JonTron

Jonathan Aryan Jafari (born March 24, 1990), better known online as JonTron, is an American YouTuber, comedian, and media reviewer.

He is best known for his eponymous YouTube web series JonTron, where he reviews and parodies video games, films and other media.

Jafari is the co-creator and former co-host of the Let's Play webseries Game Grumps, and co-created the video game entertainment website Normal Boots.

, his YouTube channel JonTronShow has 6.66 million subscribers and 1.32 billion views.

Jonathan Aryan Jafari was born in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, on March 24, 1990, to Afshin and Irene Jafari.

He is of Hungarian descent on his mother's side, and Iranian descent on his father's side.

He has also reviewed various unlicensed games, particularly based on the Pokémon franchise, as well as the 1997 film Titanic and Disney films.

In the latter, he observed China as being "farther away from U.S. jurisdiction, and much better at Disney bootlegging" and also remarked on unofficial online games based on the company's films.

Jafari occasionally uploads skits, as well as film reviews.

For his Halloween Specials, he reviewed the anthology horror television series Goosebumps and Are You Afraid of the Dark?.

According to Jafari, in an episode of Game Grumps, JonTron began achieving notability after a post on Reddit featuring Jafari's review of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System game DinoCity reached #1 on the website.

Jafari created a Newgrounds account under the name "BirdmanXZ6" in 2003, and uploaded five animations depicting anthropomorphic onions.

He attended Palos Verdes Peninsula High School from 2004 to 2008.

In 2006, he made a YouTube account under the same name.

Notable examples of topics are Flex Tape, rapper Soulja Boy's SouljaGame console, actress Gwyneth Paltrow's company Goop and its web series The Goop Lab, actor Dan Aykroyd's Crystal Head Vodka brand, and the 2007 TV series Kid Nation.

Jafari uploaded videos on ScrewAttack.com in 2010, reviewing games such as GoldenEye 007 and at ScrewAttack, he met creator Austin "PeanutButterGamer" Hargrave.

On August 31, 2010, Jafari created a YouTube channel called JonTronShow.

He stated that he chose the name JonTron because it was "reminiscent of technology" and that the show was originally going to be called JonTron 2.0.

He uploaded a two-part review of the Nintendo 64 version of the game Daikatana, the first installment in his JonTron series.

In each episode of JonTron, Jafari reviews singular games, as well as games of a particular theme, franchise, or genre.

He is usually accompanied by his green-cheeked parakeet, Jacques, who speaks with a robotic voice.

Jafari usually incorporates elements of sketch comedy into these episodes, to display his reactions to the video game that he is reviewing.

According to Jafari, in an episode of the Internet gaming webseries Game Grumps, Jacques was originally to speak in a stereotypical jive voice, with Jafari's mouth being super-imposed onto the character's face, rather than his eyes glowing red whenever he talked.

In his early days, he reviewed video games, showing fondness for Nintendo games and those developed by British game developer Rare mainly the games they made during the 90s, while being very critical of the games made since then like Star Fox Adventures and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts.

Jafari has reviewed numerous video game adaptations of popular franchises, such as Hercules, Barbie, Home Alone, Star Wars and Conan the Barbarian, as well as relatively unknown games for the NES like Monster Party and Takeshi's Challenge.

In 2011, Jafari created two now-defunct spin-off Let's Play channels.

The first, "JonTronStarcraft", has two videos of Jafari playing Blizzard Entertainment's real-time strategy game StarCraft.

The second channel, "JonTronLoL", has four videos of Jafari playing the MOBA game League of Legends.

Both channels have fewer than 25,000 subscribers.

In 2013 Paul Tamburro of CraveOnline said "Mixing a large dollop of offbeat humour with a light sprinkle of insightful commentary, JonTron's reviews of games of old have inspired many imitators, but none have proven to be more hilarious."

JonTronShow reached 1 million subscribers in May 2014.

Time magazine listed JonTron as 2015's seventh most searched Internet meme on Google.

In May 2015, Jafari released a spin-off web series on his YouTube channel titled JonTron's StarCade, in which he reviews games based on the Star Wars franchise.

The webseries included cameos from numerous other Internet personalities and actors, such as Egoraptor, Markiplier, Nathan Barnatt, Ross O'Donovan, and Kyle Hebert.

The series was produced by Maker Studios, a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company, and concluded in December 2015, after nine episodes.

Jafari occasionally uploads videos in which he comments on matters that he finds important, which are usually related to gaming.

This occurred most recently in 2016, with a video made in response to Blizzard Entertainment shutting down private servers of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft.

Jafari mostly criticized the shutdown of one of the most popular private servers, Nostalrius, which was a copy of the 1.12 version of the game.

Jafari's video helped to raise awareness on this subject, and lead to thousands of signatures on a Change.org petition.

Throughout 2019 and 2020, Jafari has continued to broaden the range of media covered on his show, instead of solely traditional video games.