Thursday, February 1, 2018

Another Promotion Blog - Saxcat20/The Gaming Corner


You know, I almost considered using the two-hour video of that Super Sleuth run of The Colonel's Bequest from the next channel that I'm about to promote, but that would be Spoilersville right there, and then I remembered that the above video would be a bitter fit. You're about to learn why.

Some of you may remember a long-time Let's Player by the name of Saxcat20. He had been around for quite a while (since 2010!) and had amassed quite a following thanks to ScrewAttack to the point that he was able to make money off Let's Playing for a while (he also managed to pay for his car with the money, which he mentions in this video). As a matter of fact, the blog series for the 
Back To The Future for the NES by Saxcat20 featuring aherr21 was my first exposure to his work, which has proven to be pretty hilarious throughout the years. I had watched the entire Let's Play in 2011 and made the blog series, and after the whole deal with GameTrailers' website revamp in 2012 that removed the blog feature forever, it came back here on Blogger/Blogspot in 2014. In the last couple of years, however, viewership tanked and the ad revenue became fewer, and it stopped being fun for him.

To make matters worse, Saxcat20 works full-time as a high school band teacher - something he has mentioned quite a few times - and the kids at the school eventually made a big deal about the channel to the point that the school found out about it and he was forced to privatize all the videos and shut the channel down after seven years, over 14,000 followers and over five million video views. This hit a little close to home for me, since I had a very young etymology teacher in my sophomore year of high school who easily looked like he could have been in his 20s and performed in a band. He had mentioned this to the class, but never went as far as what the name of the band was or what instrument he played (he may have, I can't remember), though he did play one of the songs his band performed and recorded in the studio one time. That young teacher never got in trouble for it from what I remember, and here's to hoping he never did (I hope he didn't; I haven't seen him since sophomore year!).


Since then, Saxcat20 has come back, re-branded as "The Gaming Corner" and has since used his real first name, Chris, in favor of the Saxcat20 name. This time around, the aim was to have a small collection of viewers who were into older games as well as Sierra's computer games from the 1980s, something that he got well into on the original channel, and keep it at that. So why is this video here, out of all of them?

Well, there's an interesting story to this one. About a month after the re-branding and channel re-launch, The Gaming Corner had a very small following; the sub count was at 84. Suddenly, The Game Grumps (yes,
those Game Grumps) came across the video while looking for endings for Voyeur, a cinematic whodunit PC game with quite a bit of FMV footage that was also released on the CD-i that has rather risque material for its time. These videos were looked at during the recording of the finale of the Let's Play, and the video at the top was one of them. All of a sudden, the sub count went from 84 all the way up to over 700 within a couple of days. Once again, Lady Luck happened to be on Saxcat20/Chris' side and since then, everything has been going pretty well given what happened at the end of 2017. New stuff is coming out of this channel often, and some Saxcat20 classics show up every once in a while, too.





Here's to continued success for Saxcat20/The Gaming Corner...and hopefully, maybe another blog series involving this channel's work...

No comments:

Post a Comment