The best time I had at PAX this year, was being able to hang out with the guys from Rockit Gaming and JT Machinima. The best thing about it is that I randomly got their email while on the drive up from Houston, the very first day of the convention, and without a hesitation decided to message them to set up an interview without checking out what they were about first, aside from what they advertised in their email. I decided that I should browse over their website and videos, and was suddenly impressed by the amount of work they’ve put into something that they’ve been at for only two years. According to JT Machinima, Rockit Gaming’s YouTube subscriptions sky ROCKITed, pun intended, from just under a thousand subscribers to 50k subscribers in just about a year which is “absolutely unheard of”. That is some popularity. Most likely, the jump contributed to, not only by the quality of the songs that they and their artists produce, but the amount of videos they put out on a weekly basis. Just inside last week and the week leading up to PAX, they managed to put together 21 videos in total, 22 videos if you count the live stream for their PAX panel this past weekend. Even if half of them are live streams, that is still a ton of editing work that would drive anyone to insanity.
Now, why are Rockit and his crew worthy of mention? What makes them different from other youtubers out to make subs and a buck from pretty much playing games and having people watch it. If you know anything about me…if you have ever read anything I’ve written about most YouTubers, you know by now that I don’t care for the “Career” choice that a lot of them make for themselves. The typical YouTube sensation is out to be the next PewDiePie, who document every second of their life gaming streams, only to upload it to their channel to tell other people how silly they are. Not to mention that they never forget to remind the 8 to 12 year old viewer to “SMASH THAT LIKE AND SUB BUTTON” in a collection cheesy pointless, click-baity videos because they all use the word Smash and it always gets annoying. If there is anything I can’t stand most in the world its watching a video of a streamer who just makes an ass of themselves playing a game and being overly outrageous. They all act the same way and all they’re doing is playing games live on an internet camera at home, so I hope you can understand my feelings on the matter. Sorry for getting caught up in the rant.
The guys over at Rockit, however, lead a different path and use YouTube as a tool to get their idea to the public, whilst also doing badass streams and the like to connect with their fans and promote their art and artists. “The point is, with all these different genres of music come just as many artists, and given that YouTube is such a massive platform quality sticks out like a sore thumb…” The big difference is that there is an actual art form at play here, and many youtubers should take that as a hard criticism. I’m looking at you folks who want to teach other people how to get famous making Minecraft videos. Rockit decided to form an actual video game music label where the idea is to “blur the fine line between mainstream music and game music” by using a more recent style of music dubbed Nerdcore. According to wikipedia and Rockit, the term Nerdcore, was first used by an artist named MC Frontalot, with other artists producing similar tunes such as MC Chris and Raheem Jarbo also known to many as Mega Ran. Nerdcore is a lyrical based genre of music, with the idea behind it as being able to have multiple different sounds and styles of how it can be performed. Rap is a main go to in the genre, but the guys over at Rockit and their artists, both fancy poppy and heavy rock style tunes as well.
Russell “Rockit” Mckamey and Vincent “Vinny Noose” Newsom are the heads of Rockit Gaming and Rockit Records, with them both being the head production team and artists of many of their songs that pop out on their channel. They even feature many other artists such as the music styles of John Gelardi and Christiam Ames, from JT Machinima, who have also made their music famous through YouTube. I personally enjoy the rap battles between Overwatch characters and the Team Fortress classes. The two from JT Machinima joined along side Rockit and his crew at their panel and were obliged to feature their own recent works with them as a joint effort to get the word out. If you’d like to learn more about their Rockit and his team, give their website a visit and give their plan a read into what is to come from them in the future. Its my personal opinion that with the tracks and videos that Rockit Gaming has already produced, and continue to produce on a daily basis.
If you are going to be in the Austin area during the annual South by Southwest Music Festival, be sure to be on the look out for Rockit, as they will most likely be featuring some of their artists there.
