ATLANTA — Emile Rosales sits in his throne of a computer chair, opening up Sony’s Vegas video editing software. Scattered across his sprawling configuration of three monitors are YouTube channels, video clips and endless notations, the results of an hour’s work capturing video of Super Mario 64 DS.
Rosales, a lanky 23-year-old with a boyish face, flips over to his own YouTube channel, “Chuggaaconroy,” and a video of him playing Castle Crashers begins to auto-play. He mutes his speakers. “I can’t stand listening to my own voice,” he explains.
In that, Emile Rosales is in the minority. He has more than 600,000 subscribers on YouTube and more than 500 million total views of the more than 1,400 videos he has posted during the past five years. What’s interesting about Rosales’ videos is what they’re not. He doesn’t make a scripted parody show like Red vs. Blue. He’s not a game critic or industry commentator. He’s not breaking any world records, and he’s not a professional gamer showing off his godlike skills.
He just plays games, all the way through, for hours on end, and talks about them as he does it. They’re games he’s played before, games many of his viewers have played before. But people like watching Chuggaaconroy so much that for now, ad revenue from his videos has made Rosales’ hobby a full-time job.
Kendrick Brinson/WIREDFan-created videos about games are big business. Earlier this month, YouTube owner Google released the results of a study that showed that 47 percent of all videogame-related video views on the video sharing site are generated by community-created content like walkthroughs, fan videos and Let’s Plays. Thirty-two percent of these views occur between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m., the study noted — “traditional prime time television hours.”
The genre of videos Rosales produces — and, for a time, was the most popular maker of on YouTube — is known as “Let’s Play.” Internet lore holds that the Let’s Play phenomenon grew from forum threads on Something Awful in which members would play a game and post screenshots and written wrap-ups of what had happened as they played. It was not long after that some began capturing video and laying narration over it. Soon, a widening group of gamers were spending hours upon hours watching lengthy videos of other people playing games.
In 2007, just as the Let’s Play format was getting popular, Rosales found he really enjoyed watching videos of games like Ninja Gaiden and hacked versions of Super Mario World produced by Jonathan “ProtonJon” Wheeler. Inspired, Rosales decided to make one himself, picking out one of his favorite games: EarthBound, a role-playing game released in limited numbers by Nintendo in 1995 and recently re-released on Wii U.
In the video, Rosales, then 18, nervously informed viewers that this would be his first ever “LP” and wondered aloud whether he was boring his audience.
“I’ve played this game probably six… eight times,” Rosales admitted into the microphone. This, however, didn’t tamper his enthusiasm for EarthBound — watching the video, you can hear that he was obviously enjoying himself, pointing out little details about the game’s sound and passionately defending its outdated art style.
“It starts off bad, I’m sorry,” he says two minutes in. “It’s a little bit slow in the beginning, but it gets better. Trust me.”
Things have indeed gotten better for Rosales in the years since. The room in his suburban Atlanta apartment that holds his videogame collection (including a pristine copy of EarthBound worth upwards of 500 bucks) is also the room where he records, edits and uploads his videos. The place is more than spacious enough for Rosales and his two exceedingly fat cats, but his office is like a tiny Best Buy, with several top-of-the-line computers connected to the triple-monitor setup, and piles of Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo videogame consoles everywhere.
He's actually that hyperactive and passionate.
Everything is diligently organized: Rosales’ collection is ordered alphabetically and by platform, and one gets the sense that if a single controller or disc were to fall out of place, he would immediately scurry over to reposition it.
It is ironic that someone who plays videogames for a living admits he isn’t very good at them. Many videos include one or two restarts after Rosales screws up a crucial jump and plummets into an abyss. Rosales doesn’t edit these mistakes out, preferring to crack a joke and keep things rolling. His fans have made compilation videos of his most spectacular failures.
“What he lacks in gaming skill, he makes up for in pure shenanigans,” Jonathan Wheeler, the Let’s Player who inspired Rosales, told WIRED via phone.
Rosales comes across as the opposite of the Angry Video Game Nerd. He’s consistently upbeat and enthusiastic about the games he’s playing. He does silly voices when he reads on-screen text and seems to always be having fun, even when things go horribly wrong. He tries his best to never curse, just screaming pop culture references instead: “OH, FOR THE LOVE OF ELEMENTAL HERO BUBBLEMAN!” (When he does slip up and drop an F-bomb, he gets concerned letters from the parents of younger viewers.)
