Internet confused as Highguard studio says Dr Disrespect lied about attending a press preview and his photo of an access badge was fake: 'DDR was not invited to any Highguard event past or present'

Ahead of its release on Monday, Highguard developer Wildlight Entertainment held a preview event for press and content creators, showcasing the game that most of the rest of the gaming world wasn't entirely confident even existed. PC Gamer's Morgan Park was there, and disgraced streamer Guy Beahm, better known to the online world as Dr Disrespect, was not—which might seem like an odd thing to say, except, well, he said he was.

The whole baffling story began on January 24, when Beahm posted on X about going to Los Angeles to check out Highguard. The message was accompanied by a photo of strategically-placed gaming peripherals, a "brain fuel" drink, a knife for some reason, and a Highguard launch event pass, presumably proof that he was on the scene.

This led first to questions about why Wildlight would invite Beahm to the event in the first place. You may recall that he's banned for life from Twitch for, as he put it, messaging a minor in a way "that sometimes leaned too much in the direction of being inappropriate."

As it turns out, Beahm was neither invited nor did he attend. After an actual attendee stated that the streamer was not there, theories that he might have been at a creator event that was separate from the event for press were squashed by Wildlight creator manager Chin Pua, who said said on X that "DDR was not invited to any Highguard event past or present," and furthermore, that the access pass Beahm posted a photo of "was not an official badge."

I reached out to Wildlight and the studio confirmed that the post on X did in fact come from Chin Pua, and Beahm was definitively not at either Highguard preview event. He just made the whole thing up.

So we're left with more questions, although the only one that's at all interesting is also the most obvious: "Why?" And to that, I have no answer. There's no punchline here, no grand denouement or even a flimsy "it was a joke" justification. In response to Pua's post, Beahm wrote, with his now commonplace 'pronouns in bio' insult, "Why would you lie like this Chin she/her? We even drank large Vanilla Lattes and read the Rollin Stones magazine together before the event."

Nothing else has been said about it since then: No defense, no explanation, not even a simple 'lol gottem' for the benefit of his remaining followers. Maybe it was supposed to be a joke—Beahm's previous attempts at humor include livestreaming from a public restroom at E3 and mocking Asian languages—but if it is, I don't get it.