Into the Pit Review

Into the Pit is a welcome addition to the FNAF series. After playing through the game, it’s art design, gameplay, and LORE was extremely satisfying. Into the pit got me excited for the FNAF series again! I want to see the next FNAF movie and game now. I’m curious to know what is next in the post Afton world as we get to see the Mimic take center stage as the current antagonist after ruin. The teasers share implications of a circus that may have been the start of all the horror! I’ll be keeping my eyes out for the next FNAF update we excitement.

-Reed

Transcript:

Into the Pit is an incredible game for the Five Nights at Freddy's series. It is filled with lore, Easter eggs, solid gameplay, mini-games, puzzles, and some good scares. Let's dive into the ball pit as we explore Into the Pit.

Into the Pit is a ten-year anniversary game in the Five Nights at Freddy's series. It is an adaptation of the novel with the same name. As a long-time lurker in the FNaF series, this game was on my radar after I enjoyed Security Breach and its DLC Ruined so much. Its different art style and gameplay vaguely reminded me of pixel horror games of the past. From the first time I saw a trailer, it made me want to play the game, so I was absolutely delighted when Mega Cat Studio sent me a review code for Into the Pit.

Now, this is going to be my review of Into the Pit, and also, more or less, my thoughts and reaction to the game itself. The very first thing I noticed was the absolute love poured into this game for fans of the series. In addition to competent game design throughout, I think one of the most important factors in judging any game is answering the obvious and simple question: Is the game good?

I believe that for Into the Pit, the answer is a strong yes. The game tells a cohesive narrative that you don’t need ten years of background understanding to enjoy, unlike modern MCU movies at the time of writing this. Without that weight, the game is much more palatable to common audiences. But that is not to say that old fans have been abandoned. Truly, it’s the complete opposite. The more hardcore fan you are, the more you feel rewarded by this new installment. I tip my hat to Mega Cat Studios for pulling off one of the hardest tricks in the modern era: being able to satisfy both the hardcore and casual audiences of a fandom.

The game itself can be as short as 20 minutes if the player decides to dip out at the first opportunity, but it can also run for about 3 to 5 hours on a 100% playthrough, depending on how much you read all the lines in-game and if you're taking your time. I know I was delighted when I went up to the door and was like, "Can I just peace out?" And I got an ending immediately. Those types of things really help give player agency and interest in the game.

As is tradition with FNaF games, there are multiple endings, which encourage new playthroughs. After beating the game, you, the player, are given access to a customization menu to let you control how aggressive the animatronics are. Yet another feature in this game that lets the most hardcore players get their custom night, where they can try to beat the self-imposed, near-impossible challenge of surviving all the nights and becoming the true King of Five Nights at Freddy's. Move over, Markiplier.

As a general summary of Into the Pit, we play as a boy named Oswald in a dying town that he is really having a tough time with. He wants to leave, but his father can't find a way to actually justify leaving despite falling on hard times when the local mill closed. Oswald has to stay at a local pizza restaurant after school while his dad works extra hours, and it gets to him, making him upset.

So, one time, when his dad is late picking him up, he tries to teach him a lesson by hiding in the closed-off ball pit area to make him think he went missing. When he goes in, Oswald finds himself in a completely different world. Is it memories? Is it time travel? Is it some other type of sci-fi element? I have no idea, but the theorists surely have something to say about it. Regardless, Oswald has the time of his life at this party scene of 1985 Fredbear’s Diner or whatever this is lore-wise. It’s the Pizza Plex with the animatronics in their prime.

But after having some fun times and making new friends, Oswald and all the kids are attacked by an evil rabbit animatronic. When Oswald flees back into the pit and back to reality, trying to escape all the killer animatronics, he finds his father, who is then pulled into the pit by the pursuing evil rabbit. Oswald pulls his dad back out, but now his dad is possessed by this evil rabbit.

And now, this is the crux of our game. We are trying to save Oswald's father from this other mirror world, this memory world, this alternate timeline, this time-traveling device. Again, I really don’t know what it is, but yeah, I’m going to keep throwing things out there. And we need to survive five different days of going into the pit and out of the pit using mechanics from both different worlds to try and find a way to save kids, our father, and get away from the evil animatronic. And while we do it, we unlock all sorts of different implications to the FNaF series timeline. It's fun, and it’s compelling.

