Being born in the early 90s, I was part of the last generation to grow up on an internet without YouTube. Geocities pages plastered in glittery gifs of dancing babies, Pokemon fan sites that took forever to load one single image of Ho-Oh and the site I spent most of my time on, Newgrounds.com. Before YouTube, Newgrounds was the only site on the internet that anyone could upload a video or game on. The Portal was revolutionary for it’s time, but doesn’t really get the credit it deserves. Without Tom Fulp, the creator of the site, who knows if YouTube would even exist.
Let’s go back to 2006, a simpler time when we all thought George W. Bush would be the worst president we saw in this lifetime. I was a 14-year-old who spent all of his time with a special girl named Betsy. She was an HP laptop I spent all the money I had earned from working a crappy summer job punching tickets at the beach. I spent every waking hour I wasn’t in school scouring the web, looking for any “nerdy” content I could find. Newgrounds was my home, watching videos the Badger song by the Weebl, The Ultimate Showdown and The Clock Crew shit posts. I had no idea that one of the greatest animators to ever exist on Newgrounds, who was about to single-handledly skyrocket the platform to new heights, was about to release his first video.
In February 2006, Arin “Egoraptor” Hansen released his first video “Metal Gear Awesome.” A teenager at the time, he created the crudely drawn parody of Hideo Kojima’s super-serious Metal Gear Solid franchise.It was filled with to the brim with enough juvenile poop jokes, butt shots and rambling to keep my pubescent self entertained. Video game parodies weren’t very common back then, if I wanted to laugh about my hobby I’d have to watch X-Play.
Those few years where Egoraptor was pumping videos out on Newgrounds as much as possible were some of the happiest of my life. Looking back, these videos don’t really hold up, but I can say the same about The Power Rangers . Media you watch growing up should never be rewatched at an older age, all that does is kill the little spark of nostalgia that adulthood responsibility couldn’t destroy.
Egoraptor has moved on from animating, to the much more lucrative world of “Let’s Plays.” Game Grumps, a show where the man with the golden streak sits down with his friends to play games, just hit it’s five-year anniversary. I’ve never been one for Game Grumps, I only enjoying watching games that I can’t play myself. If they do a Kingdom Hearts III series before 2018, then I’ll be interested.
Metal Gear Awesome, and the Awesome series which spunned out of it are some of the most successful animated video game parodies of all time. PokeAwesome currently has over 31 million views and helped Egoraptor earn enough money to buy a house. He worked with MTV on a few Awesome projects and actually started earning money for his creations.
It’s weird to think about how important Newgrounds and Egoraptor’s videos were to me. Without the Awesome series, I doubt I’d have the confidence to write. He showed me that a teenager with some free time and a dream can make a viral internet sensation and then become one of the most influential people on the internet. Way before Pewdiepie turned on his first webcam, Egoraptor was animating in his bedroom starting a gaming revolution.
