Markiplier

Fischbach is primarily known for his playthroughs of indie and horror games, including the Five Nights at Freddy's series, Amnesia: The Dark Descent and its sequel, Garry's Mod, Happy Wheels, Surgeon Simulator 2013, SCP – Containment Breach and Slender: The Eight Pages, 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[8] and Jimmy Kimmel. He has had acting appearances in TomSka's asdfmovie series, Smosh: The Movie,[9] Disney XD's Gamer's Guide to Pretty Much Everything,[10] YouTube Rewinds 2015 and 2016 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 for and collecting donations for various charities, including Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance, and Best Friends Animal Society.[11] According to Fischbach, he and his viewers have raised a total of $3,000,000+ as of April 2018.[5]

Fischbach first joined YouTube on March 6, 2012, creating a channel under the username "Markiplier", and uploaded his first video on April 4, 2012 (which is no longer on YouTube).[12] Fischbach's original intent for the channel was sketch comedy, where he would be portraying all of the characters in the sketches.[13] This led to the creation of the name "Markiplier", which is a portmanteau of Mark and multiplier.[13] 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.[14]

Fischbach in 2014

In 2014, the MarkiplierGAME channel was listed on NewMediaRockstars Top 100 Channels, ranked at number 61.[15] That year, Fischbach announced he was planning to move to Los Angeles, California, to be able to be closer to other resources for his channel, such as the YouTube Space and other content creators.[16] Fischbach and fellow YouTuber Jenna Mae appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in September 2015 following backlash that Kimmel received regarding jokes he had made about YouTube and Let's Play videos.[7] In 2015, he was rated sixth in a list of the twenty most influential celebrities among teenagers in the United States.[17]

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.[18][19] Cyndago was disbanded following the death of Daniel Kyre.[20] At the time of their disbandment, the group had done forty sketches and fourteen original songs, many of them featuring Fischbach.[18] After the death of Daniel Kyre and disbandment of Cyndago, Fischbach temporarily halted uploads and went on hiatus from September 17, 2015 to October 5, 2015.[21] He returned and reached 10 million subscribers on October 15, 2015.[22] Watson and Magee moved on to create a gaming channel called SuperMega.

Fischbach at PAX in 2016

Fischbach co-hosted the 2015 South by Southwest (SXSW) Gaming Awards with The Legend of Korra voice actor Janet Varney,[23] and was featured in YouTube's year-end special YouTube Rewind.[24]

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.[25]

Since 2018, Fischbach has hosted a podcast with LordMinion777 and Muyskern on Twitch, called "3 Peens in a Pod" (originally "The Bonercast", referencing a running joke in the Prop Hunt series of let's plays).

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 large YouTube creators such as Rosanna Pansino, Matthew Patrick, and Game Grumps.[26]

On November 15, 2019, Fischbach launched a new channel with fellow YouTuber Ethan Nestor called Unus Annus (Latin for 'one year'), 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.[27] 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.[28][29]