As the Internet Changes, James Rolfe Remains a Classic Man

James Rolfe is a darling, despite his resting grouch face. To his fans, he carries himself as a kind soul, calm while he’s interacting with others and eager to carry small talk through a multitude of “mhms” and “yeps” and a bright smile. To me, he spoke thoughtfully, carefully choosing his words when answering questions about his career and personal life, but also deeply reminiscing about his family in real-time. Somewhat cautious without being completely on edge, James Rolfe is a sweetheart.

The Angry Video Game Nerd, Rolfe’s alter ego, is no such darling. He is the Mr. Hyde that breaks through Rolfe’s typically put-together presentation. A product of too many Rolling Rocks and an obsession with decade-spanning nostalgia, the Angry Video Game Nerd is a foul-mouthed, pissed off caricature of pop culture nerdom. Dressed in Revenge of the Nerds chic with a white Oxford button-down shirt whose pocket is filled with ballpoint pens, Rolfe spazzes out in front of a camera to deliver hype game criticism through a barrage of “fucks” with an inside voice that rings a few decibels too loud.

Rolfe has been playing the role of the Angry Video Game Nerd—or, more simply, the Nerd—for over 16 years now, 14 of them on YouTube, and he was one of the earliest content creators on the platform, though he might not have known the impact of that role at the time. In 2006—around the time other game-related groups like Mega64, Machinima, and Rooster Teeth were finding their way to the site—Rolfe joined YouTube as Cinemassacre, a brand he created with his video and production partner, Mike Matei. At the time, YouTube wasn’t the one-stop-shop for videos it is today, and competitors like Blip, Daily Motion, and even the barely remembered Google Video still seemed like viable competitors.

Today, Cinemassacre boasts over 3 million YouTube subscribers, and the channel’s videos—a mix of short films, movies, and character comedy—have collectively amassed over 1.5 billion views. The Angry Video Game Nerd is, without question, the brand’s shining star. Over the last decade and a half, Rolfe, with the help of Matei and a few friends named Bootsy and Kyle, have shone a vitriolic spotlight on retro video games across more than 150 episodes. Those numbers are more than just a few signifiers of virtual success. They were a sign of financial stability, a full-time job James Rolfe could grasp via films.

But it’s also clear James became yet another content creator who’s had his work-life balance thrown out of whack by the vagaries of YouTube policy. 

“There’s just less and less time to work on stuff,” Rolfe told me as we sat together on a black park bench outside of the extremely pink Caribe Royale Resort. “Where do I find time to write a video? Where do I find time to shoot it? You kind of have to fit it into a calendar of these little pockets of time you have. I work during the weekdays on a general basis, like a routine of a 9 to 5, Monday through Friday. It’s also flexible because there’s a lot of things I need to work on with my kids.”

While Cinemassacre was shaping itself as a popular YouTube brand, Rolfe became a 30-something, found love and got married, and became a father twice over. In the wake of YouTube policy changes, where the platform began prioritizing videos based on quantity, “relevance,” subscriber counts, and clicks, Rolfe was forcefully expected to kick up his work output, keeping busy at the expense of his home life to churn out more videos and make more content. He also needed time to pursue passion projects, including a feature film on The Nerd, and making appearances at various conventions across the nation to meet with fans.

“I’ve been doing one convention a month for the past year,” Rolfe told me. We were at Free Play Florida, Orlando’s annual arcade convention, where Rolfe was signing autographs, meeting with fans and hosting a few panels. “I gotta take a break… I really gotta take a break.”

Today, YouTube is the second most visited website in the world, only behind its parent company, Google. Over 500 hours of video is uploaded to the website each minute, making it a tough and competitive platform for creators looking to stand out. It’s even tougher for them to make a living, given that monetization begins at such a high threshold of views. Rolfe and Matei benefited heavily from adopting YouTube during its early years, before Google shifted the video service’s focus toward creator-focused content.

As a result of that early adaptation, The Angry Video Game Nerd videos seem antiquated. Cinemassacre is a far cry from what gaming YouTube channels are pumping out on the regular today. Videos are scripted not just for dialogue but for various character appearances and, sometimes, set-destroying escapades. The Nerd delivers thoughtful criticism on retro video games, but the need to inject juvenile potty-humor is indeed still a requirement for Rolfe’s videos. Gilbert Godfrey, a man that Gen Z––YouTube’s biggest generational viewership––will probably never care about, was casted in a video just last year. He played a man named Fred Fuchs. 

