Finding Balance In Completion: An Interview with Jirard "The Completionist" Khalil

Jirard Khalil, better known as "The Completionist", is a content creator who rose to popularity by 100% competing each game he plays. Beyond this main creative endeavor, he's also part of The Super Beard Bros. and has collaborated with many other YouTubers over the years. He can be seen all over the internet in various capacities and we were lucky enough to catch up to him recently at FanimeCon in San Jose! We discussed his start on YouTube, how he sets himself apart from other content creators, his ability to balance so many different projects at once, and lots more! Fans of Jirard, or those finding out about him for the first time, will want to read on and maybe check out some recent Completionist videos via the links at the end!

A-to-J: We’re here today with The Completionist. For those who don’t know you, could you please give us a quick introduction about yourself and your work?
Jirard: Yeah, for the last twelve years I have been called The Completionist. Every week it’s been Man vs Game. It’s evolved from kind of a review show about completing games to more or less a show about cataloguing my journey through completing games: whether things were difficult, whether I found any exploits, tricks, or secrets to help me on the journey, and any roadblocks I stumbled upon. I’ve been doing that for the last twelve years and I’ve completed over 450 games. I play video games a lot; it’s a very tough job that I created for myself but every step of the way has been worth it because I’ve been able to employ some great people like Alex, Pat, Ted, and the team back at home. We’re not the biggest YouTube channel on planet Earth and, honestly, it doesn’t need to be that way as long as folks love what we do; then we love making it.

A-to-J: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom just came out. I won’t ask you too much about it because I’m sure you’re going to make a video about it soon, but how are you enjoying it so far?
Jirard: So far so good. I’m about 120 hours into the game. I’ve been playing it 12 to 18 hours a day depending on my schedule; a lot of late nights. There is a lot to it; it’s very overwhelming and there’s a lot of collectibles. There’s a lot of quests that just show up. I’m really enjoying it though. I was kind of hoping that this would be a little bit closer to Majora’s Mask where the story would get a little weird or take us to a new area, but it seems that the story is much better this time around. It makes you care about Zelda and Ganondorf and the relation between the Hylians and the Ancient Ones. Overall, I’m really enjoying it. It’s just so much to collect and so little time. 

A-to-J: Awesome! There are a lot of game reviewers out there and I feel that you are one of the most unique because when I watch your videos you put so much emotion and care into a game no matter how bad it is. There are people like AVGN [The Angry Video Game Nerd] and Dunkey that need little explanation, and there are big sites like IGN. What made you decide to choose to be different from those reviewers? 
Jirard: The Completionist wasn’t meant to be a review show when I started it. When I came into the YouTube space I was helping a lot of content creators with writing, producing, and directing. I’d been doing YouTube prior to starting The Completionist, but it was a lot of stuff that no one was watching. I didn’t know how YouTube worked so it wasn’t until I made The Completionist that I learned how YouTube worked with the algorithms and how to market and advertise.
I think the thing that made it different in the beginning is that I was looking at IGN, I was looking at The [Angry Video Game] Nerd, I was looking at my friends like PeanutButterGamer and JonTron and looking at their content. Instead of going: “How do I be them/be better than them?" or "Do I evolve/be smart, unique and fast?” I instead asked: “How do I be different? How do I be an alternative?” In a pool of content creators where a majority of their takes are nuclear for the sake of comedy, brevity, and fun, how can I contribute to that noise? A lot of it was coming at it from a level of respect. There’s a while where there weren’t YouTubers that liked games. It was just like [Angry Video Game Nerd impression] “This game is ass!”, fart joke, and poop joke and taking out a hammer and beating up a copy of a game. That wasn’t me at all.  
In the beginning, I tried that. The humor didn’t land and I changed it overnight because I didn’t feel that I was happy with it. But the audience saw something in me and that made me realize that speaking from the heart is how I do things. You look at James Rolfe [The Angry Video Game Nerd] and Jon Jafari [JonTron] as characters but I don’t view myself as a character as The Completionist. I view myself as me. It just changed the flavor of how we made stuff. A lot of the show is inspired by looking at what outlets like IGN, Kotaku, and Game Informer did at a professional level and asking: “Is the value of this game worth the score that they gave it?”
I worked at Best Buy for a long time, so a lot of my buying habits were matched by the writers I used to follow like Greg Miller and Tim Gettys from Kinda Funny. I never really told them this and it’s not a drama thing, but there were a couple of reviews and pieces that they did that made me question them. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust their value, but what was shown was so small. How are you supposed to absorb a review of a game and say: “This game is worth $60,” when you’ve never gotten past beating the game or only played the first ten hours. For me I wanted to see what was on the other side of the rainbow. I wanted to know everything. If I’m going to tell you this game is worth $60, I better fucking find every single thing in it and tell you about it. Otherwise there’s no point in sharing my viewpoint.
The original vision of The Completionist was inspired by a Japanese show called Game Center CX where a man would trap himself in a room and he wouldn’t leave until he beat a classic game. I wanted The Completionist to be that but at the time, there was no space for that. You were a game reviewer, a sketch guy, a [Angry Video Game Nerd impression] “This game sucks balls!” hammering a cartridge, or a games journalist. There wasn’t really a medium. My goal was to find myself stuck between those two worlds and it wasn’t until a couple years in where I finally decided I could stretch my legs and make things I wanted to make instead of making what everyone else is. I think that’s where we learned to have our unique flavor and tone.
A long-winded answer. I’m so sorry. 

