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 and ended 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, largely due to many being hit with copyright strikes and requests to take down videos. However, The Gaming Historian has been on YouTube since the early days, producing its first video on the site just five years after it was first established.
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In a major blow to video game preservation efforts, one of the internet's largest gaming archives has announced that it is closing its doors.
The game historian calls it quits
The gaming historian has now made an official announcement that after 15 years, he is ready to end his channel on YouTube. 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, which covered 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 subside and he would feel excited to make them again. However, it did not end up happening.
As a result, Caruso has stated that he is grateful to everyone who has watched his channel and has enjoyed doing what he has done over the years, but he is ready to close this chapter in his life, rather than force more videos with quality suffering. He had intended his next video to be about the 1982 Universal vs. Nintendo lawsuit, in which Universal had claimed that Nintendo infringed its copyright by creating Donkey Kong. He spent a few weeks going through the documents pertaining to the case in the National Archives back in 2020, and he intended to use that information to make his next video. But now that he's scrapped the idea, he's gone ahead and made the documents available to the public via the Internet Archive.
Given the channel's long history, many fans and content creators have flooded the comments with their thanks and well wishes for Caruso. He has covered many games and parts of the video game industry over the years, including on Nintendo, old consoles, Sega games, rare game accessories and more. The Game Historian produced a total of 144 videos before the channel closed, all of which will remain available to view on YouTube. Although he will no longer be working on videos as The Gaming Historian, he is not disappearing from the internet or content creation completely, as he produces a podcast with his wife, called “The Old Timey Podcast”, that covers general history.
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15 years is a long time to do anything, especially running a well-rounded gaming channel on YouTube. The Gaming Historian is far from the first to back away from the gate, 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 the game.
