The Failure of Normal Boots

do you recognize that iconic intro while it's actually just a game over sound from a famicom game you've probably heard it from watching creators a part of normal boots which was a Content portal and group nowadays it's mainly just a forgotten brand that many popular gaming YouTubers used to be a part of it's been closed and reopened and rehauled to a shell of what it once was normal Foods was created by now popular content creators John Tron and peanut butter gamer in late 2010 when it was created they were basically nobody's the reason for its existence was to have a website to host their content and collect advertisement Revenue but if you watch the videos on our site we get Revenue which we can then use to make better videos for you seems all about you and also to start and host a community of Gamers nowadays we take it for granted Ed how relatively easy it is to monetize your content back then being in the YouTube Partner program was a luxury and the money wasn't like how it is now so a lot of creators would post their content onto YouTube to drive traffic to their website and make money through ads on there and on their website to help incentivize the audience to get off YouTube they would release their content on there first that's why when you rewatch old AVGN episodes on YouTube there's a logo for another website with the original air date John and PBG met while working at screw attack a video game Media company and they left to start normal Boots the name is a parody of how RPG video games label items the early days of the website saw the addition of some now forgotten creators such as cold morning and underbelly cold morning only ever passed 500 subscribers on YouTube they were the first to leave for unknown reasons they left normal boots around October 2011 and they haven't posted online since March 2014 from my understanding they were replaced by the completionist underbelly which did skit comedy left in June 2012 quickly being replaced by digino Gaming unlike cold morning the underbelly channel was somewhat popular as of now they have about 50,000 subscribers their Channel didn't last much longer after leaving normal boots they tried to relaunch in April 2017 although it was very shortlived and they been in active since however they've recently re-entered the public Consciousness due to the channel being featured in the most recent viral video essay by H bomag guy apparently apparently one of their videos contained plagiarism looking at these creators who left early on especially cold morning it's very depressing it's like researching Pete best the drummer who left The Beatles right before their Fame someone who was so close to Fame and Fortune but either just weren't good enough or didn't stick around long enough to achieve it and now their channels just sit there collecting dust the main goal of the normal boots website would change over the years it was closed in 2012 as the creators who operated it no longer depended on it to profit off their content the channels listed on the website when they closed were JonTron PBG continue the completionist indie game search light and dig youo gaming prior to normal boots reopening in 2014 Shane Gil of digino gaming launched hidden block a very similar content group to noral boots it became Affiliated after normal boots' relaunch as did you know gaming would be a part of both groups now why was normal boots relaunched well because they had a new reason to run the website for hosting content that was having issues staying up on YouTube as creators were facing issues with copyright takedowns around this time so if they couldn't host the video on YouTube the creat would make a video announcing the release of the video on their YouTube channel and tell Their audience if they wanted to watch it they had to go to the normal boots website in 2016 a fan-made normal Boots dating Sim was released with many of the creators actually providing their voices for the game this marks the end of the normal boots golden age it's all downhill from here from 2017 to 2019 notable creators even one of the founders with the part seemingly due to cont controversies they got involved with normal boots would relaunch again in 2021 with new creators like chronic but it's been abandoned once again it seems in today's video we're going to look at the careers of many creators who were once or still are a part of normal boots and see how they're doing now and if they left what caused them to leave this is in no particular order peanut butter gamer real name Austin Hargrave was one of the two original members of normal boots for a bit he was actually more popular than jron although JN would end up surpassing his popularity by a lot PBG made videos as a child but when he turned 19 was when he started creating content under the name peanut butter gamer the oldest video currently on his channel was released in October 2009 he produced humorous video editorials about games with skits and the likes similar to the AVGN but he had a own style to it his content seemed to focus more on the Nintendo 64 era which makes sense as he didn't grow up in the NES era like the AVGN did although like all retro gaming channels he didn't shy away from talking about the NES because I mean if you're a retro gaming channel it's like how could you how could you not talk about the NES prior to normal boots he worked at screw attack which is where he met JonTron some of the most popular videos he made was where he would show off and discuss weird hacks