A-to-J: No, that’s totally fine. I can relate when it comes to being a completionist because as a teenager I always tried to Platinum or 100% every single game I played. That took up so much time and sometimes it was just too hard. So, have you every though about content that didn’t center around 100%-ing a game?
Jirard: Yes, the team at home begs me every day to come up with new concepts or strengthen The Completionist brand without jeopardizing production schedule because our production is very unorthodox. We are like South Park in that we make our show in seven days or less every week. It is not fun. It is a very difficult business. I’ve missed birthdays, I’ve missed weddings, I’ve missed funerals, I’ve missed so many moments in my personal life because our work cycle has been: Friday, I pick a game. I’m completing it Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Monday, I write a script. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, we’re in production: voice over, editing, sketches, filming all that stuff. Friday/Saturday, the video’s done; it comes out. That’s always been our production cycle since the beginning. The only thing that’s changed is that the team has gotten bigger so that I don’t have to suffer alone. It’s not just me suffering, it’s a team of five or six of us that are suffering together. Not that it builds brotherhood by any means but it makes the show a bit easier to produce.
So every single day, whether I do things with other content creators, I’m on G4 or hosting things on TV, we have yearned for a day where The Completionist is not the only flavor of show that we deliver. With the wrapping up of New Game Plus in a couple of weeks, we have a whole bunch of shows that we are going to pilot. Some are going to be great and big, and some are not going to be that. They’re going to fail. We have to learn to experiment with what the audience wants because our data tells us that if it’s not The Completionist, they won’t watch so we have to train our audience like: “Hey! This week I’m not completing this game, but instead I am completing this or I am doing this in real life as The Completionist!”

A-to-J: What are your thoughts on playing retro games using modern conveniences like rewind and save states? Do you think someone who completes a game like this really "beat" it?
Jirard: They can do whatever the hell they want. I think this era of gating whatever counts as "completion" because of modern technology is ridiculous. Look, they didn’t anticipate that people would be playing Mega Man 2 in 2023. They didn’t think that people would play Mario 1 or Zelda 1 in 2023. What they experience and what they want is for people to be able to play the game at the very least. If you make the game too hard and you’re like: “It has to be NES/Master System hard!” then you’re just telling people not to play the game. Frustration is frustration, right? If you don’t like a tomato, you’re not going to force yourself to eat a tomato. You’re going to go: “I’ve had a bite and I’m over it.” I think that the more opportunities and the more ability to let people play the game they want to play, I think that’s great. Save stating, fast forwarding, slowing down, rewind. That’s all great. I think that when it’s using hacks or cheats in the competitive scene like using AI bots or cheater systems, that’s not accessibility; that’s purposefully turning the odds in your favor to cheat the system in front of you. So yeah, I think anyone should play however they want to play as long as it means they get to enjoy the game safely.

