Finally Went Viral On YouTube

Back in late 2021 I got a call from a friend of mine saying that my YouTube channel had been featured by an extremely popular gaming content creator by the name of “Cr1TiKaL”.

I had heard of Cr1TiKaL from a different friend who is a big fan, but hadn’t really checked out much of his content on my own.

When my friend sent me the link, I saw that sure enough he was right.

Basically, Cr1TiKaL had set up a contest rewarding $10,000 to someone that could find one of his old YouTube videos from the 2010 era that was removed for copyright reasons.

Someone tried to scam him by sending him a video featuring the type of rock music that he listens to over Halo 3 gameplay taken from around that time period.

Cr1TiKaL watched the video on stream thinking that it was what he was looking for, only to see that the gamertag featured on the scoreboard wasn’t his.

He took the stream footage and made a video about it that he titled “Stop Trying To Scam Me“.

Backstory Behind The Original Video

The gameplay he watched was taken from a video I uploaded back in 2010. At the time I was playing on a friend’s account and was matched with lower ranked players, which made for an easy win on my part. In the video I went 25-1 and finished the match within minutes.

When he initially featured the video on his stream, someone in the chat must have noticed this and commented on it. This led Cr1TiKaL to a channel that I had put together for the friend whose account I was playing on. And from there they were able to discover my old channel which was linked in the “Featured Channels” section of my friend’s profile.

That took Cr1TiKaL to the original video, which was uploaded on my old gaming channel.

Unable To Recover The Old Channel

Despite spending the next day trying old passwords and making phone calls, I was never able to recover the channel. I even left a comment identifying myself, but it was flagged within minutes.

I was a little bummed, but to be honest more than anything I found the situation to be funny.

Last I checked, the channel was hacked unfortunately.

Getting A Lot Of Views

Cr1TiKaL has such a large audience that the video got over a million views within a day of him posting it. At one point it was actually ranked on the top charts in gaming for that week, alongside big names like “PewDiePie”.

A few thousand people transferred from Cr1TiKaL to check out my old channel, but it wasn’t anything major.

If I was able to actually retrieve the account like I wanted to I’m sure I could have parlayed that into some viewership, but like I said, it just didn’t work out that way.

It just shows that sometimes you can’t depend on a “big break” in itself. You’ve got to have a catalog of material and still be consistently active within that community.

Remaining Motivated

If I had stayed more consistent over the years it is likely that today I might also be one of the big names in the community.

After all, Cr1TiKaL and I started around the same time period, and in his video he was even quoted as saying that I was a better player than even he was.

When he first uploaded the video back in 2021, there was a small part of me that felt like I had missed out. At the time I was only 24, but was just working a regular part time job and had just finished college.

Still, that’s where I’m grateful to be as young as I am, because even at 29 I feel like I’m just getting started.

Thank You For Reading

As always, I want to give a big thank you for taking the time to read. I hope that you have enjoyed, and I will see you on the next article.