[0:08] I feel a certain amount of 
kinship with James Rolfe
[0:12] we're basically the same age 
we both went to film school
[0:16] we both ultimately found ourselves 
making videos about media for YouTube
[0:22] Better known as The Angry Video Game Nerd James  
[0:25] has this behind the scenes video 
that I can't stop thinking about
[0:30] AVGN Behind the Scenes and Nerd Room Tour 2021
[0:35] There's just so much going on with it
[0:40] there's a light stand suspended 
from the ceiling with craft wire
[0:44] a cable hole made in a desk by attacking 
it with a drill like a slasher villain
[0:49] the whole thing begins with an awkward 
disclaimer that the audio is being recorded  
[0:54] from a different microphone just off screen 
than the one that's immediately apparent
[1:00] I I recorded this entire video and realized this  
[1:03] mic is not plugged in the 
shotgun mic is plugged in
[1:08] then there's the tripod
[1:10] James expresses a desire to keep things out of his  
[1:14] way tripods light stands and such to 
maximize floor space in his studio
[1:20] A worthy goal I can empathize with as I sit 
here in a veritable forest of aluminum and steel
[1:27] but then he shows his solution  
[1:30] a tripod head secured to a strip of 
lumber by two mismatched scraps of wood
[1:37] it is a wrong thing a cludged-together precarious 
mess whose wrongness is intuitively apparent even  
[1:46] to those who have little familiarity 
with the equipment of film making
[1:52] this thing ruined my life in the way that only 
the inexplicable decisions of strangers can
[2:01] why was this made
[2:02] why was this made this way
[2:05] what was happening that created the circumstances  
[2:08] that led to this being made 
the way that it was made
[2:12] many of the solutions being shown off 
in the video seemed counterproductive
[2:17] solutions to inefficiency more 
inefficient than the original problem
[2:22] this Glimpse behind the scenes paints a blurry yet  
[2:26] still identifiable picture of a 
process of endless maintenance
[2:31] a forever war James Rolfe is engaged in against 
the twin belligerent of entropy and James Rolfe  
[2:40] he includes a captivating outake from the 
recording of his 2021 video Shrek Fairytail  
[2:46] Freak Down where he's tied to a chair and trying 
to hold an onion in his mouth like a ball gag
[2:52] he loses his grip on the vegetable and 
lashes out in frustration cursing the  
[2:57] onion cursing the ropes cursing Co 
cursing the lack of hands to help
[3:03] boy I wish I had a crew wish we didn't 
have Co and all this [ __ ] [ __ ]
[3:09] it is a sincere frustration honestly more 
compelling than the video it's from but it  
[3:17] betrays a lack of foresight a lack of planning 
and its inclusion feels rhetorically misplaced
[3:26] this rhetorical confusion marbles throughout  
[3:29] the Studio Tour repeated shoutouts given 
to his multi-channel Network Screenwave
[3:34] a seemingly out of left field 
defense of his wife April
[3:38] and a laundry list of one-off 
projects consuming his time
[3:43] James says he'll be addressing 
some complaints in his words of  
[3:47] the assholish variety which suggests 
that there's something more going on
[3:53] but why say these things
[3:57] why make these admissions
[4:00] I thought I knew the Angry Video Game Nerd 
I distinctly remember huddling with my film  
[4:06] school peers around a computer in 2006 
laughing over chronologically confused  
[4:12] and mentally noting that the inevitable 
had begun serving video over the internet  
[4:18] was on the cusp of viability and the web 
was already developing its own vernacular
[4:25] internet videos weren't just the happen 
stance of virality anymore or out of  
[4:30] context Clips forwarded via email or 
repurpose clips of shows and movies
[4:35] they were things being made for the 
internet and everything was about to change
[4:43] I may not have been the most Ardent fan but 
it was impossible to not know about the Angry  
[4:49] Video Game Nerd and by extension James 
Rolfe The Man Behind the pocket protector
[4:56] as The Story Goes James Rolfe was 
a pioneer of New Media while he  
[5:01] arguably spawned the entire genre of 
angry reviews and undeniably set the  
[5:07] tempo for thousands of creators he set 
himself apart from the crowd by being  
[5:13] a trained filmmaker having a leg up on the 
skill sets of lighting sound and camera work
[5:20] even as YouTuber became a real 
career he never really seemed to  
[5:25] embrace the identity always seemed apart from it
[5:30] as his peers would often detail he 
wasn't a YouTuber he was a filmmaker
[5:37] but how could I square that reputation 
with this admission of his process with  
[5:43] the light stands arduously suspended with 
craft wire in lieu of a $15 scissor clamp
[5:52] James says his camera work has grown stagnant 
claims that it frustrates him most of all before  
[6:00] detailing an insistence on disassembling 
an entire rig to move from the prompter  
[6:05] to the tripod rather than using a quick 
release plate or investing in a second  
[6:10] camera body only to then minutes later 
admit to having a second camera body
[6:18] this made me keenly aware of one thing above all
[6:21] I do not know James Rolfe
[7:22] having glimpsed something of his 
Oddities the distant Spectre of  
[7:25] the man gripped me with a hunger for 
comprehension a compulsion to know more
[7:31] fortunately he had already offered me more
[7:34] in 2022 James self-published his Memoirs 
and autobiography A Movie Making Nerd
[7:41] circumstances being what they are I 
feel a reintroduction is necessary
[7:46] between 2004 and 2006 fresh Film School grad 
James Rolfe created a Trilogy of short skits  
[7:52] where he played a stereotypical nerd 
complaining about old Nintendo games
[7:58] the character lampooned something 
that James saw as inherently funny
[8:02] his friends getting intensely 
angry about video games
[8:06] his university buddy Mike Matei thought 
they were hilarious and in 2006 uploaded  
[8:11] the videos to the fledgling YouTube where they 
would see enormous success compelling James to  
[8:18] make more of them and creating what we 
now know as the Angry Video Game Nerd
[8:23] the brand and format coalesced quickly and 
has remained largely unchanged for 20 years
[8:29] for the seventh video MC kids 
their friend Kyle Justin wrote  
[8:32] an absolute earworm of theme song that 
is honestly somewhere between 40 and  
[8:37] 80% of the reason that we're having 
this conversation in the first place
[8:45] [singing] 'He's gonna take you back to the past'
[8:51] Mike, an avid retro gamer with an extensive 
collection, would feed James material and  
[8:56] manage logistics like web hosting, maintaining 
the YouTube channel, securing partnerships with  
[9:01] outlets like Screw Attack, and James 
would handle the video production.
[9:05] The show’s comedy hinged, and really still hinges,  
[9:08] on a combination of acidic vulgarity, casual 
violence, and an excess of juvenile machismo.
[9:18] this game is worse than a Mischief Night prank 
Mischief Night is throwing toilet paper all over  
[9:22] someone's yard this game is the equivalent of 
throwing toilet paper after you wiped your ass  
[9:26] it's as refreshing as a horse's anus [ __ ] The 
Crow up it's bird ass and [ __ ] you you [ __ ]  
[9:31] clown face Joker Kiss makeup wearing King Diamond 
Beetlejuice Alice Cooper Marilyn Manson [ __ ]
[9:38] but it wasn't James's first creation James 
did not apparate EX nilo in 2006 and a movie  
[9:46] making nerd is an opportunity 
to delve into that prehistory
[9:58] Now is as good a time as any to mention 
the odd conflict that swirls around James.
[10:04] He has attracted a not-insubstantial audience of 
cankerous hate-watchers, self-styled truthers,  
[10:10] who have made a hobby of disseminating what 
they see to be the “truth” of James Rolfe:  
[10:15] that he is a man of hubris, ungrateful for his 
success on YouTube, and dismissive of the very  
[10:21] fans who gave him a career in the first place, 
alternately a know-nothing failure of a filmmaker  
[10:28] or a cuckolded visionary who could have had it 
all if he hadn’t been laid low by his bitch wife.
[10:34] I am far from the first person to ask 
the question “who is James Rolfe?”
[10:40] James is, by reputation, 
personally extremely offline,  
[10:45] he values his privacy and sees social media as 
a distraction from his craft, tries to keep his  
[10:52] personal life personal. That is an admirable 
quality, but it’s also not a hard line.
