Alan and Rowan founded the channel in 2011 as a parody music group. When Adam joined in 2015, the group switched its focus to sketches about gaming culture.
The New Zealand comedy group overcame geographical isolation and a lack of filming resources to gain a global following.
The channel has become a full-time operation, with nearly a dozen actors and dozens of crew members developing videos. They shoot four months of the year and use the other eight to prepare scripts and produce the final videos.

Why We Stan: Viva La Dirt League embraced a tilt that combined gaming and comedy. It built a $4M studio with fan support, though it still relies on New Zealand locales for some videos.

The Story of Viva La Dirt League

The rolling hillsides, dramatic fjords, and rugged mountains of New Zealand are famous to pop culture fans as the filming location of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. It should be no surprise that in the last decade the island nation has been home to another pop cultural sensation.

Viva La Dirt League is a YouTube channel that specializes in sketch comedy, poking fun at relatable bizarre experiences playing video and tabletop games. The channel launched in 2011 as a parody boy band before switching to gaming humor in 2015. Today, the main channel has 6.5M subscribers with an additional 423K on their channel dedicated to Dungeons and Dragons content.

Adam King joined the original channel co-founders Rowan Bettjemann and Alan Morrison in 2015. But it’s more than that now, Adam tells Tubefilter. “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.”

“I met them through the New Zealand film industry, and we were all lovers of video games,” Adam says. “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.”

The group went full time in 2017, according to Radio New Zealand.

Adam tells RNZ that the channel’s home country accounts for less than 1% of the audience. “America, Europe, Britain are some of the top ones, Australia is a really big one as well,” he says. “Although we’re getting a lot of growth in the last couple of years in India and Southeast Asia, which is really cool.”

Alan once told Blizzard, “I love New Zealand, but it’s definitely not an advantage for Viva.” Rowan Bettjeman explained in the same interview, “It is hard being kind of isolated from the rest of the world … Different waking hours make it tricky. We release music videos on Tuesday morning, New Zealand time, because it’s Monday in America. You really need to time it right.”

Despite the picturesque landscape well suited for Middle watch, being in New Zealand has created some filming and recording challenges. In 2013, Rowan told Blizzard that the channel had partnered with Maker Studio and that they would have had access to professional studio space if they had been in Los Angeles. As for fantasy settings, Adam told RNZ about one small issue there: “New Zealand is strangely very devoid of castles and buildings prior to the 1700s.”

Last year, the group was able to solve the interior setting issue. Viva La Dirt League built its own studio, thanks to the $4M contributed by fans of the channel.

“It’s like a culmination of all the things that we’ve needed for the longest time, a couple of permanent sets for our shows,” Adam told RNZ.

The new facility, a converted warehouse, includes a tech store set for their running series Bored about frustrated retail workers, a large green screen, and a medieval tavern setting frequently used in their Video Game Logic and D&D logic series. However, many of their other projects rely on other locations.

“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,” Adam tells Tubefilter.

One of Viva La Dirt League’s oldest and most popular series, Epic NPC Man, frequently uses a historical village in Auckland as the stand-in for a fantasy town. Another series, poking fun at the game Dead By Daylight, is usually filmed in a paintball arena to match the feel of the game. Regardless of the location, VLDL films most of its sketches in March, June, August, and November. “We film these days in big filming … and those blocks are between three and four weeks,” Adam tells TubeFilter. During these blocks, the group is on set or location every day, much like a traditional film project.

Depending on what series they’re shooting, between 12 and 50 crewmembers could be involved. Almost all of the scriptwriting and editing for these skits are completed during the eight non-filming months.

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