Mike Matei

Angry Video Game Nerd (abbreviated as AVGN, and originally known as Bad NES Games and Angry Nintendo Nerd) is an American retrogaming review comedy web series, created by and starring James Rolfe. The series centers on Rolfe's character "The Nerd", a short-tempered and foul-mouthed video game fanatic who delivers commentary on retro games of poor quality. While the series began with Rolfe simply playing games while delivering a running commentary, the show would eventually grow in scope to encompass sketches featuring guest characters, reviews of gaming consoles and peripherals, and short lectures about video game history and culture. Starting out as an independent filmmaker, Rolfe intended for his earliest videos of the Nerd character to be a joke privately shown to his friends. In 2004, with collaboration from his friend Mike Matei, Rolfe put the Angry Nintendo Nerd videos on his website, Cinemassacre.com. In 2006, Matei persuaded Rolfe to put his work on YouTube, where it gained popularity. In 2007, the series became a program on ScrewAttack and GameTrailers, where it was renamed The Angry Video Game Nerd to avoid trademark issues with Nintendo, and to allow Rolfe to review games from non-Nintendo consoles. From there, the series became a cult success, and Rolfe began appearing as the character in various other media such as a feature-length film and video games, and many public appearances. Angry Video Game Nerd is considered one of the pioneers of internet review videos, being highly influential on the style and format of subsequent video reviewers as well as being responsible for helping to bring the concept into the mainstream. Various similar review/sketch comedy entertainers have since cited the show as inspiration for their own materialsuch as JonTron, Nostalgia Critic, Egoraptor, Angry Joe, or Joueur du Grenier among others.