A year later, a collab is almost complete.

I met Matt at SGC in June last year. Standing in a group of other YouTubers, I was certainly one of the small channels with around 35,000 subscribers at the time. Not a shameful number at all, but still just a drop in the bucket when considering who I was socializing with. I'm not sure if he even knew who I was (though he at least pretended to, which was kind of him), but we hit it off fairly well. I was starstruck throughout most of SGC, and it was crazy to me that I was hearing the unique timbre of Matt's voice in person, when I was used to hearing it on GameTheory, instead. I cautiously suggested that we work together on something, and he whipped out a business card and handed to to me, encouraging me to send him an email some time. I'm not sure when exactly I got up the nerve to contact him again, but I know it was before I moved out of Texas last August. I honestly thought he'd made the offer to work together as a sort of pleasantry, but lo and behold we began coming up with ideas as to what would work in a collaboration with two vastly different channels. He expressed that he'd always wanted to try a list of some sort, but never had a way to make it fit on his channel. This was a perfect opportunity for both of us, it seemed, and so it was decided that we would make a list of our favorite educational video games. I've covered a number of childhood favorites already, and GameTheory is branded as "the smartest show in gaming," so a list about educational games seemed more than appropriate. We began to hammer out a list. I had never collaborated with someone on a list in this fashion, but compromising with our entries gave us a more complete and less biased list, it seemed. Were it my decision, Humongous Adventure games probably would have been at the very top (no surprise), but since we were working together, I knew that I had to approach my selections differently. I'm happy with what we came up with. Once we'd finalized our Top 10, Matt suggested that we split the list into two videos. Numbers 10-6 would appear on his channel, then an annotation would direct viewers to the second half of the list on my channel. I would NEVER suggest this myself, as it would likely have framed me as some kind of subscriber poacher, but holy shit did I agree with the idea. Right now Matt's channel has over 2 million subscribers. Compare 2,000,000 to my 89,000, and you can see how this could have a very positive effect on my channel. Anyway, that was in/around November. Matt wrote a script the day after we'd finalized our list, but lost it. He got bogged down with work, I got bogged down with work. The collab crawled to a standstill. Finally, months later I got in contact with him again and started up work once more. Matt is a busy man, so I offered to do most of the work from that point on. If nothing else, it would let me feel like I was actually earning some of this good fortune. I wrote a script, he revised a few parts, and I set to recording. Matt sent me his VO last month, which I then chopped up and mixed with mine. I then started working on the visuals and waited on him to send me his live footage. Radio silence. I hadn't received video from him, and I had hit that point where I hadn't uploaded a video in a while so I started stressing out. Putting my editing on hold, I began to work on my own videos and waited for Matt to get back to me. It turns out Matt wasn't even in the country anymore, as he was on a (probably much needed) vacation. I continued to work on my own personal content until he returned. Well, he's back now, and it appears that I'll have the footage I need to finish everything up this week. The script admittedly plays it pretty safe. I didn't feel it appropriate to say fuck and/or make crude jokes since so many of Matt's subscribers would be watching. There's a fair amount of cheesiness, but I have to say it is a lot of fun to actually be interacting with someone for the entirety of a video. I think we've got a solid lineup of games, and I hope people enjoy the list. It took nearly a year, but I expect the wait to be well worth it. With the opportunity to reach this size of an audience, I might actually be able to hit 100k subscribers before SGC, which would be really cool. I guess we'll see.