Four years
(French at the end, you have been warned)
Some of you know what happened four years ago today.
The death of Alex Technoblade was announced to the internet.
Who was Technoblade?
Technoblade was a Minecraft youtuber who created his first channel on October 28th, 2013, at the age of 14. Over the next nine years, he rose to become one of the most prominent and beloved creators on the internet, culminating with his death from Sarcoma in June of 2022.
His videos were simple, with minimal editing, and often just clips from his livestreams. His sense of humor—especially his ability to make political jokes without offending anyone—charmed any and all who watched his channel, and the hijinks that he got up to spread his reputation by word of mouth: hunting down PvP experts, racking up incredible winstreaks in Bedwars and Skywars, beating Minecraft with a steering wheel, and much more.
He is most well know for two things: the $100K duel and Skyblock: The Great Potato War.
Another well-known Minecraft youtuber at the time was Dream, a speedrunner known to the community as one of the best players in the game. MrBeast brought Technoblade and Dream—indisputably the best of the best—together for a 10-round duel that required them to play with two sets of kits in two versions of the game in five different arenas. At stake? $100,000 for the winner.
Technoblade won the duel with 6 rounds to Dream’s 4, cementing himself as the best player in the world and providing a spectacle the like of which we haven’t seen since.
One of the most iconic series in the history of youtube, Skyblock: The Great Potato War follows Technoblade’s journey to become the player with the most potatos in Hypixel Skyblock—a minigame on the Hypixel server. The epic struggle between Technoblade and im_a_squid_kid lasted 9 months, culminating with a race to 500 million potatoes collected. It instantly became a classic (to this day it remains a favorite of MrBeast) and has been loved by millions, including me! Give it a watch sometime (the first video of the trilogy is linked above).
On August 27th, 2021, Technoblade posted a video titled “Where I’ve Been” in which he announced to the world that his right arm had been hurting, and started to swell. He went to the doctor and was diagnosed with Sarcoma. After narrowly avoiding an amputation, he continued to produce content for the next nine months, and his condition seemed to improve. Then, in June, he stopped uploading. This wasn’t unusual—his upload schedule had always been erratic and unpredictable, and people assumed that he was just taking a short break for a treatment or something.
On June 30th, at about 8:31 PM, we got a new video.
Technoblade’s dad read us a message that Technoblade left for us.
“so long nerds” became the most viewed video on youtube for the entirety of 2022, even after being released halfway through the year and being in competition with creators such as Dream and MrBeast. The channel gained over a million subscribers in 24 hours, and creators across every platform—ranging from Techno’s close friends, such as Dream and TommyInnit, to Elon Musk himself, who kept an unusual day of silence on Twitter before posting in Techno’s memory. Youtube itself later created a tribute to Technoblade, and Minecraft added him to the launcher for the game. Hypixel—Techno’s favorite server and the home of the Great Potato War—built a memorial to him in the lobby, then collected and custom printed 21 volumes of condolences for his family, containing over 400,000 messages.
Last year, Technoblade hit 20 million subscribers—he’s currently sitting around 22.5, and still climbing (we’re waiting for 30 million)!
My personal discovery of Technoblade was painful—about two weeks after his death, 14-year-old Benedict was watching Youtube late at night without permission. At the time, I was enjoying MrBeast Minecraft content, and came across a video with a guy named “Technoblade”. I thought he was funny, then moved on to the next video. An hour or two later, I came across the famous duel (in my first watching, I rooted for Dream, who I’d heard of before). And then shortly after that, Techno’s last video with MrBeast, which included a tribute at the end.
Over the next hour or so I found out just who Technoblade was, and found myself crying for a stranger. Since then I’ve come to be able to recite one or two of his videos from memory along with them, and to mourn the fact that I found him too late.
This is the end of my pondering. Techno has a thousand videos on his channel, very few of which I have seen, but hope to someday have seen all of them. He was loved by many while he lived, and is missed by even more now that he is gone.
As they say:
Fuck cancer.
Technoblade Never Dies.
