Back in the mid 2000s, video content was at its infancy; Nintendo was also at one of their worst times in terms of marketability. Then along came Jonathan Mann who put on the hat and the overall and you got GameJew. The show was a passion project from a song writer for his rekindling love of all things Nintendo. He became a big part of the hype for the launch of their next Revolution of a system, the Wii… Appearing alongside the Angry Nintendo Nerd (AVGN) on Screw attack, he helped bring hype to the launch of the Wii in the days before being an influencer was even a thing. This is our little tribute to a piece of Nintendo online fan history.
Jonathan Mann began his Nintendo content creation with the Mario Opera, an odd artistic musical show that has an odd philosophical bizarre journey told by music and fun dialogue. The whole show and songs has its ups and downs but overall its worth watching it at least once. He then began GameJew and was featured on ScrewAttack as one of their content creators. He got to appear in news reports, gaming websites like Kotaku and even gaming magazine EGM when they were still a thing.
You can still watch the show today on youtube and well it’s a time capsule. The show isn’t too entertaining and only lasted a couple of episodes. There was no real format for the show as it mostly showed odd bits of his life, talking about video games with people, around the world, social awareness, puppets…but in between these segments you had roughly 40 songs he wrote for the Wii… and some of these were great, catchy, nostalgic that made you eager for Nintendo’s next console to come out.
Some of my favorite songs:
“The wind whispers Wii”
“Wii for you and me”
“Wii is the revolution”
Wii Crazy
GameJew changed formats and made new shows like Blowing the dust out of the cartridge which dealt more with nostalgic gaming memories, Blaster Master being the episode I’d recommend. He also tried doing Wii Virtual Console song reviews on 1up.com, which perhaps weren’t the best reviews or songs, though it does feature one of my favorite songs 2 Princess Peaches which the best songs from this era where the ones not trying to review the game and letting him be creative. Other stuff includes an ambitious mystery show that lasted like 3 episodes. He tried many things to make it work and it’s impressive what he was able to achieve without ever being “big”. I mean he even helped write and starred on an episode of G4’s X-Play: The Musical.
His true passion was always music so GameJew was abandoned but he continued with what he did best; Writing songs about stuff that he liked, not just video games. He started a project called Song a Day in which he has written a song a day about news, technology and he has been doing that for 15+ years now. In a way GameJew was sort of a protype version of what he ended up doing and GameJew has never truly died. Since he writes songs about video games, Nintendo and even brings back the GameJew moniker from time to time for mini comebacks. I do like this one song he made with JewWario that sort of describes how some of us feel:
“Once upon a time I was GameJew” “I don’t play as many games anymore, as much as I’d like”
Who else can say they got to sing to Shigeru Miyamoto?. Who was GameJew? He is a musician, who happens to love Apple, NFTs and of course Nintendo. He is very passionate about the stuff that he loves. Check some of his content out.