[10:58] Obviously I’m holding his 
self-published autobiography.
[11:03] Whatever secrecy James enjoys by 
not dropping selfies on the gram  
[11:07] every day he makes up for with infrequent, but 
overwhelming trips into his personal affairs.
[11:14] He may not go often, but when he goes he goes big.
[11:18] And maybe that is why it has 
wormed its way into my brain.
[11:22] Not all of the fascination with the historical 
arc of the AVGN is odious. There is something  
[11:29] profoundly compelling about James:  
[11:32] people who become aware of his 
quirks find themselves enthralled.
[11:37] anyway that's all I have to say for now there's 10  
[11:40] more videos to make on this subject 
but that's James Rolfe and the dvx100
[11:45] People talk about James in a very specific way, my 
friends talk about James in a very specific way,  
[11:52] and I have developed a very strange, 
adversarial relationship with that.
[11:58] The cultural impact of AVGN 
is undeniably far reaching,  
[12:01] he is without question the direct inspiration 
for many, many imitators and derivatives. AVGN  
[12:09] set the tone that all YouTube reviews 
would in some form or another respond  
[12:15] to. Two decades on the cultural impact 
of AVGN is deep in the DNA of YouTube.
[12:22] But it is also likewise easy to overstate 
the uniqueness of The Angry Video Game Nerd,  
[12:28] as though James captured something that 
would have never otherwise existed.
[12:34] The concept of media critique as 
entertainment did not begin with James Rolfe.
[12:41] “The bottom line is this: Swamp Buggy Racing 
is one of the most inexplicably bad pieces  
[12:46] of software ever mass produced for the 
consumer market. Do not buy it. Do not  
[12:51] rent it. Do not even pick up the box. I’m 
going to go launch the game one last time  
[12:56] to get screen shots for this review, and 
after that I’ll be giving the game disc to  
[13:01] the four-year-old who lives downstairs so 
he can turn it into a colourful Frisbee.”
[13:05] 6%
[13:06] PC Gamer, May 2000
[13:10] Classic.
[13:11] Basically as long as the review has 
existed as a literary form writers  
[13:16] have sought to make them entertaining for their 
own sake. Even disregarding that long legacy,  
[13:23] the DNA of the Angry Video Game Nerd follows in 
a lineage with Siskel and Ebert At the Movies,  
[13:29] Mystery Science Theatre 3000, 
Stomp Tokyo, and Seanbaby dot com.
[13:34] Culturally AVGN was right in line with Penny 
Arcade. In 2006 Jerry and Mike were entering  
[13:41] their eighth year of success with a webcomic 
whose comedy hinged on acidic vulgarity,  
[13:47] casual violence, and an excess of 
juvenile machismo, a formula that  
[13:52] had proven so successful they were able 
to spin it off into its own expo in 2004.
[13:59] There were many people putting out the same 
kind of material as James, but his filmmaking  
[14:06] background gave him a critical advantage in the 
early days of YouTube. Simply owning a digital  
[14:13] camera and having a basic grasp of audio separated 
him from his competitors filming on webcams.
[14:20] James Rolfe was perfectly positioned,  
[14:22] and by coincidence, struck an 
iron he didn’t even know was hot.
[14:28] Like all YouTubers, he got 
lucky, he got insanely lucky.
[14:34] While the early YouTube subscriber numbers look 
modest by modern standards, JamesNintendoNerd  
[14:40] was briefly the eighth largest channel on 
YouTube in 2008 with 125,000 subscribers,  
[14:48] and the channel’s three, almost four million 
modern subscribers are respectable but  
[14:54] somewhat mundane, the subscriber numbers don’t 
betray just how popular the Nerd really was.
[15:03] By the time the AVGN movie was announced in 2011 
the channel had nearly 300 million lifetime views.
[15:12] He didn’t just have viewers, he had fans,  
[15:17] passionate fans who made fan art, 
not just fan art, fan video games!
[15:23] It is no overstatement to say that the 
Angry Video Game Nerd was a phenomenon.
[15:31] The book is structured around 
James’s career as a filmmaker,  
[15:35] taking it as a given that James is, in fact, 
not a YouTuber. Even AVGN is conceptualized  
[15:44] as a Cinemassacre production, just one 
of the many things that James has made.
[15:50] James has been making movies 
since he was 8 years old,  
[15:53] and in the telling of the story James 
chronicles his career from that point  
[15:58] through film school to the first performance 
of his band, Rex Viper in October 2021.
[16:05] The shocking thing, really, is how absent the 
Nerd is in the book, to the point It’s hard  
[16:11] to articulate how little weight is given to the 
subject. You learn more about what James thinks of  
[16:18] the film Wavelength than you do about his thoughts 
on the web show that is, holistically, his career.
[16:39] Wavelength is a 1967 experimental 
short film, created by Canadian  
[16:44] multi-disciplinary artist Michael Snow.
[16:46] Wavelength as a film is relatively easy 
to describe but difficult to explain,  
[16:51] it functions as something of an ink blot test 
for critics as the way in which you go about  
[16:56] explaining it will inevitably betray something 
about the way in which you approach film.
[17:01] Some critics praised the film as the Birth of 
a Nation and Citizen Kane of underground films;  
[17:07] while other critics heckled the film 
and many walked out. Michael Snow,  
[17:11] for his part, found this hilarious.
[17:14] Wavelength, like many avante-garde films,  
[17:16] is what you bring to it. Is it 
a 45-minute long shot of a wall,  
[17:21] or is it a film about film and its relationship 
to time? That is an exercise for the viewer.
[17:28] This versatility has allowed the film to be used 
as a foundation for complex discussions in film  
[17:33] theory. But despite its importance, Wavelength 
is perhaps better known as a foil for students,  
[17:39] the archetype of heady, pretentious 
films to endure in film school.
[17:44] Students prime themselves to reject the film, but 
even in rejection, they engage with Wavelength.
[17:51] The only constant in watching Wavelength, 
is the act of viewership itself. You must  
[17:57] physically experience the film to understand it. 
If Wavelength could be said to have a core theme,  
[18:02] it would be reflection. The film uses 
boredom and frustration to force the  
[18:08] viewer to engage. A wandering mind is 
in its own way an intended response.  
[18:14] The viewer is compelled to reflect on their 
role in proceedings, their role as a viewer.
[18:21] The movie, in essence, holds 
a mirror up to the audience.
[18:25] In cursing the time lost, and in describing their 
tortuous experiences, even the most checked-out  
[18:32] students unknowingly engage with the film’s 
ideas. That is the unique power of Wavelength.
[18:39] Even in rejecting it, the viewer 
learns something about themselves.
[19:01] James’ profile as a filmmaker is 
ultimately dominated by his one  
[19:05] feature film, crowdfunded in 2011, 
shot in 2012, and released in 2014.
[19:11] Summer 2024 will be the tenth 
anniversary of The Angry video  
[19:15] Game Nerd: The Movie, a truly bizarre 
and intriguing piece of outsider art.
[19:22] All movies are miracles, but this one is 
a bit more of a miracle than most - by all  
[19:27] rights it should not exist. The production was 
troubled in all the ways that productions are,  
[19:32] and then on top of that in a number 
of ways that movies typically aren’t.
[19:38] It is, on sum, not very good, but that much 
has been said before. It is, as a story,  
[19:43] rudderless and confusing, an unresolved 
conflict of creative fascinations,  
[19:48] external pressures, and 
foundational bad decisions.
[19:52] It’s tempting to get caught in 
the quagmire of those decisions,  
[19:56] but for the most part it can all be traced back 
to boring foundational issues. In learning of all  
[20:02] the myriad ways in which the budget was poorly 
optimized, in seeing the dated and weak humour,  
[20:08] in watching an actor who isn’t enamoured 
with the mythology of James Rolfe pronounce  
[20:13] the name “Death Mwauthzyx” to little success, 
it’s easy to latch on as though those details  
[20:19] are the thing that makes the movie what it 
is, but the true problem is much more basic.
[20:26] [Mandi] hey now don't get your panties in a wad
[20:30] [McButter] I'm not wearing any panties
[20:35] [Cooper] Hot!
