I mostly watched and tended to prefer a lot of the early vlogger-type channels, like 2008-2011 era. Many of which never took off or made any kind of real splash. Mostly under a thousand subs type channels. Those were the ones that initially inspired me to get back into retro and get into collecting. The biggest and most notable being of course PeteDorr. He was a big inspiration for me to consider getting into what was modern gaming and collecting for modern consoles at that time. He really piqued my curiosity with the Nintendo DS. There were several small vlogger channels with a focus on DS back then, one was called Retrocalypse and he was like a DS guru. Unfortunately one day his channel was gone. Turns out he lost his collection in a flood, but I later found out he was an owner of like an actual gaming store or something to that effect. He never came back to YT as far as I know.
There were a bunch of small channels like that I doubt anyone here recalls, like Benzo8686, BallinNick1982, MovieStarKitten, TVandLust, and others, just a lot of early vloggers, who mostly pointed a camera at themselves in their bedrooms and talked about what they picked up or what games they've been playing, or childhood memories or stories involving games. Many of their channels are now dormant, or gone entirely.
I never got really big into scripted content back in the old days. But later on I did watch stuff like Game Chasers, Scott the Woz, Gaming Historian, Lady Decade, Sega LordX, My Retro Life, SNES Drunk, My Life In Gaming, etc. But to be honest, I still really just enjoy a good vlog. PeteDorr is back doing regular uploads again which I've been catching regularly, and there's several other good ones going today that I like to watch, such as DatGameCollector, LegallyInsaneGamer, RNG Gamer, Heck'n Steve, Steve Craig Retro Games, etc. There's something that never gets old about that simple format of content with folks just holding up stuff in front of the camera, and talking. Especially when they take the time to interact with their viewers, and listen to subscriber feedback. I enjoy the sense of community/comradery, that comes with following a small-time vlog. Rather than feeling like just another viewer out of thousands who are watching a show, where the producers don't really care what any rando thinks and don't interact with any of their audience.