he did in popular video games the most successful video he ever made was called Super Mario 64 hacking and it has 13 million views he was also known for producing videos relating to horror elements in games like urban legends and creepy pastas running a series called the G files with some of these being his most viewed videos other things you may know PBG for was Zelda month for years every November remember on his channel he would release numerous videos about the Legend of Zelda he also made a lot of popular content about children's games such as those based off the Arthur franchise and also putt putt which is a pretty Infamous point-and-click Adventure game released on PC for kids on a second Channel called PBG gameplay he hosted a beloved let's play of Minecraft hardcore on this mode of Minecraft if you get game overed you can't respond the first season included guests like John the completionist in more all playing on the same world at the same time PBG never had any crazy or noteworthy drama that surrounded him he's he's kept a pretty clean record unlike some of the other creators in this video nowadays his channel does pretty well although it's nowhere near the PowerHouse it once was it isn't common for him to crack a million views on a video anymore as of me writing this he is still a part of whatever remains of normal boots and he just became a father so congratulations to him Jonathan Arian Jafari more commonly known as JonTron was one of the original founders of normal boots and their biggest star he's Iranian Hungarian and the son of immigrants growing up he was a fan of video games and partook in musical theater he started posting content as far back as 2003 posting animation starring anthropomorphic onions for a brief while in 2010 he was a part of of screw attack which is a common theme among a few of the normal boots creators he eclipsed people like the AVGN and popularity by a long shot John became an actual figure in pop culture his videos were humorous he had a very unique style to it and they were slickly edited which made them beloved while he started his career talking about old video games he eventually moved on to discussing movies and even got to work with Disney on a star War series to promote the force awakens although nowadays most people probably don't even know him as a retro game reviewer or as a film critic they all likely know him as the flex tape guy a video of John mocking the commercials of the product has obtained over 70 million views in with a sequel that got almost 30 million John's other videos still get millions upon millions of views even to this day he was the most popular normal boots Creator back then and even today nobody nobody even comes close to his popularity that was a part of that brand we're getting too far ahead of ourselves though prior to John Tron he had a series called the tales of super John where he joked about topics like communism prepare for a new age of super John and possibly communism uh to say the least I was proud of my revolutionary decree and decided to move on to greater things the JonTron Channel started in 2010 with a two-part review of Da Katana for Nintendo 64 his career would really take off after his video about Dino City reached the front page of Reddit in 2011 this video is also how eag Raptor real name Aaron Hansen discovered him over the past decade John Tron has done many things he was a part of the original Duo of Game Grumps a popular let's play Channel with a cult fan base he would leave after about a year which led to speculation as to why it was a very successful Channel and and it wasn't hard to to make an episode all we had to do was record him and his co-host Aaron playing some games pass the footage to a video editor and collect a check there's still discussion about this that goes on to this very day and there's a lot of wild conspiracy theories the game grumps channel is still around today although I think most would agree its Glory days are long over for other noteworthy things Sean got to do like I said he did a series on Star Wars in partnership with Disney while Jean's videos have always has been of a higher quality due to Disney being involved these videos have a pretty insane production value although some fans aren't the happiest with them at least with the first few episodes likely due to the fact that Jon didn't even direct them he would direct the later episodes and that seems to have paid off his fans were really happy with the final episode as Aaron from Game Grumps appeared in it a nice little reunion after there was speculation of the two not being on good terms listen there's a lot of esoteric jron lore I would love to go over maybe someday we can go into great detail about it all but John is only one of the many people we are talking about today so let's just jump to the most infamous part of his career already now John's departure from normal boots happened around the time of a major controversy he got himself into at the beginning of 2017 John Tron started to talk about politics a lot he even went onto a live stream with right-wing commentator turned politician Sargon of aad which that Drew some attention but what Drew even more attention both positive and negative was when he defended at the time Iowa Republican Congressman Steve King's anti-immigration views afterwards he went onto the live stream of liberal gamer Destiny to debate him on politics all of this caught his audience off guard as while John Tron does have a history of making political statements for