People and Places – Kelsey Lewin – By Brett Weiss

Entrepreneur and video game historian Kelsey Lewin is only in her mid-twenties, but she already has well over 100,000 subscribers on her YouTube channel. She’s also the co-owner of Pink Gorilla Games in Seattle, and she spends her free time volunteering for the Video Game History Foundation.

Unlike many YouTubers, who go by some kind of catchy nickname, her channel is simply called “Kelsey Lewin”, which belies her relatively serious nature. Intelligent, composed, and mature beyond her years, Lewin can talk video game history with the most seasoned of gamers, and she obviously puts a lot of time and energy into her various projects, including her videos, which cover such obscure topics as the Game Boy Sewing Machine and the Super Nintendo LifeCycle.

Where does Lewin get her work ethic and dedication to her craft? She cites her parents as her biggest influence.

“They were great role models,” she says. “They worked their butts off. My dad always told me that no one can fake hard work and knowledge, so I put my head down and said, ‘I’m just gonna learn. I’m gonna do the work and learn as much as I can.’ When I discov- ered I loved video game history, it was like, ‘sit down and learn and keep learning,’ and I’m learning more every day.”

Lewin, who has a Major in Communications and a Minor in Business from the University of Washington, has been a gamer since she was around four years old. She says her parents weren’t “super into” video games, but they never discouraged her interest either. In fact, it was her dad’s portable game system that got her started.

“When the original Game Boy came out, it was sort of marketed to businessmen,” she says. “It was like, ‘This is what you can do on an airplane when you guys get bored, so my dad got one. He was never really a gamer. He liked sports. He had those Mattel handhelds, Baseball and Football. That was about the extent of his video game experience, if you can even call it that, up until the Game Boy.