Image via YouTube/WIRED

Remember when your parents said you can’t make money playing video games? Yes, they didn’t know what they were talking about. Just ask Mark Fischbach, better known by his YouTube name, Markiplier.

With over 33.5 million subscribers and a total of 18 billion views across all of its uploads, Markiplier is one of the most recognizable names in the gaming community. The channel is in the top 100 most popular on YouTube and is reportedly worth a goddamn $35 million.

The 33-year-old uploaded his first video ten years ago. As an aspiring actor, he originally chose to focus on sketch comedy. Since his goal was to play all the characters in his skits, Mark combined his name with “multiplier” to create his famous name “Markiplier”. It wasn’t until he shifted his focus to independent and horror gameplay playthroughs that he achieved stardom. He has since become one of the faces of YouTube’s massive gaming content, having appeared on national broadcasts such as Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Larry King NOWand The Today Show.

What makes the YouTube community so obsessed with Markiplier? It’s all based on his eccentric personality, playing video games and laughing. So let’s take a look at some of Mark’s most famous and best videos on his main channel, Markiplier.

“Heave Ho MEGA EPISODE with Jack, Bob, Wade”

Being a (mainly) gaming channel, let’s start with one of the most entertaining gaming videos on the channel, the “Heave Ho MEGA EPISODE”. Mark regularly collaborates with his cohorts, Bob and Wade. When the three are together, it makes for some seriously silly fun. In this particular video, the gang is joined by fellow YouTuber Sean William McLoughlin, better known to fans as Jacksepticeye.

Whenever Mark and the gang jump on a parlor game, the star of the show inevitably becomes Wade. For someone who makes his living playing games, he seems to be basically all terrible, which is actually refreshing. Rather than a pro gamer sliding through it at the speed of light, Wade represents the rest of us, and it’s hilarious. What makes it better is how Sean’s frustration grows until it’s clear he’s tired of Wade’s accidents. I also wonder if Wade is deliberately sabotaging the group for his own amusement.

“WARNING: ONLY GAME IN YEARS: Five Nights at Freddy’s Part 1”

“This is pretty much the most terrifying game I’ve ever played,” shouted Mark in just minutes of play Five nights at Freddy’s. With that, the Markiplier Empire was really born.

Uploaded in 2014, Mark jumped in FNAF, a game that catapulted its popularity. As he points out in the video, his subscribers had urged him to give this one a try. Around that time, the original FNAF fame was an independent sensation. YouTubers all around were jumping on the bandwagon and their audiences couldn’t get enough.

What Mark’s fans appreciated, of course, is the host’s take on the experience. While he played the game, he covered it with his crazy faces and sometimes hilarious narration. It reversed the horror and stepped up the comedy. Frankly, he’s just saying what we’re all thinking with a game so stressful. It became his third most popular upload ever with 104,789,909 views so far.

“MEOW”

Clearly this is the video that propelled Markiplier to the top of the YouTube charts. Interestingly, since he has made his mark mostly on gaming videos, his most popular video is one of his simplest. It’s literally just that he uses cheap images to give cats his mouth and voice. That is it.

It’s hard to believe that out of all of Markiplier’s content, THIS is what has amassed over 363 million views since it was uploaded in 2015. It’s by far his most watched video, trailing second far behind at 148 million, which is impressive in and of itself. Sure, it’s the dog version, “WOOF”.

While “MEOW” may be number one in popularity, this simple trick of Mark putting his mouth on cute animals to get them to say usually inappropriate things is hugely popular. Inconspicuous as it may be, three of his top five videos fall into this category, and together they rack up over 609 million views.

Is this his single best effort on his expanded channel? Not hardly, but who cares? If something so simple gets you over 350 million views, you’ve done something right and it deserves its place on today’s list.

“GTA 5 Funny Moments #1: LAUGHING TOO HARD!!”

One of the best aspects of Markiplier’s multiplayer videos is that it’s all of us. Whether you’re in the same room or connected through a server, Mark and his YouTuber cohorts do all the ridiculous things each of us does when we go crazy with our friends. Throw Grand Theft Auto Vopen world shenanigans into the mix, and this is a very entertaining video.

The game itself is made to be as insane as you want it to be. As it approaches its 10th anniversary, GTA VThe lush landscape and over-the-top cars and weapons beg you to break the law in hilarious fashion. That’s exactly what Mark and his team do. Seeing them obsessively trying to steal a fighter jet from the Los Santos military base will have you reaching for your copy of the game.

“Bobs fridge”

Mark’s quote sums up what you’re getting yourself into with this video: “They delivered a refrigerator so violently your house thought it was an earthquake?” To which Bob replied, “Yeah, and this was the right team.”

When you have millions of followers, you naturally expand into new territory. For example, Mark added a podcast to his list of projects. I can’t say I listened to much distractible, but this one caught my attention. Mark, Bob and Wade had a competition to see who could tell the funniest (I assume true) story. Bob won this round hands down with a story of mounting rage and probably the most inept delivery teams in the country.

You have to be well into adulthood to fully appreciate his story of Lowe’s woe. Using his YouTube money to buy a new refrigerator, Bob is taken on a wild and frustrating ride through the world of appliance delivery. He goes through two delivery teams, a water leak, and enough suppressed anger to trigger a tsunami. It’s Bob’s enthusiastic stories that make it all so funny. That and the fact that it actually happened the day Mark recorded that particular podcast.

There is a full story on the Distractible channel and I highly recommend reading Bob’s full overview.

“THE MI LITERALLY THROWS A CHAIR IN ANGER | Getting over it – part 1”

To be completely honest, I didn’t understand what the Markiplier fuss was about before watching this video. Admittedly, I’m not a YouTube aficionado; I leave that mainly to the younger generation. My teenage kids absolutely loved this guy’s content, and they watched it religiously. One afternoon I heard incessant yelling, cursing and screaming, which caught my attention for all the wrong reasons. Then I saw this game, and I fully understood where it came from.

Getting Over It With Bennett Fody was purposely made to be insanely frustrating. Here you have, I assume, Bennett in a cast iron pot with some sort of pickaxe/sledgehammer. As a player, you let the little bald Bennett (with his superhuman upper body strength) throw himself up a mountain step by step in frustration.

Sounds simple enough, right? wrong. All it takes is an infinitesimal false move and Bennett tumbles down the mountain, sometimes all the way to the starting position. To antagonize the players, the developers have added a voiceover that comforts you with wise words about losing. Trust me, you will lose at this game, and that voice will keep giving you unwanted quotes over and over again. By the 200th time, it’s clear those little nuggets aren’t meant for comfort at all; it’s browbeating, and it’s hilarious… as long as it happens to someone else. Enter: Markiplier.

Over eight videos, Mark belongs to all of us. Just as he’s making progress, he miscalculates a climb and heads down the mountain. With each fall, Mark gets more and more irritated. Soon that annoyance ferments into anger before turning into full-blown rage. And there are eight videos of Mark going crazy. He screams, knocks over his chair and looks like he’s on the brink of a nervous breakdown.

Until then I was not interested in Markiplier. Watching him slam his chair against the wall over a video game made me think of so many frustrating hours of tiny, stupid jumps over winged turtles in Super Mario Bros. 3. Like I said, it’s great content if it happens to someone else.