Many A True Nerd

"Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, I'm Jon; this is Many A True Nerd..."

- Jon in the intros of most videos

* Many A True Nerd*(often abbreviated as MATN) is a gaming blog/YouTube Chanel dedicated to the pursuit of challenge in strategy and survival games, alongside the various indie games given a spotlight in their daily videos.



Origins
In early 2013, Claire Rousseau would consider making a general interest geek blog alongside her boyfriend Jon. Jon would propose for the blog's name to be 'Many A True Nerd', a pun based on the expression 'many a true word is spoken in jest'. It was agreed that the former was to be the title, thus the Many A True Nerd site was founded.

In March of 2013, Jon would later offer to head the Many A True Nerd YouTube channel, having been inspired by gaming videos he's seen since 2011. It was around May 2013 that Jon would actually create a video, with the first one being terrible enough that it was only seen by the MATN duo. The suceeding 'first' video would go public on May 23, 2013: The Geekiest Geek Pride Day Ever: A ManyATrueNerd Vlog, with the vlog mainly meant for their friends. A month later, they would accumulate 32 subscribers; most were known by name.

The early MATN would focus on many geek-related topics: the website would include articles regarding books, films and TV shows as well, and the YouTube channel itself acting as a 'jack-of-all-trades', with videos on baking and UK conventions discussions (most of which have been taken down by this point). From there, Jon would slowly take the channel into a gaming direction. In August 2013, an 'experiment' wherein Jon massacred the denizens of the Mojave Wasteland would cause the channel to gain a boom in popularity on the Fallout subreddit, and in a rare moment, MATN would have more than 10+ people subscribe to them in one day, totalling to around 100 subscribers. However, that would just be the beginning of MATN's path to their present incarnations.

'Pax Romana'
On December 9th, 2013 Many A True Nerd would pass the 1,000 subscriber milestone.

A few weeks later on January 12th, 2014, Fallout New Vegas: Kill Everything would come to an end, marked by a same day 500 subscriber boom. Seven days later the Fallout 3: Kill Everything series would begin, with the channel expanding to other series featuring the stealth game, Hitman: Blood Money and Why Not Wednesday, where Jon would take viewer suggestions to play random games of varying degrees of quality.

By the beginning of February 2014, the channel would reach over 3,000 subscribers.

At the end of August 2014, Fallout 3: Kill Everything would conclude, with the channel passing the 10,000 subscriber mark at the same time. Video game blog, Kotaku, would run an article about the channel's Fallout 3: Kill Everything series two days later, subsequently giving the channel its biggest single day subscriber boom in its entire history: 3,500.

Just a week later, Many a True Nerd, would hit 20,000 subscribers.

In September of 2014 Jon would release his next brainchild: Fallout: You Only Live Once, which continued on in two iterations in the eight DLCs of two different games. The ultimate defeat of the challenge would once again lead Kotaku to write another article about the channel.

By December 31st, 2014, they would pass the 30,000 subscriber mark.

A year to the day after Kill Everything's conclusion, Many a True Nerd would reach more than 50,000. The channel would begin to expand to include series with subscriber favorites such as Red Faction: Guerrilla (which started on Why Not Wednesday), indie game favorite, Life is Strange, and games of the "roguelikes" (RPG dungeon crawlers) genre to the channel's repertoire. Around this same time Jon began to consider making YouTube his full time job; a few months later, supported by a Patreon community and new Fallout 4 subs, he was able to do just that.

By 2016, the MATN community would amount to a whopping 250,000 subscribers.

The half-a-million subscriber milestone was surpassed in November 2020.

Today, though the series which help build the channel: Kill Everything, Why Not Wednesday and Mass Effect, have since ended, Jon and Claire have not stopped growing the channel. You Only Live Once returned for Fallout 4 on October 25th 2020, 4 years after the conclusion of the Fallout 3 series. With series on Crusader Kings 2, Roman Total War, Level One: Survival challenges, Fallout based video essays, and frequent indie game videos, have continue to bring in new subscribers.

In the past year Jon has revised the channel's release schedule, including biweekly live streams, Many a True Nerd continues to grow, both in subscriber, and the quality of the content they are producing.

Jon
Jon is a British YouTuber (Many a True Nerd) who is also a carton of eggs. He grew up in Leicester, a Canadian citizen through his mother. Later Jon went to Oxford University to study Classics, where he got a 2-1 degree. According to him he spent way too much of his time at Oxford playing Rome: Total War. He later went into Marketing, proving the usefulness of a degree in Classics. Little is known about Jon's whereabouts between graduating from Oxford and starting Many a True Nerd, but we know he worked at several places in Marketing and at some point in Freight. Jon has stated in MATN's LA Noir lets-play series that he worked and lived in Los Angeles at some point. Jon really likes coasters, and is famously unperceptive. He usually wears linen shirts. When he played Total War: Warhammer II, Jon realized that he liked Skaven a lot. This also means that Jon really likes shoving random people in front of him to block [Insert Projectile/ Weapon Here], and really likes artillery

Claire
Claire is a French migrant, and is married to Jon. Her job includes a lot of yelling at Jon and video editing. During Livestreams she shouts out donations, and yells at Jon some more. She is the leader of the cult of Claire, and she loves Tabby to death.

Thomas
Thomas is an unpaid intern (livestream moderator) from The Netherlands. He was one of the first 5000 subscribers and was always very active in the comments and livestreams. When Jon mentioned the need for more moderators, Thomas offered and was added. Later he also became a moderator on the Discord Server. He said on Twitter he watched Desert Bus VR 7 times.

Tabby
Tabby (or Tabitha) is Jon and Claire's pet cat, who makes frequent appearances on Claire's YouTube channel and is mentioned from time-to-time on the Many A True Nerd channel (usually regarding her favoritism of Claire).

Tabby would first appear in one of Jon's channel announcements as the star of the video, with Jon attempting to get her to do cute acts and blow him up on social media. Though he would ultimately and miserably fail, since Tabby would refuse to get up and would leave Jon as he got more tools to help his goal.

In Stellaris, Jon would create a transport fleet of Cat Cages-class transport ships called 'the Legion of Tabbies'. Most would subsequently perish in a firefight with the Yapathi due to Jon's neglect of them and were quickly replaced to cover up any trace of their disappearance from Claire.