The Golden Bolt's 4th Anniversary!

Today is a big day for me: The Golden Bolt turns four years old today!  In just a few days I'll be releasing the first piece of a brand new project I've been working on for months, one that feels like the culmination of everything I've made and learned in these past four years.  I'd like to run through some of the journey I've been on, and briefly touch on what this new series is before its official release in a few days.  I'm not entirely sure what or how much I'm going to dive into today, so I hope you'll indulge me in these ramblings!


As I said, four years ago today, on March 3, 2016, I uploaded my very first video to The Golden Bolt.  After months of planning out my review structure, future-proofing it for potential expansions into television and film reviews way down the road (that still haven't happened yet!), I published my review of Sly Cooper.  It was...it was bad.  It was very bad, so bad that I went out of my way to remake that video almost spot-for-spot for the channel's second birthday.  Within a few videos, I'd completely altered much of that gameplan I spent months on, learning several valuable lessons about content creation.


Four years later, almost none of that original format remains!  The Golden Bolt used to be a score I'd give in my reviews, in specific categories like Story, Gameplay, and Presentation.  Now it's just the name many of you know me as!  I never really anticipated in 2016 that I'd really move past reviews and retrospectives; I simply wanted to create a community that could share in their excitement about games and our wonderful medium, and I wanted to continue the growth of YouTube as a platform for these sorts of communities.  Channels like SomecallmeJohnny, The Completionist, AntDude, and a few others had inspired me: Johnny inspired me to create in general, to hopefully introduce others to their new favorite games, much like his videos had done for me with series like Sonic, Metroid, Mega Man, and many more.  Meanwhile Jirard inspired me to build a community thanks to a kind conversation we had months before my first video.  I mean come on, one of the busiest guys on the internet, a guy who barely sleeps sometimes, took the time to talk to me of all people?  That's a dedication to community, and that really reminded me of how much I loved community-building back in my days in the PlayStation All-Stars community.  It affirmed that this community was something I wanted to build, and damn it, nothing was gonna stop me!


Funnily enough, Jirard's influence doesn't stop at just The Golden Bolt's community either - some of you may know that I'm an owner and director of NewTubers, along with my good friend Moriarty of CryMor.  I took over NewTubers in May 2016, only a few videos into my channel's history, because nobody knows what to do, how to improve, how to grow in their early months and even years as a creator.  Moriarty joined me a month later, and in the years since then, NewTubers has grown to become the largest creator community ever, with over 120,000 creators at the time of this writing.  Putting aside how rewarding it's felt to help so many creators find their feet on an ever-changing platform, NewTubers has allowed me to meet just about every creator I've befriended over the years.  Some of these creators have become some of my closest friends at this point!  What's even more insane is that NewTubers has allowed me to meet many of those channels that have inspired mine, talk with them about their journeys to success, and allow them to teach tens of thousands of others through their experiences; and in my travels through both NewTubers and The Golden Bolt, I've become acquaintances, maybe to some extent even friends with, some of those inspirations.  That's insane!  


It's through these adventures that my video style has shifted over the years.  My desire to increase my upload frequency led to the creation of PLUSone, which came to me over two separate nights.  The first night, I was dozing off to sleep, and my mind landed on the idea of doing PS Plus reviews, from there jumping to the name "PLUSone."  I'm lucky I woke up to write that down!  The next week, the now-retired tagline "the games may be free, but YOUR time is valuable" hit me in the same way.   Thanks to PLUSone, boy did that frequency skyrocket, and growth wasn't far behind: I went from 22 videos and 160 subscribers in 2016, to about 70 videos and 1700 subscribers in 2017, and 2018 had another 60 more videos and I ended off with just over 6000 subscribers!  In 2019 my growth matched 2018 thanks to the PlayStation All-Stars documentary going very briefly viral on YouTube's front page!  At the same time, thanks to the change to one PLUSone a month (purely for the sake of the channel's long-term health - those short videos were a double-edged sword!), as well as life getting busier, video production dipped back to about 22 videos.  This was around the same time that I began my biggest shift yet: A push away from reviews, towards broader, more interesting topics for both myself and the viewers.  


Much of this shift came thanks to something AntDude said on his NewTubers Podcast appearance.  When describing his channel, he said something to the tune of "I cover lesser-known topics within well known gaming franchises."  This was the second lightbulb moment for me, after PLUSone: Rather than chasing a trend or sticking with very densely-packed reviews of older games, if the topic itself was more interesting, more unique, it'd be both a more rewarding video to make, and likely a more watchable (and clickable!) video.  That podcast went live on August 14, 2018; my last "proper" review was on August 31.  The problem with this new focus on interesting topics wasn't coming up with them - I have another hundred ideas I've still got on the backburner! - but with production time.  If I want to, say, look at every weird Tetris sequel, I've gotta play and essentially micro-review a dozen games; if I want to review the Pokemon mini console, that's another dozen games to look at.  Pokemon mini was meant to be a May release, but thanks to that feature creep, it didn't come out for another five months.  Oops!  These videos by and large have been my most successful main-series videos, even though Tetris competed with a similar Dunkey video the following week, and Pokemon mini competed with a similar DidYouKnowGaming video the following week...I have a way with timing apparently!


And this just about brings me to today.  These topic videos are very much something I love doing, but in many ways their scope rivaled the PSAS documentary - a video that I pulled two different 30+ hour all-nighters to finish.  That's not something I'll ever do again, and clearly my production slowed thanks to these more time-consuming projects.  After the Pokemon mini fiasco I thought, what could I do to break these videos up?  My solution: To counter the ever-expanding scope of these topic videos, I'll shrink that scope back down, far more than I ever have before.  Instead of reviewing an entire game, why not look at a specific part of a game?  What is it about particular levels, areas, or scenes in games that makes them so effective, so beloved, so lasting?  Why do we love Green Hill Zone, but hate Marble Zone?  (That'll be its own video, coming probably next week!)  The Catherine: Full Body analysis was sort of an accidental test-run of this, a spoiler-free character and theme analysis that will likely remain my proudest writing work for a long time.  Even that went far greater in scope than this new series is aiming for though.  You'll see in a few days exactly what I'm talking about, I hope you enjoy it as much as I've enjoyed working on it!


With that, I'd like to close by saying thank you for four wonderful years, even if you're visiting for the first time!  I'm thrilled with all the opportunities I've been fortunate enough to have, and I'm excited for what this next chapter will bring for us as a community. There are another hundred people I could name drop and thank for their support, their friendships, or how they've inspired me over the years, but I've mentioned all of them before and I don't want this to go on for another sixty paragraphs!  It's the three inspirations I've discussed above that I haven't really talked about enough, and I wanted to take this rambling opportunity to thank them for helping set me on the path we're on today.  But anyway, enough about all that, I'm gonna get back to that new video!  See you all in a few days - until then, Stay Golden!