Brian David Gilbert

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About

Brian David Gilbert is a video producer best known for his work with Polygon, where he creates and has participated in several regular video series on the channel. His most popular series is Unraveled wherein he delves into video game lore at absurdly great lengths, completing tasks such as reading all 337 books in Skyrim and placing all of the games in The Legend of Zelda series. His work with Polygon has helped generate an online fandom.

History

Gilbert was born January 29th, 1994 in the United States.^[1] He started a YouTube account on August 14th, 2012,^[2] though his earliest extant video on the channel is dated June 20th, 2016 (shown below, left). A video he posted on August 20th of that year became his most popular, gaining over 5.7 million views (shown below, right).

On December 6th, 2017, he posted the video cover letter he sent in to Polygon to apply for a job as video producer (shown below), and has since been primarily making content for Polygon.

Work with Polygon

Gilbert has worked on several series since joining Polygon, including FMV Quest (featuring Justin McElroy) and Week In Review.

To date, his most popular series is Unraveled, wherein he talks about absurd video game lore and undertakes incredibly complete and minute tasks. His most popular videos in the series are "I read all 337 books in Skyrim so you don't have to," gaining 1.8 million views (shown below, left) and "I wasted 3 weeks of my life finding Castlevania's hottest monster" (shown below, right).

For a live episode of Unraveled at PAX East, Gilbert performed an updated, rewritten version of the Pokérap, attempting to fit all 800+ Pokémon into nine minute song (shown below).

Online Presence

Gilbert's work with Polygon has helped a substantial fandom grow around him on social media. On YouTube, there are several videos taking Unraveled out of context which have gained thousands of views. These include a January 9th, 2019 video by user wiley that gained over 130,000 views (shown below, left) and a February 28th video by June Kwon that gained over 88,000 views (shown below, right).

He has also developed a fandom on Tumblr. There, popular memes about him include a post by tenmillionpoundsofsludge^[3] that referred to Gilbert as the best possible outcome of theater kid evolution, gaining over 22,000 notes (shown below, left). Fan account bdgunravels^[4] posted a still from his Pokérap video, gaining over 4,000 notes (shown below, right).