Angry Video Game Nerd
Angry Video Game Nerd is an American retrogaming review comedy web series starring and created by James Rolfe. The series centers on Rolfe's titular skit character, often simply shortened to "the Nerd", a short-tempered and foul-mouthed gamer who delivers commentary on retro games of poor quality. While the series began with Rolfe simply playing games while providing retrospective commentary, the show has grown in scope to encompass sketches featuring guest characters, reviews of gaming consoles and peripherals, and short lectures about video game history and culture.
Starting out as an amateur filmmaker, Rolfe intended his earliest videos of the character to be a joke privately shown amongst friends and colleagues. In May 2004, Rolfe, at the suggestion of future series producer Mike Matei, put the Angry Nintendo Nerd videos on his website, and in 2006 on the emerging video streaming platform YouTube, where it gained popularity. The series became a cult success, and Rolfe began appearing as the character in various other media such as a feature-length film and video games, and many public appearances. The series was soon renamed to The Angry Video Game Nerd to avoid trademark issues with Nintendo, and to allow Rolfe to review games from non-Nintendo consoles. From 2007 to 2011, the series entered a distribution deal with popular gaming websites ScrewAttack and GameTrailers, and briefly with streaming service Amazon Video in 2018.
The Angry Video Game Nerd is considered one of the pioneers of internet review videos, being highly influential on the style and format of subsequent video reviewers as well as being responsible for helping to bring the concept into the mainstream. Various media review/sketch comedy entertainers have since cited the show as inspiration for their own material, such as JonTron, Doug Walker, Egoraptor, Angry Joe, Scott Wozniak, and Joueur du Grenier, among others.
Premise
The show revolves around the Nerd's commentary on shovelware and retro video games that he deems to be of particularly low quality, unfair difficulty, or poor design. Rolfe's character, "the Nerd", is a short-tempered, foul-mouthed video game collector who reviews old video games in the form reminiscent of insult comedies such as Mystery Science Theater 3000. The Nerd plays the game while picking apart its various technicalities, design flaws, and abnormalities in an effort to warn his viewers against playing the game. Other episodes have the Nerd reviewing consoles, peripherals, accessories, or games with a similar theme. The reviews are often prefaced with a short lecture about the game's history or his own childhood experience, interspersed with sketches and profanity-ridden comedic rants, among various other scripted elements.Dressed up as a stereotypical nerd in his basement, the Nerd reviews the game with his trademark glasses, white shirt with buttons, high khaki pants and loafers, while sometimes being bombarded by guest characters from video games and popular culture as well. These guests often provide additional commentary on the games, mock the Nerd's anguish, and act as parodies of the characters from which they had been derived. In response to them and to the games, the Nerd derives comic appeal from excessive and surrealistic use of fantasy scenarios, anger, and consumption of Rolling Rock beer while reviewing video games. His anger and profanity over these bad games would sometimes climax in his destroying whole game cartridges, or simulating defecating on, burning, and sometimes even crushing the games or entire video game consoles.
In many cases, the Nerd dresses up as other popular characters while reviewing their games, such as Batman and Indiana Jones. Other characters in the show include the Nerdy Turd and Shit Pickle, the Guitar Guy, the Game Graphic Glitch Gremlin, Super Mecha Death Christ 2000 B.C. Version 4.0 Beta, and an assortment of others, while also the occasional guest appearance by other video game reviewers such as Pat the NES Punk. The show has also had special guests, including Lloyd Kaufman of Troma Entertainment while the Nerd was playing various Toxic Crusaders-based games, Macaulay Culkin of Home Alone fame assisting the Nerd in playing games based on the movie series, and Gilbert Gottfried co-starring as a faux lead developer of Life of Black Tiger and the Nerd's arch-nemesis Fred "Fucks" on July 31, 2019, while the Nerd reviews said game.
Episodes
Production
James Rolfe's first two episodes were intended as "a joke", with no intentions of making them public. In May 2004, he created his first on-camera game reviews, utilizing insult commentary with exaggerated bewilderment to two games—Castlevania II: Simon's Quest and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—which would later become the signature of the Nerd character. At the time, the series was hastily titled Bad NES Games. Rolfe explained later in an interview for Daily News that the joke was just how upset one obsessive gamer could get over these games that were already 20 years old. Although the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde review was intended to be the last, Rolfe's friends, who enjoyed the previous "Bad NES Games" reviews, encouraged him to create another. Collaborative friend Mike Matei helped in producing and publishing the videos on Cinemassacre, and released outside of the website as "The Quickies" tape, part of a four VHS tape set called the "Cinemassacre Gold Collection".In 2006, Rolfe began making the episodes available on YouTube. Soon, Rolfe released a review of The Karate Kid game that was the first episode where Rolfe's character is introduced as "The Angry Nintendo Nerd". Naming these videos "The Angry Nintendo Nerd Trilogy", Rolfe posted them on Cinemassacre. The success of the show made Rolfe branch out into other gaming systems, and would later change the title into the Angry Video Game Nerd to prevent trademark issues with Nintendo. Rolfe diversified the reviews of platforms and products such as the Atari 2600, Super NES, Master System and Sega Genesis video game consoles, the Power Glove and U-Force peripherals, films such as The Wizard, and the Nintendo Power magazine. He would eventually branch out even further, reviewing games like Sonic '06 on the Xbox 360 and Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing on PC.