years prior prior to this they were few and far between and never got too much attention and because his content was generally apolitical as it was just him talking about retro video games he had a lot of different people from all over the political Spectrum subscribed to him so you have a guy who is very rarely political mainly known for talking about banjo kazui and has a very large audience of a bunch of different people and now he is openly making and sharing the vice of statements and worldviews you were going to get a lot of people defending him and hating him shortly after his appearance on Destiny stream there were a bunch of articles that were released that criticized him a lot of people on the left wanted him to be cancelled and he did face cancellation of some form one of the consequences of John being more openly political was his voice work being removed from the spiritual successor of banjo kazui called ukulele this decision was controversial among apolitical and right-wing backers of of the game and fans of johon a while back I got to talk to Destiny about his most infamous debate and he said he disagreed with how Jon was treated he also added that he doesn't like the narrative that exists that he was trying to destroy Jon tron's career uh what do you think about this whole I guess debate nowadays what do you think about it like in retrospect um I'm a little bit disappointed that people view it on both sides people viewed it as me like trying to destroy JonTron I really wasn't I don't know if if you've listened to the whole thing or not but like there were a few times where I tried to give him an out like my impression of him then and still today was just that like I thought that he'd listen to a lot of really dumb online and I just kind of wanted to like challenge him a little bit on it my goal was never to like out him as a white supremacist or white nationalist or destroy his career any cringe like that but a lot of people on the left and right take it that way so do you think he was treated unfairly by the media and by the left and uh people like that um I mean I would say yes but I think everybody is but I think that the media and the cancel culture and all that is like Ultra hard hardcore cringe and everything John would step down from normal boots sometime after while he was no longer an active member he was still if for my understanding even to this day considered an honorary founder he had not been kicked out due to his statements him and Gerard from the completionist claimed the timing was coincidental as Jon had already been shifting away from video game content this seems to actually be true and not trying to save face in fact the last JonTron video that used the normal boots intro was in the skateboard kit from May 2016 all the other videos he posted after in 2016 didn't feature it they just showed his intro and some videos even prior to the skateboard kit didn't even have the Norma boots logo the brand was already becoming less prevalent on John's Channel months before the controversy Gerard khil more commonly known as the completionist or that one video gamer has a unique gimmick compar compared to everyone else we discuss in this video while yes he he does review video games he plays and discusses them what makes him stand out is his dedication to 100% completing them hence his name he'll unlock every aspect of the game collect every collectible and unturn every stone while obviously he does other content too because 100 presenting a game isn't the easiest feat in the world it it it takes a while but that's he's best known for he started doing this in 2012 in a CNN article he says he started doing YouTube after an argument while he worked at Best Buy after he graduated college and he was trying to figure out what he wanted to do with his life although it didn't go anywhere until a chance encounter at this time he attempted to launch a career on YouTube four times although it never took off in the way he wanted in a Red Bull article he explains how he met Aaron Hansen of gang grum's Fame and how that helped encourage him to not give up he met Aaron through his friend JonTron Gerard then quit his job at Best Buy and spent two months creating the first video which John and Aaron shared back then a YouTube career could be born with just one shout out and it worked he was given a career he decided on the completionist because no one else was making content beating games to a ridiculous degree and that's just how he played video games it started when he was a child he would fully beat the game in hopes his parents would buy him more someone who helped Gerard out a lot during the early days was a man named Greg Wilmont he had a falling out with Gerard in 2015 and stopped appearing in the videos so I'm going to squash it all right here Greg and I had a falling out friends fight friends bicker it wasn't pretty it wasn't good and I have some bad news he's not coming back and I am sorry that what what happened happened and on top of all of our friendship falling out publicly for the world to see there were business decisions that Greg and I felt very very differently about and unfortunately there were so many decisions made that we disagreed upon that eventually it made us part ways and not see eye to eye anymore and looking back we both handled it pretty poorly what's really interesting is in 2017 Greg had Gerard remove over 100 videos featuring him from the channel Greg sent an email saying his termination from Gerard's company was unlawful he added