Welcome to Millionaires, where we profile creators who have recently crossed the one million follower mark on platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch. There are creators crossing this threshold every week, and each of them has a story to tell about their success. Read previous installments here.
Occasionally, we here at Tubefilter like to use our Millionaires column to spotlight creators who are well past one million followers, but have hit some other big -million marker. That’s the case today, where we’re tapping in Viva La Dirt League, a gamer-loving sketch group that’s been making videos on YouTube since 2011.
We got the chance to chat with Adam King, who joined Viva La in 2015, after hitting it off with Rowan Bettjeman and Alan Morrison–the group’s two founders–through the New Zealand film industry. Bettjeman and Morrison already had an established YouTube channel where they made videos about Starcraft II, “but they were starting to lose interest in that and wanted to change things up,” King says.
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“I suggested that we start doing sketch comedy based around video games. Because we love video games and we all love film, it was a natural joining of two worlds,” he says. “We just started making just random fun comedy sketches that we came up with and slowly the channel rose in fame.”
That slow growth was only temporary. In 2016, the trio filmed the video that would put their channel on the minimap: Skip. It features Morrison as a fed-up video game NPC who’s sick of all these harried high-and-mighty adventurers skipping his very important dialogue, and kicks off Epic NPC Man, the series that would become one of Viva La Dirt League’s flagships. (That storyline comes to its satisfying conclusion, btw, in a video from 2019, where NPC Man finally lets loose on a dastardly dialogue skipper.)
Around the same time, the group introduced its “video game logic” series, where it lovingly pokes fun at mechanics in games like PUBG, Dead by Daylight, Red Dead Redemption, and [insert your favorite survival game name here] that you prrrrobably shouldn’t think that hard about. Like, how does every single survivor in Dead by Daylight magically acquire expert-level mechanic skills when they get kidnapped by the Entity? Is there a crash course class in that before they’re dumped into a box with Michael Myers?
Both those series have helped push Viva La Dirt League’s main channel up to more than 6 million subscribers. King, Bettjeman, and Morrison went full-time on Viva La in 2017, and their continued growth in the years since has seen them majorly expand their team, bringing in new talent like Ben Van Lier, Britt Scott Clark and Hamish Parkinson. They also recently purchased and renovated their own studio space, where they can have permanent sets like the tavern featured in their Dungeons & Dragons sessions and the fake electronics store “TechTown,” home to their workplace series Bored.
Heading into 2024, Viva La Dirt League has big plans.
We’ll let King tell you all about them below.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tubefilter: Hi! Very nice to chat. This is a special edition of our Millionaires column, because you guys are of course well past a million subscribers. We’re just excited to mark Viva’s development over the years, and I know you’re up to a bunch of new stuff. How’s the new studio space doing?
Adam King: It’s so good. It’s so nice to be in the studio now. We’ve been properly operating out of it since about the second half of last year. There’s still a few little things that we need to get up and running, but it’s so nice to have a space now.
Tubefilter: I know you had to do renos on it, quite a bit of reno.
Adam King: We bought a lot of renovations. We spent a fairly large amount of money renovating it. We bought basically just an empty rundown warehouse, empty leaking rundown warehouse that hadn’t been renovated since about the ’80s, so we needed to do a fairly extensive amount of renovations just to like everything, just to bring it up to health and safety codes. Then also we fully fitted it out, so they’re proper soundstage studios now as well so a lot of soundproofing, and everything to make it proper film quality level.
Tubefilter: Nooo, hopefully not leaking anymore?
Adam King: No, not leaking anymore.
Tubefilter: Good. Okay. Very good. Are you filming the majority of your stuff at the studio now?
Adam King: We film a lot at the studio now. It’s fantastic, but we are still do a lot of on-location filming as well. For our series NPC Man, one of our main locations is a historical village in Auckland, which is an exterior location we use to stand in for a fantasy village, so it’s still filmed there a lot. There’s still a lot of beautiful exterior locations in New Zealand that– we want the mountains and the forests and the rivers and the streams and everything, so there’ll still be a lot of that.
Our main interior locations, we’ve got a medieval tavern, which can also be changed into a king’s quarters or a dungeon or whatever we want it to be. We’ve got, for our other series Bored, we’ve got our TechTown location, which is a fake tech store and then we’ve got a big green screen as well for, if we want to do the interior of a volcano or something like that, we can use the green screen.
Tubefilter: I knew the Honeywood set was still exterior, but I was very curious about Bored. I’ve been watching your guys’ stuff for quite a long time, so I wanted to ask, you did a Dead by Daylight series a bit ago. Where did you guys film that, out of curiosity?
