You know me as the extremely nostalgic kind... the one who could take a look at a dust-gathering cartridge on his shelf and immediately get flashbacks to the times when it was actively being played with friends and family. In a way, I'm kinda like that dude in the Age of Mythology intro, seeing entire ancient battles through the statues he touches. I think that's kinda fitting, and more than a little silly... which just about describes my entire approach to gaming.
However, I was actually not ready to write this article until two distinct events "forced my hand": first, I was completely inspired by @Yousef's piece on the AVGN (which I totally recommend you check out). And second... well, I was going through my YouTube subscriptions, checking out early channels I was subscribed to and that haven't been touched in decades at this point, when I suddenly realized that Rinry's box had lit up for the first time in eleven years. It was simply out of my hands at that point -- the universe had spoken.
Rinry's was actually the second channel I was ever subscribed to (the first one, unsurprisingly, was James's), and the first one I actually found myself eagerly awaiting updates on. There was something about its character and presentation that just drew me in like a magnet -- it honestly felt like it was there to entertain, not impress. And that resonated with me after having tried to watch many other content creators tripping over their own feet to deliver the next big out-of-context meme or one-liner. With this Canadian gal the only thing that seemed to matter was having a good time discussing games.
"So... Nintendo explicitly warned against aiming the Zapper at the sun, huh? Well, too bad the Big N isn't here!".
What I find most fascinating about Rinry's entire career arc is that it began and ended at about the perfect time to showcase the age in which it took place. She never broke 100K subs despite being extremely well-know at the time (and, more importantly, well-liked), which is a threshold most channels seem to cross almost effortlessly these days as soon as they nail the right topic. The website was really that unpopulated at the time she began gracing the screen with her fun and original takes on the quickly overblown "retro/nostalgic" market. The other thing that fascinates me about her channel is that it remained relevant by being original, as it should have.
When many early YouTubers chose to imitate what they saw as the sure-fire way to get traction (which was to get unnecessarily angry at old games), Rinry just decided to chill out and have fun with her collection, going as far as to poke fun at the games not for being bad, but for being weird. It was SUCH a breath a fresh air. She also made sure to include the occasional experiment for keeping things interesting, making her own cartridge out of Popsicle sticks and even subjecting some common-as-water games to some fun resistance tests. Again, that wasn't what the platform was all about at the time, and what made her into a juggernaut overnight. Her energy and originality were rewarded with success, and it's just a shame that the internet wasn't tooled the way it is now to fully catapult her to new heights by having one of her videos get viral or even get dissected on some major social media site.
Squeaky clean SMB/Duck Hunt. But... will it still work?
The other aspect of her popularity (of course), was the fact that she was about the only gamer on the platform that didn't feel like "enhancing" her content by swearing every three seconds.
Even though I am as swear-friendly as they come, I must admit that it was really, really annoying hearing all these people dropping F-bombs and throwing fabricated tantrums left and right. So actually watching someone who created content I could identify with through nostalgia without tainting it with insults felt like a blessing for my younger self. Swearing was something I never did as a kid, so I appreciated her not contaminating my childhood memories with it. And while I'm perfectly aware of just how weak that makes me sound, that's just something that had to be put down in writing. Besides, adding swearing to content about childhood classics that had none to begin with seems awfully naive, and the reason why so much of it fell flat was because it required impeccable comedic timing to land, which is something the vast majority of gaming-related content creators always failed to understand, specially back then.
But nostalgia is a dangerous thing indeed... and judging someone's work through the double rose-colored glasses of me having nostalgia for their content and their content itself being about nostalgia felt like a trap. A poorly-made, thinly-veiled, but still very much dangerous trap. And so, I went through her entire channel again, this time with my kids by my side, choosing to ask for their opinions after every video (which thankfully were all very short, which is yet another clear sign of their age --a YouTuber would never settle for five-minute-long videos these days).
Limited edition, flavored 16-bit cartridges!
The results? They loved them, despite not understanding a single word of what she said due a language barrier.
They really dug the fact that most of the content on screen could be identified by the visuals, instead to having to rely on narration to convey the actions or the intent (which is something that I feel is almost lost on the current "Video Essay" era). Some of my favorite reactions to her content were found oh the "How Tough" videos, in which she systematically put NES, Genesis and SNES games to stress tests, going from freezing and washing them to making jelly out of them and downright burning them, too. The kids loved the lunacy of it all, and I appreciated the fact that she really wasn't pulling any punches when it came to making these videos as entertaining as possible. And the fact that she actually went out of her way to record the audio portions of her videos at an actual recording facility gave her just that extra boost that made her stand out amongst the masses willing to capitalize on the floodgates opened by the AVGN.
NOW... that didn't mean that the entire thing was golden, however, and I was honestly surprised by how many of her videos I actually found to be on the "barely passable" side (she was always at her best when describing hardware and physical games, but seemed to struggle when things came to the software side of things), but for 31 short videos that could be binged back-to-back in less than a couple of hours? I'd say the experience was pretty amazing. Besides, you can't fault her content for not being diverse -- anything from highlighting an old classic to reviewing a new console could be found in there, and that kept the experience interesting and the effect lasting. You never knew what she was going to upload next, and that kept me coming back for more.
Even this simple edit was going above and beyond at the time when most of the content uploaded to YouTube was either low quality video, stuff people recorded with friends or downright piracy.
But more fascinating that the channel and the content was the girl herself.
Rinry began uploading at a time when the vast majority of the site's content (and not only gaming content) was done by males, with girls choosing to do video blogs, Q&As and much more casual content that didn't really seem bound to get noticed by the majority of the site's audience. At least for a while, the only two truly successful, female-run channels on the platform were TamashiiHiroka's and Rinry's (and the former was directly inspired by the latter). Thankfully, that has since changed, and I'm subscribed to quite a few female-run channels that seem to have followed on both of their footsteps. At the time, though? It was basically either them or James and his army of imitators.
When she left the platform to focus on her motherhood, no-one was really surprised... her content had slowed down considerably by the time the would-be last upload hit the site. But even before that, some of her most recent videos were showing her in the latest stages of pregnancy and with her first-born featured on some shots. And at a time when making money off the content you made without having to sign your soul away to some weird, almost scammy network just to reach the "Mile Deal" (you got paid one dollar for every thousand views on your videos) was almost impossible, it just made sense for her to pull out entirely. And in a sick twist of fate, that made her all the more relevant... people love their "What Ifs" and enjoy talking about what could have been. For me, though, those old videos and the passion with which were made are enough to keep recommending the channel to anyone willing to give it a go. It's not your typical gaming experience and it has aged quite interestingly, but that's also kind of the entire point. And seeing anything from the logos of long-defunct gaming groups at the beginning of her videos to the cutesy outros featuring her favorite characters only make the experience all the more fulfilling, kinda like watching an archived video headlined by the old Machinima logo. You know those times are gone and you know they weren't even that great, but damn it that you had fun while they lasted.
If you are new to her channel, please give it a watch and share your thoughts. If you actually remember watching her during her prime, please share those thoughts as well.
Thanks for reading... and "Happy Gaming!" *Insert cute Kirby outro*.
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