Norman Caruso, better known online as The Gaming Historian, has spent the last decade and a half making Ken Burns-style documentary videos for his YouTube audience; he currently has over 1 million subscribers. He’s covered everything from a TV with a Super Famicom built into it to the Sega Mega Modem. But now he’s calling it quits.
A video went up on Caruso’s channel today titled “Thanks for Watching,” and he promises there’s “nothing dramatic” behind his decision—he just got burnt out after making his most ambitious video yet covering The Oregon Trail, and in the two years since it released, he hasn’t wanted to make more.
“I assumed that after a few months, I’d get the itch again and make a new video,” Caruso said in the video. “To my surprise, that itch to make a new video never really came back. I definitely tried to make something else. I even announced it on social media. But my heart just wasn’t in it, and I knew that if I ever finished that video the quality would suffer. That’s when it finally clicked: I was ready to move on from The Gaming Historian.”
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Moving forward, Caruso will focus on the history podcast he hosts alongside his wife Kristin. But even though he’s putting his YouTube channel behind him, he unveiled one last treat for fans: a shedload of court documents he scanned for a video he no longer plans to make.
The documents cover a legal case from 1982 where Universal Studios alleged the game Donkey Kong was a trademark infringement of King Kong. Caruso discussed the case briefly in his video on how various Mario characters got their names, and in that he showed off a court document which lists several other names that were considered for Donkey Kong during development of the arcade game—among them are Bill Kong, Kong Holiday, and Kong Chase. I tell you that because I think we’ll agree that Kong Holiday is a much better name.
For more trivia nuggets like that, you can view the documents Caruso uploaded to the Internet Archive. He said he also provided the files to the Video Game History Foundation in his video. “Making the Gaming Historian was truly a life-changing experience,” he said. “I will always cherish that chapter of my life.”
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