“It’s not a shtick, that’s really him,” Wheeler says. “He’s actually that hyperactive and passionate about games.”
Kendrick Brinson/WIREDAlmost all of the games Rosales plays are older Nintendo titles, and he suspects this attracts a very particular type of viewer, one hungry for nostalgia. To cater to them, Rosales’ commentary often recalls how a particular level or song affected him when he first played the game as a child. For fans, these videos are a sort of comfort food, not new or exciting, but relatable and enjoyable because of their familiarity.
Rosales says he primarily designs his videos to work as helpful walkthroughs. He offers advice to players as he progresses through levels, pointing out do’s and don’ts. He possesses a near encyclopedic knowledge about the games he’s playing, and reliably dispenses gobs of obscure information as he plays.
In addition to being a maker of Let’s Plays, he’s still a viewer of them. Rosales’ collection includes many games from the anime-styled Tales Of… role-playing game series that has had umpteen entries in Japan, but he says he’s “infamously terrible” at them. To make up for it, he watches videos of other players who play the games to completion — videos that span dozens, even hundreds of hours.
Kendrick Brinson/WIREDChuggaaconroy says he is not legally allowed to disclose the revenue that he makes from the ads that play from his YouTube videos. But he says that producing Let’s Plays is his only job, and it covers all of his living expenses.
Like many who make their livings directly or indirectly through online advertising revenue, Rosales is increasingly concerned by the use of ad-blocking software. The web browser extension Adblock Plus has become so ubiquitous that major companies reportedly have started paying its maker to allow their ads through its filters unchecked.
Although he said he was reluctant to “go on a rant” about Adblock, Rosales does see it as a rising problem facing YouTube content creators. The problem, he says, is that many people don’t understand the negative impact Adblock can have. “They think they’re only cheating Google out of money,” he says, “but no — if the ad doesn’t get viewed, the content creator doesn’t get paid.”
Kendrick Brinson/WIREDRosales’ YouTube revenue also took a hit in May, when Nintendo asserted the rights to the ad revenue from videos featuring footage taken from its games. This caused a stir inside and outside the Let’s Play world. YouTube does give content owners the ability to automatically identify and deal with infringing videos uploaded by fans, but it would seem unclear that uploading an original playthrough of a game with commentary is tantamount to uploading a copy of a Lady Gaga music video.
Rosales says that some of his videos were targeted. Other Let’s Play makers that rely on ad revenue for their incomes swore off making videos of Nintendo games ever again — why would they, if Nintendo would claim all the ad revenue? But after the initial controversy, Rosales says that Nintendo appears to have backed off — the Mario maker has since stopped pursuing the issue.
If true, this is probably for the best. The soft benefit of millions of viewers watching Chuggaaconroy gleefully play through the latest Mario game could be more beneficial to Nintendo’s sales than some short-term ad revenue.
Adblock Plus and Nintendo’s legal team notwithstanding, Rosales’ popularity and income have grown steadily over the years, allowing him to scale up production. Using specially modified game systems and his knowledge of video editing software, his recordings look and sound more polished than his early work. Today, when he does a complete recorded playthrough of a game, he organizes videos with extremely cool interactive maps like this one for Super Mario 64 DS.
Popularity on the Internet doesn't last forever.
At the moment, Rosales is saving money so he can return to college. He admits his choice to move from his native Phoenix to Atlanta at the beginning of 2012 was in part because it would put him closer to Georgia Tech, which he’d be interested in attending. His long-term plan: Get a media arts degree to make him more employable as a professional video editor.
“I don’t think I’m going to be doing this when I’m 30,” he says. “Popularity on the internet doesn’t last forever.”
For now, there are a whole lot of people who think Chuggaaconroy is at the top of his game. They often look to him to buck them up when they’re down in the dumps about their own ability to create popular Let’s Play videos. Rosales, ebullient as ever, tells them to look on the bright side.
“They’ll say, oh, this video only got 100 views,” he says. “That’s huge! Imagine you’re standing on a pedestal with 100 people listening to what you have to say about a videogame. That’s awesome.”