About the Irate Gamer "Opening Up" video...

I watched the tell-all video that Chris Bores made about his history with James Rolfe!

Oh, how croo-el I was! I made a series of text commentaries that gave a particular amount of limelight to his reviews! I know it branched out and looked at others, but he was the first one to be mocked!

I am a worm! A useless worm!

All he wanted was to be recognized by that unscrupulous Angry Video Game Nerd and he never batted an eye! O-O-Oh!

…

No.

I’m not going to do the same thing the uncritical minds do and just defend this guy at the drop of a hat. If you actually stopped and thought about the whole thing, you would see that this is — to quote Blazing Saddles, “the last act of a desperate man”.

Why do I say this? According to Socialblade’s stats on his channel, it’s not doing as well as it used to. Since October 2012, his monthly views have gone way down; six months before that saw the start of a relative plateau in terms of subscribers that continues to this day. 

As of this blog entry, Boring Man’s main show is over: no more regular Irate Gamer videos. The YouTube gaming community has, by and large, moved on as well: no more parodies, no more rants. Heck, I got tired of the dude. When he did his abysmal NES GI Joe video, I didn’t riff it; I reviewed it myself (and peppered it with a few jokes based on his video).

Eventually, a certain dramamonger (whom I shall refer to as “William Randolph Hearst”) who called him out on his plagiarism back in the day, one who did a wrestling video based on the events and went so far as to trap him on the radio, made a video telling people to stop criticizing the guy and that he’s awesome and whatnot.

Boring Man responds to Hearst’s video in an attempt to “open up about [his] rise to success” in a thirty-nine minute video of stammering and half-truths. He starts off by saying that he always wanted do a video like this, but never got around to it. Kinda weird, though since he did this one video way back in the day... though perhaps I'm wrong and it was scripted.

He talks about his old days with the Y2B2006 channel. Contrary to what he says, he only uploaded SOME Haunted Investigators videos (but mostly trailers) as well as some shoddy Mythbusters spoofs and some pretty lame shorts (“Back to the Past” and “Loyal Order of Chris”, for instance). This channel went up on January 18, 2006.

On April 8, 2006, James Rolfe and Mike Matei started up the JamesNintendoNerd channel (since renamed “Cinemassacre”).  The reviews of Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (both produced in 2004) were uploaded to YouTube. They went off like a rocket and the “angry reviewer” fad was born.

Bores wanted in on the hype, but claimed that he “didn’t want to step on anyone’s toes” and stuff to that effect. Yet his first video under his new Irategamer channel was none other than the Back to the Future game. He claimed to have always hated that game, yet the content was practically a carbon copy of Rolfe’s video on the same game.

He said it was his first time and didn’t know how to do a game video. I can give just a little leeway on this: nobody’s truly at their best when they start at something, be it a video, a job, or a game. You can always build up your skills over time. In this case, though, since he claimed to have “always hated that game” perhaps he could have brought up some past experiences. Maybe you got it for your birthday or for Christmas and thought it was going to be just like the movie?

But this brings up something: at this point in the video he admits to having “borrowed” material from others. He still kept it up through this year… and made money off of it (through ad revenue and DVDs). Kinda illegal, don’t you think?

You can’t really say it was an homage to Rolfe and others, that’s different. In its genesis, Star Wars was an homage to Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon; it wasn’t a mash-up of the plots of either series: it had its original characters, great visuals, and a solid story people can recall even a century from now. In short, Star Wars stood on its own legs.

Bores continues, goes on to talk about making reviews on Where’s Waldo and Goonies II, but they didn’t get much attention.

He brings up the “OutNerd the Nerd” contest on GameTrailers. From what I've found out, it was held in August 2007; by that point, seven Irate Gamer videos had been uploaded. By his account, the people at GameTrailers said he had the contest in the bag. He implies that they were mods and other higher-ups on the site, but as far as we know they could have been regular users like you and me.

Derek “Happy Video Game Nerd” Alexander won instead. Bores was upset: despite copying some of Rolfe’s material and filling it with ParticleIllusion effects, they picked someone who didn’t act like the AVGN character at all. The problem with this thinking is simple: Derek was able to OutNerd everyone else. I’m not sure what video he uploaded to the contest, but the HVGN videos I’ve watched are coated with trivia like cheese on a Cheeto. Watch Earthbound, the Capcom-Disney games, Rocket Knight Adventures and Sparkster, DuckTales, et cetera… they are soaking in information! From what I've been told his winning entry was the Journey to Silius review.

At this point, we get the first accusation toward Rolfe: that he rigged the contest. It's kind of weird, because according to Mike Matei, it was done without his or Rolfe's consent. It would seem more like a ploy by Stuttering Craig and/or Handsome Tom -- Guru Larry thought this at one point, but it wasn't the case.

Bores goes on, brings up how the SMB2 "scandal" video got featured on YouTube's front page. He goes on to say that this is where he got popular and got a bunch of views and e-mails and boxes of chocolate on his doormat, blah, blah, blah. He claims that started getting heat then and there (perhaps if you labelled them as contest entries like masterd68 and Drewdog did, maybe it could have been avoided).

He claims people were angry at him, but he wasn't taking his reviews seriously. Sure. The time-warp in Back to the Future, the angel and devil effects in the Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom ("This Video was my most time consuming to date and my Blood sweat and tears literally went into this thing..."), all of that completely not taken seriously! Despite mostly doing this "for his friends", he put the show on DVD and sold it.

He continues talking about the other reviewers and their fans were out for him, screaming that he stole Fizzy Lifting Drinks and bumped into the ceiling which had to be washed and sterilized.

There was actual justification for this… and it wasn’t just because of the Back to the Future video or the mouthing of “S**tload of F**k” in Mission Impossible (something he edited out to “piece of s**t” on his DVD). He complained about Ghosts n’ Goblins and Zombies Ate My Neighbors! being too hard. He also tried to pass off the changing of Doki Doki Panic into the Western Super Mario Bros. 2 as this groundbreaking discovery that nobody knew about while dismissing it as total crap. It’s like saying that World War I happened solely because Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, ignoring the political consequences that started building up since Napoleon was defeated nearly a century before.

By the time Boring Man did the MUSCLE review, according to him, people were spreading “lies” that he was making sockpuppet accounts. He may not have had the time to make, say fifteen hundred or so to five-star his videos back in the day… but he did make some.

Who remembers iratefanboy345? He ran around saying YouTube changed the dates to make it look like AVGN came first? He was Bores.

Remember his first account, Y2B2006? It became a sockpuppet WAAAY back in the day. Keep this screenshot in mind.

How about Mama? Ladybuggin777. Lasersquad was pretty much the Toto to your Wizard.

Of course, there were legitimate fanboys: Armake21Truth (who had about four or five alts of his own before quitting for reasons known only to God), lukestarkiller441, the two SuperGGangsta kids, Charlie, and 2600theeatari (not to be confused with Charlie's username, which consisted of one less "e"). Eric "Wise Sage" Allen was another, apparently, but he mellowed out.


Boring Man goes on about how he cared about what Rolfe thought of output. Keep in mind that he was getting flak for his practices, so he sent a private message to Rolfe:

Hello James,

I'm not sure if you know me but my name is Chris Bores, I do the Irate Gamer videos on youtube.

I feel compelled to finally write you since my videos are starting to get popular on youtube and tons of people are comparing my quality of work to yours. 

I don't know if you'll end up reading this because you probably get tons of emails in a day and I know mine would be swimming in the sea of them, but I wanted to write you anyway.

Anyhow, I just wanted to let you know I've been a fan of your videos ever since I saw your Ninja Turtles game review around last year. And I gotta say, it was very inspiring to me. In fact, I hardly got any sleep that night because I had hundreds of new idea's flowing through my mind of what I could do with this intriguing thing you started. But due to my career, I had to tuck them away for a few months until I could get some spare time to record them.

Now I'm not sure if you've ever seen any of my reviews or ever heard of me, or heck, even like me for that matter, but I just wanted to take some time out of my busy schedule and let you know I respect your work and I do try my hardest to not copy your material. Although in my earlier reviews, I will admit, that I accidentally used some of your well known made up words in my review and I only found this out because people were telling me I did. I felt really bad about it and still do because the last thing I want to do is steal your catch phrases.

Since then, I made a point to watch all your reviews again and to make sure not to make that same blunder again. So if I ended up causing any negative feelings because of it, my apologies. But hey, I just wanted to email you and let you know I respect your work and clear the air of any hard feelings if there are any, because I'm just doing this stuff for fun and I know you are too.

So thanks for everything, and I should mention, since day one I thought it would be neat to do a duel review with you, but I'm still trying to figure out how getting both worlds to collide would work. Hmm Oh well, maybe one day. Thanks again my friend, and I'm glad to see you doing so well!

-Chris

This PM was sent approximately one week before the release of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles video, which did three things: 

• It showed that Boring Man didn't know about the Arcade and Genesis versions of Turtles in Time.
• It showed his lack of awareness of the graphical limitations of 8-bit consoles.
• It out-performed the Back to the Future video in terms of unoriginality.

Bores conveniently glosses over TMNT. Furthermore, he said that Rolfe sent him a list of demands in turn. We are never shown a screencap of the demands.

That's another problem throughout the video: he never backs up his claims. He can show the occasional stock footage of himself or screenshots of stuff like his channel being ranked as the 55th most-subbed on YouTube. All the stuff he says about GameTrailers guaranteeing a win in OutNerd and Rolfe's demands? Nothing.

Anyone can tell you: if you make a claim, you'd better back it up. Hearsay only gets you but so far. If there was a list of demands, Chris, show it.

Bores goes on to shed crocodile tears, blaming Rolfe for publicizing the e-mail (an untruth since Matei runs that channel) after it was sent and lost a ton of respect for him. Perhaps they got upset that he went right back to being a copycat with the TMNT video? Every time he calls Rolfe and Matei dickweeds and stuff, remember: he LIED to them. He briefly brings up being a very religious person; from what I can remember, he identified as Buddhist. I'm not quite familiar with its teachings about lying. I assume it would be bad karma or something, but I can't make the call.


He goes on to say that people were accusing him of being in it for the money and that it all went away after Rolfe did his non-existent Kickstarter (crowdfunding was done through IndieGoGo). He talks about being seen as a threat to Rolfe because he was going up, up, up -- makes me think of the professor from the beginning of The Mole People, only backwards. He makes a video on the Tetris "scandal", which was ranked the 7th highest video on the site. Did Yo Noid and ZAMN! not warrant any attention? I'm sure a few people had something to say about it.

He plugs Hearst and does another shot at Rolfe. At a gaming convention, Rolfe was asked about his opinion on Bores. His response:

"He pretty much pretends that I don't exist, so why would I feel the need to say anything about him?"

All Boring Man can do is think about awfully the guy screwed him over, blame him for showing the PM he made after that TMNT video, and randomly brings up PewDiePie. Why did Rolfe do Let's Plays on his channel after PewDiePie became a thing? 

That's a pretty weak argument if you do your homework. Over a year before PewDiePie was even known, Rolfe and Matei did a video where they played Magnavox Odyssey games together. It was pretty much in the same style as their current "James and Mike Play" vids. Even before that video, people were doing Let's Plays! I can remember watching LPs on Yoshi's Safari, Knuckles' Chaotix, and Castlevania games before I'd even heard of the AVGN.

Blah, blah, blah, the tide is turning. Yadda yadda, chinks in the armor. Hold on.

Didn't you, at one point in the past, say that you quit watching him? Refer back to the Y2B2006 link. He was subscribed to Rolfe. Matei shared this image, presumably, after the TMNT incident. I remember the screenshot being used in an Irate Gamer parody back in the day (the exact one eludes me). Boring Man hid the subscription box later when a few people caught onto it. My theory is that he used Y2B2006 to monitor what Rolfe was doing. Can't really confirm it, mind you.

Suddenly all of his haters were starting to see the light! It was all thanks to opportunism!

He talks about the SMB2 "scandal" video being a "documentary" with a Satanic twist at the end and Rolfe's SMB3 video having similar themes.

It's pretty faulty since the first half of Rolfe's video was a review of The Wizard, mostly because it served as an introduction to SMB3 for Western audiences. Furthermore, the demonic stuff was thrown in to make fun of people trying to overanalyze stuff that doesn't need any of it. That's why he was playing up stuff that only vaguely looks Satanic. The fight at the end served as a segue into the NES Accessories video.

