"Anyway, after that entire moment with GameSpotting came to an end, life pretty much returned to normal. I graduated from high school, went to Rutgers, graduated after five years, tried making zero-budget YouTube videos for a year..."
Oh, I guess it's time to go over THAT in detail, isn't it? Ahem...
"Hey There, Gamers & Anime Aficionados!"
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| This was YouTube's logo back in 2009. Today, the tagline would be "Broadcast What We Approve of, or Else No One Will Know About It". |
So, as mentioned above, after that "I got published on GameSpot" thing happened in late February, I graduated from high school the following June, right before my 18th birthday. I then attended Rutgers University for five years to get a Bachelor's Degree in "Journalism & Media Studies", and it was during that time that the way we as a people interacted & learned new things changed. For example, I remember in what may have been my very first day of school at Rutgers, back in September of 2004, being told about this new-fangled website called "Facebook", which had only launched earlier that February, where college students could intermingle online & talk about their professors; today, Facebook is an absolute behemoth of social media. One year after that site launched, though, another website would launch & become a phenomenon of its own kind: YouTube. This site allowed people to upload videos that they had produced, and while online video hosting wasn't anything new, it was the first of its kind that allowed essentially anyone to upload & share content. And when it came to video games, one man in 2006 essentially changed everything via YouTube: James Rolfe.
Starting in May of 2004, a few months after my GuestSpotting piece (amusingly enough), Rolfe would go on to produce a trio of short videos where he bemoaned how horrible he felt the NES games Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, Dr. Jekyl & Mr. Hyde, & The Karate Kid were. In 2006, he uploaded them onto YouTube after an idea by his friend Mike Matei, and not long later the "Angry Nintendo Nerd", later the Angry Video Game Nerd, became a hit. Naturally, this influenced others to produce their own videos about old video games. Some of them would take a more positively-attuned focus, but many followed Rolfe's lead & simply trashed games they hated; the main difference, though, was that Rolfe would exaggerate his hatred, for simple comedic effect. Personally, while I might have heard of YouTube around 2006 & 2007, I didn't actually really start going to it regularly until around 2008, while my first AVGN episode was the one about the Atari 5200, which was first released in early 2007 over at GameTrailers, but wasn't uploaded to YouTube until mid-2008. Still, it was stuff like what James Rolfe was making, alongside other YouTube channels like MN12BIRD (who actually came back this year, after a 4-5 year hiatus!), Classic Game Room (itself a revived version of The Game Room from 2000, one of the very first online video shows), & Happy Console Gamer, as well as much smaller producers like MJC Reviews & JQJDaMan who have stopped making videos a long time ago, that started making me wonder if I could do something like that, too.
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| A complete list of all 71 videos that have survived the decade of purging, plus my two later videos. |
Naturally, for someone who had some minor experience working with a video editing program like Final Cut Pro... I then proceeded to not do any sort of video editing at all!
Yeah, while I was inspired by people like James Rolfe (AVGN), Mark Bussler (CGR), & Johnny Millennium (HCG), all of whom had prior experience & education in video production, I instead aimed to be much more basic in nature, more along the lines of MN12BIRD, though even he did some editing for his videos; in fact, I named my videos in the same simplistic [Name of Game (Name of Console)] format as him. Unfortunately, I was also intensely lazy about actually putting in more work than what I felt was necessary, so the method to my madness was honestly rather simple. I used my family's digital camera, a Sony that used a Memory Stick Pro for storage (yeah, the original long one, not the Duo that the PSP would utilize), screwed it onto the tripod we had, pointed it at the Toshiba TV I had in my bedroom, turned on the console to get the game booted, pressed "Record", and talked while I played the game. Now, to be fair, I did use my two years of photography while in high school to make sure that the framing of the video was as good as I could for the time, after a rougher start, and I didn't stretch any 4:3 video into full-screen (or, at least, I don't think I did). Once I was done, or started to reach the 11-minute time restriction that YouTube enforced at the time (yeah, that was a thing!), I signed off, pressed "Stop" on the camera, hooked up said camera to my computer to transfer the videos to my desktop, and then simply uploaded them to YouTube with a proper name & general description.
Yes, that is all I did. In fact, I didn't even stop there, as I'd normally record three videos in a row, & upload them all on the same day! To quote James Rolfe, "What was I thinking?!"
In terms of what I covered, I kind of did it all, really. My first video was a two-parter about Knuckles' Chaotix for the Sega Genesis 32X, while I'd also go on to cover games like Strahl for the 3DO, Battle Heat for the PC-FX (via an emulator that only allowed for about five minutes of gameplay, or so), Streets of Fury for the Xbox 360 via Xbox Live Indie Games (made by the studio that's now helping make Street of Rage 4!), Windjammers for the Neo Geo CD, & even the Atari Jaguar port of Doom; just all kinds of stuff. I even once did a series of 18 videos under the "Wii-A-Thon" name, featuring original Wii releases, WiiWare, Virtual Console, & even GameCube games, all to celebrate the release of Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars, which itself was a multi-part video; one for the game itself, one to explain each of the Tatsunoko characters & where they came from, & one for the Ultimate All-Shooters mini-game. I also made videos in which it was just me & the camera without the tripod, as I showed some new purchases, like when I bought a Neo Geo CD & a Vectrex (still own the latter, actually), showed off how the video quality on laserdiscs looked (which shows footage from Star Wars, so how that hasn't been taken down yet amazes me), or an awkward attempt at playing the Dreamcast port of Silent Scope using (mostly) only the VMU, as it does replicate (as best it can) the gameplay on that little screen.