Adam King: There’s a paintball arena in Auckland that just looked really run-down and grungy and it just worked perfectly. Dead by Daylight, the way the game is, to me, gives very paintball arena vibes because all of the Dead by Daylight maps are so contained. Just the vibe that this particular paintball arena has in Auckland just had, they’ve got four arenas that they have that they run paintball in and just every single one has a very big Dead by Daylight vibe.
Tubefilter: DBD really, really does give paintball. I would never have thought of it, but with all the tiles the way they are, it really is laid out. Also, I know we jumped right in, and usually for more established creators, I try to avoid basic questions, but I also feel like there’s the potential that somebody may be reading this and doesn’t know you guys. If you want to give a little intro about the three of you and how you came together and how you ended up on YouTube in the first place, I feel like that would be helpful for some readers.
Adam King: Viva La Dirt League is the three of us, me, Rowan, and Alan, but really, to be honest, Viva La Dirt League is a much larger family now. We have a core cast of people like Ben and Britt and Hamish, Byron, Ellie, Rob, and there’s many, many more that often join in as well. Me, Alan, and Rowan met about eight years ago now. Alan and Rowan were already running Viva La Dirt League as a channel. They were doing Starcraft II music videos, so the channel already had a few thousand subscribers from that, but they were starting to lose interest in that and wanted to change things up.
I met them through the New Zealand film industry, and we were all lovers of video games. I suggested that we start doing sketch comedy based around video games. Because we love video games and we all love film, it was a natural joining of two worlds. We just started making just random fun comedy sketches that we came up with and slowly the channel rose in fame.
The thing that really kicked it into gear, though, is when we started the series Epic NPC Man and first coined what we call the “video game logic” series. NPC Man is based off World of Warcraft and Skyrim and Witcher and all those other kinds of RPG games, so that series takes the piss out of RPG games. Then, as you say, we’ve got Red Dead Logic, Dead by Daylight Logic. We did…
Tubefilter: Apex.
Adam King: Yes, Apex Logic, PUBG… I’m forgetting. We’ve done so many. There’s tons of others, basically picking holes in particular video games using their logic.
Tubefilter: With the Dead by Daylight series, something that really comes across is how you know the game. And not just the game–the community, the memes, the common joys and gripes of the playerbase. Where does that come from? Do you all play the games, or do people on staff? How do you pick which games to feature?
Adam King: Generally we only make sketches about games that us and the other creatives on the team play, because it just has to be coming from an authentic place. We get people all the time ask us, “Make a series about this game or that game” or whatever. It’s like, “We don’t play it.” Yes, it could be incredibly popular because the game’s incredibly popular, but because we don’t play it, the sketches won’t be authentic.
We’ve for the longest time wanted to do GTA roleplaying sketches, but none of us play GTA, so. People keep telling us to do League of Legends sketches, but we’d never played League of Legends. Because we don’t know that community and we don’t know the ins and outs of the game and we don’t know the logic of those games, it would just be us researching or us doing a couple of days playing, and the skits would feel very inauthentic. We just don’t really want to do that. So everything, all of the games that we’ve made sketches of, are all games that we play and know and love very well.
Tubefilter: It really comes across. Like specifically with DBD you had a skit about tunneling, and I was like, “Oh. Damn. They get it.”
Adam King: It’s good you know tunneling very well.
Tubefilter: It’s great. It’s the greatest time. It’s really fun. But yes, it definitely comes across.
Adam King: Tunneling, actually, that’s like the perfect example. Someone who’d only played Dead by Daylight for one or two days or just searched it online and tried to figure out what it’s about wouldn’t understand what tunneling is, and so we’d miss those gags that people who truly love it and play it know what it is.
Tubefilter: Exactly! Switching gears a little, what does the average week look like in the studio?
Adam King: The way we film these days is we film in big filming blocks, and we do four filming blocks a year, and those blocks are between three and four weeks. We do a March filming block, we do a June filming block, we do an August filming block, and we do a November filming block. Whenever we’re filming, a week looks like a normal film industry filming block where we’re on set filming every day.
Tubefilter: How big is your crew for those blocks?
Adam King: It depends what the sketches are that day. A small day could be a Bored filming day if it’s just a two-header between like Alan and Rowan, for example, and not much stunts or not much props or stuff. A crew day would just be 12 or 15 people. If we’ve got a big NPC Man day that has lots of stunts and lots of extras and lots of props and costumes, we sometimes get up to 50 people on set, which is nothing compared to a Hollywood feature film or something, but it’s still a fairly large for us.