But even though the Nerd chews up shitty video games and spews out harsh words about them, Rolfe’s alter-ego remains a caricature, a form of parody and not an actualized GamerGate crusader hellbent on gatekeeping video games from the masses. The Nerd stands on his soapbox to see games as a consumer product over a piece of art to personally dissect because the games he became popular for shitting on were mostly a product of his child brain’s frustrations. Those bad games became childhood memories of terrible gaming experiences that remained through Rolfe’s college days, when The Nerd character was initially born. 

When we first started talking at Free Play Florida, Rolfe told me about his initial love for film, attending college, meeting Matei, and how he chose a path as a filmmaker, which eventually snowballed into a role as a full-time YouTuber. “I think I knew [film] was art first,” Rolfe said. Making videos became the best way for him to express himself. “In school, I had a rough time communicating. I went to special ed for seven-and-a-half years. I liked it, I had a good time. But socializing in general… I was a little awkward. Art always made me feel comfortable.”

Rolfe began toying with camcorders at age 8, shooting short films with handmade puppets and action figures. “If I drew a funny comic, or something like that, people would laugh. That’s when I first decided I wanted to do some kind of art.” He dabbled in just about everything: “Painting, drawing, taking still pictures, posing with my friends and pretending like we’re having sword fights… The reason why I was set on movies is because it was a combination of all of the arts at once.”

It wasn’t until age 15 that Rolfe gained confidence in his own filmmaking abilities. After showing his earliest films to neighborhood friends, he began enlisting their help to act in and produce them. During his teens, he explored every avenue of film possible––weirdo horror films, full-length features, animated shorts using paper cut-outs and stop-motion, music videos, and crude but endearing short films. The passion stayed with Rolfe throughout his attendance at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where he first met Matei. The friendship started with a memorable if somewhat embarrassing encounter: After drinking a bit too much at a college party, Rolfe puked all over Matei’s arms.

After Rolfe and Matei realized they both had an interest in video games and pop culture nostalgia, they began working on videos together on general geek fandom. These efforts birthed the Angry Nintendo Nerd, a character resentful of the terrible, deeply flawed games he played as a child who decided to film himself reacting to them. In an early episode that set the tone for the dozens that would follow, Rolfe, dressed in a white oxford button-down and equipped with a few pens in his pocket, speaks directly into a camera to describe his frustrations with The Karate Kid for the NES. “This game is ass,” he says, before yelling five “fucks” at his camcorder and slamming his head into a kitchen cupboard. With Matei’s encouragement, Rolfe ended up uploading videos of the character onto YouTube in the hopes of gaining attention.

Of course, YouTube wasn’t the sole path Rolfe took to internet stardom. At a time when G4TV was just a few years old, a handful of websites rose up to rival the digital cable channel’s video gaming programming. One of those notable websites is ScrewAttack, launched by Craig Skistimas and Tom Hanley in 2006.

“I reached out to James in early 2006, I think,” Skistimas told me over Discord. “When we started ScrewAttack, we wanted to have a website where we could have something on every single day. Our tagline was ‘Something original every freaking day.’” Skistimas discovered James Rolfe with a simple YouTube search, after typing in the string of words “funny video games.” Skistimas watched some of the Nerd’s early videos and then reached out to Rolfe. He wanted The Angry Nintendo Nerd to shout obscenities on his site, ScrewAttack, as well.

“I remember the emails just being really casual,” Skistimas recalled. “I was like, ‘Hey man, we have this website and we’d love to put your stuff on it, and maybe we can grow at the same time.’ And James was like, ‘Yeah, cool, sounds great.’ We got to know each other a little bit and we started working together, and the first episode he posted [on ScrewAttack] was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles episode.”

Eventually, Skistimas and Rolfe’s partnership led the Nerd to GameTrailers, at that time one of the most popular websites focused on gaming videos. “I also told him, ‘You should probably change your name from the Angry Nintendo Nerd to the Angry Video Game Nerd,’” Skistimas told me. Rolfe took the advice. In addition to reducing the chances of a lawsuit from Nintendo, the rebranding would also allow him to broaden his horizons.

“I recreate the feeling while playing a game, in an exaggerated fun way,” he told me about The Nerd. “It’s like venting, but I’m aware of how funny it could be so I try to make it a good venting, and make it entertainment. I try to keep it close to real life––the Nerd’s [opinion] close enough to my real self’s opinion, where it’s believable. Just exaggerate and go farther, but keep it grounded in some kind of relatability.”