[20:35] The script was written haphazardly by James and 
his high school buddy Kevin Finn over the course  
[20:40] of almost six years, originating shortly 
after AVGN itself in 2006. It is trying  
[20:47] to be a supersized episode of the web show, 
and a flex of James’ skills as a filmmaker,  
[20:52] and a self-aware b-movie version of a blockbuster, 
and just something altogether not the web show.
[21:00] This is the foundational problem: an 
inability to decide on what the project  
[21:06] actually was. Without a creative vision, 
an actual big picture creative vision of  
[21:11] what the finished product is supposed to be, 
the end product lacks focus, lacks intent,  
[21:17] lacks the backstop of feedback that would tell the 
two of them that Death Mwauthzyx as the name of  
[21:24] the film’s ultimate kaiju villain is an in-joke 
between the writers that just isn’t very funny.
[21:32] The entire movie bizarrely revolves around the 
Nerd being compelled in some way to review E.T.  
[21:38] for the Atari 2600, the fragmentary shards of the 
movie as a supersized episode, but clearance for  
[21:45] the actual E.T. intellectual property was never 
secured requiring the movie to revolve around a  
[21:51] spoof instead, which undercuts the verisimilitude 
of the movie as a big budget episode.
[21:59] The core plot never makes much sense, the 
motivations of the Nerd are incoherent,  
[22:04] and the core conflict seems to 
be that the Nerd doesn’t want  
[22:08] to review the game because it 
gave him nightmares as a child,  
[22:12] which itself appears to be an episode lifted 
from James’ own childhood as a version of the  
[22:17] scene is one of the recurring nightmares James 
describes in the first chapter of the book.
[22:21] The production itself was plagued with indecision:  
[22:24] James was wearing a lot of different hats that 
placed tremendous demands on his attention,  
[22:29] requiring a level of delegation 
that he was simply unprepared for.
[22:34] The process stretched out years 
longer than anyone wanted and  
[22:38] left James thoroughly burnt out and 
disillusioned with the whole circus.
[22:43] Some AVGN viewers wonder why the film 
introduces two new characters, Cooper and Mandy,  
[22:50] in lieu of using Kyle, Bootsy, Mike, or any of the 
other day players that featured in AVGN episodes.
[22:56] But, like, the answer is obvious: imagine 
Mike Matei trying to act in a feature film.
[23:05] No.
[23:06] Just… no.
[23:08] James himself struggles through the entire 
film because… he’s also not an actor.
[23:15] Like, well, he is an actor in the literal 
sense, he performs a character on camera  
[23:21] professionally, but he is, and always 
has been, an actor of convenience.  
[23:29] The only reason he is the nerd is because he 
didn’t have anyone else to be the nerd instead.
[23:37] That’s not to say James isn’t good at being 
the Nerd. It takes work to be a clown.
[23:43] James has skills as a performer, his ability 
to suppress his self-consciousness and yell,  
[23:50] scream, fart, and vomit for an 
audience isn’t to be downplayed.
[23:54] Do you have… any idea how hard it is to get mad on 
camera? There’s a whole instinct of embarrassment,  
[24:02] of self-preservation, that you need to 
bury in order to sit alone in a room and  
[24:08] howl at full volume for an audience that 
doesn’t even exist! They can’t see you,  
[24:13] the real you, sitting on the floor of your 
basement debasing yourself for them! They’re  
[24:19] just phantasms off in the future that are 
going to consume some ghost of you spewed  
[24:25] out at them by their phones as a crass 
homunculus of photons and digital audio!
[24:33] It’s easy to postulate on what the 
movie maybe should have been instead,  
[24:38] a low budget horror movie or creature feature, 
literally just a big budget YouTube video in  
[24:43] the same vein as the Channel Awesome anniversary 
specials, basically anything other than what it  
[24:49] actually was, but I have mulled on and dismissed 
the notion that AVGN: the movie is an aberration.
[24:58] While there are undeniable 
conflicting incentives in the mix,  
[25:01] the whole thing was clearly an extension of 
the Angry Video Game Nerd because that was  
[25:06] the thing the crowd would respond to, 
the thing they could raise money for,  
[25:10] I think what we got is ultimately truthful 
to James’ instincts as a filmmaker.
[25:16] Jame’s earliest filmography has been 
lost to the inevitable rot of VHS tapes,  
[25:22] but conveniently the book preserves 
many of them as anecdotes, lessons,  
[25:27] and technological milestones in 
James’ journey as a filmmaker.
[25:31] The book, by volume, is mostly concerned with,  
[25:35] second, the shooting of AVGN The Movie, and 
first, the documentation and preservation  
[25:41] of over two dozen home movies James produced 
in the 1990s between the ages of 12 and 18.
[25:48] James, from his own telling, draws a lot of energy 
from being the director, which in the nebulous  
[25:55] hierarchy of the playground is less a creative 
visionary and more the child who leads the play.
[26:03] These home movies, which James 
pointedly and explicitly calls films,  
[26:07] are, from their descriptions, basically 
what you’d expect from a child let loose  
[26:12] with a camcorder. They’re improvisational, loose,  
[26:16] unfocused, and shot in linear order. 
In short, filmmaking as a form of play.
[26:24] “Getting friends to act wasn’t easy. Everyone 
was busy. Next time I got some of them over  
[26:29] was “Snix” (1993). I quickly thought of a 
spontaneous story about an ancient warlock,  
[26:35] Snix, who died centuries ago but 
left behind a mask (made of paper  
[26:39] and feathers). In the present day, the mask 
is discovered and possesses my friend with  
[26:43] the warlock’s spirit when he puts it 
on. He stalks me and tries to kill me.
[26:47] We made up the plot as we went along, but 
it was cut short when his mom called him  
[26:51] home to dinner. After that, I had to complete his 
scenes by puppeteering the mask in close-ups only,  
[26:57] and performing Snix’s voice myself. 
Again, it was complete garbage,  
[27:02] but it survived. It’s my oldest 
existing movie to feature live  
[27:06] actors besides myself and has become, sort 
of, in a strange way, a classic of mine.”
[27:11] His actors were whatever neighbours 
were available. In spite of his pleas,  
[27:16] the filming of “Dinomen from D4” (1994) 
rolled over from Saturday into Sunday and  
[27:22] had to be abandoned, because his friends 
just didn’t want to do a second day.
[27:27] “A Night of Total Terror” (1996) was the 
first movie where James felt his friends  
[27:32] wanted to be there. It was, in his own words, 
a blatant rip of Raider of the Lost Ark and The  
[27:38] Maltese Falcon, the MacGuffins of those 
films replaced with a cursed genie lamp.
[27:43] His films eventually settle into a routine 
of James hanging out with a few friends,  
[27:47] making stuff they find fun. James learned 
to treat the films with soft hands,  
[27:52] as his friends refused to learn 
lines, rarely respected continuity,  
[27:56] and occasionally would just overwrite 
the tape and destroy the footage.
[28:01] This informed his style as a director. 
James says he likes to work in small  
[28:06] crews, treating actors as “close personal 
friends”, and encouraging them to improvise.
[28:12] This informal style, where productions 
are measured in hours rather than days,  
[28:17] and the enjoyment of the actors is given priority, 
was well suited to the Angry Video Game Nerd  
[28:23] series. Mike could goof around to make James 
laugh, and it would translate well to YouTube. 
[28:29] But the AVGN Movie exposed the flaws in 
James’s filmmaking approach. Union actors  
[28:35] in Los Angeles don’t want to be the director’s 
friend, and the shooting schedule of Snix  
[28:41] Returns does not prepare you for 28-days of 
principal photography for a feature film.
[28:47] The AVGN Movie is, spiritually, 
just another home movie.
[28:56] So, I may have misrepresented the book, 
though maybe you already figured this out.
[29:01] It’s bad.
[29:02] But.
[29:03] In the constellation of awful YouTuber 
autobiographies, which range from  
[29:06] shamelessly improvisational to active attempts 
to obfuscate crime, A Movie Making Nerd doesn’t  
[29:12] really rank. It’s not that kind of bad. But 
it is also impressively self-destructive.