So those are filming days. It’s a pretty standard filming day for any film production. Then outside of that, it’s coming to the studio, prepping for what we’re going to be filming in that upcoming block. We have our writers room meetings on Mondays, and that is brainstorming for new sketches or going over ones that we’ve already written and giving each other feedback on our scripts. Meetings, too–I’ve just come out of a meeting, planning for the scripts we’re doing for our March filming block and planning out how we’re going to be doing a few of those bigger, more complex sketches.
Then outside of those filming blocks, we do film quite a lot still. We do little one-off days or little half days here and there. For example, our D&D series gets filmed just slotted into wherever it needs to be. We do lots of various little bits and pieces. We’re doing some D&D filming on this Friday in a couple of days. Lots of fun little bits and pieces, little meetings here and there, little filming bits.
Tubefilter: Outside of filming blocks, what’s production like? How long does the average video take to come together from start to finish?
Adam King: Easy skits can literally be edited together in less than a day. Some Bored episodes get edited together like that, especially if they don’t have VFX or they don’t have a lot of– it’s not going to be a crazy edit or anything, but then we are upping the production quality these days and some skits can take weeks to finish, especially if it’s got large amounts of VFX or something in it.
We’ve got a team of four editors and two VFX people these days. It used to be me, Alan, and Rowan would edit everything. About probably four years ago, we started hiring editors to take over some of that workload so we could focus on everything else.
Now we have four editors, a head of post-production who runs those editors, and they do everything from editing the episodes to doing all our social media cutdowns using Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve. They edit our D&D series, which is also filmed with Blackmagic cameras. They go back into our old archive and they do all our compilations and do our memes. There’s a lot that goes on than just editing the videos. Once a video is done we do what we call the YouTube format, the final video, but there are still so many other deliverables and outputs that need to happen.
The post department of Viva La Dirt League is one of our largest departments, probably our largest department actually.
Tubefilter: Yes. Then for, as for writing, the three of you…?
Adam King: Yes. The three of us do a lot of the writing. We also have a writing team these days. It is creative that people would recognize. Ben Van Lier is one of our writers. Britt Scott Clark is one of our writers. Then we have a few writers as well who aren’t on screen. We’ve had people like Hamish and Byron write for us as well. Ellie’s done some writing for us. A lot of the creatives that we have join our writer’s room and help give ideas and then write scripts for us as well.
Tubefilter: I wanted to ask about Hamish specifically because I remember his first sketches as kind of like a bit part, and then he became such a sensation in the comments and with the audience. And Britt too! I remember her first stuff. I was curious about how you guys choose to bring people in for more permanent central roles. How you’ve integrated new onscreen talent.
Adam King: Hamish is a good example that– I knew him as an actor and a comedian in the New Zealand comedy space. The first couple of times we got him along, he is so amazing at improv comedy. His brain works at a million miles a minute and you just put him in front of a camera and give him a prompt and he will keep going. It is insane and he’s so, so funny.
The first few times that we had him along, we were just like, “We need to keep working with this guy. He’s so good. He’s so funny.” The more that we worked with him, the more he came a core cast member.
Then the same with Britt. We started working with her when she was just getting into acting. She was 20, 21 when we first started working with her. She just grew as an actor and a writer and a creative, and we wanted to keep working with her because the audience love her and we love working with her and she’s a fantastic actress. That’s the same with Ben and Ellie and Byron. Although we’d love to work with Byron more often, but unfortunately he is a successful actor outside of Viva in his own right. [laughs]
Tubefilter: Unfortunately in high demand.
Adam King: That’s basically how it goes with everyone. If we love working with them and the audience loved them, then yes, we’ll keep getting them back.
Tubefilter: It seems like that’s pretty common, where it’s both you and the audience instantly love them, so that’s good.
Adam King: We’re in a stage at the moment where we want to grow the cast of Viva further. We’re trying out new people and seeing if we like them and if the audience liked them. There are a few more growing talents within the Viva cast that we’re starting to work with more like Rhiannon and Brynley. There’s a few others that we’ve just had, Theo Shakes, who’s a TikToker, in a Bored episode, and we’re probably going to get him in a whole lot more. There’s a few people in upcoming episodes that we loved working with and that hopefully the audience will love to see once they hit the screen.
Tubefilter: How does the casting process work? Are you mostly sourcing people you already know, or doing open casting? Or both?
Adam King: A bit of both. Just being in the film industry, we know so many talented New Zealand actors and creatives, so that is easy to just sometimes go, “I know that person. Let’s grab them.” We have so many sketches now, and the need for extras and the need for bit parts and the need for day players, that we also just have a big production team and we go out to agencies and just do proper auditions and casting and stuff these days as well, go and try and find new talent that we don’t know.
