Mark Edward Fischbach ( FISH-bahk; born June 28, 1989), known professionally as Markiplier, is an American YouTuber, filmmaker, and actor. One of the most popular YouTubers on the platform, he is known for his "Let's Play" videos of indie horror games. He was listed by Forbes as the third-highest-paid content creator on the platform in 2022, and has won four Streamy Awards and a Golden Joystick Award. He has spun off his YouTube fame into a notable media career, venturing into acting and filmmaking.
After joining YouTube in 2012, Fischbach became popular on the platform with Let's Plays of Amnesia: The Dark Descent and the Five Nights at Freddy's series; as of August 7th, 2026, his channel has over 38.8 million subscribers. He signed with talent agency William Morris Endeavor in 2016. While with the agency, he released a clothing line, wrote and directed the YouTube Original series A Heist with Markiplier (2019) and In Space with Markiplier (2022), and hosted or co-hosted two podcasts, which reached No. 1 on Spotify.
In 2023, Fischbach signed with United Talent Agency and was nominated for a Children's and Family Emmy Award. He starred in the series The Edge of Sleep (2024) and made his theatrical debut directing, producing, writing, and starring in the horror film Iron Lung (2026).
Mark Edward Fischbach was born on June 28, 1989, in Honolulu, Hawaii. His father Cliffton Morris Fischbach Jr. was a German American military officer who met his mother, Sunok Frank, while stationed in South Korea. Fischbach's maternal grandfather was a North Korean defector and his maternal family history is covered in the 2022 documentary film Markiplier from North Korea.
After Fischbach was born, the family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, but his parents divorced when he was still young. Fischbach graduated from Milford High School in 2007 and enrolled at the University of Cincinnati in a biomedical engineering program. His father died in 2008 when Fischbach was 18 years old. Fischbach met Wade Barnes in sixth grade and roomed with Bob Muyskens in his freshman year of college—they would both become his long-term friends and collaborators.
In 2012, Fischbach was beset by many different issues: he went through a breakup, was laid off from his job, moved to an apartment after his mother kicked him out of her house, had an emergency appendectomy, and went into debt. After being hospitalized because of an adrenal tumor, he "decided that he wanted to do something else."
Fischbach registered his first YouTube channel on March 6, 2012. He originally intended to upload comedy sketches and action videos. He named the channel "Markiplier", a portmanteau of Mark and multiplier, as he would be portraying all the characters in the sketches. Fischbach later said it was a "really dumb name". However, Fischbach also had a lifelong interest in video games and decided to make gaming videos while the trend was growing. His first series was a Let's Play of Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010), and the channel reached over 94,000 subscribers within the year.
YouTubers with over one thousand subscribers were then eligible to earn money under YouTube's AdSense program. However, Fischbach had problems with his AdSense account which prevented him from monetizing his videos, and he was forced to move to his current channel in April, originally named "markiplierGAME", now named "Markiplier". He dropped out of college the same year to support his growing online career, only two semesters away from graduating. In early 2014, Fischbach moved to Los Angeles to be closer to potential business opportunities.
Fischbach and Janet Varney co-hosted the 2015 South by Southwest Gaming Awards, and he was featured in YouTube Rewind. He was ranked sixth in a list of the twenty most influential celebrities among teenagers in the United States. 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.
Fischbach began living with fellow YouTubers Daniel Kyre and Ryan Magee, who ran the YouTube channel Cyndago. In September 2015, Kyre was found in critical condition after attempting suicide in his room. He was hospitalized but was taken off life support two days later. Cyndago was disbanded, and Fischbach went on hiatus from YouTube for a month before returning on October 5. He reached ten million subscribers on the 14th.
In November 2016, Fischbach signed with talent agency William Morris Endeavor (WME). His first project with WME was his "You're Welcome Tour" in Spring 2017, in which Fischbach and four other YouTubers—Muyskerm, Barnes, Tyler Schied, and Ethan Nestor—performed 31 shows across the United States and Europe. Fischbach had said to Variety that he was interested in more traditional entertainment. Taking five months to plan, he incorporated musical, comedy, and improv elements and audience participation in the tour. In January 2018, Fischbach began producing exclusive content for Twitch as part of a deal with Disney Digital Network.
His YouTube channel reached 20 million subscribers in March, before going on another hiatus in June to mourn his step-niece Miranda Cracraft, who had been killed in a car accident at the age of nineteen, raising over $79,000 for her funeral through GoFundMe.
In October 2019, an interactive special, A Heist with Markiplier, was released as his first YouTube Original. Produced by Fischbach and Rooster Teeth, the special follows two burglars—the viewer and Fischbach—and contains 31 possible endings. Fischbach had released a similar project titled A Date with Markiplier in 2017.
On November 15, 2019, Fischbach launched a new channel with fellow YouTuber Ethan Nestor (formerly known online as CrankGameplays) called Unus Annus (Latin for "one year"), a channel which planned to upload a video every day for one year, after which the channel would be deleted along with its videos. The channel rose to early success, gaining 1 million subscribers in its first five days and 4.56 million in its last few minutes, and over 11.5 million video views in its first week. Following a final 12-hour live stream that peaked at over 1.5 million concurrent viewers, the channel was deleted by Fischbach and Nestor on November 14, 2020, at 12:00 a.m. PST.
Since 2017, Fischbach has voiced the character 5.0.5 in the Cartoon Network series Villainous. Fischbach starred and co-produced a podcast drama called The Edge of Sleep, which follows a night watchman who discovers that everyone who fell asleep the previous night died and must try to stay awake. The first project from QCode's Wood Elf label, The Edge of Sleep debuted September 2019, and was renewed for a second season set for 2023. Fischbach reprises his role in a television remake produced by New Regency, in which Lio Tipton and Eve Harlow also star. It was released in 2024 and debuted in Amazon Prime Video's Top 10 charts.
Fischbach, alongside Barnes and Muyskens, hosts the podcast Distractible. Also produced by Wood Elf, it rose to No. 1 on Spotify and Apple Podcasts' charts when it was launched in May 2021. Fischbach and Scheid also launched Go! My Favorite Sports Team in February 2022, a comedy podcast where the enthusiast Scheid and the unknowledgeable Fischbach discuss sports.
The two-part In Space with Markiplier (2022) was again produced by Fischbach and Rooster Teeth as his second interactive YouTube Original. The viewer takes on the role of the captain of a collapsing spaceship with Fischbach playing its head engineer. In Space was nominated for Outstanding Interactive Media at the first ceremony of the Children's and Family Emmys Awards.
Deadline announced at the start of March 2023 that Fischbach had signed with United Talent Agency (UTA). A week later, it was announced at Spotify Stream On that Spotify would exclusively host new video episodes of Distractible and Go! My Favorite Sports Team. Fischbach also said he was working on an upcoming film. On April 21, Deadline announced that Fischbach had begun production on a film adaptation of the 2022 indie horror game Iron Lung by David Szymanski. Fischbach directed, produced, wrote, and financed Iron Lung himself. The film stars him and Caroline Rose Kaplan and was released on January 30, 2026. It grossed $13 million in its opening week at the US box office.