[29:18] As I went through its pages I found myself 
tempted to make sweeping claims about how  
[29:22] James sees the world, how he sees himself, 
but stopped when I realized that I couldn’t  
[29:27] tell the difference between statements that 
implied a total lack of self-reflection,  
[29:31] a mind that still held juvenile 
opinions 20 years after the fact  
[29:34] as sincerely as the day they were 
first formed, and the weak writing.
[29:38] Large swaths of the book are 
very basic in their construction,  
[29:42] pages of paragraphs of six to 
seven word subject verb sentences.
[29:46] Page 146:
The most fun class  
[29:47] was acting. The instructor was very serious 
about it. He was like a drill sergeant.
[29:52] Page 228:
The fans take an  
[29:53] active role in the movie. They’re the ones 
requesting the Nerd to review the game. I  
[29:58] think that’s a great thing. The fans 
helped create the idea for this movie.  
[30:02] But my character, the Nerd, doesn’t want 
to review the game. He feels pressured.
[30:07] Page 96
Not all of the assignments were  
[30:09] fun. Some of them were rudimentary, like painting 
grey scales or color wheels. All were tedious,  
[30:14] messy, and basic. Some of the textbook classes 
required writing boring essays to explain “why  
[30:19] time is like a grain of sand.” In other words, 
do your best to come up with some [ __ ].
[30:25] Over 430 words are dedicated to a failed 
location scout for a boiler room set during  
[30:30] the filming of AVGN the Movie that 
could be funny if it were well told,  
[30:34] could be a trivial event that details a 
state of mind or just elicits a chuckle,  
[30:39] but is delivered with the narrative 
intensity of a grocery list.
[30:43] I don’t doubt that the book is a reasonably 
accurate accounting of factual events more  
[30:48] or less in the order that they occurred, and 
that it contains certain insights into James,  
[30:55] his life, his way of thinking, 
and his relationship with himself,  
[31:01] but at the same time I don’t think it 
can really be trusted for much else.
[31:06] It is not a bad thing that it 
was self-published, but it is a  
[31:10] keenly present thing. It is self-serving, as all 
autobiographies are, but equally self-destructive.
[31:18] The portrait painted by the book is one 
of a stagnant man with limited capacity to  
[31:23] self-reflect, a poor understanding of how 
and why things happened the way they did,  
[31:29] and a general lack of curiosity.
[31:32] A Movie Making Nerd compels us 
to conceptualise James not as a  
[31:36] revolutionary YouTuber, but as a failed filmmaker.
[31:42] James Rolfe, the main character of the book, 
reflects back on university two decades after  
[31:47] the fact and seemingly has no new insights into 
what his instructors were trying to impart. There  
[31:52] are no lessons that were obnoxious in the 
moment but made sense years later, there is  
[31:58] no appreciation for the exposure 
to cross-disciplinary fundamentals,  
[32:02] nothing to suggest that being made 
to draw basic household objects with  
[32:06] the cold precision of a draftsman gave him an 
appreciation for the geometry of camera optics,  
[32:13] no reflection that being made to write about 
film as art, as metaphor, gave him tools that he  
[32:21] has called on in his nearly twenty year career as 
the host of a show deconstructing creative works.
[32:31] He tells a story about a technical exercise in his 
first year of university, an assignment meant to  
[32:38] familiarize students with the basic operation of 
the 16mm Bolex cameras that were standard film  
[32:44] student tools of the day, that he hijacked 
in order to remake A Night of Total Terror.
[32:52] His own framing of the story makes him 
look like an egomaniac. The assignment  
[32:57] is to simply use the camera successfully,  
[33:01] to create an image of literally anything. James 
pitches an elaborate shoot with costumes and  
[33:08] lighting. The instructor kindly explains 
that it’s not that kind of assignment.
[33:14] James says he found the assignment annoying at the 
time, but on reflection it was really valuable.
[33:22] Because it taught him to stand up for himself.
[33:25] Because he ignored the instructions, showed 
up on the day with a box full of halloween  
[33:30] costumes, and hijacked the entire class and the 
instructor just kinda caved because, whatever.
[33:40] It’s not entirely clear from the book, but the 
implication is that he spent the entire time  
[33:46] as the director, no one else got a turn with 
the camera, they just got to be his actors.
[33:54] he let me have my way coaching me through 
the bulky 16 millimeter technicalities but  
[33:59] letting me shoot my little narrative as intended 
directing a room full of 20 students gave me a  
[34:04] positive Rush the energy and excitement was 
high and nobody here was goofing around like  
[34:09] some of my younger experiences here they were all 
100% Cooperative it made me feel like a director
[34:18] It’s a heartwarming story about how 
if you just ignore the instructions  
[34:22] and disregard your peers you, too, can 
get to feel important for an afternoon!
[34:27] He would then re-make A Night of Total 
Terror again in Junior year,his third  
[34:32] crack at the story by my count, the cursed 
skull being replaced with a cursed cat statue.
[34:38] Seemingly every movie James makes revolves around 
an inanimate object that’s either cursed, alive,  
[34:46] or cursed and alive. A conspicuous chunk end with  
[34:50] the protagonist being pursued by 
a demonic doll or action figure.
[34:56] He just.. He keeps remaking movies 
he made when he was a literal child!  
[35:03] If not remakes then sequels! There are 
six Snix movies! His most recent crack  
[35:09] at something not AVGN related was The Head 
Returns, a 20-year-later sequel to a home  
[35:16] movie he made in high school! And it ends 
with James being chased by a haunted doll!
[35:23] Boring anecdotes are interspersed with 
bizarre claims that seem rooted entirely  
[35:28] in an understanding of the world that calcified 
decades ago. Speaking of high school James states  
[35:34] that in 1997 he got into “the kind of music you 
don’t hear as much on the radio” like Metallica.
[35:43] Metallica.
[35:47] Metallica in 1997 was one of the biggest 
bands in the world, every weirdo nerd our  
[35:54] age had a Metallica phase in the mid 90s, I had 
a Metallica phase in the mid 90s. Just to seal  
[36:02] the absurdity James name drops King Nothing, a 
top 10 single on the US hot 100 from an album  
[36:09] that was number one in eighteen countries in 
a decade where people still bought albums.
[36:15] If you wanted to communicate the 
irony of a character in a film,  
[36:19] someone with a self-mythology of outsider 
status while ultimately being no less in step  
[36:26] with extremely mainstream tastes you would 
drape the character in a Metallica t-shirt.
[36:33] An editor would have caught this immediately.
[36:36] The actual substance of the book is largely 
a chronological catalogue of over two dozen  
[36:41] of James’ home movies, many of which are 
sequels and outright remakes of his own  
[36:47] prior movies. In a roundabout way this, 
actually, seems to have been the original  
[36:52] impetus behind writing the book, or at least 
one of the books that became this book.
[36:59] There’s evidence scattered throughout that  
[37:01] large chunks of the book are lightly 
adapted from contemporary documents.
[37:07] Though by evidence I really mean James 
basically says it outright on page 150.
[37:12] “Now the trauma has long faded, just as the VHS 
tapes have deteriorated. I never digitized or  
[37:18] preserved them, since the tapes have no purpose 
to me outside of the college circle. This text  
[37:23] is the final preservation, which I first 
wrote down while the incidents were still  
[37:27] fresh in my mind. It was the catalyst that made 
me want to write a book in the first place. Sure  
[37:33] it took decades to finish and publish, but 
those decades have given me plenty to add.”
[37:40] This is… weird, right?
[37:44] The admission that this “was the 
catalyst that made me want to write  
[37:48] a book in the first place” and that that 
catalyst was still an animating force  
[37:53] in 2019? That you’re just adding stuff to 
something you started two decades earlier?
[38:00] Is this autobiography legitimately a project 
he began in 2002, long before the days of his  
[38:08] public success, and uncritically picked up 
sixteen years later and just started tacking  
[38:17] more on to as though the Snix sextology, 
getting suspended for an academic year,  
[38:24] and launching one of the most influential YouTube 
channels ever are all equally weighted events?
[38:33] The trauma he’s referring to is an episode 
that consumes much of the middle of the book.
