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, covering a 15-year history with one last video on his account.
Video game content creators have been on YouTube for years, though it hasn't always been easy, mostly due to copyright strikes and requests to take down videos. Gaming Historian has been on YouTube since the early days, though, producing its first video on the site just five years after it was first founded.
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A gaming historian skips it
The Gaming Historian has officially announced that they are set to shut down their YouTube channel after 15 years. In the first video uploaded since April 2024, he made the announcement in a brief video explaining his reasons. His last full video, which is covered The Oregon Trail The academic play, took years to make, and left him in a state of burnout. At that point, the gaming historian decided to take a step away from the site and planned to go back to making videos part-time, hoping that the burnout would eventually fade, and he'd feel motivated to make them again. However, that was not the end.
As a result, Caruso says he's grateful to everyone who watches his channel and has had a lot of fun doing what he's done over the years, but he's ready to close this chapter of his life instead of churning out more videos with quality pain. Another of his videos is about the 1982 Universal vs. Nintendo court case, in which Universal claimed that Nintendo was infringing its copyright with its creation. Donkey Kong. He spent a few weeks in 2020 looking at documents related to the case at the National Archives, and was going to use that information to make his next video. However, now that he has scrapped the idea, he has gone ahead and made the documents available to the public through the Internet Archive.
Given the channel's long history, many fans and content creators have been flooding comments with their thanks and well wishes to Caruso. He has covered many games and elements of the video game industry over the years, including Nintendo, old consoles, Sega games, rare gaming accessories, and more. The Game Historian produced a total of 144 videos before shutting down the channel, all of which remain available for viewing on YouTube. While he no longer works on videos as The Gaming Historian, he hasn't completely disappeared from the internet or content creation, as he is 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 Grand, with content creators like Game Theorist's MattPat and legendary game developer Masahiro Sakurai eventually walking away from the site. While many are sad to see Caruso go, his videos will remain a great resource for learning about gaming history.
