Weekend Lounge ~ Angry Gamer Rewind

Welcome to the weekend! Hope it's been a good week for you. I've been tinkering with a lot of stuff behind the scenes for various projects, so there isn't much to report on this week.

In case you missed it, Star Wanderers is out for everyone post-campaign! It's 8 stories of adventures between a galactic cop and a mysterious space knight. For those who read it, yes there will be more. In fact, I have some more in the can (one of which was released in Anvil #2, if you missed it!) and some yet to be announced. Aside from that, I do have other stories I'm working on, including a set I'm trying to get done ASAP for later submission periods. In fact, after this post is done I will most likely get back to them (unless something goes sideways, anyway).

On top of all that, Phantom Mission is still ongoing! We just passed an important reveal regarding the underground city and what the not-do-good doctor's plans might be for the future of this fallen place. Is the world really ending, or is there more to it all than we think? Catch up on this serialization by checking out the Patreon today! For those curious, I've also already finished up the first draft of the follow-up to this story (it's looking like it will all come out to be a total of 3 parts), so if you want to be the first to read it, sign up today!

That aside, for this weekend I wanted to cover a nearly forgotten time in internet history--early YouTube. It might be hard to imagine it now, but the first days of the site contained a very different world than the one we live in now. Said site was also tremendously more functional and less prone to backbiting and sabotage.

But I digress.

Before the western world became a series of shanty towns for subcultures spun out of control into cults and separated from the greater whole, the online world was once a window into what late 20th century life was rapidly turning into. Back then we were still mostly united and had very similar every day to day lives and experiences, and it shows when you watch early YouTube today. It might feel foreign to a kid today, but that's part of the point. That stuff succeeded back then because everyone could relate--not a hyper-specific minority of loud people.

It's hard to imagine now, but one of the earliest successes on the platform back then was the Angry Video Game Nerd (Originally "the Angry Nintendo Nerd") who mastered the early format of YouTube by keeping his videos short, concise, and relatable to the Gen Y teenagers and young adults hooking themselves up to the platform for the first time. He was THE star of early YouTube. His comedy videos focused on what it was like to grow up in the late 80s and early 90s, a world that was very rapidly disappearing, and filtered it through shared experiences in his work. His videos were very popular and more or less defined the early history of the site, even when doing battle with the diabolical copyright strike system of early YouTube who clearly had no idea what they were doing. When people say the early internet was the Wild West, this is the sort of thing they mean. It wasn't always as tightly controlled (though that is rapidly falling away) and formulaic as it is today.

This creator of the AVGN , James Rolfe, would eventually come to define what YouTube would eventually be used for, both good and bad, in the decade that followed. In essence, he was a pioneer of this new landscape and was the first to show others how it could be done.

Naturally, of course, this meant he would have many imitators and followers that would both ape what he did or go in their own direction using his example as a base. The most obvious example is Doug Walker, the Nostalgia Critic, who would instead focus on movies and TV shows from the past and rib them in a way similar to James. 

However, there is a bit of difference to how it began Vs what it turned into. If you paid attention to a lot of early videos back them from either James or Doug, or their imitators, they would frequently discuss what it was like for "us" growing up and how "we" felt at the time these things were made. In a sense, they were speaking to their generation and communicating both tongue in cheek observations and stray thoughts their cohort had growing up at the time. It was never meant to be taken seriously, but to the generation who were ironically raised on their videos, it was deadly serious. They just didn't understand  at the time how it would come to define them.

Before nostalgia became a weapon to either fire up subversives or traditionalists, it was entertainment itself. The above video focuses on just how many people at the time there were on the early days of YouTube trying to connect and express this discovery. At the same time, others were simply trying to get a piece of the pie for themselves. What "pie" that is, however, is not clear, since there was no monetization on early YouTube. There wasn't anything to gain except video views and attention. I personally believe a lot of this early fanfare was just an excitement that you could actually connect with others across the world on your shared interests--something you could not do before YouTube came into existence or the internet became more ubiquitous in everyday life. YouTube, much like the then-burgeoning social media, would change how the internet worked in the years to come. It would do this to the point that the world before it has almost entirely been erased.

