Moving Forward: The Death and Rebirth of a Channel

Today I removed four years of content from my personal YouTube channel. I write this for the record, as an archive of what came before.

Humble Beginnings

In the year 2010, with nothing but Windows Movie Maker at his side, my thirteen-year-old self started editing gaming music videos. While that year saw my first successful efforts (if you can call them that; they were dreadful things), this was hardly my first interest in the world of video.

Chris vs. Wesker GMV (2010) — My first YouTube video

I remember watching YouTube in its infancy through the mid 2000s, taking particular interest in the emerging culture of edits by way of AMVs and GMVs. I researched into the methods and programs used to create these edits, but hardly got a superficial understanding before a series of life events forced me into a several-year period without internet (wow, imagine that in today's world). Around 2009, I took a computer class in my final year of Junior High. For some of our last assignments, we got to use camcorders to record short videos and edit them with iMovie, which reignited my interest in the subject. In 2010, I was just starting my freshman year of high school and had reacquired internet access, this time at unprecedented speeds compared to the dial-up I'd known before. And with that, I was determined to make my fantasy of assembling a GMV into reality.

My first video was – you guessed it – a Resident Evil GMV. It was awful. It featured a big fat watermark front and center from the program I used to rip the footage, and music literally recorded through a cheap microphone, held together by tape, pressed against a speaker as it played the song. At the time of this writing, many of my edits from these early years can still be seen as re-uploads on the P³ YouTube channel. This particular video, however, no longer exists on the internet. It was that bad. But it was a start.

Birth of a Content Creator

After cutting edits together from downloaded footage for a few months, I upped my game by investing in my own capturing capabilities. Enter the Dazzle DVD Recorder HD. Despite its name, this off-brand capture card was completely incapable of recording High Definition resolution. It also sported some peculiar digital artifacts that were impossible to do away with. Nonetheless, recording with a direct signal at all impressed me at the time. Oh, how innocent I was. But perhaps the biggest revelation came in the form of Pinnacle Studio; Dazzle's proprietary editing software, which came bundled with the capture card. That marked my first time working with anything more advanced than Windows Movie Maker, and I can't begin to emphasize how much this program, however limited, expanded my horizons. It was on Pinnacle Studio that I taught myself the basics of editing theory, and learned to assemble cuts with more deliberation and proficiency.

However, just as I grew more experienced at editing, I began to see the merits (profits, really) of a far less produced form of web content. On 30 January 2011, I uploaded my first gameplay commentary using a team deathmatch in Call of Duty: Black Ops... Yeah. Call of Duty. I was 14 years old. I cringe looking back at it now. My voice was boyish, my microphone quality terrible, and my verbal fluency abysmal. For those who can't envision that last one now, bear in mind that, much like the present, I was awfully shy and introverted, so such commentaries were pretty much the most I'd ever spoken to that point, let alone at the unnatural task of holding a conversation by myself while speaking into an inanimate recording device.

But this spawned another evolution in my journey. From there I branched out into commentating on a greater variety of games. And creating such content regularly over the next few years proved an excellent practice in speech and communication, which sowed the seeds for the articulate oratory abilities I maintain today.

Life as a Creator

My Blue Yeti arrives, 2012

Throughout my last three years of high school, from 2011-2014, this channel became my primary outlet. Under the moniker MetalGamer (cringe), I would upload gaming videos and commentary, and even delve into the burgeoning realm of live commentary and playthroughs (or Let's Plays, as we call them today). Eventually I upgraded my Dazzle to a Hauppauge HD PVR, and Pinnacle Studio to Sony Vegas Pro (and yes, it was still owned by Sony at the time), and my cheap headset mic to a Blue Yeti which, as of this writing, I still use.

With all these combined I continued to improve my quality and craft, and began to yield some attention for it. In January 2012, inspired by Maximilian Dood's The Online Warrior series, I tried my hand at improving in Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 through a series I dubbed The Road to the Warrior. This garnered Maximilian's attention, and through a twitter shoutout he gave me a sizable boost in viewership and subscribers. Which, according to available analytics, was the single biggest subscriber increase the channel experienced.

The discernible jump in subscribers from Maximilian Dood’s shoutout

I also did a Dead Space playthrough which, in Part 32: Gravity Tethers in October 2012, covered an area that confounded many people. Evidently, this section was so troublesome that folks went looking for playthroughs to use as guides, and so that video's viewership steadily increased in the nine years since its upload. As of its removal, it sat at 17,374 views, and as of this writing is still the single most viewed YouTube video I've ever produced. This is perhaps the video I feel worst about removing, because even until this day I'm still getting thankful comments from people who were helped by it.