that he wasn't trying to harm the business in his view removing the videos wouldn't hurt because it had been 2 years and more videos had been made he gave him two weeks to do this or there would be legal action Greg wanted to do this because he never gave Gerard permission to use his likeness and he felt removing this content would give him creative freedom I responded to Greg saying that I would remove all the videos that he is in at his request and he never wrote back it's with a heavy heart that I announc that I am going to be removing all 120 episodes of the completionist every top 10 every defendant every Super beer bro series and any and all goofy random videos that featured Greg Wilmont and his like on September 1st here's what I'm offering I'm giving you all 30 days to watch all of the content that Greg was a part of you can download the content you can burn it to DVD you can give it out on the streets for all I care give it to your friends give it to your family it is free for you to take home today although it wasn't a total loss for Gerard it actually gave him the opportunity to recreate all those older videos hey everyone and welcome to the very first episode of the completionist new game plus the show where I revisit games I've already completed to find out if my opinion has changed as I've become an older and wiser gamer that and the first 120 episodes of the completionist are no longer on this channel they're on the internet somewhere if you want to watch them you totally can but this is a very different show so you know it worked out it worked out for Gerard worked out for our buddy Gerard or I shouldn't say but I should I don't want to say buddy and we'll get we'll get to that a second the completionist left normal boots in 2019 he signed with creative artists agency alongside alphared in 20120 in 2021 he got to produce content for the official Sonic the Hedgehog YouTube channel in 2022 he got to be on television during G4S short-lived Revival and now in 2023 he's making a video game which is being published by platonic games which is a company made up of X rare employees you they're they are the the same company that removed John Tron from ukulele while I was making this video he got into a massive controversy regarding his charity foundation in which he was accused of withholding over half a million dollars of donations he's received over the course of a decade the accusations come from creators Carl Jost and some ordinary gamers and they had the tax filings to prove it Gerard claimed he was not aware until either 2021 or 2022 that the money had not been moved and he had been working on figuring out a way to send it he also admitted he did spend some of the charity money to help cover expenses relating to his charity events but he claimed he had the full amount and will be trying to donate it as soon as possible okay so here's the update while I was making this video took a while this video took a while Carl and mudahar released more videos while Gerard was publicly quiet they pointed out Gerard's family was involved in their own charity work and they called it a scam in these videos they publicly requested the authorities investigate Gerard and his family after these videos were released Gerard donated the $600,000 to afd he then threatened a lawsuit and has gone back to posting his regular videos I'm sure this is far from the end of the story maybe I can make a full documentary and going into great detail when it's over if you guys are interested let me know in the comments did youo gaming is a YouTube channel that produces slick videos going over video game fun facts what makes this channel stick out is the fact the videos have consistently had different hosts and narrators often popular YouTubers the channel was created in 2012 and quickly took off on Facebook it received 20,000 page likes in about 8 weeks did you know gaming was a part of normal boots prior to the first shutdown they've been featured in the mainstream media such as the Huffington Post the creator of dig you gaming is Shane Gil and the channel has had a pretty consistent popularity for over the decade it's existed like PBG the channel isn't as popular as it used to be back a decade ago but it still has a sizable audience as of recently their second channel has had some success uploading hourlong videos discussing video game facts specifically designed to help you fall asleep in my opinion dig youo gaming is the least interesting channel to discuss from from normal boots as it's just a Content Farm putting out gaming fun fact videos it's not exactly the type of channel to have some huge controversy although in late 2022 Nintendo of America issued a copyright takedown of one of their videos which garnered a lot of attention with people claiming censorship the video was later restored in April 20123 their Channel got hacked by cryptocurrency scammers although like the video their Channel got restored as of making this video the channel and Shane are still a part of normal boots I think Shane controls the normal boots X account as all it basically does these days is retweet did you know Gaming's posts continue is a trio who produced Let's Plays of retro video games they joined normal boots in May 2011 the hosts are Nick Paul and Josh continue had one of the smaller audiences of normal boots unlike many of the other normal boots creators who had numerous videos crack well over a million views continue has never done that once even to this day most of their videos now only receive a couple