Tubefilter: It’s very intimidating to grow a team this size and have this many people depend on you, and then you guys also opened this studio space. That’s a lot of investment, so I was curious how you hit that point where you were like, “Okay, we can sustain this. It can hold this growth.”
Adam King: We realized the need for a studio when basically the team had grown to a point where we were having large meetings in cafes or at our own houses and that kind of stuff. It was necessitated. We wanted a space for everyone to be together, to be able to work together, to be able to have those meetings and work collaboratively. We wanted our own permanent sets for things like TechTown and green screen and tavern and whatnot.
It was the growth of the team that necessitated getting the studio. Really, just financially, we could see that Viva was growing and that growing the team would help grow Viva further. We just made a bit of a gamble on ourselves and grew the team and got the studio, and it seems to be paying off so far.
Tubefilter: Do you have any plans or goals you’re working toward, aside from general growth?
Adam King: Yes. We’ve got our main channel, which does the game logic sketches and Bored, and we’ve got our D&D channel. We do want to start making– vertically make more content and so start some new YouTube channels for other different styles of content.
We’re also working on our own website at the moment as well, where we can start getting more premium content, possibly behind a paywall and have that as a bit of a community hub for Viva La Dirt League. Then outside of that, we’re looking bigger and beyond social media as well, looking at doing feature films, looking at doing video games, card games. What else is there in the works? Board games. Tons of different things. Comics, books, all that stuff.
Tubefilter: Oh, so you have lots going.
Adam King: Lots going on.
Tubefilter: Very interesting. You mentioned you want to grow more vertically. Are you thinking about video games?
Adam King: We do want to get into video games. We are working on a very, very– I don’t want to say small. That doesn’t sound right. A very indie game at the moment, just a nice little pixel game. We do want to move into video games as well because we have all of these IPs that we’ve created ourselves, like Epic NPC Man and Bored and a few other bits and pieces here and there. We may as well capitalize on some of those and make video games out of them.
Tubefilter: Then as for you guys launching other YouTube channels, are you still thinking of game content, or would it be content in other subjects?
Adam King: It’ll always be, not necessarily video game, but it’ll always be nerd-centric. We want to build out from that kind of core base of people who love pop culture, love nerd content, love the internet, build up from that. It could be food, it could be fashion, it could be lifestyle. We’re not 100% sure yet, but it’ll always still be based around that kind of nerd aesthetic.
Tubefilter: To wrap up, what has been your favorite part of this whole being-on-YouTube thing?
Adam King: Oh, I don’t know. There’s lots of things I love about it.
Tubefilter: You can answer more than one thing.
Adam King: I love the reaction that we get to skits. I’ll give you two examples. A couple of weeks ago, we put out just the weirdest skit about Britt turning into a mushroom. It was just the weirdest idea that we came up with in writer’s room. We’ve got a few more. We call it the MCU, the “Mushroom Cinematic Universe.”
We’ve got a few more coming out. I love being able to see from a weird dumbass idea that someone has come up with and how the audience reacts through the production process out to an audience reacting to that. I love getting into the comments and seeing what people are saying. It brings me so much joy. To see the reaction to those mushroom episodes, so, so happy.
Then we had an episode last week in the Bored series with Hamish and Ben having a fight in store. I’m the round card girl and I’ve got my shirt tied up and I’ve got pink shorts on and high heel boots on. Just to see the reaction to that kind of stuff is so fun.
Tubefilter: Yes, it pays off. It’s the improv goblin blood.
Adam King: Oh, yes. Then outside of just the actual reaction, the amount of messages that we get from the community of people saying that our skits have given them lifeblood. Not to get too dark, but people who have said that literally our skits have saved their lives because they’ve been feeling depressed or anxious, and just being able to come home and pop on our sketches and have a bit of levity in their life has literally saved them.
To be honest, it’s the little things that I love. I’m wearing one of our merch pieces at the moment that we just, we managed to make a gag out of a dingo, like the phrase, “That shit’s dingo,” or the stupid dance we made up called the flip-flap, or there’s just so many little things. In our D&D series, one little throwaway line, I called the team Baradun and the Dickheads, which was me just being mean to the other three. That is now the canon name of our D&D team, Baradun and the Dickheads. It’s just fun little stuff like that.
Tubefilter: Your community and your videos have always felt like an inside joke that you share with all of us.
Adam King: Yes! Those are the bits I love.
