Regis Altare hopes Alban Knox collab “opens the gate” for Hololive & NIJISANJI

Regis Altare and Alban Knox are breaking down barriers between Hololive and NIJISANJI EN with the two stars collabing for the first time. The VTuber revealed how it came to being, and his hopes for “opening the gate” for more streams between the agencies.

The walls between Hololive and NIJISANJI have been torn down this week. For more than two years, the English-speaking talents of the two agencies have never collaborated, and previous attempts were shot down at the last second.

However that deadlock was broken when TEMPUS guild leader Regis Altare announced his Terraria stream with Alban Knox on October 15. It will be the first collaboration between Hololive EN and NIJISANJI EN, more than two years after the former debuted with Myth.

The collaboration is a big moment for the two agencies and their talents, who have long expressed their desires to crossover. They are big supporters of each other on Twitter, but never appeared on stream together.

Regis Altare doesn’t want to get “too meta” with it though, and told fans ahead of the collaboration it’s just two friends playing games together ⁠— and that’s all it should be.

“We messaged each other and I was like ‘bro’. And he was like ‘bro’. And like, ‘bro’. And then the collab was made,” he laughed.

“He’s really cool. He’s fun. We played a little Zomboid off stream and we were talking like ‘hey why can’t we have a collab between us? What’s stopping us?’ We talked to our managers, we talked to the company, and we were like ‘can we push this through?’ It took a lot of talking.

“I’m hoping with this collab here, I don’t want to get too meta with it, but my thoughts on this. It’s sincerely just that I want to play with Alban Knox because he’s cool. He’s my friend. And that’s all it should be at the end of the day.

“It shouldn’t be anything about numbers. It shouldn’t be about companies or the VTuber world, whatever it is. It’s really all just about ‘I want to play with this cool guy,’ right?”

As for what it means for the future between the two agencies? Regis wants there to be more collaboration between Hololive and NIJISANJI. There’s already been another stream between Selen Tatsuki, Kureiji Ollie, and Vestia Zeta confirmed, and fans want more.

The talents just want to play on stream with their friends, regardless of their agency affiliation.

“I don’t know if this is going to open up things for more people,” he continued. “I don’t know if it’s going to make it so others can do collabs too. 

“But in the future if this does lead to a future where any of the talents from any companies can collaborate without fear of fans, of companies, of getting dunked on the internet. I really hope this can be the first step towards opening the gate. Someone’s gotta do it right?

“Alban and I, we both talked about this, and we said things have got to change. So maybe starting from this we can make small changes. We can… lead the charge. It’s nothing about companies. We just want to play games because we’re friends. I hope people can understand that.”