Happy Birthday, YouTube!

Happy Birthday, YouTube! This week marks half a decade of user uploaded, highly shareable vids, copyrights be damned! Has it reallyonly been FIVE years, though?! It’s actually pretty difficult to remember a time without YouTube on the internet… Hell, it’s hard to remember GamesRadar without YouTube. So, as our present to the web’s leading video site, we’re taking a look back at some GR features that wouldn’t have been possible if we were paying for the hosting.

USA – Aretha Franklin brings Christmas home

Above: The Queen of Soul sells Nintendo Entertainment Systems for Target"

A few years back we broke downgames by the holiday seasonwe wanted them most, featuring box art and commercials aplenty! And guess what: YouTube was there for us!

The games you wanted for Christmas:

The commercial you saw over and over:

For our2010 Week of Hatewe needed thegreatest hissy fits every caught on video. Of course there was only one place to go:

One thing YouTube rarely gets credited with is being the single greatest music resource on the internet! Seriously, anything else you're thinking of, the Tube's better than that. Featuring almost every song, remix, mash-up and unsigned artist throughout all of history, it was the first place we looked when it came time to put together our17 Soundtracks The Were Ahead of Their Time article.

Platform
Super NES

Why it was ahead of its time
DKC is notable for many reasons (return of Donkey Kong, pre-rendered graphics, start of Nintendo’s “aggressive” marketing), but the soundtrack is just about the only one that’s stood the test of time. Its composer, David Wise, mixed a rich, varied soundtrack using animal sound effects, soothing backbeats and catchy riffs, and was one of the very first game music CDs released in the US. Up until then, the very concept of releasing videogame music on CD or cassette was ridiculous, even though Japanese gamers routinely see game soundtracks for sale.

Above: Fear Factory, another fan favorite

Screw VH1! Not only is YouTube the greatest musical repository in the history of anything… YouTube never forgets. In our 15 Music Videos that Rip-Off Games Magnificentlyfeature, we left some space for the worst. So, as much as MTV2 probably would like to forget this little ditty, YouTube remembers:

Franz Ferdinand
Take Me Out

This one comes from the thankfully dead MTV series Video Mods. The premise was to take hit songs and then reskin them with videogame characters singing them. Basically they worked as lame double-commercials, advertising both the song and the game and question.

And what medium other than YouTube could've possibly given rise to acat that almost sort of played an electric piano?! We Rick Roll'd with the sensation and had the globe's foremost feline maestro play off several icons of gaming.

May 18, 2010

I LIKE TO MAKE THE GAMESRAIDER!!!!!!!1