For a grand bulk of the people on that article, they still have some presence online, whether it's some Facebook profile going unnoticed, a new YouTube account they started to disassociate from their past, a legacy that gets more and more lurid (Game Dude was more than just an AVGN rip-off), or even one or two videos are saved from the sands of time, also Archive.org typically has a snap of old YouTube channels.
However, some still elude me, some have practically blanked off the face internet with only small traces remaining to confirm they had some kind of presence. Excluding those who still have easily traceable old content, channels still active in some capacity, those that weren't interesting to begin with, for some reason, this guy got my interest.
The article lists Futuramaooy, a game reviewer who dropped off rather early and hadn't been seen on YouTube since. The early departure gives me mixed messages, and I'll get to them when I can.
What do I know?
Futuramaooy got on YouTube back when it was getting traction in 2006, clued by links he left to his channel still having the old URL structure. He is Australian, his face had been revealed, and going by another handle he went under, his first name is Rhys. He did comic work, namely a MegaMan fan comic, but this is now totally lost.
Aside from the obvious, that he made gaming-related content, apparently he played a part in the anti-Irate Gamer bandwagon that was big in 2008-2009. Not sure if it was down to video parodies or him supporting others that did it, but if it was enough to get acknowledged in his little blurb he got somewhere with it. He was also apparently a retrogamer, going by most of his posts and the sites he used.
Futuramaooy, already setting me up for confusion due to the username mixing with a show that yields multiple results, when searched on its own surprisingly got me some good results. Nothing major, but it does show me some other websites he used. Along with Futuramaooy, he also went under Mega-Rhys, and used both in tandem.
For the first handle, along with it being his prime YouTube channel, it's also tied to an IMDb account which was used to review one film as far back as 2005, as well as AtariAge, the Homestar Runner forums and the They Might Be Giants wiki (ironically, the latter two reflect the interests of infamous creep Nick Bate)
As for Mega-Rhys, more accounts are tied to that including a Twitter account, a Drunk Duck webcomic page, Blogspot (for all old web-heads), and a deviantArt account for both handles. The Mega-Rhys one is abandoned but still stands, while his Twitter and YouTube (that soon) were removed (this doesn't count sites that went under, so Drunk Duck's out)
His timeline goes as far as 2008, 2009 being the latest. Bits and traces of his older profiles still exist whether they haven't been deleted or have been preserved by the Wayback Machine. Unfortunately, they didn't quite preserve his YouTube channel well, I guess they thought his background was more worthy of preservation.
So W'ever Happund?
I'd say he couldn't handle whatever heat he got for his reviews (back when everyone assumed every game reviewer ripped off the Angry Video Game Nerd), but that's just a theory since only his YouTube and Twitter went down. Back then, most review channels were taken down by YouTube over copyright and some didn't recover, so it could've happened to him and he never bothered to return.
A darker theory I have is that someone took their disfavor of him too far and leaked his personal info, but then everything would go dark and he would allude to it.
If I had to guess, he probably found a new line of work and wanted to abandon his previous accounts since they no longer fell in line with him. All I have is his first name and last initial, so I can't trace him through Facebook, let alone if he has one, though based on the posts he made things seemed stable, and he probably just lost interest after his YouTube channel went belly up.
I'm hoping the worst hadn't happened, because he did seem interesting.
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