Rolfe's series received mainstream attention when his review of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles went viral on YouTube. In an article by writer Alex Carlson, he explained that before 2004, video gaming criticism was mostly reserved for the larger game magazines and websites. He went on to state that the opinions of the professional writers and journalists who were writing the reviews didn't entirely correspond to the opinions of the average gamers; and that "everyone with a webcam and Fraps can now become a critic and don a characterized mentality, spouting profanities at will without getting censored." Since then, the show has increased substantially in quantity, production value, and fandom. Rolfe began infusing various episodes with emphasis on homemade special effects and narratives. The first of these cinematic episodes was a review of the 1989 Friday the 13th game in October 2006, featuring expressive lighting and camera angles to emphasize its horror film-themed narrative in which the Nerd is attacked by Jason Voorhees for disliking the game. Later episodes have alternated from straightforward game reviews to those with a narrative focus resembling a documentary, with Rolfe pointing out information about the game or gaming console under review. When asked if the Nerd is going to make reviews in the current generation of video games, Rolfe replied that the "show is all about nostalgia," adding that he's "mostly a retro gamer."
In late 2007, Rolfe halted the production of the series after suffering from a break in his voice. On March 17, 2010, he publicly announced that he was suffering from burnout as a result of stress from his constant work, and that the show would be entering a brief hiatus. The show was resumed a month later; however, only one episode was released each month, as opposed to two episodes per month due to Rolfe's other projects. In late 2011, Rolfe announced the show would be put out of production for a short while so he could work on the AVGN movie. The show eventually resumed production in late summer 2012. Since then, he has self-released Nerd videos on his Cinemassacre website and YouTube account in a very sporadic manner in order to balance his personal life with the other projects he continuously works on. By 2013, the show garnered more than 900,000 subscribers and over 400 million views on YouTube. By 2014, Cinemassacre already had 1.5 million subscribers. Rolfe stated that the show "got popular right around when YouTube got popular."
In January 2013, the YouTube channel was suddenly shut down due to claims of severe violations of YouTube's terms of service. YouTube later reinstated the channel.
In March 2016, the channel reached 2 million subscribers, 10 years after the channel's creation and first uploads. Rolfe made a short video to thank all the people who subscribed, watched the videos on the channel and for supporting himself, Mike Matei, and everyone who made Cinemassacre more popular. In June 2019, the channel reached 3 million subscribers, to which Rolfe once again thanked everyone's support and for the fans still watching Nerd videos on the show's 13th anniversary.
In December 2020, Rolfe announced on the main Cinemassacre YouTube channel that longtime collaborator Mike Matei would be leaving the channel in order for Matei to focus on his Twitch career.
Videography
VHS/DVD
Blu-ray
Other media
Rolfe's review of the Back to the Future game was reported in an MTV segment called "Viral Videos Infect the Mainstream". On November 2, 2008, his videos and personality were featured on the nationally syndicated radio show Opie and Anthony. The Nerd has also become the subject of Howard Stern and David Arquette in an episode of Stern's Sirius XM show, in which Stern commented negatively on the show's format as well as the gaming community in general during a TooManyGames 2011 convention in Philadelphia. James Rolfe himself appeared as the Nerd at various gaming and internet conventions.On September 24, 2008, Rolfe collaborated with fellow internet reviewer Doug Walker to create a fictional feud between his character – Nostalgia Critic – and Rolfe's own. The plot behind the events created between the two was over the Critic's dislike towards comments made to one of his online videos that expressed similarities between him and the Nerd, supposedly written by the Nerd's fans, that were "unfair comparisons between the two of them". The pair worked together to create a series of tongue-in-cheek video responses between the two characters, culminating with a fight between the Critic and Nerd in Clifton, New Jersey, a dare between the pair to review something in the other's line of work, and a final fight between the pair in the Nerd's basement on October 10, 2008, which featured parodies and clichés from popular films such as The Matrix Reloaded and Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith. The resulting series of videos created became a huge hit with fans. To celebrate the first anniversary of the ThatGuyWithTheGlasses website, both Walker and Rolfe collaborated again on a special video involving their characters; the video focused on the pair meeting once more to battle against the other, in which they were joined by fellow reviewers and contributors to the website who sided with one or the other, culminating with the pair calling a truce and putting their differences aside. Rolfe would later guest star as his character in various Channel Awesome shows, even appearing to review the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movie with the Nostalgia Critic, with both the Nerd and Critic making a background cameo appearance in the anime Zettai Karen Children: The Unlimited.