Markiplier
Family
His dog’s name is Chica.
Gaming Origins
Makiplier was born in Hawaii, but his family soon moved to Cincinnati in Ohio after his dad retired from the military and got a job as a layout artist there. He and his brother grew up either playing PC games or exploring the woods behind their house in their spare time. His dad introduced them to video games at a very young age and later bought them a Super Nintendo Entertainment System.
However, the woodland adventures stopped when his family was forced to move into a smaller hose when his parents divorced. When he was in high school, he joined the school band as a trumpet player. Right before he was about to start college, he found out that his father was diagnosed with cancer. Although he had originally planned on pursuing video game development, he decided to go with Engineering, as he felt that this would be a more responsible decision and because he knew that his father would be happier with it. His father passed away when he was in college.
During college, when he was around 22 years old, Markiplier was working part-time as an engineering co-op, but was laid off from his job. He went through a series of other difficult events, including surgery on an adrenal tumor and a bad relationship.
These things made him reconsider what he was doing with his life, so he searched for a new outlet. He attempted to write comics, as he was inspired by his brother who works as a comic book artist, but that didn’t work out. He also attempted drawing, video game programming and focusing his attention on his Biomedical Engineering degree. However, none of that really appealed to him.
Professional Gaming
After he had been trying out different things for a while, Markiplier’s brother then told him about ‘Let’s Play’ YouTube videos, and he decided to look into them. He saw this as an opportunity to combine his love of video games with practicing his voice acting in case he chose to attempt a career in that field in the future. He found that he enjoyed creating them and continued to do so even though he wasn’t able to monetize his content at the time.
His first channel was banned at 2,000 followers due to an algorithm error on YouTube’s part when he was at around 2,000 subscribers. He put out a video explaining the situation to his followers and requested that they follow his new channel. 600 of them did, which made him realize that there were people who genuinely followed his content. This motivated him to continue to produce content.
It was only after a year of consistent content creation that he finally started monetizing his content. At that point, he was torn between attempting to make a career out of YouTube or choosing to complete his degree and pursue a career in his field. In the end, he decided to drop out of college when he only had two semesters left to complete his degree, in order to pursue his YouTube career.
His mother was initially extremely upset with him when she found out what he had done, but she has since come around to it in light of his success, and even occasionally features in his content.
In 2019, he started his own clothing brand called ‘Cloak’ alongside Jacksepticeye, and also occasionally streams with him as well as PewDiePie.
Relationships
He is dating PlanetPeebs.
Streaming Hours
Aside from his weekly podcast on Tuesdays at 19:00 UTC, his other streams are sporadic.
Interesting Facts
He is severely allergic to alcohol.
Quotes
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I realized very quickly that being an introvert shuts you down from a lot of opportunities. Pushing myself out of my shell of being an introvert and trying to actually make connections with people is the only way that I’ve progressed in my life. It’s the difference between pre-surgery and post-surgery where before surgery I was very closed off. I didn’t feel like I needed to interact with anybody and then I realized that I had to put myself out there if I was going to have any success in the world.