But gaming wasn't all I tried to do! No, I also did the occasional anime review, as well, as while people talking about video games (both retro & new) were already a dime a dozen on YouTube, even for late 2009, there really weren't nearly as many doing videos about anime. Alongside the Chaotix video, I also did a video about Next Senki Ehrgeiz as one of my very first, and it was literally just me playing an old AnimeVillage.com VHS release on my VCR, while I did my usual tripod-held camera recording of me talking over the video; I even had to visibly lower the volume while recording! During this time, I reviewed titles like Ring ni Kakero 1 (which was even what the channel's original name was, because I was lazy), B't X, Naikaku Kenryoku Hanzai Kyousei Torishimarikan Zaizen Jotaro, did a sort of "Let's Watch" for the infamously terrible Panzer Dragoon OVA, & I even did a couple of my earliest "12 Anime" lists, though these were actually in "Top 12" format; in fact, the license rescue list originally got its start in video form. Unfortunately, copyright claims in the years since have resulted in me removing nearly all of my anime video reviews, as I never felt it was worth going through the effort to fight the claims (I wasn't making any money off of these videos, anyway). Today, only the following anime videos still remain up: Reviews of the Ring ni Kakero 1 Pilot Film, Ring ni Kakero 1: Shadow's Volume 1 & 2 DVDs (it's weird, because Toei claimed my review of the first two seasons, but not these), Zaizen Jotaro, Matchless Raijin-Oh Volume 1, & a two-part list for the "Top 12 Hot-Blooded Anime Opening Themes" (which was literally just me playing other people's YouTube videos while talking). Thinking about it, while I don't do videos like I used to, I think the only people who were doing anime videos on YouTube back in 2009 & are still producing content of some sort to this very day might just be me & Tristan "Arkada" Gallant of Glass Reflection; hey, at least one of us is doing it in a way that makes them money, so props to Arkada. Thankfully, neither of us went down the path "Mr. Anime" did; you can look him up for yourself, but it ain't pretty.
Also, I've long since redone all of my old anime video reviews in text form here on the blog, so the loss of the videos aren't anything major.
Now hopefully you've noticed something that I haven't brought up yet when it comes to these videos; the actual content of said videos themselves. There's a good reason for that, and it's a simple one: THEY...SUCK...HARD! Okay, maybe that's being a bit too harsh on myself, but I do feel that they aren't anything special or noteworthy. Remember, every single one of these videos were done without any video capture, editing in post, or scripting (the most I had were some web pages open on my computer to my side for specific info), & were produced by a guy who was still super shy & afraid of putting himself out to the "public" like that; these videos were effectively me coming out of my shell, to an extent. I'll grant my younger self some credit for delivering a sort of "mini Let's Play", which I kind of did without ever knowing about how the Something Awful forums coined the phrase just two years prior in 2007, mixed with elements of a proper game review, but watching a bunch of them today just makes me feel embarrassed. There are way too many "uh"s & "um"s for my liking, and while I do tend to keep from simply rambling, I just can't find myself enjoying them today; I also just have this never-ending feeling that my voice doesn't sound "right" when recorded. I had my moments, though, like when I got a comment on my Quarterback Attack video by Joshua Solomon, a former Digital Pictures employee who worked on the graphics, or when I came across a weird glitch during my PaTaank video, and there were some videos I made that I can call "decent", at the very least, like my Strahl video.
And yet, somehow, I seemed to get some decent numbers, at least for my standards, and even a bit of positive comments; I guess people were much easier to please a decade ago. Twelve of my videos managed to reach five digit numbers when it came to views, with my most "popular", as YouTube puts it, video being (seriously) my review of Ring ni Kakero 1: Shadow Volume 1, with over 51,000 views as of this article, while the Volume 2 review is in 4th place,with over 30,000 views; compare those to my old written review of the entire season, which currently is sitting at a little less than 2,500. My most-viewed game review is Spectral Force 3 for the Xbox 360, at over 36,000, putting it at #3 overall; #2 overall is the one about Laserdisc's video quality (again, how has that not been claimed yet?). Beyond those, other five-digit videos include both of my Dragon's Lair reviews (3D for the GameCube & Trilogy for the Wii), Pitfall!: The Big Adventure for Wii, Street Fighter Alpha 2 for the SNES (via the Wii VC), the first half of my Data East Arcade Classics review for Wii, Matchless Raijin-Oh Volume 1, Mad Dog McCree Gunslinger Pack for Wii... & Autobahn Polizei for Xbox 360 (it's based on a long-running German police drama). Admittedly, it still pleases me that obscure as hell topics like RnK1, Spectral Force, Raijin-Oh, & a 360 game that barely anyone has heard of are among my most-viewed videos, but after those everything drops sharply in views, from 6,000 to 5,000 to below 1,000; my least-viewed video is Part 2 of the Chaotix review... with only 86 views over an entire decade. In fact, a number of my most-viewed videos were in fact some of my very last, which I think shows that I might have been possibly on to something.
