Interview with Vetted Games
How two gamers got together to create a great gaming channel on YouTube, SoundCloud, and Spotify
Vetted Games is a gaming channel created by two really amazing guys with awesome banter: Richard and Chris. The project is proof that creating a channel and community doesn’t have to be a one-player game, and that finding the right player 2 can lead to a great adventure.
The duo that is Richard and Chris offer an entertaining and thought-provoking conversations about games, new and old. Even during the interview, I witnessed their impressive, impromptu banter. If you listen to their podcast, you’ll get an idea of exactly what I’m talking about.
What’s really interesting about them is that they are building various gaming content on different media outlets: audio and visual. It is more challenging, but also gives their fans more opportunities to engage with their content — podcasts on the run, or videos when you’re chilling at home. If you like to listen to gaming debates, seriously give the Vetted Games YouTube channel and podcast a try. They especially like holding debates on gaming classification; for example, whether or not Super Smash Brothers is a fighting game.
Super Smash brothers gets a bad rap from fighting game community about whether or not it’s a fighting game. I try to plead my case that it’s a fighting game but it’s not in a traditional sense: it’s a platformer fighting game.
— Chris
Vetted Games: A Brief History
I started Vetted Games as a small little blog about a year ago, with a couple of my veteran buddies.
— Chris
Prior to the Vetted Games collaboration that we know today, it started as a small gaming blog created by Chris and a few of his veteran friends (Chris is a US Marine Corps veteran) in 2017. Chris was inspired to create the blog because he wanted to have a project to call his own. The name was inspired by the double-entendre behind the word Vetted: the idea that they would focus on a vetting process for reviewing video games, and also because the blog was created by veterans.
Unfortunately, the blog project eventually fell through due to outside obligations that conflicted with people’s ability to contribute and maintain the blog’s activity. It went dormant for about a year, and that’s when Chris met Richard. They met through mutual friends on a college campus during a game of Magic. Their conversations struck a chord, and they agreed to reawaken the dormant Vetted Games.
Chris and I burn the midnight oil every night to provide the content that we do.
— Richard
Since that time, Chris and Richard have been producing quality podcasts and videos. They agreed to put the blog on the back-burner and focus on the other two media. The podcast is laid-back, off-the-cuff, and what Chris describes as “BS-ing for half an hour” about the latest news and their perspectives on it. It’s a way for fans to get a more relaxed impression of the two, as opposed to the videos, where they like to dress themselves a bit more.
Vetted Games Podcast is where we get together and it’s very off the cuff, laid-back where we just BS for an hour and a half, talking about our weeks, interests, and the news.
— Chris
Chris’s History
Chris is a Marine Corps veteran and a self-identified gamer, as well as an avid game collector. He hunts out and buys retro games. He started getting into it when he was a junior Marine — every weekend, he’d go to San Diego and visit Swap Meets. At the time, the games were super cheap to pick up. Eventually, the retro gaming craze caught on and retro games skyrocketed in value, making it harder to collect.
Richard’s History
Richard had a YouTube channel back in 2008, where he did LetsPlays with his friend, but his friend eventually moved away. Richard did all of the editing and understood the work that goes into creating and producing videos, and brought that skill to the table in reviving Vetted Games. He upgraded the recording equipment and brought the editing to a professional level.
It’s just fun, it’s just what we like to do. If I can dedicate all my time to just focusing on this, I would.
— Richard
Vetted Games has now become both Chris’s and Richard’s passion project — something they can both call their own. Both of them have professional lives outside of the channel, and intend to keep the project as a way for them to simply have fun. In other words, they’re not concerned about monetizing it any time soon. They just want to focus on entertaining their fans — the way a channel should be built.