Now, I do want to address some of the criticisms that I'd like to put out there that I've been seeing about the game and what I experienced in my own playthroughs. Honestly, these are more nitpicks because I really don't have any big gripes with the game.

The first nitpick here is there are a lot of dialogues that are unskippable while playing through the game. Players looking to speedrun the game, especially on Nightmare Mode, which has permadeath, are subject to replaying the same 4 to 5 minutes to start every single run, and then to have that cut short by one mistake is going to erode the goodwill of the player. It's odd that that doesn't seem streamlined when there is an in-game speedrun tracker that encourages players to speedrun the game.

Next, the game isn't really that long on its surface. If the player ignores all the mini-games, this game will fly towards an ending. I can see players being unsatisfied if they are looking for more Security Breach-kind of content, as Into the Pit is not an open world. It's not something where you explore a comprehensive Pizza Plex like we did in Security Breach. Instead, it's a much more condensed, cohesive story that is filled to the brim with Easter eggs, a strong narrative, and an easy-to-understand gameplay loop.

Speaking of the mini-games, I think there’s criticism—on the weaker side—that the mini-games artificially increase the playtime of the game. I don't agree with that because I was able to play through most of them with ease and get all the bonuses for the secret ending in less than 50 minutes max. If I got stuck on one of the games, I’m not saying, "Oh, it’s so impressive how fast I went through it." It more shows that even someone casually playing, who also can't stand platformers (one of the games is a platformer), can do this in plenty of time, and it's not going to make the game run artificially long or frustrate players with a grindfest. If you want all the endings, you have to do all these mini-games, but everything is very casual in how it is built. It really allows players that want that extra difficulty to seek it out for themselves.

I think unanimously the current worst feature in the game is having to click the gumball machine a ridiculous number of times. I’ve seen people say it’s 50 times, 90 times. People thought you could only click it at certain points in the story, which was not true. On my playthrough, I immediately went to it to start because I was curious, and I was able to unlock one of the secret mini-games. So it’s just a lot, and it’s unnecessary how long it takes. That’s something I think the developers can reasonably drop in and make much easier for the community, as it’s actually a mini-game required to get the secret endings in the game. It’s one of those quality-of-life things that can be tuned.

During my playthrough, I didn’t experience any noticeable bugs, but I did experience tons of Easter eggs, lore nods, and was pleased to see that when I messed around in the game, the game messed back. One of the things I loved seeing was that sitting in the dark too long caused the main character to start hallucinating what’s going on in his room. I loved seeing the eyes all of a sudden turn into masses and characters and things that had been haunting him, which also filled in the characterization of Oswald as he’s going crazy, dealing with this mind-bending journey into the pit.

In addition, calling 911 or your mom in other parts of the game rewards the player with dialogue or even secret mini-games. It’s nice to feel that kind of creativity and agency. That’s the kind of fun you put into a video game that makes games worth playing. I believe it’s what keeps players coming back, always hoping to find, "Oh, maybe there’s some other number to dial," or "Maybe there’s something else to do."

Obviously, I haven’t even touched on the art style yet. Another delight to me was seeing the different art style introduced to the Five Nights at Freddy’s universe. There really aren’t too many games that I’m playing lately that are in this 16-bit animated style, along with some really interesting animated cutscenes that help bring and tie the whole story to life. The entire art style delivery of the game calls into question what is real and what isn’t. From the very loading screen, we are choosing our options and playing on a TV, just like the first Five Nights at Freddy's games are considered to be canon in the world. According to Help Wanted VR, the art style could be telling us that this is playing as a person who is playing a literal video game inside a video game, which is getting a little meta. But that doesn't mean what happened in the game didn't actually happen inside the canon of the FNaF universe.

It's very possible that whatever's going on in this video game could be paralleled or close to what's actually going on in the real series, because so many of these mini-games tell us the true story of what's going on for FNaF, and that's how we end up down the MatPat rabbit hole, which I'm not going to do. I'll happily leave that to the rest of the FNaF lore community to unpack. They are excellent at it and have a good ten years of understanding on me. So please go check with the experts if you really want to dig into that FNaF lore.

That's something that I think I'll see a lot of casual players do if they pick up this gameplay for the first time. If they don't feel the need to go find those endings for themselves, going online, looking up those endings, and then finding the theories out there that explain them is what's going to be the pipeline for this game. And then that enhances the community because it gets the dialogue going.

