Hey Guys, Taylor aka AntVenom here!

I’ve been making YouTube videos since April of 2006. I’ve come a long way since the early days of YouTube. You’ve probably visited this page to learn more about me, and learn you shall!

This page will cover a brief run-down of some of my major memories in gaming! Every one of these games holds a significant place in my heart, and helped me become the person who I am today!

If you want to find out how I got the name “AntVenom”, check out this link!

For a SERIOUSLY in-depth look into my gaming career, check out my 1,000,000 subscriber video!

Use the buttons below to toggle between each game!

Tony Hawk Series

From 2004 through 2007, and even a little bit today, the Tony Hawk series has played a huge role in my gaming career.

This game isn’t just a game about scoring the most amount of points possible. It’s about the ability to improvise complex lines on the fly, and pulling off really cool and unexpected lines with style. It’s the sort of thing you have to see to understand.

I originally started playing this game as a “glitcher”, finding crazy techniques to get to spots in any given level that you’re not supposed to, and generally having fun breaking the game. As the years went on though, I got more interested in the “improv” scene. When I tried honing my own skill in the game, and finding myself slowing getting better at it, I was hooked. Thanks to a PC mod for THUG2 called “THUG Pro”, I still play this game every week or so to this day.

You can a few of my old Tony Hawk videos on my first YouTube Channel! There are also quite a few if you search for “ptc thps” on YouTube.

2019 Edit: These days, I sort of lead a double life on YouTube. I run a second channel for THUG Pro called the “THUG Pro Hub”. Every video released from 2016 onwards is a video that I made.

LineRider

For a couple of months between 2006 and 2007, I spent time in the LineRider community when the game was close to hitting “Beta 2”, the mode that included a straight line tool, and an eraser.

What made this period of time so special is that I actually got the opportunity to become the games beta tester after submitting a few bugs to FSK, the games creator. It was also quite rewarding to think of ideas the game could use, and seeing them implemented. My primary contribution being the ability to load levels with physics settings from prior updates, which would prevent levels from breaking between each incremental update.

You can see a lot of my old LineRider videos on my first YouTube Channel!

RuneScape

From 2007 through early 2011, RuneScape took up the majority of my gaming time, whenever I wasn’t working in a movie / game rental store. Yes, that was actually my job, and it was awesome.

For all of 2007, I just played the game for what it was worth. But toward the end of 2007, I became familiar with names like TehNoobShow and LuckyBucket. I became amazed at the capture and editing quality of Luckybucket’s “Hey Driver” RSMV. I immediately learned the software he used to capture the video with, as it was crisper and cleaner than any RuneScape video I had seen to that point.

RSMV stands for “RuneScape Music Video”, which essentially means adding edited RuneScape visuals to our favorite music. While the idea seems cheesy, it was our way of being creative, and learning new tricks with our editing software. It was around this time I became familiar with the editing program Sony Vegas.

As time went on, a lot of the community moved into comedic sketches created within RuneScape. In 2009, Jagex, the company that created the game, held an official Machinima competition. To this day, my submission to that competition was one of my best pieces of work, even though it didn’t place among the final 6 entries. A lot of people thought it would, and for that, I’m proud of it. That video can be found here!

In late 2010 / early 2011, I began a series called RuneScape Undercover, and posted that onto the YouTube channel “Machinima”. It was something I wanted to create full time, but then a little game called Minecraft came along, and changed everything for me…

Minecraft

What can I say about Minecraft. Too many things. This is gonna be the longest section of this “About” page. I started playing Minecraft in late November of 2010, and have been playing it ever since.

My best friend introduced me to Minecraft when I was visiting his house a couple nights before Thanksgiving. He told me to check out this new game he had gotten into, but I initially declined, as I didn’t want to get addicted to another game, as was the case with World of Warcraft. But after some persuading, I checked out the game. Being the kind of person who loved retro games, I fell in love with Minecraft immediately. The concept of a brand new kind of game baffled me. After showing me the basics, I was introduced to “X’s Adventures in Minecraft”. Since I spent the night over this friend’s house, I used up the remainder of my phone’s battery watching as many episodes as I could, and when I got home, watching the rest of the series. While watching these episodes, I began work on “The Peaceful Map”, which was my 2nd ever Minecraft map, and can actually be found for download at the top of this page!

After having been hopelessly addicted to Minecraft for a few months, I thought it would be a good idea to begin recording my experiences in Minecraft, following in the footsteps of “X”. I began documenting random things I made on my Peaceful Map, as well as making other random videos here and there about the game. In February of 2011, I had the idea of doing a “Let’s Play” of the game that involved an end goal. This, amazingly, was a new idea for Minecraft, as most Let’s Plays were just an endless play-through of Minecraft. I called this series “Hunt for the Golden Apple”, and posted the episodes on the YouTube channel “MachinimaRealm”

The launch of “Hunt for the Golden Apple” was the launch of my Minecraft YouTube career. From this point on, my YouTube channel began growing at a steadily increasing rate. After two months of that series, I released a video called “The Far Lands”, and tweeted it to Notch. Notch directly retweeted the post, which sent 40,000 new people to my channel all at once. In an effort to retain this audience, I had the idea to a new Minecraft video every single day, which at the time, was also a fairly new idea. After that video came out, I released a sequel called “The Corner Far Lands”, covering the Far Lands of Minecraft in more detail. That video got 20,000 views in a few days, and from that point on, I was getting twice as many views per day as before. Within two months of that video coming out, and me consistently posting Minecraft videos, YouTube became my full-time job.

In April of 2012, The Hunger Games movie was still fresh in everybody’s mind. Team Vareide had just created a Minecraft map based off the book / movie, and IHasCupQuake invited me to a tournament held within that map along with 11 other people, hosted by the YouTube channel “Machinima”. It was called “The Survival Games”. While my channel was growing at a steady rate before The Survival Games, my channel exploded in popularity when, as the underdog, I bested the entire field of competitors, and won the tournament. It exploded even more when I won the 2nd Survival Games tournament as well. And in case that’s not enough, I also won the third tournament as well. Ever since The Survival Games, I have been known for my expertise in the area of PVP, as well as my general knowledge of Minecraft itself.

2016 & Beyond

On August 28th of 2016, I made a choice to no longer do live-commentary videos on my YouTube channel. After doing them for over 5 years, I not only grew tired of the format, but my channel was also in the process of a slow and painful death. Each video was doing between 15-30k views, which wasn’t what I was after. I have always preferred doing calmer content that’s more informational in nature. With this change, I not only regained pride in my work, but my audience grew, and continues to grow to this day! I was stuck at 2,300,000 subscribers for two years before this change, but now I’m at 2,700,000 subscribers and still growing!

As of January of 2019, instead of videos averaging 15-30k views, they’re averaging over 200k views, with the vast majority of videos going over 100k views. I’ll never take this for granted, and I’m always looking ahead, from here on out!

So I hope you all have enjoyed, my name is AntVenom, and I bid you all farewell, thanks so much for reading!