The youtube of old was different and in many ways much of the content has been lost to time. This includes videos and channels, forgotten by most and only remembered by a few fans from time to time. Today we’ll take a look at Sadies Gaming Infection. An early youtube video game review show that featured a girl gamer. This was during the era of every youtube reviewer is an Angry Video Game Nerd rip-off so it was difficult to find any content that was original. We are going to mostly discuss the show only and not so much the drama of Ultraneko. Was the show any good? Is it still worth watching today? Did it deserve more?
Ultraneko’s channel started with a small introduction of her show Late Night Gaming with Sadie, she mentions se grew up in a gaming family, has played RPGs since she can remember. She considered herself a casual gamer, and her family subscribed to EGM and game informer. The format of the show was a quick introduction, she’d pla the game for 15 minutes and later give a review for it. The episodes are mostly a bit boring to get through now, the quality is not not great and the commentary wasn’t fantastic either so the episodes are a bit boring. However it was something new on youtube and it felt fresh. She was indeed a cute nerdy girl as she described herself, she didn’t exactly play recent games or retro games, just older PS2 games which made it not as interesting. It did help there really weren’t other GaMeR GiRlS back then and of course it helped that she had big boobs.
She rebranded her channel to Sadie’s Gaming Infection. The format was pretty much the same except she would play 1 or 2 hours of the game, with the reasoning that if a game doesn’t catch your attention in that time frame then it’s not worth your time. The gimmick was that you had Dr. Sadie who presribed games to Ultraneko to play to cure her gaming infection. Despite being the same show as before the extra ‘lore’ did make it more interesting to follow. It’s difficult to rewatch episodes since a lot of the footage is mostly her playing the game and not as much footage from the game. As I mentioend in the beginning she only reviewed PS2 games in the early PS3 era because of her budget for the show. She did start to get the hang of it and make the show a bit more interesting with her commentary.
She did use a lot of profanity but it felt more natural than the average AVGN clone. She would try to get a themed outfit or sometimes cosplay related to the game she was playing. She also knew what people liked to see as the cleavage was prominent, there’s some statements made much later that she didn’t try to but rewatching the show after all these years does make it clear she was aware and knew what she was doing with a lot of her outfits. I mean most of the screenshots I took for the article are just at random. There’s sexual jokes int he review, tons of cleavage, bouncy boobs and not in the most subtle way. Now while she did use sex appeal, it wasn’t what she tried to put the focus on. But it’s definitely revisionist history to say it was never intended to be that way after rewatching it.
In September 2007 her channel got featured on youtube and was made a partner, this incremented her popularity by a lot and her personality seemed to change during this time. The quality of the show begins to drop and in general the novelty started to wear off. The show in many ways is tedious since she rarely has much interesting to say about the game and her opinions tend to be repetitive. The cuteness can only get you so far. But now you had tons of guys simping for her years before simping had a name. She slowly tried to become more of a “hardcore” gamer but that backfired when people would call her out on stuff she’d say. So her trying to get more gaming cred didn’t help, and it wasn’t necessary for her to try to do that,s he was what she was. She was indeed a nerdy girl that liked some games, not everyone needs to know everything about gaming, she didn’t need to pretend.
Overall the show is tedious and boring to watch the more episodes you get into since she really doesn’t say much and it’s repetitive. Kind of like this last sentence repeating what I said earlier. As her popularity grew she started asking for donations both in terms of money and games/consoles, so she was gifted a PS3 among other stuff and people started resenting that. This was the time people did youtube for the love of the art, no real monetization so people saw it as selling out even if by today’s standards it’s normal. She took a break and never came back except to delete the channel withnot a lot of explanations except that she wanted to focus on school. If you followed the drama it was mostly that she didn’t want to deal with being an e-celeb and I can respect that.
I would not recommend the show nowadays even if it’s for nostalgia, it’s just not good anymore but at the time it was fresh and fun. It was also ahead of its time, I mean it’s basically what people do on Twitch now, she just had different tools to do it with and was less of a personality. What you see on twitch is far more professional, fun, interesting, sexual etc. Everything Ultraneko did but better, but in a way she was one of the firsts, not just doing an simple attempt at being the AVGN but as a girl. If she returned today she wouldn’t really be able to be as popular as she was, perhaps if she had never left she could’ve built a fanbase to stick with her but there’s just so many options now that she’d just be another one.
I’ll just mention briefly the drama but it would require a whole “The Destruction of Sadie” article which I don’t really care to write. But the gist of it is fans were upset that when information about her not being a hardcore gamer started to surface, some guy named sinistermoon who worked with her revealed some of the information about how her ex-boyfriend was the one who had helped her and many of the ideas were his which is why the quality had dropped. People started calling her fake because of it and she tried to defend her point. People would call her greedy because she had been getting a lot of donations and a sell out. It’s not that many of those things were untrue, but now it’s just considered normal. She’s married now and happy still in love with Cloud Strife, as a true casual geek should and out of the spotlight.
From her old website:
Sadie Destefano
D.O.B.: 12/04/1985 –
Blood Type: O-
Likes: Cosplay, action, adventure, RPGs, horror and shooters.