I know, quote unquote "scary games," as this is not on the hard spectrum of scary games, but it's still scarier for the most casual of gamers. It can be a really big commitment because a lot of people don't like scary games or being scared. But there are a ton of people that love learning about scary games. It's a weird dichotomy that you see. Players would rather watch and read about a scary game than be forced to play it themselves, which kind of gets into the whole button-crushing thing (which you can check in my video essay about pressing or not pressing a button in video games and what that does to you psychologically).

But back on track, I must point out it was FNaF 3 and its mini-games that told a secret story of what was actually going on in the Five Nights at Freddy's world that finally got me hooked on the series. Seeing new versions of these mini-games inside this game gave me the same chills I got back in the day, which was wonderful. Nostalgia. There is something special about that true 2D horror that continues to grow my interest in the Five Nights at Freddy's series. The subtle storytelling that an enthusiastic community tries to decipher through these very ambiguous and horror suspense-filled mini-games, or maybe radios or sound files or books and so forth, really has a soft spot in my heart.

Now I point all this out to show you how many decisions Into the Pit has made have different meanings for different players, and it really tackles that idea of an iceberg-like game. It delivers on the promises it makes to both the casual and hardcore fans of both gameplay and lore. It doesn't threaten to take up your life like an Elden Ring game would, but it may be too short for players looking to put tens of hours into this game, but not hundreds of hours. And if they have no interest in the gameplay loop challenge of avoiding the animatronics and custom nights, you're not going to get a lot of distance out of this game.

Overall, Into the Pit is a spectacular success. I applaud Mega Cat Studios for the addition to the series. After the poor reception of the launch of Security Breach, I'm so happy to see the FNaF community have a bunch of wins with Help Wanted, the FNaF movie, and now Into the Pit. I really can't wait for what's coming next in the series. I never thought the finale would be as strong as it has ever been, ten years later, but it is.

Congrats to Scott and all the creatives that made this possible. It's been a really special experience, and I loved it.

The Darkest Dungeon Gave me Light

Darkest Dungeon completely enraptured me when I finally gave it a try many years after its release. It is no shock to me now that I would love the game. It is grim dark turn-based dungeon clearing game with D&D 5e-like combat and a mysterious plot that keeps you on your toes.

The game has, deservedly, taken many hours of my life as I have braved the darkest dungeons with my group of broken heroes. What hit me hardest was “your decisions matter”. By far the easiest way to make me jump out of my seat as a gamer is establishing there are good and bad consequences to every action.

When opening the game you are greeted with the following message:

 Quick Backgoround

What a wonderful way to set the tone of the game from the start. No messing around, no guesswork, this is what you are in for. I find that extremely refreshing in a world were games unintentionally or intentionally mismarketing their games in order to drive sales or reach corporate goals.

So when the sequel to Darkest Dungeon was announced I was so excited, ready to jump on. But it was announced that it would be going through early access on Epic, which deflated all my excitement. Instead I opted to wait for a “finished” game, holding my breath.

A year and change later, the game fully released, and I was thrilled to have waited. The game exceeded my expectations and my jaded early access skepticism. There were new relationship systems added, a fresh coat of graphical paint, and new bosses. What more could I ask for?

Well it would seem the community was not in agreement (but when is a community ever? Maybe during a controversy where everyone can agree to dislike a thing or person?). There was valid criticism of the game’s departure from the original game systems. DD2 focuses more like a rogue-lite where you upgrade your character after every run, but they retain being the same character as long as you survive. Where DD1 was more a meatgrinder to the heroes, new adventures coming through in droves in order to feed the required manpower required to defeat the evil unleashed!

The debate goes into far more detail and nuance. I found myself of the perspective that I liked and played both games. DD2 doesn’t replace or make DD1 inadequate in the same way DD1 doesn’t do the same to DD2.

 The Thrill

What absolutely thrilled me, what gave me that special “high” that I believe most gamers chase when playing video games (for different reasons) was the ending of DD2. For me the shrines set up an ending that gave me goosebumps due to my own life experiences.

SPOILERS

At the end of the game you are facing the corrupted scholar that unleashed the madness of the darkest dungeon on the world. This is the appreciation of the narrator who was killed in sacrifice of the ritual that brought all these creatures to the world.

Inside the final fight you fight your way vertically until you are facing the appreciate in his eldritch throne. Displaying an incredible 1000 health (that’s a lot in Darkest Dungeon 2) it feels like it is going to be another costly final battle.