[38:38] Over fifty pages, about a sixth of the volume, 
are dedicated to James getting kicked out of  
[38:44] university at the end of his first year due to a 
whole chain of events where he had these roommates  
[38:50] who were trashing their dorm room and he began 
taping them “documentary style” so they began  
[38:57] performing for the camera, escalating their 
behaviour, and then at the end of the year James  
[39:03] took all the tapes he had of them lighting trash 
on fire, putting holes in the walls, and throwing  
[39:10] things out the windows, and cut it all into a 
pseudo documentary which he sent copies of to the  
[39:18] few other people involved, and one of these copies 
made its way to the dean, who expelled them all.
[39:25] The entire episode isn’t completely devoid 
of accountability, he does at times express  
[39:31] some remorse for, well, mostly his inactions, 
but these statements are seemingly stapled on,  
[39:39] with the vast majority of the event is 
talked about as unfair accusations and  
[39:45] guilt by association, a thing that was done to 
him, and he even speculates that the school was  
[39:53] deliberately malicious in their timing, 
as the letters of expulsion didn’t arrive  
[39:57] until too late in the summer 
to appeal before registration.
[40:01] He insists throughout that he was just a 
bystander, and doesn’t really contend with  
[40:06] the fact that if you point a camera at someone, 
and they turn to the camera and go “check this  
[40:13] out” before jump-kicking a light fixture 
until it explodes, you are a participant.
[40:20] But is all this an expression of a True James, 
or just bad writing? Is self-reflection absent  
[40:30] because James doesn’t experience it, or is 
it merely his weakness as a storyteller? Is  
[40:37] it the lack of an editor to point out that 
he’s ultimately just talking to himself? To  
[40:43] tell him his emotions, however deeply 
felt, aren’t making it onto the page?
[40:49] The way he talks about unfinished home movies 
from when he was 12 is just really weird,  
[40:55] because he treats them as completed 
objects that are of the same stuff  
[41:00] as everything else. AVGN the movie 
(2014) and Crazy Carnage (1996),  
[41:07] the sequel to Mighty Joe Rampage (1996), 
left unfinished when the camera battery died,  
[41:13] are not strictly treated as equal, but it’s 
insane that they’re being compared at all.
[41:20] I keep coming back to Jame’s camera setup.
[41:24] The longer I stared at the beast the more  
[41:27] it consumed me. What was going 
on? Why was it? Does he even know?
[41:37] Maybe if I built it myself, if I held 
it in my hands, I could understand.
[41:46] Is this the fruit of obsession? 
Is this where compulsion takes  
[41:50] us? Are the damned and the damnable 
all doomed to wander to Home Depot?
[41:56] Building something kinda the same isn’t enough. 
A half-assed, cynical replica isn’t enough,  
[42:04] if you build it out of malice you inject 
it full of all your own prejudices,  
[42:09] it ends up bad for reasons you’ve 
created, and it tells you nothing.
[42:16] James’ board is planed and square, 
so my board must be planed, squared,  
[42:22] and sanded, taken seriously, a good 
faith replica, not just a joke.
[42:29] This thing is very strange to build, physically 
confounding at times. Two strips of scrap wood  
[42:35] and some three-inch carpentry screws hold the 
fluid head in place by gripping a flange around  
[42:41] the base, a thing only possible because of the odd 
profile of the Davis and Sanford FM18 fluid head.
[42:49] I’ll admit that by the time my replica 
was complete it felt more secure than  
[42:54] I’d assumed from photos, but simultaneously 
precarious. I didn’t think it was at risk of  
[43:00] spontaneous self-destruction, but still there’s 
a looming sense that I shouldn’t push my luck.
[43:07] My screws had already started to bend during 
the tightening, so done was pretty much done.
[43:13] The thing I struggled with 
from the very beginning,  
[43:16] the thing my brain chafed against like 
cheap khaki, is that the end goal here,  
[43:22] a camera head mounted to a board, isn’t some 
far off concept, isn’t some radical use case:  
[43:30] it’s a thing the thing is already 
made for, already designed to do.
[43:36] Thousands of commenters saw this build and knew, 
immediately, intuitively, that it wasn’t right,  
[43:43] but plowing through the comments and 
the commentary of the assholish variety,  
[43:48] seemingly none of them knew why: that the head 
already has a hole in the bottom for a bolt.
[43:54] You can take the lumber and 
just drill a hole in it.
[43:58] In the industry it’s called a low 
hat. Cardelini will sell you one  
[44:02] made out of anodized aluminum for almost $600,  
[44:05] but these aren’t very popular. Everybody knows 
you can get away with $10 of wood and bolts.
[44:13] It’s so simple, so straightforward,  
[44:17] that I can’t stop making them. I keep drilling 
holes in wood and bolting camera heads to them.
[44:24] The thing that’s confounding about it is 
that this is low-budget filmmaking. Like,  
[44:31] that’s James’ thing, right? Scrappy, 
low-budget filmmaking, practical effects,  
[44:37] all the movie magic that can be worked with 
styrofoam, hot glue, some plywood, and a drill?
[44:46] So why are his low-budget rigs so… bad?!
[44:57] I have been watching Angry Video 
Game Nerd episodes for days now  
[45:02] in a tsunami of diarrhea and nostalgia 
for games I never played as a child.
[45:09] I find myself at times uncertain about what it 
is that I’m actually watching. Maybe some of the  
[45:16] beauty of internet videos is that it demolished a 
lot of corporate ideas about what genres are and  
[45:22] what a show looks and sounds like; we now have 
so many things that never could have existed in  
[45:29] a framework of network television where someone 
needed to describe their vision to a fifty year  
[45:35] old man in a suit who hasn’t watched TV since 
he was twelve and convince him to pay for it.
[45:43] AVGN is one of those things. It is, across time,  
[45:48] formulaic, but ultimately very loose 
with its structure and identity,  
[45:53] and the longer I think on it the less 
I believe that it’s even a review show.
[46:00] I’m probably not the first person to notice 
this, and maybe I’m even late to the party,  
[46:04] but it occurs to me now, as I psychologically 
wade hip-deep thought buffalo turds,  
[46:10] that AVGN is at its heart a skit show that uses 
the premise of video game reviews as little more  
[46:17] than a framing device, and as such there’s 
scant allegiance to the games themselves.
[46:23] But even that’s not entirely true because  
[46:26] that would suggest a level of 
consistency that doesn’t exist.
[46:31] Really it would seem that the show is both 
review and skit in whatever ratio James and  
[46:38] his co-writers are compelled by at the time 
of writing, though it’s unclear to what extent  
[46:45] they are aware of that about themselves. The 
game serves as fodder for jokes and skits,  
[46:51] and the videos are rarely a comprehensive 
overview of the subject because they just  
[46:57] kinda work the material until 
they’ve got a video worth of stuff.
[47:02] It is what it needs to be in order to 
exist, the Nerd was never a sincere  
[47:09] expression of James’ obsessions, 
the Nerd was always a character,  
[47:14] the critiques are as authentic 
or performative as is convenient.
[47:20] Superficially the membrane of performance 
makes AVGN useless as insight into James,  
[47:27] but the hitch is that James just isn’t 
a good enough writer to divest himself  
[47:32] fully from the end product, to write wholly and 
organically in the voice and mind of The Nerd.
[47:40] The way that James talks about Wavelength, both 
in the book and in a standalone video as himself,  
[47:48] is largely indistinguishable from the way 
that the Nerd would talk about Wavelength.
[47:54] Wavelength is long, it’s grating, it’s abrasive, 
it’s boring, it doesn’t make any sense,  
[48:01] there’s no story! They tease you with a 
dead body but then nothing happens! It’s  
[48:05] just a picture of some waves on the wall! Is 
that why it’s called wavelength? The length  
[48:10] of time it takes to get to some waves? Why 
would they do this, what were they thinking?!
[48:33] I feel a certain amount of kinship with James 
Rolfe. We’re basically the same age, we both  
[48:38] went to film school, and we both ultimately found 
ourselves making videos about media for YouTube.
[48:44] We both have an enduring interest 
in the aesthetics of old media,  
[48:48] be it VHS camcorders or vintage video games.
[48:52] And we both feel the pressure of creation,  
[48:55] the sense that there’s just never enough 
time to do everything we want to get done.
