Preface
If I had a dollar for every time a Youtuber (be it one guy or a group of people) started off doing skits with nothing more than video game footage a la Machinima, only to then form a successful animation studio, I’d have two dollars. It’s not much money (although it’s more than I make on Medium as of writing), but it’s enough to make you wonder how it’s possible.
So, the internet has two dollars worth of indie animation studios that came from gaming culture. One being RoosterTeeth and the other being the Australian animation duo Glitch Productions.
(If you’re just here to read my thoughts on The Amazing Digital Circus, you can skip to the next page break. But if you’re okay with reading backstories, let’s keep going.)
While RoosterTeeth’s origin story came from Halo 2 gameplay, GLITCH started from an even bigger (or would it be smaller?) niche in YouTube’s gaming culture: Super Mario 64. But before people like SimpleFlips showed up to put the game on the map through speedrunning, it was on May 7th, 2011, that a YouTube channel, supermarioglitchy4 (now known as SMG4), started uploading Super Mario 64 “blooper” content.
I was twelve years old at the time when this happened. These “bloopers” were simply skits made using an emulated version of Super…
