Becoming a hit on YouTube is difficult enough on its own, but maintaining the popularity that you attained is another matter altogether. The members of Mega64 know a thing or two about creating an online empire, garnering millions of views on their YouTube channel since first opening up shop in 2003. While the band of creators typically focuses its energy on the world of video games, some of Mega64’s biggest videos lampoon the anime world, with “Dragon Ball Z in Five Minutes” sitting at the top. Recently, we here at ComicBook.com had the chance to talk with creators Rocco Botte, Shawn Chatfield, and Derrick Acosta about maintaining success and creating new ground-breaking material.
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To kick off our interview, we chatted with the trio about jumping into the world of the Z-Fighters. To date, Mega64 has found serious success with “The Cell Saga in 5 Minutes,” “The Frieza Saga in 5 Minutes,” “The Saiyan Saga in 5 Minutes,” and “The Majin Buu Saga in 5 Minutes.” Taking household items and a limited budget, the YouTube creators re-enacted the shonen anime series, which has given them millions of views ever since the first episode arrived over ten years ago. Ironically enough, the gang’s take on the world of Akira Toriyama came about directly thanks to Funimation.
Derrick confirmed that their collab got the anime ball rolling, “Funimation reached out to us since they needed an advertisement for Dragon Ball Super: Resurrection of F back in 2015. We were just trying to come up with any way we could come up with to help promote it. The biggest problem we identified was that there’s so much lore to Dragon Ball that you can’t go into that movie without knowing what’s happening. So it was like, we’ll just sum up everything that’s happened in the Frieza saga, just to tell you what you need to know about Frieza to go in to see Resurrection F.”
When asked whether Mega64 would return to create new “Five Minute” takes on other Dragon Ball series, such as Dragon Ball Daima and Dragon Ball Super, Acosta was hopeful, “Well, I don’t know how the other guys feel, but I pretty much only watched what was available when I was like a teenager in the 90s on Cartoon Network or, sometimes you turn into like Telemundo because they had, Spanish versions of stuff that haven’t been released here. It would be cool to make adaptations of those since there was some great stuff in Dragon Ball Super, and I feel like Dragon Ball Z is almost like human mythology at this point.”
Mega64 on The Video Game Industry
Things have changed in the world quite a bit since Mega64 first started, including the video game industry that helped fuel the comedy group’s beginning. In discussing their origins, Shawn Chatfield went into detail about how video games have changed for the better and for the worse, “I’ll say when we started, it was such a great time for video games. We graduated high school when we started Mega 64, and it was this time where video games were progressing very rapidly with new ideas, concepts, and technology. Like we saw the Wii come out motion controls like open world games became expansive. I remember we play-tested the first Assassin’s Creed and just the idea that you could go up to any wall in this game and climb.”
As for the good in the gaming industry, Shawn emphasized the need to search for games that will have appeal to gamers, “I feel like there’s always new ideas out there. You just have to look a little hard, and like the indie game scene, you’re probably going to see us start making more videos about that because it’s really like The Assassin’s Creed video we made was just the fact that the main character was touching people as he walked past them. It’s just those little details, those little ideas that make the funniest videos for us.”
Rocco added to Shawn’s thoughts on the current state of the industry, “I’m still finding games that are, every year I’ll at least find a handful of games that I really love, but it is a weird atmosphere because the game companies are, some of them are being kind of evil when it comes to, you know, the workplace conditions. Like ‘Ok, we have to spend ten years making a game now. All right, we’re done. Lay everybody off now.’ In the ‘Triple A’ space, it’s kind of sad.”
Surviving The World Wide Web
The topic of Mega64’s continuing success was also discussed, as Derrick fleshed out how the beginnings of the troop helped to solidify their future online, “I think one of our biggest strengths is, and has always been, honestly, that we all met doing theater and just making each other laugh in a theater class. We originally set out to do a public access TV show, and that ended up going on the internet, but that was already like we set out to do one medium. I think the three of us just like performing and making people laugh, and trying new things. We’ve always been on multiple platforms like YouTube and Twitch, and I think that’s why we’re still here twenty-three years later, because we never put all our eggs in a single basket.
Mega64 currently has quite a few irons in the fire at the moment, with their Black Friday sale currently underway for their wide array of merchandise that you can check out here. Along with continuing to record their Mega64 podcast, the boys are expanding their video resume with the video series, Cringe Lords, exploring a new side of internet phenomena. With Mega64 also performing a residency in Los Angeles with the variety show, Mega64: Christmas Spectacular, fans can see the show for themselves on December 7th. The boys’ love of video games and anime alike cannot be denied and is a key reason why Mega64 might never die.
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Image Courtesy of Marvel Comics
