My Secret YouTube Channel (Patreon)

At some point earlier this year, I found myself intrigued by the idea of YouTube channels that just post raw footage of video games. There’ve been more than a handful of them over the years, but most of the ones I’ve found fall into a couple of categories.

First are the ones I, personally, really like. These channels are Japanese in origin, typically, and they’re posting footage of games I’ve never seen before. Deep cuts for the PC-88 or the FM-7. Like this Dr. Slump game for the PC-8000:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sznimylw-c8

Or weird sideways Pac-Man for the MZ-1500:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLHRWnh10cU

This channel’s been posting Advanced Pico Beena games lately:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-LHx0g-q9U

Or there’s always whatever this is, from an offshoot channel that I believe mostly deals in type-in games or cover disk games from old magazines?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ockMrEpEOFM

And then there’s always Classics of Game, which is a very particular slant on game capture that kinda raises the whole thing to an artform all its own.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bimZeT5iZsI

It all left me kinda just… I don’t know. Wanting to get into the act a bit? Especially because a lot of the channels that do this fall into category 2: channels so old that all the footage is extremely grimy and low-res. With this monstrosity of cables and equipment I built to capture footage in 4K, I thought… well, might as well use it, right? This would also be a great way to test out some of the ways I'm now feeding video from my capture card to the PC monitors in front of me, rather than having to crane my neck off to the side and turn around to see it on the TV. This is sorta key for some of the other "video feature" things I'm trying to get off the ground, so it's been helpful to figure a lot of this stuff out.

Anyway, I decided to just quietly start a channel and post footage of games, usually running on a MiSTer, typically upscaled to 4K via the RetroTink-4K, and nothing else. It’s been a late night endeavor, for the most part, because it’s something I can very quietly do on nights where I have a baby asleep in my office. These days that’s actually every single night. So on nights when I don’t (or can’t) really have anything else going on, I’ve been knocking out some random footage of old games and throwing it up on YouTube. I wasn’t really sure why or what I’d ever do with it, but other than just posting a few links to videos here and there, I wasn’t really spending a ton of time thinking about it, and I certainly wasn’t talking about it.

But I figured I’d let you know that I was doing this, in case you’re also a maniac who’s interested in this sort of thing. Some of these channels have made for pretty good second (third?) monitor fare on this quiet, lonely nights I’ve been having. It’s been slowing down a bit at the moment because so many new games are coming out. I… should probably be playing The Outer Worlds 2 right now, for example. But this has been a nice little diversion for me, when I need one.

I’ve mostly been picking games by saying “well, what console haven’t I looked at lately” combined with “what’s a game on this platform that I know practically nothing about.” It’s led me to some real… curious stuff. Dude, did you know they made a Speedy Gonzales game for the SNES in 199-frickin’-5?!?!??! It’s exactly as good as it sounds.

It’s also been an interesting experiment in the whole “what happens when a YouTube channel gets close to zero promotion and videos are just pushed out there late at night for no one to see?” thing. Not sure that I have any interesting conclusions there, and me posting this will likely kind of ruin that aspect of this, but that’s fine.

Anyway, if you’re interested in this, check out WOW, OLD GAMES! today. It’s a real dumb idea and I’m not sure what anyone would do with it (maybe if I keep the filenames standardized someone could build some kind of database for emulator front-ends to use, I don’t know) but that hasn’t stopped me from recording stuff. I’ve also been cropping the edges off of them because I just like the idea of a 4:3-ish YouTube video that still runs at 4K.

This post looked a lot nicer in my head until I discovered that the Patreon post editor doesn't seem to be able to handle external video embeds in the body of a post. Anyway, here’s Quest: Fantasy Challenge.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlpQfWFHeGc