Rayque


 * "You can dream about everything, but nothing of those will be real if you just think of them. Work hard, and let them be reality."
 * "You can dream about everything, but nothing of those will be real if you just think of them. Work hard, and let them be reality."

Rayque is one of the pioneers for the creation of the Rayque3 YouTube Channel. Along with his friend MechaRaptor, they started their video career on July 7th, 2008. In addition to Youtube, he also writes on his own blog since 2011.

During the years, the type of videos that he made have changed drastically. Most of Rayque's first videos were short and for comedic purposes. This also allowed him to produce a large number of videos each year, since these videos had a short development time.

After MechaRaptor started his first walkthrough for the Rayque3 Channel, which was the Tarzan Action Game Walkthrough, Rayque followed with his first walkthrough for the game WarioWare: Smooth Moves. Halfway through production, the series had to go on hiatus after Rayque's computer crashed. This caused Rayque to permanently lose several finished parts of the walkthrough before they could be published, alongside many older videos from the channel that are still lost to this day. This event caused him to reconsider his approach on video making, which ultimately gave birth to the High-Dex Hero, MapleStory Guides and Single-Part-Videos series.

After completing the WarioWare: Smooth Moves Walkthrough in 2010, most of his videos started to become more serious, lengthy and driven by quality when the Rayque3 Channel entered the Second Era. The amount of videos produced by Rayque has gone down during the Second Era, as modern Rayque3 videos have a much higher development time than they used to during the 2008-2010 period.

It was only until after the introduction of the Smesh Bros Series in 2016 where Rayque allowed himself to return to the somewhat comedic approach of the Randomness series, albeit staying true to the modern approach of the Youtube channel today.

History (2008 - 2010)
Before the creation of the Rayque3 channel, Rayque was a fan of the comedic sketch approach on gaming videos, which was a popular format at the time. This ultimately led him to attempt his own contribution to this format, through the Randomness series.

Rayque's interest in starting a Youtube channel has been around since early 2008, at the time when both he and MechaRaptor were frequent users of the website. Originally, it was Rayque's intent to create the channel until after he figured out how to record gameplay footage from gaming consoles for the Randomness series, but he didn't see any issues with starting the Youtube channel earlier than was planned.

As was common with the limitations of late 2000's website and (username) account design, the Youtube channel name was identical to the username, and this could not be changed until several years later once the platform adapted to a channel ID system that was independent from the username. The username "Rayque" was already taken on the platform in 2008, so Rayque had to go with a different name for the channel. This ironically led to the name "Rayque3", which was available for use. Thus, the Rayque3 Youtube channel was created on the 7th of July, 2008.

Because of the unexpected earlier creation of the Youtube channel than he envisioned, Rayque did not have any videos prepared to be uploaded on the channel for the first several months. In order to fill the void until he could provide his own videos, Rayque's first contribution to the Rayque3 Channel was the official trailer for the game F-Zero GX, taken directly from the game's website.

Thus, MechaRaptor provided most of the videos in 2008 while Rayque was learning the basics of video recording and video editing. On the 12th of November, 2008, Rayque published his first video, "Rayque fails in Super Mario Brothers", which was a short comedic sketch that utilized the pure basics of video editing; a pre-recorded gameplay footage from an emulated copy of the game [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Bros. Super Mario Bros.], together with a post-commentary track where Rayque attempted to act accordingly to what happened in the video, as if he was playing the game while recording. The footage was recorded with Camtasia.

Another short Randomness sketch was released two weeks after, which was the "Randomness: Some guys can't design ;)" video. This video was a simple video editing exercise that utilized a couple of sequential lines of text, where Rayque describes "Some people can make box-layouts.. But..." with the Peanut Plain theme from Kirby Super Star in the background, followed by an image of a poor packaging design. During the segment where the image of the packaging is shown, Rayque leaves an audible "What the hell?" as a response to the poor design, which later became an exploitable and recurring piece of audio that even made several appearances on MechaRaptor's side channel.

Several weeks after the release of these two videos, Rayque figured out how to record both gameplay (albeit without in-game sound) and his live reactions while playing games, which he then used for his first MapleStory videos, which is a three-part playthrough of the first infamous Kerning City Jump Quest: These were Rayque's first successful recordings of a game with Fraps, which became Rayque's main recording software which he still uses for all PC-gaming related videos except for the Single-Part-Videos. The original recording had to be split up in three parts because Youtube had a video length limitation of 10 minutes at the time.
 * MapleStory: Will Rayque fail in Jump Quest? [1/3]
 * MapleStory: Will Rayque fail in Jump Quest? [2/3]
 * MapleStory: Will Rayque fail in Jump Quest? [3/3]

By the end of 2008, Rayque purchased his first capture card device, the Dazzle. This became an important hardware device for many videos on the Rayque3 Channel, which Rayque used frequently until 2011. The last time Rayque used his Dazzle was in 2017, which was to provide a twenty-second comedic sketch for a Smesh Bros video released several days after.

