Happy Birthday VideoGameDocs!

The Sega Saturn Thumbnail

Today, February 27th, 2021 I officially released a video by the name of “The Sega Saturn & Sega’s Fall from Grace.” With it came the new name of my channel, VideoGameDocs (no spaces)

3 years later I’ve managed to release 12 fully fleshed out videos. I’ve covered topics ranging from Super Mario RPG, the GameCube, Donkey Kong 64, Luigi’s Mansion, and more.

While I haven’t had any immediate success with my YouTube, I’m incredibly proud of the work that I’ve done. The comments, likes, engagement, views, subscriptions, everything has been more than I ever thought I would get and I can’t thank everyone enough.

Here’s some background on the Sega Saturn video to celebrate it’s release:

The idea came from looking up “Sega Saturn” on YouTube and not finding really anything in terms of it’s history. I had gotten a Saturn for fairly cheap at my local retro store, with Virtua Cop, Virtua Fighter, and of course Daytona USA. Booting the Saturn up and hearing “ROLLING STAAAAAAART” was such an incredible experience honestly. It was an immediate blast to the mid 90’s, an era that I have never been too familiar with outside of the Nintendo 64.

I thought to myself “Sega Saturn? Of course Sega released the Genesis and the Dreamcast, but they made a console in between? What was the point of this thing?” so I started to delve into the console and it’s history between classes in Undergrad.

I found a PDF of the developer’s manual, I read about it on Sega fansites like SegaRetro, I imported a Japanese version of NiGHTS: Into Dreams (with the joystick controller) and began writing a script.

I’d always wanted to do something similar on YouTube, if you haven’t I do recommend watching my “A Special Series” episodes on Zelda and Sonic, and my videos on how Breath of the Wild and the design of Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze I believe are still well made. I realized however that simply writing video essays on games wasn’t quite what I wanted to do.

Instead I rebranded, created a new logo, a new name, and got to work on my Sega Saturn script, intended to fill a niche.

By the time I voiced, edited, and published the video, I got 59 views in the first 24 hours. A record for my channel! Half a year later the video started to boom (in my channels terms) and hit over 4,000 views.

3 years later, it’s my third highest performing video. My follow-up video on the Sega Dreamcast is a close second, and finally my video on Luigi’s Mansion is first.

While I haven’t been the most consistent with uploads, I’m very grateful to be able to create in the way that I do. I sincerely thank everyone for the support as I work through this journey.