I can't say whether that part of it was intentional, but there is a bit of bitterness in these spaces today that wasn't really there at the time. Getting drunk video responses arguing about how the original NES TMNT game was actually flawless from college kids showed just what sort of environment was. When that disappeared, much of the intent was lost. Instead of communication device, it became its own ecosystem.

It's a big goof now for the Millennials raised on the internet to lampoon or goof on the early days of what we have now, but it was taken surprisingly seriously at the time by the Gen Y teens and young adults who were trying to take advantage of this early landscape to communicate with their cohort. And despite how it would later turn out, it wasn't to share their love of the pop cult or let everyone know who world changing or terrible entertainment was--it was a desire to find your fellow wanderers through life and connect with them as the world was so rapidly changing post-9/11. It's hard to describe, or really get across today, but the site was very different before money and worldwide fame became a real factor.

That doesn't mean there weren't still coattail riders, though! Check out the above video and you'll see what I mean. Amidst the genuine angry reviewer wave of people like Armake21 (RIP) there were just as many who simply wanted to be James Rolfe with no idea of what made his material work. There is a reason few of them lasted beyond the early days of YouTube, though the fate of some is surely an interesting story in itself.

What is funny is that you can track the change and how fast it morphed by the time of the Blip.TV days with sites like That Guy With The Glasses to being an attempt at an industry that  thrives off not only milking nostalgia, but tearing down the past. By the time the 2010s hit, that early vibe and optimism was lost to the growing cynicism and greed that would come to define many of the "Content Creators" to come. Different world, different priorities.

Related to that, the same user as the above video also made one that features an in depth look at how the Nostalgia Critic came to be, showing the change from the mood of early YouTube into what it would become in the process. He also gives some perspective as a younger viewer at the time and how he processed a lot of this Gen Y attitude that comes across as strange to many young people today who take it for granted.

I recommend this one as well, though it is much longer:

You can see a lot of DNA here in what would soon become the madness of 2010s YouTube from political wankery to the ever-prevalent "Us Vs Them" narratives that more or less run the site now. Do whatever you can for those extra dollars, just like what wiped out journalists in the mainstream media. Eventually even the "Content Creators" will suffer the same fate. It didn't start that way, though, and it's fairly obvious when watching early footage from when it began that it was never meant to be anything other than a lark.

And yet, here we are today.

Regardless, that old world is gone now. Though James and Doug still exist and are still successful on the platform, as we barrel towards their 20th anniversary as video creators (yes, we're that close), it seems clear that where we are now is not where we imagined we'd be back then. What exactly we imagined is still anyone's guess, but with how unstable formerly stable things have gotten, how the internet went from being a sure thing to being ready to fall apart at a moment's notice practically over night, it's strange watching a lot of this early material and remembering just how different it was back then--especially when you consider what happened to a lot of these people over the years and where we ourselves have gone.

When was the last time we could use the term "we" and feel like it could actually apply to a cohort? It feels like it's been ages.

Of course, none of that is ever coming back, but this current present also isn't forever either. No one really knows what's coming next, though I don't think we've ever been quite so uncertain about it before. This makes looking at a lot of this past work so fascinating from the perspective of the unstable '20s. We never saw any of this coming. Would things have changed if we had? Maybe. There is no way to ever know.

We were born before the internet was even a factor in anything. What will it be like when we return to that state? What will we have have learned and applied from this experiment that just didn't work out? I don't rightly know, but it is interesting to think about. Today isn't eternity.

That's all for this week. I hope you're keeping cool as we head into the final stretch of August. Summer is almost done, but we're not. There's still plenty to look forward to.

That is one thing that will never change.

8 Stories of swords, sorcery, guns, criminals, danger, and crime! It's Star Wanderers!