Sure enough, after a few attacks the game asks you to “FACE YOUR FAILURE”. Here I groaned, disappointed that the ending of the game was much like the first. The final boss of Darkest Dungeon 1 is the heart of darkness at the center of the Darkest Dungeon…dungeon. It forces you to sacrifice two character if you bring in a full party. The forced sacrifice is a eighty and brutal decision that I believe reinforces the type of game DD1 represents. DD1 is a game where no matter the outcome sacrifice is necessary. It is about making the best of a bad situation. Even in triumph there is loss.

Reluctantly and with a sigh  I choose my Grave robber as the first to go in the DD2 final boss fight. In the moment I click, I do not find my character obliterated, no! Instead their greatest fear/regret appears fighting beside the boss. It is the graverobber’s abusive husband!

Suddenly I am at full attention and grinning cheek to cheek. None of the other characters can do any damage to this eldritch apparition which gets my game master feels jumping! Only Graverobber can do damage to this nightmare and when she defeats it she is given a special attack that deals about 250 damage to the final boss.

At his point I’m shouting to myself like a crazy person, basking in the beautiful weaving of storytelling and game design. To me, it is incredibly thematic that the characters unlock all of their skills by facing their repressed memories of the past. Each character faces the most devastating, hurtful, and broken parts of their life (minus the flagellant?). After facing each of these memories, the characters are now face to face with their past. A perfect challenge of character growth! “Who are you now? How do you deal with what haunts you today?”

Thematically the other characters can’t damage the summoned apparitions because it is not their fight to conquer. Each hero must defeat their own personal demons in order for them to move forward. I don’t know about you, but as a massive fan of storytelling, that hits all the right spots for me.

Each hero finds a way to defeat their past, symbolizing moving on. A way of processing grief for the past in the most Tabletop RPG type of way I could imagine. The evil boss using your characters greatest fears against them, only to have the heroes overcome their fear because they have grown in the face of this hopeless, evil world  is what stories are made for.

Mechanically each character facing their past is exactly enough damage to defeat the massive pool of health the final boss presents. When you strike the final blow you are shockingly given an ending of hope. An ending I found unexpected at first but fits the themes of the game. DD1 is about sacrifice, DD2 is about hope.

Both are wonderful games I absolutely recommend people give a try. If you resonate with it, you will probably love it.

Now I am off for another run, because the world won’t uneldritch itself.

-Reed

LEAVE MY DISCOUNT LEGEND OF ZELDA ALONE

A Love Letter to Star Fox Adventures: The Zelda Clone I Chose

0Ah, Star Fox Adventures. The game that dared to venture where no Star Fox game had gone before: directly into the territory of The Legend of Zelda. Now I had no clue when I was a kid. I was so excited one Christmas way back in the early 2000s. My sister and I got a Nintendo game cube with a stack of games! Inside that stack was Star Fox Adventures. I played the heck out of that game by myself, with my sister, and with my cul de sac friends I grew up with. There are so many fond memories I have of the game like trying to beat the dumb racer part of the game while eating tostito chips and cheese. It is the special kind of experience where you internalize not just the feelings and sights but also the tastes, feel, sound of it all.

But my happy story comes to a road bump as I grew up. The internet absolutely hated the game for many valid reasons. It strayed from the original Star Fox, that makes total sense to me. I never played the 1st so I didn’t have that issue. People complained that it was clunky and done better before, well I never experienced anything like this game before. Then many MANY years later, I am in my last year of college and my roommate gets me to play Ocarina of time on the N64. Within 10 minutes of playing it, I go “Oh shit.” All the hate totally made sense to me. I couldn’t help but laugh, Star Fox was a weaker Zelda clone trying to cash in on the popularity of the time.

So you know what? I still love it. Yes, even now, with the clarity of hindsight, I can see it for what it is—a less-polished, fox-covered version of The Legend of Zelda. Yet, my heart clings to it with a nostalgia-soaked grip that I happily defend.

When Dinosaurs and Space Foxes Collide

Let’s set the scene: it’s 2002, and Rare decides to take our favorite space-faring fox, strip away his spaceship, and plop him onto a prehistoric planet filled with dinosaurs. The result? Star Fox Adventures. Think! It is Rare at their prime, it is Zelda WITH DINOSAURS, and Krazoa Palace is the coolest temple I have ever experienced in video games. Are there tons of annoying parts? Yes, but the lows and highs click for me. It is like Mario Super Star baseball, it has a ton of issues but is the best Mario baseball game ever. The sequel fixed all the bugs, but I dropped that game within the first day of playing it to go back to Super Star Baseball. Sometimes those highs and lows hit right to keep you hooked.

