Gaming Historian
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Gaming Historian is a YouTube channel created by Norman Caruso. Known for its extended documentary-style looks at topics related to historic video games, Gaming Historian posted new videos from 2008 until 2026.
History
Gaming Historian is known for what PC Gamer called "Ken Burns-style documentary videos" about video games, including history, hardware, and legal cases.[3] Topics covered on the channel have included The Oregon Trail, a television that had a Super Famicom built into it, the Sega Mega Modem,[3] the first-ever video game cartridge,[4] and the history behind the Nintendo Entertainment System.[5]
At its peak, the channel garnered over a million followers.[4] A local news outlet in 2022 posited that the channel's popularity came from how people connected with its longform documentary style, as the videos "pull on a nostalgia from video game enthusiasts of a certain age that keeps them coming back".[6]
Caruso actively posted videos to the channel for over a decade starting in 2008.[7][A] He reduced his involvement to part-time in 2024[3][5][4] after releasing a particularly work-intensive look into the The Oregon Trail series.[7] Two years later, Caruso stepped away from the Gaming Historian, citing concerns with burn out. He continued a history-focused podcast he had founded with his wife.[3][9]
Shortly prior to its closure, Comic Book Resources ranked Gaming Historian as one of the ten best gaming YouTube channels.[5] It was also a finalist in the gaming category at the 10th Shorty Awards.[10][11]
Universal v. Nintendo documents
Beginning in 2024, Caruso released National Archives and Records Administration-held court documents from Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Nintendo Co., Ltd., a 1982 case where the former alleged that the latter had effectively copied King Kong in creating Donkey Kong.[12][13][14] When he stepped back from the YouTube channel in 2026, he uploaded all of the documents to the Internet Archive for anyone to view.[3][7][15]