![]() I’ll be carrying the torch of this fantastic, one of a kind company to amazing new places. I’ll be flying to weird countries and eating even weirder things on camera. I’ll be scripting Lightsaber battles and hiring animators to decapitate my friends. I’ll be writing and hosting and producing comedy sketches. ![]() Our plan is to create bold, awesome, insane new original videos from the ground up and reach audiences we’ve never had before. I’ll be leading the creative of our bold new initiative to create original video content on IGN, the world’s biggest video game and entertainment site. Recently, I’ve taken up a new position at IGN, Host and Producer of IGN Original Video. I said “Hell yeah!,” flew to California, and here I am now. I didn’t think they would need someone like me, but they wanted to try a new approach and I would help spearhead their features department with some comedy articles. ![]() ![]() article, and a few days later I got a phone call from an editor at GameSpy regarding a job position. I remember reaching out to IGN about a Smash Bros. Out of nowhere, the site started getting close to 500,000 uniques a month, and we were floored! On our first day, Kotaku and a site called Dig picked us up – a lot of our stuff would start to show up on different sites. We really tried to shine a light on the part of games that was funny. We put up comedy articles with real news stories with funny slants and headlines every single day. I went and built my own website, called The Minus World with some friends. We’re in this moment where games are being taken more seriously by mainstream press, and we needed this humorous criticism. I looked at the industry, and said, “What’s missing?” I saw that no one was really taking an ‘Onion’ or ‘Daily Show’ approach to games. Joystiq and Kotaku and IGN would all go to the same events, get the same press release, play the same previews, and all of their articles would of course be sort of similar. I noticed that everyone would get invited to the same events at the same time, and everything would go up at the same time. It wasn’t until after college when I decided to start a website about video games and comedy. When I was a kid, I drew maps of my favorite Mario levels I created fake video game magazines and handed them out in school, stuff like that. Games were always there for me – they inspired the art I created and the music I wrote. I feel like if you ask somebody and their answer is, “I just started playing video games two years ago,” then it’s probably not an industry they’ll stay in long. I’ve been playing video games my entire life, which is the way most of these stories start. How did you get into the video game industry? They told me I would never have to do that here! I told them that when it crashed, which it did often, I would be on the phone with tech support until two in the morning. When I first started at IGN, they asked what kinds of problems I had to deal with while running my own website. It’s great, because it’s all yours, but once something breaks it’s all yours to deal with. I remember the thrills and terrors of running my own website. Oh, and he likes long walks on the beach. When Brian is not doing those things, he’s probably still doing something awesome. He’s made the entire Internet laugh with his awesome improv in videos and podcasts, both for IGN and The Comedy Button. In addition to being a host of original content at IGN, the biggest gaming website in the world, Brian Altano is a comedian, musician, part time Jedi and full time Italian meatball.
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