About

I am Derek Alexander and I am lophatjello Productions. I was born, raised, and still live in Anchorage, Alaska. After graduating from high school in 2002, I attended the University of Alaska Anchorage where I received Bachelor’s degrees in Psychology and Japanese. When I’ve had my fill of this whole internet thing, I plan to return for my Masters.

Many of you know me as a gamer, but if I had to classify myself (I’d rather not), I say I’m more of a musician or music lover. I played piano and violin in elementary school, and starting teaching myself the guitar in high school mainly through learning video game songs by ear. In college, I hosted my own college radio show, “Arbitration of Exchange”, from 2003 to 2008 on KRUA 88.1fm The Edge. In 2005, I was voted the Most Energetic DJ by my peers. In 2006, a friend and I won a Goldie award for radio excellence for an interview we did with local band, The Riot (RIP). My time at KRUA was all volunteer, I didn’t receive college credit or money. However, I was allowed full access to their production studio and music library. Many production skills I learned at KRUA I still use today with the HVGN.

For a short while, I was making a name for myself in the local scene in Anchorage playing weekly open mic’s. However, I wasn’t much for preforming live, so I started recording music instead. After recording 20 or 30 lyric-less song, I began collaborating with fellow musician and friend, Calvin Hansen. Shortly after that, in May 2007, we formed the electronic group Starship Amazing. Together, we have independently produced a Double Album, a B-sides collection and 2 EPs. All original music heard in episodes of the Happy Video Game Nerd is produced by Calvin and myself. This includes all HVGN theme songs, the DuckTales and Rescue Rangers remixes, and all music in the “D” and “D2″videos.

Sometime in late 2006 (when Youtube was still new), I stumbled upon a community of people making video reviews the crappy games from my youth. This lead me to the progenitor of this community, Angry Video Game Nerd. I became a fan of the AVGN immediately. After a few months, sometime in early 2007, it had occurred to me that the AVGN had spawned countless imitators yet all of them were basically taking the “Angry” aspect of James Rolfe’s character and putting their own spin on. I realized that no one had yet taken that idea and simply done the opposite. This was the spark that birthed the Happy Video Game Nerd. The idea of it least. It was a concept that pretty much developed itself, and I was dumbfounded that no one was doing it! But I was a musician who didn’t know the first thing about filmmaking, so I dismissed the idea as something I could never do.

However, through the months of the spring and summer of 2007, ideas for the HVGN kept coming to me: lesser-known good games instead of well-known bad games, a black dress shirt instead of a white dress shirt, wine instead of beer. But I couldn’t have been the only one with the idea on their mind, so every time I started thinking about the HVGN I’d check around to see if anyone else had done it yet. As the months pushed on and when I saw that still one else had, I started to think that maybe I should do the HVGN, even if I didn’t know the first thing about filmmaking.

In August of 2007, I found myself at the end of the Summer. The Fall semester was coming in two weeks. I had only two homework-free weekends before college started again and this would be my second to last semester before graduating. I was taking nothing but high priority, upper-division classes. I knew that if I didn’t finally do this “Happy Video Game Nerd” thing now, I’d never be able to fully dedicate myself to this project after class started. This idea had been stewing for so long, I couldn’t allow myself to half-ass it. Also, if I had sat on this idea any longer, someone else was bound to beat me to it! On the weekend of the 17th, I captured the game play footage of the overlooked NES game MetalStorm, and shot the few live action scenes that would make up the first episode of the Happy Video Game Nerd. Since this was my first time shooting anything other than Christmas videos or my friends and I doing stupid crap, it took all Friday, Saturday, and most of Sunday night to write, act and shoot the review. I started editing immediately after wrapping Sunday night. Again, because I didn’t have any experience, I didn’t get very far.

On August 20th, the following Monday, I went to GameTrailers.com, where the newest episodes of the AVGN are hosted, to find they had just announced the start of a new contest that morning. It was called “Out Nerd the Nerd”, and it was a contest to see who could make the best video in a style similar to the AVGN’s. I couldn’t believe my luck! And I don’t expect many of you to believe it either. Not 12 hours after I had finished shooting my parody of the AVGN, a contest was announced to see who could do just that. I went home and reviewed my footage and realized that two key scenes needed to be redone. The following weekend I reshot those scenes, edited the first episode of the Happy Video Game Nerd and uploaded it to youtube and GameTrailers on August 29th.

The response wasn’t enormous, but what response there was was surprisingly positive. Right from the start, I was receiving requests for games to review along with praise. At the time, anyone who copied the AVGN’s style was flamed to death but people were surprisingly supportive of my parody. I wasted no time starting work on another episode. The second episode of the HVGN, this time spotlighting the overlooked Sun Soft classic Journey to Silius, was finished on September 10th. Both videos were submitted to the “Out Nerd the Nerd” video contest. Journey to Silius, the second video I ever made, won first prize (Trivia note: I applied for graduation the same day I faxed my release forms to GameTrailers). For years I had been performing as a musician or a Radio DJ but this venture into filmmaking was the first time I had ever found success performing. Reflecting on winning the contest and the events leading up to that, I describe it as the most fun I ever had completely losing my mind. When I received the email stating I had won the contest, I actually jumped up out of my chair and back away from the monitor, like it was attacking me. It didn’t really matter that I had just been won a Nintendo Wii and a ton of games, it was the first time I felt like a successful entertainer.

That’s how this whole thing started. It’s really been a fucking crazy ride. And it hasn’t really slowed down at all either. I have a bad habit of constantly saying how overwhelming this has all been, so I’ll say it indirectly.

wuv,
-da