During this period I also directed three machinimas, two in Call of Duty: Black Ops and another, more ambitious project in Halo Reach. These were pretty significant for me. It was with these productions that I realized I had all the skills needed to make films. And with the makeshift, gung-ho spirit of an indie filmmaker, these became my first forays into cinematic storytelling, a craft I still pursue in the present. If you're curious, all three of these are preserved by re-upload as the earliest machinimas on the P³ YouTube channel. They're not good, but it is interesting to look back and see the purest beginnings of my style as I approached the medium with absolutely no theory or craft.

Strike (2013)

My first gaming PC, 2013

Then in March 2013, BEHOLD a gaming PC. No longer was I hindered by the world of consoles, and could record Minecraft and triple-A PC games with an actual watchable frame rate!

Despite all these fond memories, I can't help but look back on this period as a rather bleak time in my life. Though these years were a valuable formative experience as a creator, they were also a time of intense loneliness. My family had split in many disparate directions for enumerable reasons, and I spent these years as a despondent teenager left to my own devices. I had no friends throughout high school, and for the most part I created in a vacuum without collaborators. What few online gaming friends I maintained were gradually pushed away by my own character defects. On a few occasions I did videos with a Canadian creator that went by Dr. Parabola. But beyond these, I was alone as my mental health deteriorated. My only consolation was the MetalGamer channel, and the grades I accumulated in a vain pursuit of academics, as well as some awful vices with which I medicated. That channel and my schooling were the only things giving my life a sense of direction and worth. And even those were fleeting, futile objects which rarely, if ever, garnered the acknowledgment I sought.

The Death of a Channel

24 December 2012 is a date I won't soon forget. That night I attended a Christmas candlelight church service, where the gospel truly penetrated my heart for the first time. Shortly thereafter, I found salvation in giving my life to the Lord. I continued to operate the channel and keep up my school work as normal, hoping to graduate valedictorian. But something had changed within me, and with graduation soon to come, I knew these things weren't to last.

Come 2013 I moved across the country with my father, and had to finish high school in a completely different place, as part of a larger class where I couldn't quite make the cut for valedictorian. I graduated in 2014, and having dedicated so much of my life to academics figured college to be the next logical step. Desiring to give education my best effort, without having to split my attention with a side hustle, I made the hard decision to shut down the MetalGamer channel... It wasn't that hard, actually. Viewership was down and my drive had dissipated as I looked toward future plans for a career. I hadn't uploaded a single video during my entire senior year. For all intents and purposes, the channel was already dead. And with one last update video, I put the nail in the coffin.

I enrolled in Drexel University, and spent the last few months of 2014 studying in their Westphal College of Media Arts & Design. I enjoyed my time there. It was my first experience living independently, I had a good church, and academia had long been an environment in which I thrived. But alas, it was an ill-fated endeavor, as financial difficulties soon forced me to drop out.

This left me distraught for some time, as I'd hinged so much of my identity on being a scholar. But after extended prayer and soul searching, God gave me peace on my journey home. I didn't know what was coming next, but I had hope for an unforeseen future. And soon that hope manifested as a new vision for my artistic path. One which focused on the elements of creation that I enjoyed, rather than pursuing notoriety with mere content. But this time I wasn't alone. God was within me, and my sibling was beside me. In 2015 Loryn and I began uploading videos as Pacheco Projects & Productions. And the rest is history.

Moving Forward

Why am I writing this? Monty Oum, one of my creative heroes, had a simple motto that became his legacy following his untimely passing: “Keep moving forward.”

The MetalGamer channel was a formative part of my creative development, to which I owe much. But it's in the past. It's a snapshot capturing a younger iteration of me during a trying time in my life. I'm a different person now. It no longer reflects my present. And it may have never been appropriate that someone so young should be immortalized in that state on the internet forever. After all, my character and ideals were not well formed, and I doubtless said things in those four years that I wouldn't stand by today. But by virtue of their coexisting on a channel where my present self also resides, they can be found without context and associated with that present. And so I have set to private all 488 remaining MetalGamer videos from my personal channel.

I am an archivist by nature. I like to preserve the historic record, and ensure the liminal moments of life are captured in some form for the future. So this decision took a long time to commit to. Ultimately, I could not in good conscience follow through without first writing this post. This final act of remembrance.

But this is more than a eulogy. It is a birth. Because today I did more than destroy. I created. I uploaded a new video to my personal channel, giving my thoughts on the Resident Roleplay TTRPG campaign I finished running last year.

This is quite representative of the kinds of videos I would love to do more of going forward. It is not my intent to leave this channel desolate. In fact, I've planned many thoughts, essays, teachings, and other such content that has no firm place on the main P³ channel. You may have noticed a few of them go up over the past two years. There's so much more I want to do with this channel. But I also recognize it would be strange to newcomers who might arrive and see these latest thought pieces right beside a teenager's gaming content, with no apparent gap at a superficial glance of the uploads page.

And so I take this step to create a more singular identity for the channel, built around my matured self, who I'm sure will still continue to change and grow, but will do so beyond his adolescent years, with whatever knowledge and wisdom he might've gleamed from what came before.