About
PewDiePie, or Pewdie is the YouTube alias of Swedish gamer Felix Kjellberg. He is known for his Let’s Play videos, often choosing horror-themed games. Throughout his videos, he can be found obnoxiously screaming and crying in reaction to the games.
Online History
Felix Kjellberg began his YouTube account PewDiePie[1] on April 29th, 2010 with a Minecraft playthrough video showing a zombie that had spawned in a minecart. In the first few months following this video, Pewdie began uploading playthroughs of Call of Duty: Black Ops, Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Dead Space 2.
In October 2011, a single topic blog Fuck Yeah PewDiePie[17] was created for fans of his videos, which has gained 2200 followers[18] in the span of 8 months. As of June 2012, Pewdie’s YouTube channel has 668 uploads, including play-throughs of 38 games and 27 Amnesia custom stories[8] sent in by the fans, 1,000,000 subscribers and fares an average of 253,391 views per day. Outside of YouTube, Pewdie’s Facebook fan page[3] has 195,528 likes, his official forum[10] has 11,000 members and a wiki[11] about his videos has 45 pages. In addition, posts and fanart about Pewdie appear on Tumblr under the tag “pewdiepie”[15] and there are more than 8700 pieces of fan art for PewDiePie on deviantArt.[16]
Characters
Throughout his videos, PewDiePie talks to props in the games as if they were real people. The first character he created was introduced in a run of a custom Amnesia story titled “Abduction,” uploaded to YouTube on April 17th, 2011. In the video, Pewdie finds a golden statue in a bookshelf and names it Stephano (sometimes spelled Stefano).
Over the course of PewDiePie’s YouTube series, the object gained a fearless personality with a French accent. When Pewdie is scared or distracted, Stephano advises him to not make noises or complete actions that will alarm enemies. However, Pewdie will often place Stephano on the nearest shelf immediately after telling the creature to keep quiet.
A Servant Grunt[19], one of the monster classes that appear in Amnesia, was given the name “The Bro” in another playthrough of the game. The Bro often appears in Pewdie fan art and cosplay (below left) as one of his recurring enemy characters in the series. Pewdie has also named rotting pigs found in Amnesia’s kitchens and cellars “Piggeh,” giving them the personality of a sexual predator that often is found in fan art (below right) as well.
Pewdie also calls chairs that he throws at enemies in any game “Mr. Chair” and created a fake language called “Chopnese” during a playthrough of “Afraid Of Monsters.”[20]
Enemies
PewDiePie is also known for hating barrels[21] (below left) that are seen throughout Amnesia, since they create loud noises and attract Servant Grunts. He also considers Teleporting Naked Guys, a type of “jump scare” characters that catches the player off guard in Amnesia custom stories, to be one of his biggest enemies. In one of Pewdie’s videos (shown below, right), a Teleporting Naked Guy apparently startled him so much that he had to close the game and look at pictures of kittens.
Reputation
King of the Web
On February 1st, 2012, PewDiePie entered the King of the Web[5] contest, a social media competition that awards cash or merchandise prizes to the winners of a weekly competition. After receiving more than a million votes, he was crowned King of the Web on February 29th, 2012.[22] After receiving the cash prize of $6750 in April, he donated the entire amount to the World Wildlife Foundation.
Fan Feud
YouTuber UberHaxorNova[23] began uploading playthrough videos of the flash game Happy Wheels[24] on October 8th, 2011.[25] Months later, when PewDiePie began his series of Happy Wheels videos on February 1st, 2012[26], fans of the two YouTubers began arguing over whose playthroughs were better, making their cases through user submitted levels in the game, deviantArt polls[27] and fanfiction.[28] In May 2012, Pewdie contacted Nova via Twitter to see if they could collaborate on a video to end the fan war, but as of June 2012, no video has been completed.
<a href="https://twitter.com/UberHaxorNova">UberHaxorNova</a> Hey man, love your stuff. How about a possible collab? Think it could stop the whole fanwar deal ^^</p>— PewDiePie (Pewdie) May 18, 2012
Most Popular Videos
As of June 2012, the following videos have between 3.5 million and 6.7 million views.
Personal Life
Felix Kjellberg was born on October 24th[13] and lives in Göteborg, Sweden with his dog Maya. On March 28th, 2012, Pewdie did his first newspaper interview with Swedish site Expressen.se[7], noting that he was able to make his YouTube channel his full time job and will be moving to Italy with his girlfriend, Marzia Bisognin. Online, Bisognin is known as CutiePie[14] and the couple often appear in videos together. Kjellberg also maintains his own website[2], Instagram[12], Twitter account[4] and deviantArt[11] page. CutiePie, like her boyfriend, has also run for Queen of the Web.[29]
Search Interest
External References
[1]YouTube – PewDiePie’s channel
[5]King Of the Web – Pewdies Campaign
[6]King Of the Web – Cuties Campaign
[7]Expressen.se – KRÖNIKA Därför är Pewdiepie Sveriges hetaste internetstjärna
[8]PewDiePie Wiki – List of games played by PewDiePie
[9]PewDiePie Forum – Pewdie n’ Friends
[13]Facebook – Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg
[14]YouTube – CutiePieMarzia’s channel
[15]Tumblr – Posts tagged “pewdiepie”
[16]deviantArt – Search results for “pewdiepie”
[17]Tumblr – Fuck Yeah PewDiePie
[18]Fuck Yeah PewDiePie – And Another Round of Hugs To You Guys
[19]Amnesia Wiki – Servant Grunt
[21]Wikitubia – PewDiePie & Barrels
[22]King of the Web – PewDiePie’s win announcement
[23]YouTube – UberHaxorNova’s channel
[24]Total Jerkface – Happy Wheels
[25]YouTube – Happy Wheels w/Nova Ep.1 – I Never Asked For This, You Did
[26]YouTube – PSYCHODAD! – Happy Wheels – Part 1
[27]deviantArt – = UberHaxorNova or PewDiePie =
[28]deviantArt – Pewdiepie x Uberhaxornova
[29]King of the Web – CutiePie’s profile