It's been a busy few days - since posting my last video, Vanilla has had a big influx of testers, bug reports, and feature requests that I've been working my way through - but I wanted to take a moment to say thanks to all of you guys for watching and supporting what I do.
This year we actually hit two pretty big milestones: not only did the channel reach a whopping 500,000 subscribers, this year also marks the 10-year anniversary of me creating my channel (on October 27, 2015). Huge thanks to everyone who's here and has stuck around all of these years; I wish I had been organized enough to do something special to mark these occasions, but hopefully the release of the first Vanilla/Wii U video (finally) was a good enough concession.
I know the channel has been a little unpredictable for the past few years. To be honest, it's been a challenge finding the right balance between doing cool projects that are fun to watch (and hopefully provide some use or value to the retro community I love so much), while also making high-quality videos that I'm proud to put out. I'm a perfectionist, so my natural inclination is to spend a lot of time getting everything "just right" before it goes out, but that doesn't necessarily make for a very successful YouTube channel.
Going into 2026, I have big plans to ramp up video production, and my biggest hope is that at some point I'll be able to hire a full-time editor/videographer, and that we can not only get more videos out, but keep the quality and consistency up too. I experimented a lot this year with getting outside help for videos - some of which turned out great, some not-so-great - but I've learned a lot and feel very optimistic about the videos I've got in the pipeline. I hope you enjoy them too!
Happy new year and have a fantastic 2026!