[49:01] better known as The Angry Video Game Nerd 
James has this behind the-scenes video that  
[49:05] I can't stop thinking about AVGN behind the 
scenes in nerd room tour 2021 there's just so  
[49:12] much going on with it there's a light stand 
suspended from the ceiling with craft wire a
[49:17] it's not all weird though James has all 
his studio lights on the same power bar so  
[49:23] he can turn the whole setup on and off at 
the same time a kind of obvious yet still  
[49:28] clever trick that inspired me to rewire 
the lights that I have over my workbench
[49:33] so so I've got this idea
[49:35] the video ends
[49:35] the video ends with James cataloging a Litany of  
[49:38] reasons why he doesn't have as 
much time for AVGN as he used to
[49:42] In addition to this behind the scenes 
video James has an autobiography,  
[49:46] A Movie Making Nerd, which 
he self-published in 2022.
[49:49] These glimpses James allows into his private life 
have become the locus of an entire para-audience  
[49:55] of hate watchers, the Cinemassacre truthers, 
who have memified and dissected them to truly  
[50:00] bizarre levels of hostility and entitlement 
that I don’t particularly care to fully unwind.
[50:07] It’s the usual soup of in jokes 
piled on in jokes piled on in jokes.
[50:12] Almost as compelling as Rolfe himself is 
this community that swirls around him,  
[50:17] seemingly offended by his continuing 
existence, though they will absolutely  
[50:22] take offence to that characterization and insist 
that they’re not hateful, fatphobic misogynists,  
[50:27] they’re just too edgy for woke soyboys, and 
it is merely their unwavering commitment  
[50:32] to free speech that compels them to allow the 
hateful, fatphobic misogynists to stick around.
[50:38] You know the song and dance.
[50:40] Thing is, though, that Cinemassacre broadly 
has provided them with a lot of red meat.
[50:45] Mike Matei who handled moderation of the 
studio social presence for years is kind of  
[50:50] an edgy [ __ ] himself who would pick fights go 
on aimless banning sprees and other misbehavior
[50:57] he once posted a photo of a penis not necessarily  
[51:00] his penis but certainly framed to 
imply that it was his penis to his  
[51:04] Twitter account to win a literal dick 
measuring contest with rowdy commenters
[51:09] in the shame-soaked aftermath he 
tried to scrub this event from  
[51:12] history and as the moderator of the 
cinemas subreddit went on a Banning  
[51:16] spree there which led to the formation of 
the splinter sub The Cinemassacre Truth
[51:21] As production of AVGN: the movie dragged 
on through 2013 and 2014 James contracted  
[51:27] with multi-channel-network Screenwave to 
manage more of the channel’s back end.
[51:32] Now, okay, in the book James mentions that 
he has not, in fact, made his millions,  
[51:37] that during the time where AVGN was at its peak 
cultural relevance their ability to monetize that  
[51:43] success was pretty spotty. Their relationship 
with YouTube, as a platform, wasn’t the best,  
[51:49] and while they were able to be grandfathered 
into the now long-defunct Director program  
[51:54] and retain their ability to post videos longer 
than ten minutes, they weren’t in the first,  
[52:00] or even second, or even third wave of 
channels admitted to the Partner program.
[52:05] Merchandising, the publication 
contract with Game Trailers,  
[52:08] and various one-off contracts provided an income 
that made AVGN viable as a job, but James claims,  
[52:16] and I’m inclined to believe, that this did 
not manifest as the kind of wealth drawn  
[52:21] in by the likes of Smosh, Shane Dawson, 
and other early YouTube contemporaries.
[52:26] James is justifiably proud of AVGN: the movie, 
a film that by all rights shouldn’t exist,  
[52:32] that should have fallen apart, that 
very well could have ruined the channel,  
[52:36] ruined his finances for the rest of his life, 
ruined his marriage, and ruined his friendships.
[52:42] A lot of people helped make the 
movie, but very few championed it.
[52:48] AVGN: the movie, for all its faults,  
[52:50] isn’t the product of a miracle, 
it’s the product of James Rolfe.
[52:56] And it nearly destroyed him.
[53:12] So I have this theory that in 2014, when the 
movie did not manifest greener pastures, when  
[53:17] James realized that he kinda hated making movies 
at that scale, loaded up on credit card debt from  
[53:23] finishing the movie, someone at Screenwave 
said “we can fix your monetization problems.”
[53:29] Because what follows in 2015 through 2022 
is just an absolute frenzy of content.
[53:35] Podcasts, clip compilations, panel shows, round 
tables, vlogs, full season videos, basically every  
[53:41] form of content possible that could either 
be offloaded entirely to an outside editor  
[53:46] or would otherwise maximize efficiency, stuff that 
takes an hour to record and forty minutes to edit.
[53:52] Cinemassacre goes from publishing a 
little over one video per week in 2013  
[53:56] to publishing five videos a week in 2017.
[54:00] In order to facilitate this a new cast of hosts 
appear very suddenly, Screenwave employees who  
[54:06] are already on the clock and don’t have scheduling 
conflicts or other jobs that they would need to  
[54:12] work around, to do a podcast and two panel 
shows a week. People who are convenient.
[54:19] Cinemassacre, through Screenwave, became 
visibly extremely corporate extremely quickly,  
[54:24] and remember: James doesn’t see the 
channel as “the Angry Video Game Nerd”,  
[54:29] he sees it as Cinemasscare the production house.
[54:33] So while this transition made sense to 
him, it made less sense to his fans,  
[54:37] since all of these secondary videos would show 
up in their subscriptions, not just AVGN videos.  
[54:43] When you see the channel has a panel show 
where James is only an occasional guest,  
[54:48] the narrative of a corporate takeover, 
of James “selling out”, writes itself.
[54:55] But, like, none of this would matter 
if it were good. If the podcast is  
[55:00] entertaining no one’s going to 
care that Justin and Kieran and  
[55:02] Ryan suddenly show up out of nowhere 
or that James isn’t the main focus.
[55:07] But it’s not good, because these dudes 
they bring in are a void of charisma with  
[55:12] basically no on-screen chemistry. Because 
the reason they’re there is convenience.
[55:20] recently I took the old website and I made a 
big document of every single article that was  
[55:27] on the old website and what YouTube video or it 
goes to or whether that video is like lost and  
[55:35] we would have to get it from the sources 
so I have this like huge map and I gave  
[55:39] it to Justin and Kieran and all of them and 
they're going to start digging through that  
[55:44] or having someone dig through that and start 
uploading some of the old stuff like the uh  
[55:49] like all the turtle Tuesdays and all of all of 
that stuff the goal forgot about those cuz all  
[55:56] the WordPress stuff and stuff the goal is to get 
monster man that's on there fully and finalized
[56:00] Also, like, James just isn’t very 
good at spontaneous conversation,  
[56:04] he’s not a strong podcast host, 
but he’s the star of this show,  
[56:09] he’s the person people are tuning in for, 
which makes a chatty podcast format a  
[56:15] really bad choice. It’s a product showing the 
star of the show in the worst light possible.
[56:22] Then there’s James’ dad rock band, Rex Viper. 
Named after a joke character from the Big Rigs:  
[56:27] Over The Road Racing episode of AVGN, 
Rex Viper is so insubstantial a project  
[56:33] that it would barely merit mentioning if it 
weren’t for the fact that James and James  
[56:38] alone seems to take it really seriously 
and talks about it like it’s important.
[56:44] The sum total of Rex Viper is two live 
performances and four music videos for  
[56:48] parody songs that are just songs from 80s 
movies with the lyrics sometimes retooled  
[56:53] to throw in video game references or the 
instrumentation altered to mix in game themes.
[57:00] Eye of the Tiger Electronics. Mighty Wings 
and Hadoukens. Nintendo Power of Love.
[57:06] I’m gonna be honest, I hate this entire genre,  
[57:09] I am the last person to give it a fair 
shake, so I’m just going to move on.
[57:14] All of this is easy pickings for truthers:  
[57:17] whether it be the cringe or the cynicism 
there’s a lot here to make fun of.
[57:22] Truthers even have a name 
for all it! The Slobwave era!  
[57:26] Get it?! Because Justin Silverman is fat and 
Keiran Fallon has that heavy metal look going on.