thousand views although that's fine for them while their audience is smaller they seem to be very loyal and they have a lot of members on their patreon according to graphon they are making about $2,000 a month from patreon alone they like left normal boots in 2020 this was because they were not located near the other creators as at this time normal boots was aiming to do in real life collaborations between creators all of these creators seemed to focus on a gimmick to try and separate themselves from the rest and projared's focus was on role playing games similar to John Tron and PBG he started off at screw attack but was either fired due to him ignoring his obligations to focus on his personal Channel or he left to pursue his own personal projects it's uh it's not it's not quite clear prior to screw attack he was a GameStop employee his channel was once very popular boasting a million subscribers he even got to guest star as himself on the Nickelodeon show game shakers Sky whale I'm Roar and I am W this was the final sitcom Dan Schneider made for the network as it was poorly received in both ratings and reviews now he used to have a million Subs but now he only has 800,000 so how did this happen well projared would end up facing one of the biggest online cancellations ever on May 8th 2019 projared posted a statement announcing his divorce letting people know that rumors may be going around and that he hopes he and his wife could exit their marriage with style and grace about half an hour later his now ex-wife would tweet out I recently learned my husband Pro Jared has been Holly Conrad behind my back for months and I can't see a statement because he blocked me he faced a bunch of other allegations around this time such as abuse and sex thing with underage fans one allegations his now ex-wife defended him on was that his size was small with her claiming it was actually big you want to know why YouTube doesn't show the exact sub count on channels anymore it was because around this time live streams showcasing creators like Pro Jared and James Charles losing subscribers were becoming popular YouTube removed this feature to try and curve cancellations like this Pro jira lost over 120k subscribers in a single day normal boots would cut ties with Pro jera during all of this and The Game Grumps took down videos containing Jared projared will later respond on August 27th of the same year in a video titled you've been lied to in which he denies being a sexual predator soliciting miners for those of you who are unaware a few months ago some individuals circulated serious accusations against me and I want to make it perfectly clear right now they are false and I have proof I have the receips he straight up denies talking to one of his accusers who said they sexed with him while they were underage it's also important to note that he states that he has no evidence of us ever interacting so all we have to go on is his word and in an instance such as this where he has no evidence my word is just as valid as his and here's the thing with that I don't remember ever talking to this person none of what he claims sounds familiar to my memory at all the actions he describes doesn't sound like something I would ever do nothing in it sounds right or familiar and through everything that I scoured with any and all possible correspondences that I could have access to I found nothing with chai whatsoever with his other accuser he proves they lied to him as they had claimed to be 18 when they were not this is important because their whole narrative relied on the belief that jiren knew they were minors while they had sexual conversations every single part of Charlie's allegations against me hinges on the belief that I didn't know their age Andor didn't ask they even argued that I should have known their age because they used the phrase I am a baby as if this somehow denotes how old they generally are even though it's used in a context of shyness or feeling intimidated and I did did asked their age and they lied they also clearly knew then that they were doing something they know they shouldn't and is doing something they know I'm not okay with they had full access to the entire conversation and omitted to all of you that they lied to me deceiving all of you they knew about this from the get-go which is why on Twitter they immediately began to backpedal on their claims Jared also claimed he never sent them nudes by the way Charlie also would have seen that in our entire conversation I never sent them a dickpick so all these beliefs that Jered sent nudes to miners is factually untrue while this is still very inappropriate The Narrative originally pushed was inaccurate and projared's response was met with a lot of Praise receiving Millions ions of views and now many cite him as a content creator falsely accused even PewDiePie covered his video citing projared situation for why he stopped making episodes of his series Pew news which was an internet drama and news show PewDiePie used to run there was allegations but there was yet to be no evidence the internet lost her mind over this projared thing the internet gets so worked up over these things not everyone but most I think majority of people don't think for themselves they just go with the popular Trend or whatever everyone else is thinking be like oh this person is bad and this person is bad oh we need to do something about this and then oh actually oh they didn't do anything bad at all oh okay it's like all these ideas are like diseases that that are