New Revisiting video! The Blighttown video that changed everything! (Patreon)

Hey everyone!

Here's the much delayed but hopefully still enjoyable instalment in my ongoing Revisiting series, where I go back to older videos and give my commentary on them years after the fact. This one is kind of special—it's been five years since I made a video called Why Blighttown Really Matters. It was a short video discussing the ways in which Dark Souls used verticality as a means of conveying its atmosphere and overall philosophy, in a way that steeled you early on for what was to come in the game. It was my first true experience of a video Blowing Up, as the kids say. I gained, like, 10-15k subs in the span of a week and it eventually became the first video I'd made to hit a million views (I think, it's either that or the Zelda one). 

Inevitably, this changed my view entirely on this whole endeavour I'd been pursuing, at this stage, for a year and change. Of course it was incredibly vindicating in the sense that I could further justify the time I was putting into this thing beyond mere creative fulfilment, but it also showed me a lot about the nature of the platform that would go on to become my job, the fleeting nature of what you could call "YouTube Success," and the ways in which The Numbers going up could be as scary and irritating as it was cool. 

In this video then, I ramble about all of this stuff, as well as coming to realise that maybe I was being a bit hard on my older videos, haha. It's an hour in length and involves a lot of stopping and starting the video, so you can probably listen to it as a podcast and not lose track of what's going on. I apologise that the audio of the actual video I'm watching is maybe a bit low, I'll try and sort that out for next time.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this. I definitely plan on this being a more regular feature in the coming year, it's just that work and family stuff got in the way of getting this out for the five year anniversary of the Blighttown vid (which is a totally nuts figure in itself, holy moly). I'll have the Patron Q&A up soon too, and then a couple of other videos before the year is out. 

As always, thank you so much for your continued support. I honestly could not justify the time that goes into these videos without it. Thank you.

Hamish

Writing on Games