[57:32] Ultimately, though, no matter what the 
Cinemassacre Truth might be accurate about,  
[57:36] it’s all just a vehicle for ableism, 
fatphobia, sexism, transphobia, and,  
[57:42] like, they’re chan trolls, it’s not 
that deep, they are in fact just haters.
[57:48] They have a particular hate boner for James’ wife, 
April, for reasons that are complicated, but not  
[57:53] complex. They’ll frame it that James was dragged 
kicking and screaming from his basement because  
[57:58] she wanted kids. They cast James as a henpecked 
husband whose career was derailed by a woman.
[58:05] This flies in the face of both everything James 
has ever said, and also just observable reality.
[58:11] James and April were together before the first 
AVGN episode hit YouTube - there is no Garden of  
[58:17] Eden for Eve to tarnish. April has been here 
the whole time. During the filming of AVGN:  
[58:23] The Movie she moved with James to LA for six 
months and took on the role of production  
[58:29] manager. If the movie had one champion it 
was James, if it had a second it was April.
[58:36] But because he describes her as giving him an 
“ultimatum” about having kids they are able to  
[58:40] depict it as browbeating, vilifying April as 
a nagging shrew who uses their children as a  
[58:46] chain to keep James from realizing his 
ambitions, as though it is preposterous  
[58:51] on its face that James might honestly prefer 
fatherhood to making videos for the internet.
[58:57] One time James and Mike sat 
down to record a let’s play,  
[59:00] and James had somewhere he needed to be, to 
pick up his kids from swim lessons or something,  
[59:06] which gave him a hard out of 5:40 if 
he was going to get there on time.
[59:11] 5:40 came and went, James started to 
visibly panic when he noticed the time,  
[59:16] and wound up leaving rather ungracefully before 
finishing the LP later in the evening, alone.
[59:22] let's break it all right well anyway it we 
just ran out of time because I have to be  
[59:28] done at 5:40 right now and so what's going to 
happen is exactly 540 next time you see this  
[59:33] James is going to beat this on his own 
uh without me cuz the way we record so
[59:38] yeah okay just to make it clear again 
what happened was that we ran out of time
[59:47] truthers have clung to 5:40 as a meme ever since
[59:51] these are what James describes as 
comments of an assholish variety
[59:56] And really, the thing with the 2021 behind the 
scenes video, the odd texture of the whole thing,  
[60:02] isn’t that it’s partially a response to 
these comments, but that all of it is.
[60:07] That’s the animating force behind it, that’s 
the reason why it exists. It’s not a behind  
[60:13] the scenes room tour for the sake of easy 
content, it’s an explanation, a defence.
[60:18] As a room tour it’s bad, James bounces from odd 
detail to odd detail, spends tremendous amounts  
[60:25] of time outlining problems, and the whole of 
it is a weird and nearly incomprehensible level  
[60:31] of honesty about his bespoke inefficiencies, 
but all because it’s a defence of Screenwave,  
[60:38] a defence of his wife, a defence of his children, 
and a defence of his priorities in life.
[60:59] So why doesn’t James have enough time anymore?  
[61:03] What’s he spending his time 
doing if not making AVGN?
[61:07] I don’t know and I honestly don’t particularly 
care. If AVGN has declined in some spiritual  
[61:14] way it’s not because James isn’t grinding 
away with burnout-inducing 16 hour days.
[61:20] In watching through all 52 hours of Nerd videos in 
reverse chronological order I’m not even convinced  
[61:26] that there is some calculable decline. Maybe this 
is to its detriment, but the show has always been  
[61:33] spotty and kinda ragged at the edges and it has 
remained incredibly consistent in that zone.
[61:40] Maybe the format is just dated, 
YouTube has left AVGN behind,  
[61:45] maybe the audience is just aging out, maybe 
James lacks ambition or he’s just out of ideas.
[61:52] Hell, maybe it is his wife and kids 
“getting in the way” of the show. But  
[61:58] here’s my hot take on that: that’s fine. 
The Angry Video Game Nerd is not a load  
[62:03] bearing pillar of reality, it’s a YouTube 
sketch comedy, it doesn’t need to exist.
[62:11] I do not know James Rolfe, 
but in this I feel confident:  
[62:14] James Rolfe loves his wife and 
kids and they are his top priority.
[62:19] The best written parts of his autobiography,  
[62:22] by a substantial margin, are the stories about 
the challenging births of his two daughters,  
[62:27] and how he discovered that he 
really, really enjoys being a father.
[62:32] His mistake was to share that fact with 
an audience too immature to comprehend it.
[62:37] No, not just too immature.
[62:40] An audience patently unwilling to 
comprehend it. Probably the most  
[62:45] baffling mistake James has made is assume 
that his haters are here to be persuaded.
[62:51] “Do you want me to suffer?”
[62:53] Yeah, James, they kinda do.
[62:56] But, still, like, mistakes have been made.
[63:01] Like, what’s the point of having a 
company to handle all this stuff if  
[63:05] James is going to make a video where he 
tries to do his own PR response to his  
[63:11] haters by showing off his janky 
DIY rigging? Why employ editors  
[63:17] if they’re going to leave in the footage 
where he has a humiliating panic attack?
[63:22] Part of what is so transfixing in all of 
this is this parade of contradictions,  
[63:28] that from the outside there are these very 
visible, very public decisions being made,  
[63:33] but those decisions aren’t 
producing the intended results.
[63:38] Even without access to their actual back 
end I can say that massively increasing  
[63:42] the channel output absolutely improved revenue: 
even if the podcasts and whatnot under performed  
[63:49] there’s just so many of them, it is on 
net hundreds of millions of views, but  
[63:56] what good is that if it damages the brand?
[63:59] What’s the point of doing damage control at 
all if it just raises a million more questions?
[64:14] In a spiritual sense James has 
trapped himself on the couch:  
[64:18] his access to the capital resources needed 
for larger projects is dwindling and his  
[64:23] sensibilities as a filmmaker are too myopic to 
appeal to an audience that isn’t humouring him,  
[64:30] telling him that Rex Viper is cute 
and they’re just glad he’s having fun.
[64:35] In a more literal sense James has trapped himself 
on the couch because the room is just too small.
[64:42] I had heard this before, but I find 
that just saying it or looking at  
[64:46] frame grabs doesn’t do justice to 
the realities of physical space,  
[64:50] so I did the thing any normal person would do 
and built a 1:12 scale diorama of the nerd room.
[64:57] He needs to haphazardly hang things from the 
ceiling and build franken-low-hats because  
[65:02] when he moved house in 2016 he had Kyle build a 
replica of the Nerd basement in the new garage,  
[65:10] so that the new basement could be dedicated 
to a fake video rental store, but Kyle,  
[65:16] whose day job is renovating houses, built the room 
as an actual room, not as a set with accommodation  
[65:23] for the needs of recording, and for reasons I can 
only speculate on the set is only eight feet wide.
[65:31] I dunno, maybe the rest of the garage is a 
workshop or they needed it to still fit a car,  
[65:38] I really truly don’t know. It would 
feel cramped just as a rec room but  
[65:45] as a film set it’s claustrophobic, 
there’s nowhere for the stands to go.
[65:52] And, okay, now, every film set is crowded with 
junk, every film set is a jungle of stands and  
[65:58] tripods and apple boxes and lens boxes and 
lights on standby, but this tightens things  
[66:04] down to a point where you just can’t get in and 
out without stepping over everything, it becomes a  
[66:10] game of parkour just to change a battery, and when 
you’re working mostly alone that gets frustrating  
[66:17] really fast, and when you get frustrated you get 
impulsive, and those impulses lead to half measure  
[66:24] solutions, and those half measure solutions 
accumulate into a whole network of bespoke  
[66:30] inefficiencies that you just live with because the 
process of unravelling them feels just so… big.
[66:42] It was in the finishing touches of James’ 
low hat that it began to make sense.
[66:48] Screwing on a bubble level did something 
to it, transformed it. It was still janky,  
[66:53] it was still inexplicable, 
but I suddenly cared for it,  
[66:57] no longer saw it as just a heap of 
scrap stapled together for a bit.
