Egoraptor / Arin Hanson

About

Egoraptor is the online alias of American animator, song artist, and let's player Arin Hanson,^[1] known for creating the Awesome Series and his co-production of Game Grumps and Starbomb.^[2] His animations, music, and let's play videos all focus on video games.

Online History

Newgrounds

On February 23rd, 2006, Hanson uploaded a short animated film titled Metal Gear Awesome to Newgrounds,^[3] featuring a parody of the game Metal Gear Solid (shown below). This was the first in what went on to be a famous staple series on Egoraptor's YouTube channel titled The Awesome Series. Almost directly after having uploaded the Metal Gear Awesome animation, Hanson was approached by MTV to make animated shorts in the same style for them, specifically requesting he not improve the style and keep it shitty.^[20] Other notable series uploaded on his Newgrounds channel include Lemon n' Bill, Girlchan in Paradise, and Press Start.^[19] Egoraptor has the most fans on Newgrounds at 43k total, and is the 13th highest rated creator on there with an average rating of 4.43/5.^[21] From 2006 to 2012, Hanson uploaded an additional 69 animations to the site.

Youtube

Arin Hanson created his YouTube account Egoraptor on March 11th, 2006.^[4] Eight months later, he uploaded his first video to the channel titled Gunpey Review., featuring Arin Hanson reviewing the video game Gunpey (shown below).^[5] Egoraptor's popularity on YouTube steadily climbed as he released more episodes in the Awesome Series, the series reaching its peak of popularity on December 8th, 2011 with his most viewed video Awesome Series – PokeAwesome – Just a Pokemon Battle which has 27.4 million views as of April 19th, 2016.^[27] Starbomb also heavily increased Egoraptor's notoriety since its first music video's release on December 17th, 2013 titled Luigi's Ballad ANIMATED MUSIC VIDEO – Starbomb which received 22.7 million views.^[28] The most popular Starbomb video was released on April 8th, 2014 titled BEST Zelda Rap EVER!! ANIMATED MUSIC VIDEO by Joel C – Starbomb and received 27.2 million views.^[29] Many of the videos on his YouTube channel are re-uploads of animations from his Newgrounds account (mainly ones from the Awesome Series) and as a result often feature the Newgrounds banner at the beginning or end of them. As of April 18th, 2016 he has the 617th most subscribed-to channel on Youtube and the 1575th most viewed with 92 uploads to the channel total.^[22] Over the course of ten years, the channel garnered upwards of 364 million views and 2.4 million subscribers.

Social Media Presence

Arin Hanson's Egoraptor Facebook page has 258k likes^[34] and his Twitter page has 456k followers and has made over 10k tweets as of April 19th, 2016.^[35] His Instagram @egofaptor has 196k followers as of April 19th, 2016.^[36] On January 29th, 2014, Egoraptor did an AMA which received 2400 comments.^[37] His Reddit account has 3k link karma and 79k comment karma.^[38] On July 9th, 2015, the official Sonic the Hedgehog twitter tweeted to @egoraptor a question (shown below).^[39]

Sr Pelo Drama

On July 30th, 2019 Sr Pelo posted a video parodying YouTube "StoryTime" Animators who tell stories about their past in animated videos. Sr Pelo's video parodies tropes of the genre, such as the blasé content, sometimes-poor animation quality, and overuse of jokes relating to the storyteller's anxiety. Several times in the video, an audience stand-in character will appear to dramatically declare, "Wow, that is relatable!" Pelo also takes specific shots at regular StoryTime animators by parodying their characters. Eventually the video devolves into a nonsensical police farce before showing Sr Pelo himself at the end.

Hanson commented about the video on Twitter, saying, "This is mean. I got made fun of like this all the time when I made cartoons and it fucking sucked. It didn’t give me a thick skin or make me a better artist or make me think more about what I was doing, it just hurt. The fact that all the people patting you on the back for this cartoon are old school-newgrounds types with very few “STAs” commenting speaks volumes. You can use this thread to pretend it’s all in good fun, but it’s not fun, it’s mean. It hurts."

Twitter users were highly critical of Hanson's criticism, saying Hanson was thin-skinned and hypocritical for his comments. Users brought up comments Hanson made when he regularly posted on Newgrounds that were highly critical of other users. Another user pointed to a clip of Hanson and his wife Suzy laughing at the N-word.^[40][41] The resulting backlash led to Hanson posting an apology note on Twitter in which he apologized for past behavior he was ashamed of (shown below).

Sr Pelo repeatedly stated he bore Hanson no ill will and said he and Hanson had worked things out privately.^[42] On August 2nd, he posted a video featuring the hamster bully character from his original video, parodying the drama and imploring people to move on.