A-to-J: That’s awesome! What is the hardest completion challenge you’ve done? Or are there games on which you completely gave up?
Jirard: I get this question all the time and it always changes depending on the time of year and which games I’ve done. There’s not really one game that’s too difficult that it really breaks me nowadays. I’ve played over 400 of them. I think the hardest thing is making a show about it because you have to find a unique way every week to not only complete a game, but also share your experience in a way that now one else has. That to me is a more difficult challenge. It’s almost like the game and my skill don’t matter. It’s literally the framing devices and how do I convince people to stick around and watch what we do. The games are almost like this week’s movie or actor appearing on the set, and I’m the director trying my best to tell a good movie with them. I definitely have a lot more favorite games that I do bad games. As you can tell on my channel I don’t play bad games very often, but when I do play bad games we try really hard to find a unique approach to it because anyone can take a hammer to a cartridge and call it a day. I think that’s the sauce that we try our best to figure out. Making the show is the hardest game that I have to complete every week.

A-to-J: You also do Super Beard Bros and have a lot of other projects. How do you manage to juggle them all?
Jirard: The team. They work their asses off to balance my schedule to work with theirs. Beard Bros has kind of been passed on to Alex who’s been doing a phenomenal job. I see him as the showrunner of Beard Bros while I’m the showrunner of The Completionist. Honestly it’s different flavors, and different skillsets and approaches. With The Completionist, I have to direct, write, act, and edit and work with the team that does that with me. Patrick is our editor over there; Cameron’s our head writer. We have our production team, Frazier and Michael who are part of scheduling.
When it comes to Beard Bros, I just get to be an actor. I get to be a participant and be a talent. I can just show up and Alex handles me the controller and says: “You’re going to do this today.” and I go: “Sir! Yes, sir!” and the conversations we have are what you see is what you get. It requires a different part of my brain so I don’t have to worry about being perfect as The Completionist. I get to have flaws and hang out with my friends and have a good time.
It’s everything else that we’re trying to build outside the company that’s more the bigger challenge. Doing conventions like Fanime, working at G4. I was the CEO of our company and I was an executive at Comcast for G4 working 20-hour days every day. It was really 6 AM until 2 AM every day for a year and a half to two years. I did it because the amount of money that was coming in was to protect our interests. YouTube doesn’t pay a lot. There’s not a lot of folks out there that pay a lot of YouTubers.  
There’s this kind of grandiose image of “Every YouTuber makes millions of dollars and they live in big mansions and things like that.”  It’s fake, it’s very fake. Unless you’re a YouTuber that has millions and millions of views every day/month and you have a sponsor willing to pay you what you’re worth, chances are you’re trying your best to come to conventions and sell merchandise and find sponsors and embrace Patreon as best you can. It creates a different breed of content creator: ones that are hungry and just want to live their lives and want to provide for their families, their friends and their team. We’re not at the level. We’ve never really been at that level. I try my best to put myself into every single project hoping this next thing we make is going to be a banger and someone’s going to look at it and say: “Here’s $10 million! Now, you get to make whatever you want and you can help your team, get them houses, mortgages, health care and expenses.”
That to me is what my job is: To see the vision of the company at large and ask: “How do we grow this business so that we’re not 50 years old completing games every single week?” Not that I don’t ever want to not complete a game but if I’m 50 years old still doing a YouTube channel that is barely making any money and my team is still with me, there’s a fundamental problem that we haven’t figured out. That’s the bigger part of the job that people don’t really know about.  