[67:02] It’s still a bad solution, it still looks, 
visibly, like a bad solution, but it felt  
[67:09] personal. I could imagine myself as James, 
self-conceptualizing as not an indie filmmaker but  
[67:17] a backyard filmmaker, a kid with no resources but 
what he can scrounge out of the garage, and this  
[67:26] felt far more homogenous with that than with 
any other James I had considered so far.
[67:33] In 2010 James posted a autobiographical 
documentary called The Dragon in My  
[67:37] Dreams. James tells a story of a 
recurring nightmare he had as a child,  
[67:41] being born down on by this massive dragon, 
an image that he connects to a dragon-shaped  
[67:47] water feature in a neighbourhood park 
his parents took him to as a toddler.
[67:51] For the video James, with friend Matt behind the 
camera, visits the park on the day it just so  
[67:56] happens that workers are removing the dragon from 
the spot where it’s sat for thirty some odd years.
[68:02] In voice over he reflects on his 
childhood, on the imagery of the dragon,  
[68:06] on the then-upcoming milestone of turning thirty, 
and holding back tears he takes a knee beneath  
[68:11] the dragon and avows himself to the path of 
the filmmaker while the dude who was working  
[68:17] the jackhammer stands just off screen having a 
quick smoke as these two guys do their thing.
[68:23] It’s all kinda cringe, a truly 
elemental example of pretentious,  
[68:27] self-important film-school pap, but whatever, let 
he who is without cringe throw the first stone.
[68:33] The conclusion of the video is muddled, just 
kinda wanders between a few different ideas,  
[68:38] but the intent is clear: it’s a 
reflection on just how far James  
[68:42] has come, and an aspiration of just how 
far he has to go, a phase of his life  
[68:48] coming to an end just as conclusively as 
this dragon being torn out and replaced.
[68:53] That metaphor crumbles to bitter ash when 
you realize that the dragon didn’t really  
[68:57] go anywhere, it was displaced all of 
thirty feet, from sitting inside the  
[69:01] water fountain to standing beside 
the gate of Fox Chase playground.
[69:05] In a way The Dragon in My Dreams is itself 
a brutal metaphor for Jame’s career:  
[69:10] James is a calcified dragon whose films 
have barely changed between high school  
[69:16] and middle age, uprooted from VHS and 
transplanted thirty feet away in HD.
[69:22] I think about James every day now,  
[69:24] every time I have to step over 
something that’s in a bad position,  
[69:28] every time I need to get something off a shelf 
but there’s stands or tripods or boxes in the way.
[69:34] Every stack of books, every lens without a home, 
every camera bag left on the couch for weeks on  
[69:39] end, every clamp, every cable, every stray roll of 
tape has become an accusing presence in my life,  
[69:45] a bespoke inefficiency that I can stare 
directly at and yet never fully escape.
[69:51] What if the problem is me? James hasn’t moved, 
I’ve moved. AVGN is what it’s always been.
[69:59] The truthers claiming that the show is bad 
now are getting spooked by their own shadows:  
[70:05] the show is what it’s always been. It 
isn’t bad now but good in the past,  
[70:10] you’re just older. You’re not seeing 
a titan of YouTube fallen from grace,  
[70:15] you’re seeing a man as immovable in 
his interests and habits as Atlas.
[70:21] But, like, so what? Would 
it even matter either way?
[70:25] We don’t have the James Rolfe, we have 
a crass homunculus of James constructed  
[70:31] out of photons and wavelengths, 
delivered to us through our screens,  
[70:35] a codex of symbols we can interpret but never 
fully know, and in that void between the real  
[70:42] and the perceived, impose meaning, 
compelled by what we’ll never know.
[70:53] Today we’re going back, we’re going Flashback.
[70:56] Released in 1991, this game was available for 
most consoles available at the time, plus PC,  
[71:02] but all I’ve got is the Super Nintendo 
version, so that’s what we’re playing.
[71:06] This was part of a trend of so-called “cinematic 
platformers”. Many of these games are considered  
[71:11] classics because of the way they elevated 
games as an art form, took it seriously,  
[71:15] and confronted audiences with complex, sober 
stories. They weren’t just reflex-based arcade  
[71:21] games where you hop on Goombas to rescue a 
princess, they told complex stories, like films.
[71:27] So, will Flashback delight and astound, or will 
it put the ass back in classic? Let’s find out.
[71:34] It opens with a pretty impressive 3D cutscene 
that was clearly intended for PC because the  
[71:39] Super Nintendo is really struggling. Still, many 
Super ports at the time would have replaced these  
[71:44] with a static slide show, so the fact that 
they even tried to keep it is impressive.
[71:49] Okay, so your character crash 
lands in the jungle with no  
[71:52] guidance on who you are or what you’re doing here.
[71:54] Well, turns out that’s intended, your 
character has amnesia and needs to figure  
[71:58] out why he crash landed in the jungle. The 
only thing you know is your name is Conrad.
[72:03] The first thing you notice is that the 
animations are very smooth and lifelike,  
[72:07] because like Prince of Persia the developers 
rotoscoped actual footage of actors walking  
[72:12] and jumping. This does lend the game 
a certain weight. When you drop down  
[72:16] off a ledge with your pistol drawn and 
ice two mutants it feels super badass.
[72:21] Yeah, take that you mutant [___]!
[72:23] The second thing you notice 
is that the controls are ass!
[72:26] Every time you push a button on the controller 
Conrad takes one giant step forward, or jumps,  
[72:32] or rolls, or draws his gun, and 
you need to wait for the whole  
[72:36] animation to finish before you can 
do anything else. And that’d be fine,  
[72:41] but the game still has tons of reflex-based 
obstacles that require very precise timing.
[72:46] One of the very first challenges 
you’re given is jumping over this pit,  
[72:49] but to do it you need to start 
running on the previous screen,  
[72:52] and then enter the command to jump before 
the new screen has even finished loading,  
[72:55] or you just run off the ledge into the pit 
below, and then need to climb back out,  
[73:00] waiting a short eternity for Conrad to go through 
his lifelike, cinematic animation every time.
[73:06] Just like in cinema Conrad doesn’t have a life 
meter on screen. Instead he has a personal shield  
[73:11] that can absorb a certain number of shots. Okay, 
so that’s health by a different name. So to check  
[73:16] your health you need to open your inventory and 
cycle through everything you’re carrying until  
[73:20] you get to your shield module, where it’ll 
tell you how many charges you have left.
[73:24] Oh yeah, that’s cinematic.
[73:26] Cinematic as dog farts!
[73:28] Yeah, it turns out that in video games 
“cinematic” is a code word for “[___].”
[73:32] Oh, the controls suck ass?
[73:34] Just tell players it’s cinematic!
[73:35] The story gives you no clues 
about where to go or what to do?
[73:38] It’s cinema!
[73:39] You eventually get to a giant pit that this 
shady [___] tells you to jump into in order  
[73:43] to get to New Washington. At least 
he warns you that you’ll die if you  
[73:46] jump without an anti-gravity belt, which 
he offers to sell you for 600 credits.
[73:51] Okay, so you need to go find some 
credits. Fortunately there’s lots of  
[73:55] them hidden around different areas of the jungle.
[73:57] But here’s the thing, if you go out of your way to 
get all of them, thinking they’ll be useful later,  
[74:01] you’re wrong. He doesn’t just take 600 credits, 
he takes all your credits! He robs you!
[74:06] Cinematic!
[74:07] Anyway after you pay this lying [___] everything  
[74:10] you have Conrad jumps into 
the pit and enters level 2.
[74:39] There’s nowhere to go! There’s just 
three screens! There’s nothing but  
[74:43] an elevator down into a hole! Sure, you can 
recharge your shields down there in the hole,  
[74:47] but it’s not going to get you anywhere! 
It’s cinema! You can jump up to this ledge,  
[74:51] but it doesn’t go anywhere, either! 
There’s this ledge that you can see,  
[74:54] but it’s out of reach! You just can’t jump 
high enough to reach it and pull yourself  
[74:58] out! This is your life now! You’re trapped 
here on these three screens until you quit!
[75:03] Anyway, what you need to do to progress is  
[75:05] confront your insecurities and accept 
that you’re not a filmmaker, either.
[75:11] What did you say?
[75:25] He's the angriest Gamer you've ever heard
[75:44] Assssss