Nah, like that'd be the case!
Anyway, I kept at this whole "making YouTube videos supremely lazily" thing for a little over a year, producing "close to 100" videos in total, with my last "normal" uploads being the Dragon's Lair Trilogy & Autobahn Polizei reviews, both on November 4, 2010. I literally made them because rainy weather made me unable to go to work for a second job I had at a horticulture farm, so I pretty much had nothing better to do. Around that same time, though, I had already started putting serious thought into giving a legit blog a try; not some makeshift blog on a forum, but rather one that can act as its own site (sort of). Four weeks later, on December 1, I finally made that idea into a reality by starting up a blog over at Google's Blogspot service, one which I decided to call The Land of Obscusion, because I like stupid puns. The original idea was to actually continue making videos strictly for video game reviews, especially since YouTube had since started allowing videos to be beyond 15 minutes in length, while the blog would be for anime reviews; even at that point, copyright claims made me less eager to continue doing anime content via YouTube.
Honestly, what annoys me more than anything about this whole YouTube endeavor is that I never gave it a proper sendoff. On January 18, 2011, I made a short update video stating that "I'm Not Dead", promising that, though I'd slow down & focus primarily on games from there on out, I wasn't going to stop making videos. I promised to make videos reviewing B't X Neo & "that other title", which I believe was going to be Gundoh Musashi, & I stated that my next video was going to be a review of Ring ni Kakero 1: Shadow Volume 3, finishing off that series. Unfortunately, those plans were dashed rather quickly, as that family camera which allowed me to make said videos, with admittedly more-than-decent video & clear audio, had been given away to a family friend, and the newer camera that we had was actually worse than the older one, though I didn't realize it until I made that update video with it. I actually had started recording the RnK1: Shadow Volume 3 review, but decided to abandon it, since I knew that it'd sound like crap; likewise, after that update, I simply stopped making videos altogether, focusing solely on the blog.
I did what I swore to myself I'd never do: I imitated countless other YouTube channels that died out, made an update video stating that I'd be back with more... And then proceeded to never follow through on my promises; I effectively ran away. To this day, I wish I could go back & fix that mistake, even if it was just a video stating that it was over.
A month later, I did my first video game review on the blog, Super Robot Wars Compact 3, effectively putting a final nail into the coffin that was my halfhearted attempt at making YouTube videos. To be fair, I never truly took the effort seriously, I honestly wasn't all that good at it, and I know that I never had any long-term goals with it, but whereas I can look back at that whole thing with GameSpot & smile, the whole "being a faux-YouTuber" thing is something I look back at with shame. In fact, it'd take over 4.5 years for me to even bother doing another video for YouTube, which was the video version of my interview with Robert Grebe about the life & legacy of American Laser Games, and a little over another year until my next, which was the video version of my Twinkle Nora Rock Me review; I have yet to make another since the end of 2016, though. The main difference with those two productions, though, is that I eventually did purchase a video editing program, VideoPad, I actually put honest & earnest effort into both of them, & I am super proud of how both ended up; they are examples of what I am truly capable of, and I can only get better. Unfortunately, with YouTube only seeing more & more uploads on a daily basis, this year was measured as 500 hours per minute(!), neither of those videos have seen anywhere near as much viewing as most of my old videos. In fact, the Twinkle Nora Rock Me review only saw a boost early this year due to Kenny Lauderdale's videos on the OVA, & even then it only got pushed to over 2,200 views. It is depressing, and only halts me from doing more videos, but I also think of it as karmic retribution for having abandoned things before; had I been doing videos like those two back then, things could have been different.
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The weirdest thing, though? I still get new subscribers every once in a rare while. Today, my channel has 236 people following it, whereas I was only around 150 or so when I stopped doing videos in early 2011. I have no idea why people do that, but it's not like I don't appreciate the gesture. Will I ever actually make another video? Maybe, as I have come to really enjoy the art of making videos (even if my current desktop isn't exactly built for doing so, on a larger scale), but not on any sort of regular basis. Was I ahead of my time in any way? Not at all, and in the grand scheme of things I'll obviously be nothing more than a speck of dust in the machine that is YouTube. What this year of making videos did do, however, was eventually drive me to create the blog that you are reading this article on at this very moment, which is something that has allowed me to meet, interact with, & befriend all sorts of people. Had I never put in that (lazy) effort on YouTube, I don't know if I'd be where I am today, i.e. that weird guy who writes about stuff that no one else really cares about.
In that regard, those videos from a decade prior did result in something positive, even if only on a personal level, and that's mainly why I don't just get rid of all but my post-blog productions. They may not be "good", but they do show how much I've improved & grown, in my own way.
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