Fox McCloud, Meet Link

The game borrows heavily from The Legend of Zelda, particularly Ocarina of Time. From the item collection to the puzzle-solving, the influence is undeniable. But instead of wielding the Master Sword, you’re swinging a magical staff. And rather than exploring Hyrule, you’re navigating the planet Sauria. Sure, Fox’s staff might be a less iconic weapon, and Sauria isn’t exactly Hyrule, but it worked for me. Cloud Runner Fortress! The Sun and Moon Stones! The locations kick started my love for the fantasy genre.

Nostalgia is a Powerful Thing

Part of my love for Star Fox Adventures is undoubtedly tied to nostalgia. Like I said at the start, I remember popping the game into my GameCube and being captivated by the lush environments and the thrill of a new adventure. At the time, I didn’t care that it wasn’t a traditional Star Fox game or that it was trying to be something it wasn’t. I was just along for the ride. That ride gave me joy, excitement, and wonder that has lasted to this day. I will forever love Star Fox Adventures.

Embracing the Imperfections

In the end, Star Fox Adventures is like that quirky friend who never quite fits in pop culture but is endearing in their uniqueness. It’s a game that dared to be different and the same, even if it stumbled along the way. So, here’s to you, Star Fox Adventures. You may be a worse version of The Legend of Zelda, but you’re my worse version, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

-Reed

How long is too long to ask a fandom to wait?

The Waiting Game: When Fandom Patience Runs Out

Over the past decade, I’ve noticed a trend where shows, games, and series ask fans to wait longer for conclusions to their favorite stories. Initially, fans were willing to wait because something was better than nothing. However, in this golden age of media with hundreds of series being produced, asking fans to "wait" has become increasingly unreasonable.

Game of Thrones

Take Game of Thrones: House of the Dragon Season 2 for example. It’s the latest in a long line of series pushing their fandoms away with excessive waits. The season ended recently, and I felt nothing but disappointment. The episode itself was good, but the context of the series and the wait made it unsatisfying.

Game of Thrones ended in a rushed mess as the showrunners, eager to start on Star Wars projects, sped through the final season, giving fans a decade-long investment a lackluster conclusion. Book readers, who had stuck with the series for nearly 20 years, were especially upset by the hasty wrap-up.

Now, five years later, House of the Dragon makes the opposite mistake with the same outcome. Season 2 drags on where Season 8 of Game of Thrones sped through. This season violated a key rule of storytelling: promises and payoffs.

The Problem with Long Waits

Season 1 of House of the Dragon was a great prologue, setting up the deadly and meaningless Dance of Dragons. It gave fans hope after the Season 8 mess. But two years later, Season 2's weekly releases stretched over two months without delivering the cathartic release was utterly disappointing to me. The finale ended on another cliffhanger, asking fans to wait two more years for a story they could already read in its entirety. Why keep waiting when the only promise is spectacle that never comes?

Eroding Goodwill

These asks erode a fandom’s goodwill towards the show. The longer the history with a series, the quicker this goodwill erodes. Many fans, like me, were looking for some kind of epic payoff that never arrived. While I understand the difficulty of producing shows and meeting audience expectations, this wasn’t the issue here.

Game of Thrones had a winning formula: 10 episodes per season, with episode 9 delivering spectacle and episode 10 setting up the next season, with a one-year wait in between. Thanks to COVID-19, production schedules changed, leading to fewer episodes and longer waits, despite the pandemic being largely in the past. Deviating from their own formula causes cognitive dissonance within the fandom. The audience knows what they like and the show trained them on these expectations. Changing the formula without a good reason burns audience goodwill.

Comparisons with Other Series

Other series like Call of Duty Zombies, Ju Jitsu Kaisen, and post-Endgame Marvel face similar issues for different reasons. Each promises, “Just wait until the next episode/chapter/series/movie! Then you’ll be satisfied!” But the payoff is always delayed, exhausting fans and turning them away from the series or, worse, into haters. Many haters are just fans who didn’t get the payoff they were promised, leading them to hate-watch the series instead of abandoning it altogether. This misfire catalyzes vitriolic discourse, derailing the good vibes train into endless internet shouting matches.

