Angry Video Game Nerd is an American retro gaming review comedy web series starring and created by James Rolfe. The series centers on titular skit character the Nerd, a foul-mouthed gamer who delivers commentary on retro games of poor quality. While the series began with Rolfe simply playing games while providing retrospective commentary, the show has grown in scope to encompass sketches featuring guest characters, reviews of gaming consoles and peripherals, and short lectures about video game history and culture.
Starting out as an amateur filmmaker, Rolfe intended his earliest videos of the character to be a joke, with no intentions of making them public. In May 2004, Rolfe, at the suggestion of future series producer Mike Matei, put the Angry Nintendo Nerd videos on his website, and in 2006 on the emerging video streaming platform YouTube, where it gained popularity. The series was soon renamed to the Angry Video Game Nerd to avoid trademark issues with Nintendo, and to allow Rolfe to review games from non-Nintendo consoles. From 2007 to 2011, the series entered a distribution deal with popular gaming websites ScrewAttack and GameTrailers.
Angry Video Game Nerd is considered one of the pioneers of internet review videos, being highly influential on the style and format of subsequent video reviewers as well as being responsible for helping to bring the concept into the mainstream. Various media review and sketch comedy entertainers have since cited the show as inspiration for their own material, such as JonTron, Doug Walker, Angry Joe, and Joueur du Grenier, among others.
The series became a cult success, and Rolfe began appearing as the character in various other media. In 2014, a film adaptation entitled Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie was released; critical reception to the film was mixed. Multiple video games were made about the series, including Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures (2013), Angry Video Game Nerd II: ASSimilation (2016), Angry Video Game Nerd I & II Deluxe (2020), and Angry Video Game Nerd 8-bit (2025).
Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
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