Bores' video only had Irate Gamer Prime going to Hell and meeting Devil Bores after Boring Man killed him. That's it. It wasn't so much a documentary as it was a tabloid stating something that the gaming world knew for years.

He goes on to say that he would have been dragged through the mud if the SMB2 video came after Rolfe's on SMB3. Even if it were released as-is, people would still find problems in it (the slow-motion Starman, perhaps?).

He claims that Rolfe stole the idea to review Silver Surfer and Superman right after Bores announced that he was going to review them. It would sound plausible... if Bores didn't announce them later! Let me break it down:

1. Rolfe's Silver Surfer video was released on GameTrailers on June 5, 2007.
2. Rolfe's Superman videos were released on June 26 and July 8, 2008, respectively.
3. Bores' announcement was in the Fall of 2008:

Riddle me this: "Did Rolfe use a DeLorean or a phone booth to rip him off?"

Of course, the anachronisms don't stop there. Bores talks about Rolfe's and his ROB reviews.

Rolfe's NES Accessories video went up on May 14, 2008; it ended with him hinting at a review of ROB the Robot at a later date. Bores' trailer for his review on ROB went up on May 27. Depending on which video you watch it took him either one month (his "Opening Up" video) or two (the aforementioned trailer).

Next up! The Odyssey!

He seems to believe that Rolfe stole the idea, which is another anachronism: the trailer to Bores' first History of Video Games video did not go up until May 5, 2009; the Odyssey would not be discussed by him until October 2. Rolfe's video on the console came out on April 21, 2009.

Bores goes on to claim that this isn't something Rolfe normally does, despite his whole webshow being about old games.

Bores plugs Hearst again and a manchild who deserves as little attention as possible. It's through those ne'er-do-wells that we get into him rambling about a Kickstarter, which we've mentioned before didn't exist. He says that Rolfe makes so much money off of his videos that he could have funded it himself. This is a complaint I've seen from many people: how crowdfunding is wrong and stuff like that. If that be the case, why haven't Ralph Bakshi and Keiji Inafune been crucified yet? 

Of course, Bores has to bring up the Cheetahmen 2 Affair, something Rolfe apologized for. Neither he, Matei, the Game Chasers, nor Pat Contri got any money from it; if anyone pocketed anyone's money, this guy would have done so... but he doesn't exist as far as most sensationalists are concerned. He screwed up and admitted that he screwed up. Moving on.

Bores goes on about all the haters who put Rolfe on a pedastal suddenly second-guessing and seeing the light and all that jazz. How all his biggest detractors are coming to his side. Plugs Hearst once more and states that he's going to do videos for himself from now on (his friends and fans no longer have any bearing, it seems) and fade away into the obscurity of ghosts and Skylanders. THE END.

It's pretty damn amazing what a little yellow journalism and opportunism can do!

Just play the victim card and reach for that sympathy and people will forget all about the constant research failures, the Y2B Productions/Cry Wolf Productions false-flagging operations against parodies and exposure videos, and all that other stuff. Forget doing research, who'd do that?

Boring Man goes on to say that YouTube has changed. To that extent, he's right: his channel's become an ocean of Skylanders videos, Cinemassacre's views are pretty stable, angry reviewing has become old hat, and a new generation of game reviewers has emerged. If that list of AVGN, Armake21, Jedite1, etc. was his barometer for game reviewers, then it needs an overhaul.

Nevertheless, this video just feels like an act of desperation. People weren't really concerned about the Irate Gamer anymore and Boring Man needed some attention. The best remedy? Be a tabloid.

Of course, he took a page out of Hearst's book:

DLA's Note: Names have been changed to deny attention.

Riddle me this: "Why are there commercials?"

Think for a second. This isn't like a webshow with ads playing at the beginning and middle of a video; this was supposedly candid. Every time somebody clicks this video to feel sorry for ever laughing at an Irate Gamer parody, Boring Man gets bread in his pocket. I'm all for capitalism, but this isn't the way to do it. He's practically playing people for saps.

It's kind of a shame people are so quick to jump to conclusions without thinking critically first.

Would I riff another Irate Gamer video? If I did, there wouldn't be any further vids on him and I would only agree to it to set him out to sea in a burning longboat.

That is all I have to say.

I'm DLAbaoaqu and I'm not sorry.