Trivia / Extra Credits

• Author's Saving Throw: After every Extra History series, they include an episode called "Lies," in which they address any anachronisms, inaccuracies, biases, or omissions in the episodes. Since several of their videos focus on extremely long and/or complex periods of history that they could't possibly cover completely in such a short timeframe, the "Lies" videos are very necessary, allowing them to keep Extra History succinct and entertaining without misinforming people.
• Bury Your Art: Their video Stop Normalizing Nazis was unlisted in 2023 due to its wide negative reception.
• Channel Hop: From YouTube to The Escapist, back to YouTube, to PATV, and finally to YouTube again.
• Colbert Bump:
  • In the Non-Combat Gameplay episode, they talked about how James started playing Echo Bazaar. Later that day, Echo Bazaar broke.
  • In the Amnesia and Storytelling episode, Dominions 3 was cited as an example of using mechanics to fill in the player on the backstories of the units. Who wants to wager that there's been an upswing in the number of people playing Dominions 3?
  • This is the point of the "Games you might not have tried" episodes, where they recommend lesser-known games to the viewers.
  • Averted In the episode on Propaganda, where they very clearly tried to not do this, giving the names of some particularly heinous games but not linking them and encouraging people not to go looking so as to not give these people the hits.
  • They also gave a Shout-Out to Moviebob for plugging them.
  • Dan's guest appearances in the British podcast Digital Gonzo (currently known as Digital Drift) boosted its downloads rate significantly.
• Creator Backlash: Years after their infamous defense of Revenue-Enhancing Devices, an episode examining the history of how games monetize took a much dimmer view of lootboxes, directly referencing the earlier episode under a different creative team and saying that it naively assumed this monetization method would be used responsibly and temperantly, before directly admitting it was not.
• Dear Negative Reader: After their two-part series on faith in games, they got a lot of knee-jerk reactions to their position (most of which boiled down to fact that they switched between the different meanings of the word faith). Normally they sit back and leave the follow up conversation to the viewers to kick around, but the argument got so strong that they felt that they had to make another episode specifically to address it.
• Inspiration for the Work: James and Dan admit that Plutarch's Parallel Lives generally informs and influences their biographical series on historical figures, and they generally see Justinian/Suleiman as parallels in the same style, as well as Justinian/Khosrau the Great. James often talks about wanting to do an actual parallel biography in the same style as Plutarch (i.e. take two figures from different cultures and times and pair them against one another) but they haven't yet found a way to make it work.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • After all of the episodes were deleted from The Escapist, there was a period of several weeks when there wasn't anywhere they could be seen legally. Needless to say, their "Piracy" episode hit a lot closer to home. The resulting moral dilemma was averted after all of their old episodes were added to PATV.
  • The aforementioned Piracy Episode and several others say that this is one of the few legitimate reasons to pirate games. They also point out that this is one of the major problems of server-based games, as eventually those servers will have to be shut down, making it impossible to "circulate the tapes" for those.
• Promoted Fanboy
  • One day, Daniel Floyd decided that he wanted to do a report on video games and storytelling. But rather than do a Powerpoint, he put together a video that cited Zero Punctuation as inspiration, and the very first Extra Credits (though the name came much later) video was born. Some time later, he's one of Yahtzee's coworkers and James occasionally participates in debates with him.
  • A few other examples: Many of the guest artists are Real Life friends of the others and industry insiders, including LeeLee, but all are fans of the show. While detaching her own webcomic Name Game from The Escapist, LeeLee became a rotation artist for EC, since Theus has been unpredictable.
  • Also happened to the founding members of Extra Curricular. Some cases of Shoot the Dangerous Minion ensued behind the scenes, as detailed here.
• Network Decay: Extra Credits for much of its lifespan was primarily a gaming-centric analysis channel, with all of it's efforts being dedicated to game theory, analysis of gaming design and so forth. Extra History initially started as a side project that came to be as a result of Total War's development team asking the Extra Credits crew to teach some history related to their newest game's subject matter. Overtime however, Extra History became increasingly popular, much more so than the original channel's content related to gaming. As a result, as of December 2022, The gaming side of Extra Credits is now being split off into its own channel, while the original channel is being rebranded into Extra History.
• Screwed by the Network: Daniel and James do the Extra Credits series unpaid. They pay out-of-pocket to Allison to create artwork for their show. In turn, The Escapist pays Daniel and James a nominal compensation which covers Allison's costs. When Allison hurt her arm, James asked The Escapist to pay what was owed to them so they could support Allison's surgery. When that was not enough, they began a hugely successful donation drive. However, The Escapist insisted that 75% of what was earned through that drive belonged to them. As a result of all this drama, Extra Credits is no longer publishing on The Escapist. Shortly after the announcement, the quantity of fans flocking to The Escapist forums to express outrage broke the site.

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