Although Ju Jitsu is currently moving on from a 8 month long single battle! An interesting dynamic for the series will be to see how audiences receive the animation vs the week to week manga releases. When there is a weekly or monthly release for content, it again falls into training a fandom to expect a formula. Any deviation from that is going to be a hurdle to overcome. Oftentimes creators need to drop their brand all together and pivot if they want to make a big enough change. Many of my friends speculate Ju Jitsu Kaizen will be received well as a binge watched show vs the unsatisfying weekly cliffhangers for over a year if you include the previous arc. I excitedly await to see how that series and its reception turns out.

Conclusion

In conclusion, while waiting can sometimes build anticipation, prolonged and repeated delays without adequate payoff can erode fan loyalty and goodwill. The entertainment industry must balance creating high-quality content with maintaining a reasonable release schedule to keep fans engaged and satisfied. Otherwise, they risk alienating their most dedicated supporters and tarnishing their legacy. Which has happened for every series I mentioned.

So what is the winning formula? It depends! It depends on the series, the context, and the promises they have given to their fandom. Authors like Brandon Sanderson are masters at setting up their readers and fandoms for success. I’d say everyone could take a lesson out of Brandon Sander’s expertise because he is the current master of storytelling promises and payoffs.
-Reed

Reflecting on My YouTube Career: A Journey of Highs, Lows, and Rediscovery

Why hello!

Whether you’re discovering me for the first time or you’re a long-time follower happy to see me post again, welcome to my content and community. In this re-introduction, I want to reflect on my YouTube career—a postmortem of sorts—to accompany the first episode of the Multiverse Arcade Podcast (check it out here).

I've been a “YouTuber” and content creator since 2008. What began as a hobby gradually evolved into a business, then morphed into something I struggled to identify with, and has now become a platform for my creative expression.

Where are we today?

RADAUSTIN27’s Channel Stats as of June 2024

Currently, my channel is experiencing stagnant growth, teetering on generating no views and continuing to lose subscribers. Why, you may ask? Well, I stopped posting content on the channel for about two years. Additionally, in the three years prior, my content was inconsistent due to the decline in general interest in Call of Duty Zombies.

The Highs and Lows of Call of Duty Zombies

Call of Duty Zombies was supposed to be my “big break” on YouTube, the golden ticket so many YouTube gurus promise. While it never turned into the runaway success I had hoped for, it was an incredible experience filled with highs and lows, affording me once-in-a-lifetime opportunities for which I’ll always be grateful.

However, there wasn’t a fairy tale ending. I didn’t become a millionaire, nor did I even make a livable wage from YouTube. What derailed my success was my inability to commit to consistent content, focus my efforts, and scale the business.

The Battle Within

Over the years, I’ve noticed a pattern: every 6-8 months, I get anxious if I’m not creating something “great” or generating “lots” of revenue. So, as you can imagine, I’m anxious a lot. I’ve often been my own greatest barrier to success, plagued by feelings of “never being good enough,” “I don’t deserve it,” or “this content is garbage.”

For the life of me I didn’t want to get stuck in Call of Duty Zombies content, but by constantly doing other types of content it ended up forcing me into Zombies because it was the only content that worked.

The Shift in Content

To be clear, I’m not claiming my content was high art. Ha! Maybe the posters I designed, but my content primarily focused on news-based Call of Duty updates and story line explanations. That content had no long term legs. When the news dried up, did I lean into my strength in story explanations? Nope.

My second most viewed video, one of my most "recent videos", is a showcase of diving into a story and sharing my take on it. It resonated with the community, no gimmicks needed.

Instead, I pivoted to live streaming, Let’s Plays, movie reviews, and even entered the corporate workforce. All of which were terrific experiences, but didn’t make YouTube a success for me. Hindsight is 20/20, as the saying goes. I’ve spent much of my life trying to figure out what brings me joy and what I can do for a living that doesn’t make me want to scream. It took nearly half a decade of YouTube under performance and two years in the corporate world to regain my perspective on what I want to do.

Discovering What I Want to Do

The two years that followed my departure from creating YouTube videos professionally was an incredibly insightful experience. I worked in the public sector helping educational institutions create content, manage their social media or update their websites. Well, on paper that is what I was supposed to do. I was shocked by the bureaucracy, lack of effort or care in one’s work, and absolute disdain for anything other then the status quo. I saw 20+ employees and colleagues leave because the education industry has changed so dramatically from what it once was.