Game Grumps

Arin Hanson and Jon Jafari/JonTron co-created the Let's Play channel Game Grumps.^[9] In its launch in July 2012, the channel quickly developed a fanbase consisting of video game enthusiasts and subscribers to the two hosts’ personal YouTube channels. Between July 2012 and June 2013, Game Grumps released more than 600 videos, accruing more than 197 million views and a million subscribers in less than a year. Egoraptor and JonTron had a good run together, but after about a year Jon left to focus on his own channel and was replaced by the current co-host Leigh Daniel Avidan/Danny Sexbang.^[8]

Starbomb

Arin Hanson collaborated with Ninja Sex Party to create the band Starbomb which produces comedy rock, synthpop and rap music.^[10] Their first and second albums focus exclusively on video games and every song has been fully animated and uploaded to Egoraptor's channel.^[11] A video of the first album's songs without the animations was released December 13th, 2014 (shown below, left).^[12] On March 25th, 2014, a rap-along version of the Starbomb song I Choose You To Die was released including the voices of famous youtubers Rocco Botte, Ashly Burch, Keith Apicary, The Angry Video Game Nerd, Markiplier, Dude Huge, The Completionist, ProJared, Steve Kardynal, Chloe Dykstra, and Smooth McGroove (re-upload shown below, right).^[23]

Fandom

Arin Hanson has undoubtedly acquired a large fandom given his strong ties to video game fandoms and the 369.4 million total views on his main animation channel Egoraptor; in addition to the views on his co-hosted let's play channel Game Grumps currently at 2.1 billion total views.^[4][30] He has acquired his own Wikipedia page^[31] as well as several wiki pages about him found on The YouTube Wiki,^[32] Game Grumps Wiki,^[6] and Wikigrounds.^[33]

Fan Art

Fan Remixes

Notable Videos

Notable Series

Awesome Series

The Awesome Series is a comedy series featuring animated parodies of video games. The first episode in this series was also Arin Hanson's first ever publicly available animation titled Metal Gear Awesome which was first uploaded to Newgrounds.^[3] Uploaded on February 23rd, 2016, the animation was met with strongly positive reception by the Newgrounds community for its hilarity and ridiculous style, causing MTV to take notice and offer Arin Hanson the job of animating shorts of the same quality for their television channel which he accepted.^[20] The series was originally uploaded on Newgrounds and then re-uploaded to YouTube, but now episodes are exclusively uploaded to YouTube.^[19][4]

Sequelitis

Sequelitis is a review series featuring comedic animated critiques of video game sequels. The first episode in this series was titled Sequelitis – Castlevania 1 vs. Castlevania 2 and it along with all episodes of the series was uploaded exclusively on YouTube (shown below, left). Uploaded on March 11th, 2011, the episode was met with strongly positive reception for its intelligent blend of game design analysis and humor. Notably episodes in this series are much longer than typical videos on Egoraptor's channel, the longest episode being Sequelitis – ZELDA: A Link to the Past vs. Ocarina of Time which was 31m 29s long (shown below, right).

The Tester

Arin Hanson submitted a video (shown below, left) to a contest to become a contestant in Sony's show The Tester and fans voted him to victory. However, on the first day in the show the judges gave him a tough time, saying they'd leave a spot open on the couch for him to sleep unlike the other contestants whom had beds.^[14] He tried his best but was ultimately voted off by the judges on the third day for questionable reason after having been beneficial to his team (shown below, right).

Fan Outrage

Egoraptor's fans unanimously agreed the show's judges voted him off the show for no good reason other than wanting him gone. This outrage led to fans uploading numerous videos to YouTube mocking and criticizing the show's judgement as well as other online gaming sites conveying similar feelings.^[13][15][17] He was later quoted saying "The Tester can lick my nuts" in an interview on Destructoid.^[16]

Related Memes

Arin Hanson's Chin

Arin Hanson's Chin is a meme about Hanson's chin that grew popular after the release of a video on his channel titled Lightsaber Fightsaber – Episode IV on May 19th, 2012.^[18] His chin has been referenced in a number of image macros.

Personal Life

Arin Hanson was born on January 6th, 1987^[6] and married his wife Suzy Berhow/Mortem3r on October 25th, 2013.^[7] His father is a musician named Lloyd "Pararaptor" Hanson, his mother is Maurette Hanson, and his brother is an aviator named Nate Hanson.^[6] Jon Jafari is a close friend of Arin's who co-hosted Game Grumps with him during its first year in which they shared many close humorous moments. Leigh Daniel Avidan took over after Jon left and became similarly close friends with Arin as a co-host of Game Grumps.^[26] Arin Hanson is a friend/friendly enemy of Ross Kenry O' Donovan and regularly conveys as much on the show Game Grumps, most notably while playing levels Ross created in Super Mario Maker and during the five-episode Guild Grumps series.^[24][25]

Search Interest

External References