A-to-J: Can you tell us your favorite completion moment or one that you will cherish for a long time? 
Jirard: As far as gamer acumen, it’s hard to say because it feels like nowadays I’m slow and old compared to everyone else. Tears of the Kingdom has been out for two weeks and already, SmallAnt has spedrun the game in less than 200 hours. He’s completed it in about 136 hours and gotten everything to it. I’m not the fastest guy. I’m just the guaranteed guy. I will get it done and I will put in the man-hours.
I think the thing for me that is my greatest accomplishment is my career and the connections I’ve made and just the people who constantly give us life for what we do. You’re so used to making content in a bubble and you never know who is watching. We call ourselves “The YouTubers’ YouTuber.” While my audience at large may not be watching everything I do, but there are content creators out there who respect and trust and love me so much that they watch our content and what we do. We’re like the most unpopular popular channel that exists because the homies support us. That to me is the crowning achievement: Having so many friends, family and celebrities just coming out of the woodwork and go: “Man, the work you do is so fucking cool.”
We’re lucky to have close relationships like WWE superstar Xavier Woods, AEW superstar Adam Cole, Jamie Lee Curtis, Sisqó, and Terry Farrelll from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. These are all people that entered my life because they were fans and/or I was big fans of theirs and their loved ones told them to watch my stuff and they gave me a chance. And the fact that I have close relationships with these people and they see my content, see me as a person and see what we’re trying to do, is the coolest fucking thing on planet Earth.
And then you take that and come to a place like Fanime, where in the beginning, you don’t know if anyone’s going to know you are and then you do a huge panel for Mario Maker and everyone just loses their shit for an hour. You really don’t know who’s watching and why and when, but it just gives me life to know that for 12 years people are still with us supporting us as we try and support them with our content.

A-to-J: Amazing man! Lastly, can you give us a closing message for your fans?
Jirard: Oh man, a closing message for my fans. If you’re watching a content creator and you respect and trust and love them, believe in that feeling. Also recognize that not all of them are going to be having the best day all of the time. We are human, we do make mistakes, we will make mistakes, and people on our behalf will also make mistakes. I think that now, because of how social media is, everyone is looking at content creators like they are report cards of self-reflection. Does everyone get A+ for the performance? They said a swear? Is that a B? They yelled at a fan? It’s a C. You never really know what anyone’s day truly is. I always just say: “Hey! Let them have the empathy from you to let them know you care about them.”
It's a parasocial relationship, right? I’m a guy that you watch. You know nothing about me outside of the 15-30 minutes of The Completionist, or the 20 minutes of Beard Bros that you watch every day, so you feel like you know me. Maybe don’t come up to me and call me a piece of shit because of my opinion on a game. Not that you would, but that’s the kind of stuff that people don’t think about. They just get to go: “Oh, that’s the show I watch and this episode sucked today.” or “This person is bad now and I hate them.” I always say if you can just look at the empathetic viewpoint of a content creator, we are just people who were people had lives before this and will have lives after this, and we’re just trying our best to figure it all fucking out without rocking any boats. I think people forget that. They just assume that a tweet, or a Facebook post, or a message is absolute fact, opinion, and feeling when in actuality it’s just text on a phone. It doesn’t actually tell you anything about the person. We forget that. We live and die by 280 characters on Twitter and it’s frustrating because we’re all just fucking people figuring this all out.

We'd like to thank Jirard Khalil for the interview and we strongly encourage everyone to check out his various work as The Completionist and more via the links below. As always, keep an eye out for more from The Completionist in the future! Also, special thanks to FanimeCon for this opportunity!

For More Information On Jirard Khalil:
The Completionist YouTube Channel:
​https://www.youtube.com/@ThatOneVideoGamer
Super Beard Bros. YouTube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/c/superbeardbros
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/TheCompletionist
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Completionist
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thecompletionist/

The above interview was conducted by Tony Dinh, with assistance by Manuel Figueroa and photography by Ivan Aburto. Transcription by Jeffery Kelly.