James Rolfe

He also created an hour-long comedy film entitled Stoney, which is a spoof of the 1976 film Rocky.

James D. Rolfe (born July 10, 1980) is an American YouTuber, filmmaker, and actor.

Rolfe began creating homemade video productions in the late 1980s, having created more than 270 videos and short films by 2004.

Among these were the first Angry Video Game Nerd (originally known as Bad NES Games, and later Angry Nintendo Nerd) episodes, which were subsequently released on his Cinemassacre website that same year.

Two years later, he gained mainstream attention after the series went viral upon being published to YouTube.

Rolfe was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on July 10, 1980.

He was raised in south New Jersey.

He is of Italian ancestry.

His parents bought him an audio recorder as a Christmas present sometime in the early to mid-1980s.

Later, he got a camera and took photographs of him and his friends play fighting.

He was inspired by The Legend of Zelda and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to create adventure stories.

Rolfe also illustrated comic books, which he updated monthly.

One such comic he created had a plot inspired by the video game The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.

Rolfe started filming shorts in 1989 continuing this hobby into the mid 1990s.

He used Mario Paint for a few of his early films.

His early films did not have scripts or rehearsal.

However, once he started writing scripts, his friends gradually lost interest because of the pressure of trying to remember their lines, which left many of Rolfe's films unfinished.

He then tried his hand at action figures and puppets.

In the late 1990s, Rolfe created several films such as the B-horror movie The Head Incident that he finished in 1999 but did not release until its tenth anniversary in 2009.

The plot of The Giant Movie Director (1994) involved toys coming to life.

Rolfe attended a special education school for seven-and-a-half years during his childhood.

He reflected on his past, "In school, I had a rough time communicating. I went to Special Ed for seven-and-a-half years. I liked it, I had a good time. But socializing in general... I was a little awkward. Art always made me feel comfortable."

Rolfe attended the University of the Arts in Philadelphia where he studied filmmaking.

While in college, Rolfe met several friends that became collaborators in future projects, including Mike Matei, Kyle Justin, and Brendan "Bootsy" Castner.

In May 1996, he filmed A Night of Total Terror in his backyard, a horror film that he has called "the turning point of [his] life".

He also made Cinemaphobia in 2001, which follows an actor who suffers from an overload of work and sees hallucinations of cameras following him.

Two versions of the film were made, a ten-minute version and an extended, fifteen-minute version.

Rolfe has stated his preference for the shorter ten-minute version.

The same year, he created Kung Fu Werewolf from Outer Space which is a mainly silent movie except for narration.

His eighth film of 2001 was It Came from the Toilet!.

In 2003, he created another film, Curse of the Cat Lover's Grave, which was split into three parts to define three different horror genres.

Rolfe made a pilot of a planned web series entitled Jersey Odysseys: Legend of the Blue Hole, which is based on the urban legends of the state of New Jersey.

The pilot centers around the legend of the Jersey Devil.

He is best known for creating and starring in the comedic retrogaming web series The Angry Video Game Nerd (2004–present).

His spin-off projects include reviews of retro films, television series, and board games.

He graduated from the University of the Arts with a bachelor's degree in fine arts in 2004.

He is considered a pioneer of internet gaming videos, and is noted for his widespread influence on YouTube content after the series premiered on the site in 2006.

He worked as a film editor for corporate safety and instructional videos after graduating, but quit in 2007 following the success of his Angry Video Game Nerd web series.

Rolfe operated and ran an annual "haunted house" Halloween attraction out of his parents' garage (the same garage was later used in building a graveyard for his horror comedy film The Deader, the Better and again used in his film/series pilot Jersey Odysseys: Legend of the Blue Hole), using a collection of several props and antiques that he later reused multiple times in his other films.

Following its success, Rolfe released a feature length film based on the series in 2014, which was met with generally mixed reception.