Our intrepid reporter Adam Rorke made the journey up the Hume highway to attend the first ever Rooster Teeth expo in Australia. Dubbed RTX the show was host to some amazing games, films, anime and various other pop culture related stalls. Adam has used his time well, managing to get a host of interviews, previews and reports toghether for your entertainment. Welcome to Player2’s coverage of RTX Australia 2016
Interview – Craig Skistimas – RTX Australia
Craig is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of Screwattack (not a porn site). From producing content and being the voice in so many videos to running the Screwattack business that holds it all together, Craig has been there from the very beginning. We managed to catch up with Craig early on day 1, before the Con-Fatigue started setting in. Read on:
Adam – Hi Craig, thanks for taking the time to talk to me, how have you found your reception here so far from the G1 community in Australia?
Craig – For the most part, everyone here at RTX has no idea who I am, which is pretty cool. Not that I deserve to have anybody know who I am or anything, but the G1 community, it’s been really cool to have people say hi on the streets and to be recognised, that’s amazing.
Adam – Since the merge with Rooster Teeth, has it opened up a lot of opportunities for you guys? Namely events like this, five years ago that probably wasn’t an option.
Craig – Screwattack has always been home grown, it literally started on my parents counter. I stayed at home the first year out of college and worked in their kitchen. It’s always been about survival and then we hooked up with Full screen and that allowed us leniency and working with Rooster Teeth who are owned by Full screen as well, it’s really great because they’ve been doing it longer than Screwattack (13 years) and we have our 10th year coming up in 2 weeks
Adam – What are you doing for that?
Craig – We got some plans. We’re going to do a 48 hour marathon and all of our marathons up until this point have been about playing games and hanging out and stuff. When we were down for the Extra Life stream that Rooster has, I really liked their format where the game’s secondary and its more about people hanging out and talking. I love that! So we’re going to follow that lead with our stream and we’re going to have a lot old faces from Screwattacks history show up, a lot of people who played big and small roles. It’s going to be good man, I’m crazy excited about it.
Adam – It seems like, from an outside perspective, that you guys pull crazy hours, is it always so busy?
Craig – Oh yeah, we produce so much stuff. Literally since Screwattacks started, our tagline has been ‘Something original every day’. And we do produce something every day. A lot of those shows take a lot of man hours to do, you look at a show like Death Battle, our biggest show now. That takes on average about 600 man hours to produce one episode and there’s other little things over 10 years that we’ve been doing like top 10’s …
Adam – And you’re still doing those!
Craig – Yeah I was doing them, then I stepped back and now I’m doing it again. I think that’s the biggest advantage of working for Rooster Teeth, as Screwattack has grown I’ve been doing more and more business and I’ve worn so many hats, it’s been crazy. Rooster Teeth essentially put out a hat rack and told us to put all our hats on the rack and we want you just to focus on content. And literally for the first time in 8 years, I’ll be just focussing on making stuff for our audience.
Adam – That’s good because since it started a lot of people have resonated with you as StutteringCraig, I know him, and when you stepped away from that it seemed like we were missing out on something.
Craig – Yeah getting back and making content is exciting. I had a list of things that needed to get done and I think I finished about nine pieces of content, three top 10’s and Evil Craig made an appearance. I don’t know when I don’t know the last time I did that much, from a content perspective, in a week and it was invigorating to focus on one thing, and that is making fun stuff for our audience and it was really exciting! I’m really excited about the next year just to see where everything goes.
Adam – Is there anything to add or say here to finish up?
Craig – The biggest thing is, if you ever watched a piece of Screwattack content, whether it was in 2006 or 2016 is, thank you very much for everything you’ve done. Whether it’s one video or a million videos, you’ve helped us grow to a point where a lot people haven’t been online. It’s very exciting and flattering and we can’t do this without the community, thank you very much.
Adam – Craig, thank you for your time.
Craig – Yeah man thank you again.
Adam Rorke
