Markiplier
Mark Edward Fischbach, known online as Markiplier, is an American YouTuber, gamer-commentator, actor, and comedian. Originally from Honolulu, Hawaii, he began his career in Cincinnati, Ohio, and is currently based in Los Angeles, California.
, his channel has over 13.3 billion total video views and over 26 million subscribers. Fischbach specializes in Let's Play videos, commonly of survival horror video games.
YouTube career
Channel format
Fischbach is primarily known for his playthroughs of indie and horror games, including the Five Nights at Freddy's series, ' and, Garry's Mod, Happy Wheels, Surgeon Simulator, SCP – Containment Breach and ', among others.Fischbach has collaborated on sketch comedy and gaming videos with a number of fellow YouTubers, including Crankgameplays, Jacksepticeye, LordMinion777, Muyskerm, PewDiePie, Matthias, Game Grumps, Cyndago, Yamimash, Jacksfilms, CaptainSparklez, Egoraptor and LixianTV, who currently works as his editor. He has also collaborated with celebrities such as Jack Black and Jimmy Kimmel. He has had acting appearances in TomSka's asdfmovie series, , Disney XD's Gamer's Guide to Pretty Much Everything, and and Five Nights at Freddy's: The Musical.
A recurring staple of Fischbach's channel are charity livestreams, during which he plays games while campaigning and collecting donations for various charities, including Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance, and Best Friends Animal Society. According to Fischbach, he and his viewers have raised a total of over $3,000,000 as of April 2018.
History
Early years and switch to MarkiplierGAME (2012–2013)
Fischbach first joined YouTube on March 6, 2012, creating a channel under the username "Markiplier", and uploaded his first video on April 4, 2012. Fischbach's original intent for the channel was sketch comedy where he would be portraying all of the characters in the sketches. This led to the creation of the name "Markiplier", a portmanteau of Mark and multiplier. Fischbach's first series was a playthrough of the video game Amnesia: The Dark Descent. After playing several other game series, including Penumbra and Dead Space, YouTube banned Fischbach's AdSense account, and he created a new channel on May 26, 2012, MarkiplierGAME.Channel growth and move to Los Angeles (2014)
In 2014, the MarkiplierGAME channel was listed on NewMediaRockstars Top 100 Channels, ranked at number 61. That year, Fischbach announced he was planning to move to Los Angeles, California to be closer to other resources for his channel, such as the YouTube Space and other content creators. Fischbach and fellow YouTuber Jenna Mae appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in September 2015 following backlash Kimmel received regarding jokes he made about YouTube and Let's Play videos. In 2015, he was rated sixth in a list of the twenty most influential celebrities among teenagers in the United States.Hiatus and breaking 10 million subscribers (2015)
Beginning in 2015, Fischbach lived with fellow YouTubers Daniel Kyre and Ryan Magee, who created and ran the YouTube sketch comedy and music channel Cyndago. Matt Watson from Kids w/ Problems later joined Cyndago after they moved to Los Angeles. Their work was noted for having unexpected endings and dark, often disturbing, humor. Cyndago disbanded following the death of Daniel Kyre. At the time of their disbandment, the group made forty sketches and fourteen original songs, many of them featuring Fischbach. After the death of Daniel Kyre and disbandment of Cyndago, Fischbach temporarily went on hiatus from September 17, 2015 to October 5, 2015. He returned and reached 10 million subscribers on October 15, 2015.2015–present
Fischbach co-hosted the 2015 South by Southwest Gaming Awards with The Legend of Korra voice actor Janet Varney, and was featured in YouTube's year-end special YouTube Rewind.In January 2016, Fischbach signed to Revelmode, a subnetwork to Maker Studios, along with other YouTubers such as Jacksepticeye and PewDiePie. Revelmode was disbanded in early 2017 as a result of PewDiePie being cut from Maker Studios. He subsequently signed to another Maker Studios sub-network, Polaris.
Throughout 2016, Fischbach moved some of his focus to comedy sketches, showing his aspiration of improvisational theatre. In 2017, Fischbach posted an interactive Choose Your Own Adventure-style video titled "A Date With Markiplier", which was well received by fans.
In October 2019, Fischbach announced a new Choose Your Own Adventure story similar to 2017's A Date With Markiplier, a YouTube Originals production titled A Heist With Markiplier. Produced by Fischbach and Rooster Teeth, this series contains 31 possible endings and stars other YouTubers such as Rosanna Pansino, Matthew Patrick, and Game Grumps.
On November 15, 2019, Fischbach launched a new channel with fellow YouTuber Ethan Nestor called Unus Annus, a channel that plans to post a single video every day for one year before being deleted along with all of the videos on the channel, with no reuploads of the channel from two of them. The channel shot to early success, gaining 1 million subscribers in its first 5 days and over 11.5 million video views in its first week.
Other ventures
Fischbach joined the board of comic book publisher Red Giant Entertainment in November 2014. In June of that year at the San Diego Comic-Con, he co-hosted a panel with figures from the company including CEO Benny R. Powell, and writers David Campiti, Mort Castle, David Lawrence, and Brian Augustyn. In 2016, it was announced that he would appear in his own line of comics.Fischbach signed with William Morris Endeavor in late 2016, having expressed interest in branching out from YouTube content.
In 2014, he provided guest vocals in the song "Smash!" by Starbomb, which parodies Super Smash Bros., from their second album Player Select. Since 2017 he has voiced the character 5.0.5 in the Cartoon Network series Villainous.
In 2018, Markiplier announced the launch of a new fashion brand called Cloak, in a joint venture with Jacksepticeye. In 2020, fellow YouTuber and streamer Pokimane joined Cloak as a partner and creative director.