Man Shocked Through Video Game Controller After Lighting Strike

A man from Robertson County, Tennessee was playing a video game on Saturday night during a storm when a nearby lightning strike resulted in him being shocked straight up the wire of his controller.

As WKRN reports, the man was playing after dinner when he was hit, and called emergency services for assistance.

Josh Rice, the Assistant Director of Robertson County Emergency Medical Services told News 2 that medics had responded around 9:15 p.m. Saturday to a call of a man struck by lightning in Greenbrier.

When crews arrived, they said they determined the man’s house was either hit, or the lightning struck nearby, and he suffered a shock through a video game controller.

While this sounds bad, he’s OK! He was able to make the call, and when ambulance crews arrived, they found that he didn’t appear injured, “wanted to be checked out to make sure he was not injured” and didn’t need to be transported to a local hospital.

Lightning strikes while playing video games are no joke! I remember playing San Andreas on my PS2 back in the day and a tree right outside my bedroom window was hit by lightning. It didn’t pass through anything I was holding or sitting on—unlike this unlucky guy—but my TV was bizarrely fried, in that afterwards it would only show its colour in varying shades of purple.

And while this might sound like a one-in-a-million kind of event, it was just last year that Karma, a pro Rocket League player, was playing a game during a storm, holding a wired video game controller, and the exact same thing happened.

In this case she was even unluckier than the Robertson County man, as Karma actually suffered burns to her hand, and the shock melted the USB connection port on the controller she was using.