Mike Matei

About

Mike Matei serves as the executive producer for Cinemassarce, the website of The Angry Video Game Nerd, and helps write, edit, and star in the channel's videos. He has grown into a somewhat infamous figure online for his low-quality sketches and interactions with fans.

History

Matei started the Cinemassacre YouTube channel in 2006,^[1] where it was originally called "JamesNintendoNerd." After assisting with and starring in several AVGN videos, Matei began to make his own content for the channel. On January 24th, 2011, he uploaded his first solo video for Cinemassacre, "How to Jump Over the Flagpole on stage 1-1 in Super Mario Bros," gaining over 1.2 million views (shown below). In 2015, he began livestreaming video games and uploading the videos to YouTube.^[2]

Reputation

Brown Bricks

On May 11th, 2012, Matei uploaded "Minecraft with Gadget," a video in which he and an animated version of Inspector Gadget, voiced by Matei, reviewed the IOS port of Minecraft. In the video, Inspector Gadget has trouble pronouncing the name of the game, eventually calling it "Minecrap". He repeated the name several times during the video, eventually repeating "I love to build brown bricks with mine crap." This spawned the Brown Bricks meme. Due to the negative response to the video, it was taken down (Mirror shown below). The video was quickly mocked and parodied online shortly after its release, and Matei has worked to delete all reuploads of the video.

In late 2016 and early 2017, multiple renditions of the infamous video started appearing on YouTube. The meme's sudden resurgence in popularity may be due to it's frequent use in media surrounding Iris animator Chris O'Neil (Oney) who can often be heard quoting or referencing it. It became a popular meme amongst of the channel's fans. In May of 2017, Siivagunner began referencing the clip in their videos. On May 14th, they uploaded "Main Theme – Inspector Gadget: Mad Robots Invasion," gaining over 19,000 views (shown below, left). On May 17th, they uploaded a parody of the Angry Video Game Nerd intro using the clip (shown below, right).

Mike Matei Has a Huge Dick

In late 2014, a persistent rumor started appearing in comments on Cinemassacre videos that Matei has a large penis. Fans gleaned as much from pictures of Matei where the bulge in his pants appears quite large (examples shown below). One of the earlier known references to the size of Matei's penis comes from a Tumblr^[4] post dated September 22nd, 2014.

The rumor was addressed in a thread on /r/OutOfTheLoop^[3] on December 12th, 2014 and has been covered in TV Tropes^[2] and Encyclopedia Dramatica^[5] in their pages on Matei. In late 2015, Matei tweeted out a picture of his penis next to measuring tape to answer a question to someone asking how large his dick was. He said "10 inches." The picture has since been deleted but a screenshot of the tweet was posted to /tv/ on November 5th, 2015.^[7]

/r/Cinemassacre Drama

Matei is a moderator at /r/Cinemassacre. On May 30th, 2017, he made a post titled "Shedding Some Light"^[8] about his moderating practices, which others in the subreddit took issue with, after conversations between moderators about Matei were leaked to the subreddit. Matei was known for banning anyone who made reference to the Brown Bricks video or referencing his penis, and he attempted to explain this in his post. Other moderators of the subreddit were angered by this, Mattophobia,^[6] recommended the removal of Matei from the channel altogether for his unapologetic and harsh moderating policies. The entire fiasco was covered by two /r/OutOfTheLoop^[9][10] posts and a post on /r/SubredditDrama.^[11]

Criticism

Matei has grown infamous for his poor comedy and alleged poor character. During their playthrough of Sonic '06, Game Grumps went on an extended riff about Matei's simple style of comedy (shown below).

Matei has also been criticized for being unfunny and arrogant by Encyclopedia Dramatica.^[5] Commenters on /r/Cinemassacre have also spoken negatively about Matei's character. In response to his "Shedding Some Light" post, user digitaldebaser wrote of Matei, "He was rude, he was degrading, and he made me question if James was anything like him. It hurt as a fan."

Search Interest

External References