just spread and I don't like it and it's part of the reason why I didn't I stopped doing punis because I hate playing it into all this drama that it doesn't mean anything it's a waste of time I don't want to spend my life caring about these things trust me I'm doing you a favor by not doing pun after the controversy projared received support for his videos he even had some of his normal gaming reviews crack almost a million views although as of now his channel seems to be on Hiatus with a fraction of the viewer base it once had despite no longer being a part of normal boots he still collaborates with normal boots and hidden block creators I found a vaud archive from August 2023 where he streamed with peanut butter gamer and space hamster from hidden block and when the completion of story broke Jared publicly defended Gerard before deleting his tweet as it was clear he didn't research the topic at all although this shows there seemed to be no bad blood between Jared and the normal boots creators at the time as he came out in defense of someone when he didn't even know the facts of what was going on and that's true dedication there chronic is the biggest outlier in a normal boots lineup in my opinion while yes he does discuss topics adjacent to video games he is most well known for doing reaction type content he finds a funny video discusses it and makes jokes to be clear this isn't the lazy type of reaction content these are nicely edited videos he isn't just putting a face cam in the corner and saying nothing like people such as Jinx used to do he garnered a lot of success around the mid-2010s so much so Disney XD aired some of his videos on television they used to have a gaming block and on this block they got the rights to certain YouTube videos and they just aired them on TV and chronic was one of the creators who they picked he's had a bunch of side projects over the years such as gloop which was a channel where he was going to discuss Nickelodeon however he quickly abandoned it because he was facing copyright issues the gloop channel was then rebranded to yojoyco which is a multimedia company chronic runs in 2018 he launched a comic book under it and as of right now he's working on a video game like some of the other normal boots creators he isn't a jron or a projared he's never had some huge Scandal that people still discuss to this very day however he's had a few minor noteworthy drama esque moments in 2019 YouTube closed his comment section at the time the platform was having serious issues with pedophilic content specifically in the comments sections and this became a huge controversy so they shut down a bunch of comment sections until they could figure out a better solution chronic was upset about this and he felt the situation was being abused by companies to try and get lower ad rates and also just so you know advertisers will not typically pull out just because it's part of the moral High Ground they pull out so that when they want to come back they can try to get lower advertising rates that's that's the real reason I mean they could always say it's for the moral reason that they say but not necessarily always it's basically just a system of everyone trying to take advantage of everyone else in 2020 he was featured in mainstream media articles on YouTube's new child friendly rules which put channels like his at risk as while he discusses media children like he isn't a channel that targets a young audience he's a channel for people nostalgic about the '90s so like yeah he talks about Pokémon but his content isn't made for children it's made for manchildren and I would agree holding his content to the same standard as baby shark is unfair while he was collaborating with normal boots creators years ago dating at least as far back as 2016 he didn't join normal boots until 2021 and he's still a part of whatever remains of it as of writing this the normal boots website just shows a few t-shirts you can pre-order no hosting of any type of video content or Community I checked out a few of the channels that are still connected SL associated with normal boots in that once iconic intro no longer plays at the beginning of the video nor did I see any mention of normal boots in the description the normal boots X account is still active although they only seem to retweet digino gaming websites like normal boots are a thing of the past it seems you don't need to create your own website to run ads on your videos you can just upload to Youtube and run ads once your channel meets the monetization requirements which aren't super hard to meet and you'll get more views and make more money posting your content this way instead it also doesn't help that Norma boots lost their biggest star years ago and multiple of their top creators got into massive public scandals so I don't know if normal boots will relaunch once again judging by its history it might but with each passing year the need for its existence becomes less and less [Music] important

Channel: Michael Alberto

Views: 532,598

Keywords: michael alberto, micheal alberto, miguel alberto, miguelalbertoyt, michaelalbertoyt, michael alberto video essay, video essay, michael alberto tiktok, internet culture, documentary, jontron, jon tron, peanut butter gamer, peanutbuttergamer, pbg, the completionist, chadtronic, chad tronic, Jirard Khalil, thecompletionist, dykg, did you know gaming, didyouknowgaming, normal boots, normalboots

Id: QBATqZcnEC8

Length: 35min 39sec (2139 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 29 2024