Dan just sighs and lets Phil have the cookie as he didn't really want it anyway.
• Running Gag: Enough for its own page.
• Running Gagged: A pattern of videos with various clickbait titles alluding to the infamous "are they a couple"? question finally resolved in October 2025, with "Are Dan and Phil In a Relationship?", which definitively states "yes", with much explanation of the history of their time together and what factors led to the delay on being public about it.
• Screams Like a Little Girl: Dan. Repeatedly, either due to being scared during horror games, or due to pure anger and frustration, often at a stupid mistake on Phil's part. They've mentioned that their neighbors and headphone users probably hate Dan for this reason.
  • Phil, not as notoriously loud as Dan, has more of a propensity to do a high-pitched yelp or squeak. Becomes Screaming at Squick when he does it over something he finds gross, like a food he dislikes that Dan is forcing him try.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here!:
  • Dan shuts off the lights, storms out of the room, and slams the door behind him when he finds out you need all your skips in order to win The Impossible Quiz, leaving Phil behind, only to burst back in a few seconds later so he can rant at the game.
  • When Dan ends up eating a skunk spray Bean Boozled bean at the end of their second time playing "Higher or Lower?", he spits out the bean and just leaves the room due to the hideously unpleasant taste.
  • While playing Getting Over It, Dan accidentally pushes the player character off a cliff, resetting the progress made throughout the entire episode. After falling over and angrily gnawing on his slipper, he storms off. Phil has to remind him that they still need to close the episode.
• Screw Yourself: When asked by the "What Would You Do If...?" game what would happen if he was dropped into a separate universe, Dan says if there's another Dan, he'll "fuckin' kill him", which he then adjusts to "fuck and kill him" due to the similar sound of the phrases.
• Security Cling: During Spooky Week 2023, they played Don't Scream, a horror game that's connected to the player's mic and has one simple rule: if you scream, you lose. Since they were desperately trying to keep quiet in the face of several jumpscares, Dan and Phil defaulted to grabbing each other when scared.
• Seinfeldian Conversation: Frequently occurs between the two, and they often realize and stop to get back to the games they're playing. This has been acknowledged, with Dan noting that their frequent tangents often rival the amount of time discussing the game.
• Sensory Abuse: Dan's high-pitched screaming has often been acknowledged by them to be a problem for headphone users, to the point where it became something for Dan to work on in 2018. In a particularly bad case (playing the infamous Stormy Ascent), Dan claimed his screaming "necrophiled" the audience's ears; that is, the sensory abuse continued after the eardrums of the viewers had already blown out.
• Sensory Overload: "Christmas Shopper Simulator 2" eventually overwhelms Dan. Not that you can blame him, as the experience included catapulting people through stores, hijacking an escalator to send shoppers flying, an animal sex store, and ballooning patrons.
• Serious Business:
  • The Impossible Quiz quickly turns into this, and any mistakes that cost them lives turn into the bane of their existence.
  • "Golf With Your Friends" is surprisingly intense and competitive for both Dan and Phil and the audience, despite it being a simple game of virtual mini-golf.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!:
  • At the end of the Just Dance Dan vs. Phil competition, Dan gets very smug and in Phil's face about winning, dancing around him and boasting about his superior skill. While Dan is closing his eyes in a victory dance, Phil grabs one of their subscriber-celebration balloons and pops it in Dan's face, startling him out of his gloating.
  • After Dan wins in "Hide and Shriek", a competitive game where laying Jump Scare traps and using startle spells is a key mechanic, he starts getting obnoxious as he puts the sticker on his side of the board, saying he's won too many times for the stickers to fit on his side at the size they're in. Phil uses this attitude, and the game's theme as an excuse to startle a preoccupied Dan from behind the board. This just makes Dan even less sympathetic toward Phil's loss.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: Dan, as always. He's rarely censored, though earlier videos and some more extreme curses have bleeps. In the third episode of Yasuhati, Dan swears so much that they make the decision to bleep it all, with a disclaimer at the beginning letting people know.
• Sore Loser: They can both fill this role in different ways.
  • When Phil demands "all or nothing" rounds in Dan vs. Phil. He's not really such a bad sport in truth... he just likes the bonus of winning. His insistence to have a prize even in non-D.v.P competitions can create this for himself when he's not the winner.
  • Dan can get rather upset and stomp his feet when he loses, especially if he feels strongly that his loss was unfair and for reasons out of his control (such as luck in the Game of Life).
• Staring Contest: A staring contest is one of the challenges in the final (2018) Dan vs Phil video. In 2023, they spontaneously have a breath holding contest in the midst of Trombone Champ and, although it's not a staring contest, they do stare at each other and make silly faces.
• Straight Man and Wise Guy: Phil is often the wise guy while Dan is often the straight man but they sometimes switch roles with each other. The best case of this role reversal has to be Dan's reaction to Phil's puzzle-solving in the second Impossible Quiz video.
• Stunned Silence:
  • While playing Undertale, this is their response to Flowey's Evil Laugh and speech at the end of the Ruins.
  • This, and a combination of inarticulate stammering, is also their response to Asgore destroying the Mercy button.
  • When Phil makes them lose all their progress on "The Impossible Quiz" by accidentally refreshing the page, all Dan can do is sit there staring at him, jaw dropped, in complete and utter silence for a full minute. Phil babbles on for a few seconds, then gets to trying to get Dan to say something. (Or even just blink.)
• Take a Third Option: In their second round of "Golf With Your Friends", Dan and Phil are competing for a pair of novelty socks, which go to whoever wins. The game ends on a perfect tie, so Dan and Phil each take one of the socks.
• Tranquil Fury: Contrary to the usual, while playing Bread & Fred, Dan doesn't explode but is rather quietly upset (at least, quiet by his standards). Since they weren't aware of the game's Anti-Frustration Features, they kept having to start over.
• Verbal Backspace: Due to the channel usually maintaining a cleaner tone than Dan's separate content, he will occasionally pull a Precision F-Strike and then go back, saying he meant to say a milder equivalent. (For example: "FUCK!....I mean, "flip".) Occasionally defied when he's annoyed enough at the game, where, after cursing, he'll say something along the lines of "-I mean...no; that's exactly what I mean."
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Dan really takes it out on Phil for his frequent moments of odd logic or gullibility, to the point where the two of them have had to remind the audience that it's all competitive joking banter and that they really are friends.
• Vocal Dissonance: Discussed by Phil, who comments that if he'd known Flowey would turn out to be such a pivtoal (and evil) character, he probably wouldn't have given him a Texan accent.
• Was It Really Worth It?: Dan asks this nearly word-for-word when they finally beat the Impossible Quiz. Phil thinks it was, Dan is unconvinced. They have similar reactions to completing the Stormy Ascent level.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: As on his main channel, Dan says, "Are you fucking kidding me?!" a lot in response to out-there, difficult, or just plain annoying events. He screams it when he finds out you need all your skips to finish The Impossible Quiz.