While speaking with me, Rolfe was careful to broadly speak on his home-life, never once accidentally naming anyone in his family or revealing much about his home-life at all. He also didn’t tell me much about The Nerd beyond it being a fun character project that turned into a full-time job. His apprehension might have stemmed from criticism he faced by journalists and celebrities alike over a short video he uploaded titled “Ghostbusters 2016. No Review. I refuse.” In it, Rolfe, not the Angry Video Game Nerd, expresses his exhaustion over the various remakes and reboots of classic films in cinema history, and the bait-and-switch feeling some fans of the original franchise feel the 2016 movie is aiming for. “Calling it Ghostbusters, but without having any connection to the original story or characters, is a shameless attempt to bank on the name to get fans to see it based on the title alone,” he says in the video. “At the same time, it takes advantage of the younger generations who might not have even seen the original. They’ll see it without feeling there’s a prerequisite in having to see the other movies.”

Of course, neither Paul Fieg nor Columbia Pictures are beholden to fan requests or outrage, and the video made waves over the internet. Waves so big, the New York Times picked it up as a story, delving into its “whiffs of sexism” and including a poke from Patton Oswalt. They also broached a personal line Rolfe seemed to be avoiding with me by touching on his family life.

In a follow-up email after our initial meeting in person, I asked Rolfe how he handled the backlash over that video. “The day that happened, I was taking my daughter to her first swim class,” he wrote. “So, when you ask how I handled it? The point is, I have too much going on in real life, to look on the internet. I just don’t see these things. But yeah, of course I heard about it, a bit later, after it happened. It was a misunderstanding.

“The female cast was great! All of them are extremely talented in everything they do. But for a decade or more, Dan Aykyroyd was building up fan support for a Ghostbusters 3 film where the old Ghostbusters would pass the torch to the new Ghostbusters. This could have been that same film, but they cut the continuity loose, and rebooted it instead. So my statement was that the studio didn’t listen to what the fans wanted (which they’ve gotten the message now), and also a blanket statement that if you don’t like a movie trailer, instead of complaining, just don’t see the movie.”

Rolfe’s had some assistance since YouTube switched its policies up and he became a family man. Since 2017, the all-encompassing (record label, game publisher, YouTube production crew, talent outreach recruiters) Screenwave Media has helped Rolfe and Matei maintain their Cinemassacre output. At the start, this partnership meant offloading some of the duo’s typical editing duties, but it eventually extended to help planning future episodes of The Angry Video Game Nerd.

“We were already editing James and Mike Mondays and other random videos pre-2017,” Screenwave editor James Silverman told me. “I think we proved ourselves enough for Mike and James to take a chance on a few AVGN episodes, then it grew into more and more. It was around the Polybius episode, which I’m actually in. Like, literally inside the cabinet popping things on the screen. I think James started offloading more duties to us since then and, together, we came up with new show concepts.”

“We meet up at the beginning of each year and plan all the major shoot days,” Silverman tells me about crafting Cinemassacre’s production schedule. “We also plan the AVGN seasons as well––what episodes go in what months––so we’re all on the same page when it comes to ideas and recording gameplay. Then we meet up monthly to go over the weekly videos. So, we kinda just keep chopping at it until the pieces are digestible and ready to work on. I handle all the scheduling with James and Mike.”

The Cinemassacre channel currently has a rotating roster of videos. Each week, subscribers can expect to see James and Mike Mondays, where the duo play a retro video game together, a Rental Review every Friday, which involves the Screenwave gang and James talking about a cult movie together in a sort of podcast environment, and a single episode of the Angry Video Game Nerd––updated with high definition production quality, and way more intricate costuming and casting choices––every month, with special one-off videos in between. 

“We’re getting used to being this organized machine,” Rolfe tells me. “Before it just used to be me and Mike doing everything, but now we have the whole Screenwave team. The team at Screenwave have been helping and taking the majority of editing off my hands. They saved the day. They’re helping the videos stay possible. Otherwise, I’d only be able to make three or four episodes per year, and I can’t sustain myself on that. Now we get brand deals. A lot of the revenue on YouTube, because it doesn’t pay what it used to, it’s become a lot more complicated now. It’s hard to keep the flow going these days.”

And despite being less hands-on as when he first started his character, James Rolfe still loves making films. He just needs to find more time.

“I’m going to put a book out,” he told me as we wrapped up our interview at Free Play Florida. “I’m probably going to self-publish it. I haven’t had any time to touch the book. I’ve just been working on episodes [of AVGN]. Hopefully, with the next free time I get, when I’m caught up with videos enough, I’m going to work on the book. After that’s done, eventually I’m probably going to have to stop on it again and come back to it. After that, I wanna start on this film and figure out how to schedule that.”

It’s clear that although James Rolfe has been playing the same character for over a decade, choosing to change very little about his brand and style, he’s still determined to entertain others just as he set out to do in his youth. He’s stayed true to his classic self.