What You Can Expect From MatPat's Retirement

Summary

• MatPat has formally retired from YouTube, but is still working on new projects like Creators in Fashion and collaborative events.
• Despite stepping back from the camera, he remains busy with behind-the-scenes work on Theorist channels.
• MatPat plans to enjoy more personal time after years of creating content, but still remains active in the online entertainment industry.

As I put together my schedule for PAX East, I crossed my fingers that I’d be able to make time for MatPat’s Storytime panel. The convention organizers often get prominent faces from around the internet to kick things off with a day one mega-panel, and I managed to find enough time between other appointments to catch his.

“But wait,” I asked myself as I sat down at the back of the packed main theater, the room filling with thunderous applause as the house lights dimmed, “didn’t MatPat like, just retire?”

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Technically, yes. On January 9, a video was posted to Game Theory, his primary YouTube channel that blossomed into the vastly-successful Theorists network, announcing that he would be stepping back. After spending a decade and a half pumping out content that deep-dives into the lore of games, movies, food, and fashion, it was time for his next venture.

“I always wanted to go out on a high note,” MatPat explained in the video, announcing that his final YouTube videos with the channels would be posted on March 9.

True to his word, MatPat’s last video was posted as scheduled and featured an appearance from controversial Five Nights at Freddy’s creator, Scott Cawthon, with Game Theory having spent years pulling apart the horror series at the animatronics’ seams. Not two weeks after this, though, MatPat gave an inspiring talk at PAX East about how, in a time when the video game industry feels volatile, it’s important to stay in love with the magic of the medium.

Soon after my time at PAX, I received word about Creators in Fashion, a new project from Game Theory and Style Theory that MatPat would return to co-host.

MatPat’s Public Retirement

I sat down to speak with MatPat about Creators in Fashion and was impressed by how passionate he was about putting on a collaborative runway event featuring prominent online creators and their clothing lines. But as his return approaches so soon after his departure, I had to ask MatPat what retirement from YouTube truly meant to him.

“Making sure the team has what they need [was] first and foremost,” he emphasized. In his retirement from the platform, MatPat handed off the four Theorist channels - Game Theory, Film Theory, Food Theory, and Style Theory - to longtime Theorists team members who had been working on the projects both on-screen and off for quite some time.

As for him, “My schedule went from around 100 hours a week down to 60 hours a week,” he explained, and I believed him. Before our interview, he’d been in a creative meeting with the Food Theory team, trying to work out the logistics of making an invisible hamburger for an upcoming video. Then, immediately after we spoke, he headed to the airport to fly to California ahead of Creators in Fashion to help his collaborators on-site as the April 25 event drew near. In our call, he also hinted at another collaborative event from Food Theory that's to come once Creators in Fashion is over.

What’s Next For MatPat?

MatPat doesn’t intend to vanish entirely from the internet – far from it. Instead, he’s looking forward to more behind-the-scenes work with the Theorist channels now that he’s stepping off-camera, as well as other types of collaborative work outside his own network.

He’s also been plenty busy outside event-planning, too, telling me he’s been making the rounds on gaming-centric podcasts and other YouTube shows, enjoying some time to talk about games more casually with the friends he’s made throughout his illustrious career. He’ll appear on Brain Leak with Jacksepticeye and CrankGameplays soon, and he's recently gone on Mythical Kitchen from longtime web creators Rhett & Link, for example, and said he loved having time now to make appearances like podcasts or the talk I saw at PAX East.

“Retiring from YouTube in your 30s isn’t quite the same as retiring at 65.”

Mostly, though, MatPat is looking forward to some time to just be, after spending almost half his life on camera. He told me of trips he’d taken at the height of his career that turned into content-creation experiences more than actual vacations, “carrying my camera equipment, huddling in the corner of the hotel room at the end of the day with my microphone, ‘Hello, internet!’”. He laughs and uses his arms to tent his jacket over his head on camera to show me how he’d try to mute exterior noises when recording off-site.

At PAX, he spoke of a grand worldwide road trip he was on as a tie-in to a favorite childhood game, Illusions of Gaia, showing photos and footage from the global adventure to visit all the sites from the Super Nintendo classic. Now, though, he’s excited to enjoy time with friends and family in a much more private way. “I took my first vacation without my camera,” MatPat grinned, telling me of a quiet hiking trip in the northernmost parts of the US from which he’d just returned.

Overall, though, even though he won’t be hosting the Theory channels anymore, MatPat isn’t going away just yet. “Retiring from YouTube in your 30s isn’t quite the same as retiring at 65,” he said, explaining the things with which he’s kept busy since his departure. But now that the longtime entertainer has taken a large and very public step back from his video essay empire, he’ll not only have more opportunities to do things like PAX panels and podcasts, but also time to actually enjoy the fruits of his labor as one of YouTube’s original and longest-running creators.

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