It became clear that the “hustle” YouTube culture has completely poisoned my perspective on my own work ethic. Often times at both jobs I’d have my work done for the week by noon on Monday, but had to find ways to stay busy. That fake busy work led to me me falling in love with videography, photography, and editing all over again.

Getting to test camera, camera settings, special effects and more had my creativity flowing again, I just needed a direction to put it in. That’s what lead me back to my own photo and video business and returning to YouTube content creation.

Rediscovering Joy and Purpose

Despite the struggles and setbacks, my journey has taught me valuable lessons about resilience, self-awareness, and the importance of aligning my work with my passions. Moving forward, I aim to create content that truly resonates with me and my audience, embracing the creative process without the constant pressure of hitting arbitrary milestones, pleasing the egos of administrators, or being busy for the sake of being busy. I believe time to be my most valuable resource, wasting it gives me a moral crisis inside a cubicle.

The Greatest Highs

There were incredible highs during my YouTube career. Here is a shortlist of the ones that come to mind.

Covering Zombie Chronicles and Meeting the Call of Duty Developers
How could a person not be completely starry eyed at the opportunity to fly out to LA, play all the remastered zombie maps that they have loved from the past, and meet the people that have made the game that has dominated most of your thoughts for the past six years (at that point)?

I was completely in love with the whole experience and time has continued to age it well for me. Nothing will ever be like that reveal experiences. Which is great, because life has so many more experiences like that to come.

Participating in the ZWC tournaments
I was able to participated in ZWC 1 and 3 and i will be forever grateful to Matt and Jose for putting on those events. I saw first hand how my content actually impacted people in real life. So much of my career I undervalued my work and felt like I was yelling into a void.

In addition, I made so many friends within the zombies community. ZWC created a long lasting memory for me that I still look happily back on.

Solving the Der Esiendrache Easter Egg first in the world.
Getting to solve at least one main quest easter egg in Call of Duty Zombies “first” was incredible. It was a milestone because I had spent years to the point playing, loving, and reporting on the game mode. Solving it helped legitimize my channel, push it over the 100k subscribers mark, and came after getting out of a terrible relationship.

An honorable mention to being “first in the world” to solve an easter egg was the Tortured Path Easter Egg. In WW2 zombies DLC 3 you need to beat all three maps consecutively to get the cutscence to play. My team ended up beating everything sequentially but not inside the same online lobby and game. Cameron Dayton DMed me saying that we were technically first in the world to complete all the easter eggs, but we didn’t get the cutscene.

I completely forgot about it because “First in the world” means next to nothing in present times. First, everything we find in the live stream era of easter egg hunts come from the collective group think of the community. There is no “one person figures everything out”. Slowly many people find many things allowing for a group to piece it together. Being first in the world, is really being the first to understand all the work before and finish the job.

Secondly, “First in the world” use to mean views, increased revenue, increased subscribers, and increased overall success. None of that is true, since the biggest channels can reupload the trailers without even playing and dominate the search engine results due to their size.

But hey, for a normal player like John (Juan) on my team to be in some crazy YouTuber hunt and get to the end, I understand why he counts that as a win!

The success of my Let’s Explore Series and of my WW2 Zombies Videos
These were milestones that showed me my videos could be successful at a scale of hundreds of thousands of views. For WW2 zombies it helped reinforce that I didn’t need Treyarch zombies to be successful. Obviously it was still zombies, but the breadcrumbs were there. WW2 zombies was a new audience, a new story, and a different era.

It also allowed me to meet and befriend Cameron Dayton, the Zombies director at Sledgehammer games at that time. He has since moved on, but it was an incredible experience.

The Greatest Lows

Having my videos not break 300 views once I entered college in 2013

College was a very confusing time for me. I was pursuing a degree I didn’t realize I hated, trapped in a toxic long-distance relationship, and constantly hearing that college would guarantee me a good life. None of those things lasted or turned out as promised, but my generation has experienced this disappointment ad nauseam.

I struggled to stay motivated after Origins dropped in 2013, but I picked up steam again when Exo Zombies released.

Using my last few hundred dollars to invest in an Xbox 1 to cover Exo Zombies
Shockingly this was the best worst console purchase of my life. I purchased the Xbox 1 to cover Exo Zombies because at the time Xbox had early access rights to the DLCs. Outside of Exo Zombies, I don’t think I played the Xbox 1 more then 10 hours. After getting years out of previous consoles, this was the most expensive paperweight in my entire gaming collection.

