---
title: 'I Don''t Know James Rolfe'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=b3gZOt1Lo4A'
video_id: 'b3gZOt1Lo4A'
date: 2026-06-28
duration_sec: 4615
---

# I Don't Know James Rolfe

> Source: [I Don't Know James Rolfe](https://youtube.com/watch?v=b3gZOt1Lo4A)

## Summary

This video is an in-depth analysis of YouTuber James Rolfe, creator of the Angry Video Game Nerd (AVGN), examining his 2021 behind-the-scenes video, his self-published autobiography 'A Movie Making Nerd', and the contradictions between his public persona and private self. The creator explores themes of DIY filmmaking, audience perception, and the spiritual stagnation of a pioneer who never fully evolved.

### Key Points

- **Kinship with James Rolfe** [0:08] — The creator feels a kinship with James Rolfe—both are the same age, went to film school, and make videos about media for YouTube.
- **Bespoke Inefficiencies** [1:30] — James's DIY solutions (e.g., tripod head secured to lumber, light stand suspended with craft wire) seem counterproductive, more inefficient than the original problems.
- **Outtake Reveals Frustration** [2:52] — An outtake from the Shrek Fairy Tales Freakdown episode shows James tied to a chair struggling with an onion, cursing the lack of a crew and his frustration with solo production.
- **AVGN as a Phenomenon** [4:56] — James Rolfe was a pioneer of new media, spawning the angry review genre, but never embraced the YouTuber identity, considering himself a filmmaker.
- **Self-Published Autobiography** [7:41] — In 2022, James published 'A Movie Making Nerd', which details his filmmaking journey from childhood through AVGN, but largely ignores the impact of the Nerd himself.
- **Hate-Watchers and Truthers** [10:40] — James attracts a community of hate-watchers who obsess over his perceived hubris, lack of self-reflection, and personal life, often targeting his wife, April.
- **AVGN Movie's Foundational Problems** [20:02] — The 2014 AVGN movie suffered from indecision—James couldn't decide if it was a supersized episode, a B-movie, or a serious film, and lacked a cohesive creative vision.
- **Failed Filmmaker Portrayal** [31:32] — The book compels viewers to see James not as a revolutionary YouTuber but as a failed filmmaker, stuck remaking childhood movies and lacking self-reflection.
- **Post-Movie Content Frenzy** [53:12] — After the movie, James partnered with Screenwave, which led to a content explosion (podcasts, panel shows) that alienated fans and felt corporate.
- **Priority on Family** [62:14] — Despite criticisms, James prioritizes his wife and children over AVGN, a fact his hate-watchers refuse to accept.

### Conclusion

The video concludes that James Rolfe remains an enigma—a backyard filmmaker who never outgrew his childhood habits, whose cultural impact is immense but whose personal choices lead to perpetual inefficiencies and a conflicted legacy. The creator ultimately realizes that the real James is inaccessible, existing only through the distorted lens of content and audience projection.

## Transcript

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