featured image

History was made yesterday. It is very possible that you were not aware of it.

The wildly popular — and mysterious —Minecraft content creator known as Dream finally revealed his face. This came after an announcement of the face reveal in late September, followed by reactions from his online friends who saw his face before showing it to the rest of the world.

For non-Minecraft players and probably just about anyone under the age of 40, reading headlines like “Dream Finally Reveals Its Face” probably felt a bit like reading word salad. How can a dream show its face? Wait, did the creator of? Minecraft do you have a dream that revealed his face? What?

So who is Dream and why is his face so important? I’ll do my best to explain.

What does dreaming do?

Dream – whose real name is Clay – is a 23-year-old Minecraft content creator. The building block game has a truly massive online community and the top content creators are kings among YouTubers. You can check out his YouTube channel to get an idea of ​​his content and style.

What’s wrong with his face?

Until the big reveal this week, Dream never showed his face. He hid it behind a smiley face, which in turn became an iconic part of the YouTuber’s branding, inspiring fan art and establishing some mystique around his personality. It certainly gives it a distinct look that sets Dream apart from the rest of the Minecraft content creators.

Dream has a huge number of online followers – rival big celebrities

Be that as it may, between his captivating personality, mystique and gaming prowess, Dream has gained a massive following on social media and YouTube since he started creating content three years ago. Few famous celebrities are as big as Dream.

Dream has 30.6 million YouTube subscribers and counting (versus 30.4 million last night). That’s not quite in the same league as PewDiePie (111 million) or Mr. Beast (105 million and wins fast)

But it’s on the margins of major celebrities like Taylor Swift (47.5 million) and Billie Eilish (46.7 million) and more than other popular gaming YouTubers like Ninja (23.8 million). He follows popular gaming YouTuber Markiplier (33.7 million), but barely.

So how big was this face reveal?

About 20 million people have watched the Dream Face reveal video (below), which is roughly the population of New York State in the past 17 hours (at the time of writing). That number will continue to grow. Imagine 20 million people watching you show your face to the world?

“This is weird,” Clay says at the beginning of the video. I can only imagine.

Why reveal his face now?

“Many of you are probably wondering, ‘Why now?’” Clay says in the video below. The reason is pretty cute. His best friend, YouTube GeorgeNotFound, was finally able to get a visa to come and live and work in the US and the two want to collaborate on videos featuring Clay’s real face, though he plans to use the iconic smiley face for his Minecraft flow.

“Hi, I’m Dream, and this is what I look like. After years of being completely faceless online, I finally decided to do a face reveal. GeorgeNotFound will be uploading a video of our meeting shortly, so get ready,” the video caption reads.

How bad was the internet freakout?

Well, as with any big internet thing, the response was . . . mixed. Obviously, many fans are just excited to be a part of the reveal and see the face of their favorite content creator for the first time. Others were less nice.

Twitch streamers who simply streamed themselves while waiting for Dream to show his face broke a record viewership:

(Note: That 20 million view count on Dream’s video is clearly only part of the equation, given how many people were clearly watching) other content creators are co-streaming the “event,” not to mention anyone reading articles like this one).

Of course, the reveal has also inspired fan art, drawing huge numbers of its own:

Dream has continued to post photos of himself after revealing to his millions of Twitter followers:

I still don’t get it

Look, you’re not supposed to get it. This is a generation gap thing. I’m someone who’s been into video games for over ten years and I don’t get it either. South Park taunted this case nearly ten years ago.

Basically, Dream makes videos for young people who like to watch videos about a game where you hit trees to get wood (sorry, South Park joke) and has created around him a mysterious character that has intrigued millions of adoring fans for years.

Now we know what he looks like and he is . . . completely normal. He seems like a nice boy. But will we ever really understand his success? Probably not, and that’s okay.