The Gaming Historian, aka 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, wrapping up a 15-year history with one final video on his account.
Video game content creators have been around on YouTube for years, though it hasn’t always been easy, largely due to many being hit with copyright strikes and requests to take down videos. The Gaming Historian has been on YouTube since the early days, though, producing his first video on the site just five years after it was first established.
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The Gaming Historian Calls it Quits
The Gaming Historian has now made an official announcement that, after 15 years, he’s ready to end his channel on YouTube. In the first video he’s uploaded since April 2024, he made the announcement in a brief video explaining his reasons. His last full video, which covered The Oregon Trail educational game, took years to make, 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 go back to making videos part-time, expecting that the burnout would eventually fade, and he would feel excited making them again. However, that didn’t end up happening.
As a result, Caruso has explained that he’s grateful to everyone who has watched his channel, and has greatly enjoyed doing what he’s done over the years, but he’s ready to close this chapter of his life, rather than forcing out more videos with the quality suffering. He had intended for his next video to be about the Universal versus Nintendo court case of 1982, in which Universal had claimed that Nintendo was violating its copyright with the creation of Donkey Kong. He spent a few weeks going through the documents pertaining to the case in the National Archives back in 2020, and was going to use that information to make his next video. However, now that he’s scrapped the idea, he’s gone ahead and made the documents available to the public through the Internet Archive.
Given the channel’s long history, plenty of fans and content creators alike have been flooding the comments with their thanks and well wishes to Caruso. He’s covered numerous games and elements of the video game industry over the years, including on Nintendo, old consoles, Sega games, rare gaming accessories, and more. The Game Historian produced 144 videos overall prior to shutting down the channel, which will all remain available to watch on YouTube. While he’s no longer going to be working on videos as The Gaming Historian, he’s not disappearing from the internet or content creation entirely, as he’s producing a podcast with his wife, called “The Old Timey Podcast,” which covers general history.
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15 years is a long time to do anything, especially running a well-researched gaming channel on YouTube. The Gaming Historian is far from the first to retire from the grind, with content creators like MatPat of The Game Theorists and even legendary game developer Masahiro Sakurai eventually stepping away from the site. While many are sad to see Caruso go, his videos will live on as a great resource for learning about the history of gaming.
