What is Extra Credits?

Welcome!

We’re an educational Youtube channel made up of entertainment enthusiasts with backgrounds in game design, television production, literature and academia. Our team creates short-form animated video essays every week about game design, world history, mythology, and other subjects, all of which may or may not involve a cat! Like this one:

Our Patreon Story

Extra Credits started uploading videos to the interweb over ten years ago. Then in September of 2013, we created the first Extra History episodes as a sponsored one-off, and were blown away by the response! The episodes were a hit with our community, and not a week went by without a comment or an email asking, "Will Extra History ever come back?" But as much as we wanted to, we didn’t have the resources to make a new show… until Patreon. Your support on Patreon allowed us to hire enough staff to produce Extra History weekly, with stretch goals that lead to creating the first Extra Mythology.

And as we’ve worked with our community over the years, we’ve learned a ton along the way. In fact, in our 2019 community survey, you told us you’d like to see a more centralized place to support our channel as a whole, rather than individual shows. And thus, our current Patreon was born.

Okay, but why Patreon?

Creating multiple high-quality videos each week takes a small army of folks including writers, illustrators, animators, composers, voice-over artists, editors, and more. We also believe that people who produce quality work should be paid a quality wage. And while YouTube ad revenue does help, it alone can’t cover our production costs.

Your ongoing support on Patreon guarantees that we can continue making videos, paying our crew, and keep Zoey rolling in cat treats. Not to mention, your generosity gives us the ability to experiment with and produce new content in the future, like we did originally with Extra Mythology and Extra Politics.

Also Patreon lets us connect with you on a more personal level than YouTube alone ever could. It allows us to directly interact with you via our new EC Discord, chat with you during our Q&A live stream, hear what you’d like covered next on Extra History with our patron voting system, and provide you with some additional goodies along the way.

Of course, none of this would be possible without your help. We’re eternally grateful for all the love and support you’ve shown us on Patreon and beyond, and we hope to continue making educational content you connect with for years to come.