Matt Lees

Matt Lees (also known by username Jam_Sponge) is a British video game's journalist. He is perhaps best known for his Abridged videos at VideoGamer.com and for his collaborations with Charlie Brooker co-writing the 2013 Channel 4 documentary How Videogames Changed the World and his 2014 Wipe. He currently runs gaming channel CoolGhosts.net, works with board game review site Shut Up & Sit Down and hosts the Games Media award winning video games podcast Daft Souls
Career
Lees first began reviewing games for UK games site DarkZero while at University doing a psychology degree. In a lot of instances the only money Lees received for these reviews was if he sold his review copy of the game. Lees has since disowned his reviews on this site saying they are terrible. Lees then went on to do Market Research for the Nintendo Wii and DS and then worked with the PR company Frank PR,doing work on Activision games such as Call of Duty and Guitar Hero. Whilst working for Frank PR ,Lees wrote for a personal blog which attracted the attention of Official Xbox Magazine and he began working there. Whilst at OXM Lees made a video about the then upcoming video game Dragons Dogma trying to convey how exciting he felt the game was which helped the games success. Whilst at OXM Lees met Quintin Smith,founder of board game review site Shut Up & Sit Down . Smith commissioned Lees to make a review for the site and Lees would later go on to work full time with Shut Up & Sit Down
In late 2012 Lees jumped ship to VideoGamer.com replacing Neon Kelly as video producer.At the time the VideoGamerTV YouTube channel was struggling with most videos only receiving hundreds of views.Left with free rein to do as he pleased with it Lees brought massive attention to the channel in 2013 with the video PS4 Announcement Abridged Version. The video remains the channels most popular video and brought the channel from a thousand subscribers to ninety thousand subscribers in a short space of time. Other videos of Lees such as Everything BioShock Infinite Get's Wrong and subsequent Abridged videos and DoTA 2 videos received hundreds of thousands of views also.
After the success of the Abridged series,Lees got a chance to work with one of his idols Charlie Brooker on the Channel 4 documentary How Video Games Changed The World which he co-wrote and featured in.He later on would work with Brooker again on his 2014 Wipe
In 2014 after feeling burned out and stressed,Lees decided to leave VideoGamer and set up a Patreon where patrons could fund him to make YouTube videos on his own.To this day his channel remains ad-free. Around this time Lees also set up the Podcast Daft Souls featuring guests from other gaming sites such as EuroGamer Kotaku IGN,GameSpot Rock, Paper, Shotgun,OffWorld,CVG as well as old colleagues from OXM and VideoGamer.com Daft Souls won the 2014 games media award for Best Podcast/Video.
In 2015,fed up of working on his own all the time,Lees renamed his channel and Patreon "Cool Ghosts" and set up CoolGhosts.net a small gaming site with emphasis on positivity in gaming.He runs this site with Quintin Smith

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See Also

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