Inside the Youtubers – Kolibiri

Today I had the pleasure of interviewing Kolibiri, one of the biggest reviewers of games and music(recently) on Youtube with a colossal fan base, known as HowardCneal(his stage name) to most of his fans. Kolibiri is one of the wittiest and clever youtubers out there and his stats speak for them-self!

Kolibiri’s Stats

Subscribers: 1,692

Channel Views: 109,648

Firstly I asked him if any of the farfetched info on his profile was true.

Me: IS ANY OF THIS TRUE!?
“City: 東京

(Tokyo)
Hometown: South Tarawa
Country: Japan
Occupation: Spider Catcher
Companies: Big Dan’s Bug Business”

Kolibiri: No, sadly none of that stuff is true. I have Japan as my country so when Youtube sends me e-mails it’s in Japanese and I can have a fun little time reading it. But maybe one day I’ll be a spider catcher at Dan’s Bug Business, I can always hope…

Me: Whats your real name? Howard Cena (is that spelt correctly?)

Kolibiri: My real name is Kris Offill. For Howard, I spell that as HowardCneal. Many people try to pop out a “Howard C. Neal” but no, it’s all one nice long word.

Me: What’s your real time job? (You don’t have to be specific)

Kolibiri: I work at the local amusement park.

Me: Why did you chose to start making these videos and why did you choose the 32X?

Kolibiri: My main reason is simply to document games. I mean if you try to search “Tekichuu Keiba Juku” in Google, you’re goanna find nothing but a series of rom sites and sites that claim to have cheats for the game but actually don’t. Filthy. So this is my little way to try and catalogue as many games as possible. The good ol’ 32X was chosen because it has such a small library of games, I could easily document the whole series in a small amount of time. And what a damn fine collection of games that system possesses, I must say.

Me: What age group / audience do you aim your videos to?

Kolibiri: Mainly horse jockeys and Goths. Anyone that appreciates offbeat/non-equatorial/random humour really. It seems it’s late teens/early twenties. I’m sure there’s at least a few serial killer viewers too, which is pretty exciting.

Me: Your voice seems to be core to all your work, do you think you have a talent to act? Is that voice put on? What to you want to show through your voice?

Kolibiri: The only time I acted was in this sweet play we put on in 5th grade, some detective nonsense. I was this dude named Kevin that had one little scene where I come out with this girl and I’m all like, “We’re on a way to a parrrty.” (I had to stress that party line for some reason, came out similar potty when I said it) But no, other than that, acting is something for me. My voice is pretty monotonous for the most part, at least that’s what my jerk of a speech teacher told me. It’s not put on or anything though, that is my normal talking style, although I don’t refer to women as “this little slut” as often as I do in my videos. What I want to show is sort of a guy that has no idea what’s going on in the games, very ignorant about them, and you hear that through the ridiculous comments he makes as he plays. It’s funny a lot of times when people leave comments “omfg learn to play the g4me fag,” totally oblivious to that I’m doing…

Me: Compared to other bloggers what do you think you have that they don’t?

Kolibiri: From what I gather through the other reviewers, a lot of them focus specifically on bad games, well known games for the most part to. Most take it pretty seriously too, actually pointing factual good/bad about the games. I don’t bother with any of that, I just go through a system’s library, the more obscure the game the better, and “review” it. Half the time it’s my first time even playing the game as I make the video, and I don’t bother with any editing nonsense. Whatever comes out is what the final product is. I guess that’s a quality lots of people like, lo-fi videos of a guy playing a Japanese vase making simulation for the first time talking about how your character’s fingernails could use a trimming as they’re getting rather long.

 
Me: That’s a gigantic fan base do you plan to expand, buy your own web space for a website?  

Kolibiri: Nah, I like to spend as little money as possible, and Youtube’s worked perfectly so far. If I was going to spend money on my videos it’d go towards my horrendous microphone, but even that’s not happening anytime soon.

Upcomming next blog is a review of some of HowardCneals greatest moments, and currently on the production line is an interview and review with the famours Youtube animator AgentXPQ.