Joe Vargas American YouTuber With 3.2M Subscribers

Early life

Joe Vargas, whose full name is Jose Antonio Vargas, was born in Austin, Texas, on 18 June 1984. He is an American media commentator and YouTuber, and records list his occupations as journalist and YouTuber. He is better known to his audience through the on-screen character Angry Joe, the host of his review channel.

Career

Vargas started his YouTube channel, AngryJoeShow, on 4 October 2008. The first upload was a video on Madden 2009 and the complaints of hardcore gamers. The channel's main format has him play the character Angry Joe, who reviews a video game and gives it a mark on a scale from one to ten. The reviews are usually built from comedy sketches and clips taken from his live streams on Twitch. As well as games, he reviews films on the same channel.

By April 2021 the channel had passed one billion views and had more than 3.2 million subscribers. The most recent count in the records, from April 2025, puts it at about 3.3 million subscribers.

Vargas and his channel have been covered in media reporting on YouTube, mostly because of his public opposition to what he regards as overreach in copyright claims. His interest in the subject came from an incident in which Nintendo of America filed a copyright claim against a video of him playing Mario Party 10.

For a time Vargas was affiliated with Blistered Thumbs, part of the production company Channel Awesome. He left in April 2018, at a time when Channel Awesome and many of its former producers, several of whom he had previously known, were at the centre of a public controversy.

In April 2018 he also launched a Kickstarter campaign with Jasco Games for a board game, Street Fighter: The Miniatures Game, with miniature figures of licensed characters from the Street Fighter video game series. The campaign raised 400,000 dollars on its first day, which brought coverage in the press. The game began shipping to backers in January 2021. He later worked with Jasco Games on a second project, Mortal Kombat: The Miniatures Game, built on the license of the same name.

Recognition

Vargas was nominated for Content Creator of the Year at The Game Awards in 2016. No wins are recorded for him in the database, and the nomination is the only award entry listed.