2009 can be considered the most productive year on the Rayque3 Channel. Rayque produced over half of all Randomness videos in 2009 before the Second Era, including several infamous MapleStory videos that defined the series for what it stood for. This year also saw the release of Rayque's first walkthrough for the game WarioWare: Smooth Moves on the first of June.

In 2009, Rayque made prominent use of his Dazzle, which he used to produce several Randomness videos, but also to introduce several important series, including: The WarioWare: Smooth Moves Walkthrough was an important step in Rayque's career on the Rayque3 Channel. Originally, the WarioWare: Smooth Moves series was intended to be a much larger project: it would've been released with a dedicated website to include detailed information regarding the game. Every level and microgame would've had their own dedicated page and video, and the entire website was supposed to cover the complete game to its finest details. Rayque stated in the first part in his walkthrough that he would cover "all the stages and all the minigames", but that covering all the microgames might be too hard because the game has over two-hundred of them.
 * Multirandomness, which is still an ongoing classic on the Rayque3 channel
 * Donkey Kong 64 Bosses, Super Monkey Ball 2 and WarioWare: Smooth Moves, all of which helped shaping the Single-Part-Videos format during the Second Era.

Early drafts of the website existed before the release of the corresponding Walkthrough, but the idea was scrapped due to the overly ambitious undertaking it would require (spanning over two-hundred unique videos and close to three-hundred webpages). The walkthrough eventually only covered the singleplayer and multiplayer stages. In retrospect, the cancellation of the expansive additions to the walkthrough was one of the several foundations that gave birth to the Single-Part-Videos format during the Second Era.

Halfway through production, the walkthrough series had to go on hiatus after Rayque's computer crashed. This crash caused him to lose several finished parts of the walkthrough that had yet to be published at the time. Other videos that are lost forever with the crash include: The game WarioWare: Smooth Moves has an auto-save function, which means that it was not possible to rollback the save file, so Rayque could not re-record the footage that was lost. The only way for Rayque to solve this was to start a completely new save file and play through the game until he got at the point where the walkthrough was left at. This caused a delay of several weeks until the next part was published. The walkthrough was completed on the 23rd of July in 2010 with the release of part 22. Part 22 ended with a small teaser of Rayque's next project, which was a Let's Play for the game Sin & Punishment 2.
 * #46 "[Channel Announcement] New playthroughs coming soon!", April 2009
 * #54 "MapleStory - 7X Crusader (PicoPico) VS Mushmom", April 2009

Nearing the end of the WarioWare Smooth Moves Walkthrough, Rayque has uploaded several dedicated videos for a then newly found series, the MapleStory Guides. The series contains several informative videos about the game for certain content at the time of release. Rayque has discontinued the series after realizing the fact that because MapleStory updates frequently, that most of these videos could render themselves outdated in several months. While the videos are still online for the sake of historical purposes, the series was replaced by the High-Dex Hero series, which then became a very important ongoing series for the Rayque3 Channel. The final video from the MapleStory Guides was released in 2011. Nowadays, Rayque publishes informative articles occasionally on his blog.

The Let's Play for Sin & Punishment 2 was a very short lived project, including only five videos. The first part was released on the 15th of September, and the release of the sub-sequential parts had a gap of weeks between them, with part 2 and 3 releasing on the 4th/5th of December. The final part was released on the 11th of May, 2011. The project was cancelled due to a combination of having almost no view growth, mediocre reception and the quality not being on par with the standards Rayque required it to be. From the total of 8 stages in the game, only the first three stages were published, and while recordings of the fourth stage do exist, the videos were never released on the channel.

Due to the handling of the final parts for the WarioWare: Smooth Moves Walkthrough and how the Let's Play for Sin & Punishment 2 turned out to be, Rayque decided that doing Walkthroughs/Let's Play is not his cup of tea. This decision led in Rayque producing videos that no longer require his voice, and only use his voice when it's deemed necessary, like with multiplayer videos (Multirandomness and Rayque3 Lounge) or to add comedic relief to a video, such as with Randomness videos.

After the cancellation of the Sin & Punishment 2 Let's Play, the amount of new High-Dex Hero videos increased by a large amount, which became Rayque's main contribution to the channel during the transitional phase towards the Second Era. From that moment on, Rayque's focus on high quality videos started to begin, and his style of video production evolved further during the Second Era.

Second Era (2011 - Present)
More to come.

Trivia

 * His name origins from the Pokémon "Rayquaza".
 * Because he prefers to keep his real name hidden, people refers him as "Ray" or "Rayque".
 * As confirmed by his WarioWare: Smooth Moves Walkthrough, Rayque is left-handed.
 * Rayque used to live in Tokyo somewhere in the past, as mentioned several times on his blog. Several videos on the Rayque3 Channel confirms that his Nintendo 64 is Japanese.
 * He plays MapleStory Europe since the 30th of September, 2007, on a character with the same name. He has been part of the "FallenAngel" guild since 2008. Between May 2010 and November 2016, the guild went by the name "PatchedWings".
 * As mentioned on his Steam profile, Rayque prefers to play the Demoman class in Team Fortress 2.