Even though it is my paperweight today, it is responsible for restarting my channel, getting me to refocus on zombies (as best as I can focus on zombies), and started a chain reaction that led me to many of my highs mentioned above.

Was it painful to see my last few hundred dollars as a broke college student go toward this? Absolutely. Was it worth it? Yes. Was I devastated by the final numbers in my bank account at the time? You bet. The pit in my stomach when I made the purchase still comes back to me every now and then when I make an expensive purchase.

Getting sucked into the Black Ops 4 Zombie community

This was one of the toughest times of my life. A game that had brought me so much joy and a community that helped me pursue my dreams had become my worst source of stress. I’ve always struggled with reading all the comments on my videos, and being introduced to Reddit only made things worse. My mental health went into the toilet as I found myself doom-scrolling long before it became a widely recognized term in 2020.

Everyone seemed frustrated at that time. There were so many difficult truths to swallow about Zombies, entertainment, and the world around us. Differences of opinion became battlegrounds online. I faced death threats, DDoS threats, doxing threats, and a torrent of vitriol, no matter what I posted or said. If I leaned one way or the other, there was always a group ready to slam me. This relentless negativity changed how I shared my opinions and shattered any confidence I had in my own ideas.

Removing “YouTuber” from my personal identity

After watching my channel decline due to my inconsistency and the mental toll it was taking on me, I spent months grappling with the question, "Who am I?" I had grown up on YouTube, from age 14 to 26, experiencing the wild ride of views, money, and attention during my formative years. So when my channel didn’t do well, I believed it to be a reflection of my own personal value. “If the channel is bad, then so am I”. “If the channel is dead, why don’t I?”

What would I do differently?

What I wouldn’t give to go back in time to do things over.

If I could start it all over? Cover indie horror stories and video game theory crafting. I believe Game Theory absolutely did it right. They made content that I would have thrived in. To collaborate with them would have made me proud of the content I made. I’d approach redoing YouTube by following their model. No question.

Now let me give up the fairy tale of rewritting my choices from the start.

What were the key inflection points of my YouTube career where I learned something valuable?

Don’t be so up tight
Sponsorships use to be an old taboo in early YouTube. Now we can’t get through a video without 2-3 sponsor reads and three ads. But believe it or not, back in the day a community would believe you “sold out” if you took any sponsorship for your videos.

That stupid mentality influenced me for years and continued to impact me in my decisions to take sponsorships. If I wouldn’t use the item personally, I’d never promote it. While I still feel similar today there is way more nuance in the new sponsorship culture of today.

As long as the sponsorship isn’t completely awful, it is okay to take the money to fight another day.

Don’t Be Afraid to “Play the Game” ethically

There is a clear line I draw in the sand with plagiarism and other morally wrong strategies for content, but dear lord was I trash at creating click bait titles and thumbnails. Well, clickable titles and thumbnails is what we call it now. Whenever I’d make those clickable thumbnails and titles in the past (everything was accurate) I’d get walloped in the comment section for being a click bait monster. “UNSUB!”

The odd thing was…those were some of the most watched video and ended up gaining me the most viewers. Overtime the entire ecosystem on YouTube changed while I didn’t. Clickability is so important, I’d focus harder on thumbnails, titles, and video concepts.

Commit to a Strategy and Stick with It

If i had a dollar for every new channel I started or new series I tried to make a thing on my YouTube content, I’d have about 24 dollars. It might not seem like too much, but dear lord did it constantly confuse my community and ruin any sense of regulatory to my content. I made movie channels, let’s play channels, live stream channels, and more. I can only laugh at all the dumb directions I went with my channel instead of accepting myself.

If I had stuck to story driven content, improving my craft, and keeping an open mind about new opportunities, I have no doubt I would have been at least two times as successful statistically, if not much more.

Learn as Much as I can about Editing, Film making, and Blender to Set my Content Apart

Learn, learn, learn! Stick to skills that grow over time and compliment my work. You would be surprised how useful it is to know Adobe After effects or a 3D software for content creation. Those skills create motion graphics, backgrounds, video assets, new story telling techniques, and so much more.

What’s Next?

Try, try, and try again. I’m looking to focus on story content from all forms of media. Research a bunch, share my insights, and hopefully help my community learn some valuable things. Here’s toward failing forward over the next ten years of YouTube and content creation.