The gaming historian known as Norman Caruso has revealed that he will no longer be producing videos on his YouTube channel. The YouTube content creator has been active on the platform since 2009 and ended the 15-year history on his account with one final video.
Video game content creators have been on YouTube for years, though it hasn't always been easy, mainly because many have been hit with copyright penalties and video takedown requests. However, The Gaming Historian has been on YouTube since the early days, making his first video on the site just five years after it was first established.
A huge video game archive with 390 TB worth of games is shutting down
In a major blow to video game preservation efforts, one of the Internet's largest game archives is announcing that it is closing its doors.
The game historian calls it Over
The gaming historian has now officially announced that he is ready to end his YouTube channel after 15 years. In the first video he has uploaded since April 2024, he made the announcement in a short video explaining his reasons. His last full video that covered The Oregon Trail an educational game that lasted years and left him in a state of burnout. At the time, The Gaming Historian decided to take a step away from the site and planned to return to making videos part-time, expecting that the burnout would eventually wear off and he would feel excited to make videos again. However, this did not happen in the end.
As a result, Caruso explained that he is grateful to everyone who has watched his channel and has greatly enjoyed what he has done over the years, but is ready to close this chapter of his life rather than force more videos to suffer in quality. He intended his next video to be about the 1982 Universal vs. Nintendo court case, in which Universal claimed that Nintendo was infringing its copyright by creating Donkey Kong. He spent several weeks going through documents related to the case at the National Archives in 2020 and was going to use that information to create his next video. However, now that he has discarded the idea, he has gone ahead and made the documents available to the public through the Internet Archive.
Due to the channel's long history, many fans and content creators have been flooding the comments with their thanks and well wishes for Caruso. Over the years, he has covered a variety of games and elements of the video game industry, including Nintendo, vintage consoles, Sega games, rare gaming accessories, and more. The gaming historian created a total of 144 videos before closing the channel, all of which will continue to be available for viewing on YouTube. While he won't be working on videos like The Gaming Historian anymore, he won't disappear from the internet or content creation entirely, as he and his wife produce a podcast called “The Old Timey Podcast” that covers general history.
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15 years is a long time for anything, especially running a well-researched YouTube gaming channel. The Gaming Historian is far from the first to leave the game, as content creators like MatPat of The Game Theorists and even legendary game developer Masahiro Sakurai eventually left the site. While many are sad to see Caruso go, his videos will live on as a great source of information on the history of gaming.
