CaptainSparklez American YouTuber Born 1992 in Los Angeles

Early life

Jordan Maron, known online as CaptainSparklez, was born on 10 February 1992 in Los Angeles. He moved with his mother to Santa Barbara when he was around four. He attended Santa Barbara High School and then enrolled at the University of California, Santa Barbara, first in chemical engineering. He changed to computer science during his first year, and left university after the opening quarter of his second year, once his YouTube channel was doing well enough to support him.

Career

In February 2010, around his eighteenth birthday, Maron started a first channel to post Call of Duty gameplay. On 20 July 2010 he opened a second channel under the name CaptainSparklez, a name he took on a dare. A fellow YouTuber, SeaNanners, introduced him to Minecraft, and he uploaded his first gameplay video of the game in August 2010.

He began live streaming on Justin.tv in 2011 and kept streaming on Twitch after the platform's gaming content moved there. In December 2011 he became a full-time YouTuber once monetisation made that possible. His channel passed one million subscribers in April 2012, and in September 2013 it became the fifth solo gaming channel to pass one billion views. He signed with the talent agency William Morris Endeavor in 2015. In 2016 he and four other YouTubers voiced their own Minecraft avatars in the sixth episode of the game Minecraft: Story Mode.

Maron is best known for Minecraft-themed songs, made with the vocalist Igor Gordienko, who performs as TryHardNinja, and an animator who works under the name Bootstrap Buckaroo. The best known is "Revenge", a parody of Usher's "DJ Got Us Fallin' in Love", uploaded on 19 August 2011. It is his most viewed video. "Minecraft Style", a parody of "Gangnam Style", followed in October 2012. From 2012 to 2022 he released the five videos of the Fallen Kingdom series, which begins with a parody of Coldplay's "Viva la Vida" and includes "Take Back the Night", a song that reached number two on the Billboard Dance/Electronic Songs chart. In 2017 he collaborated with Seven Lions, Illenium, Said the Sky and Haliene on "Rush Over Me".

His business ventures include the mobile game company XREAL, which he co-founded with Howard Marks. Its first game, Fortress Fury, was released for iOS and Android in May 2015 and was downloaded more than two million times in its first three months. In February 2020 he launched an athleisure clothing brand called Quality Content. He signed partnership deals with Maker Studios' Polaris in 2013 and with PocketWatch in 2017.

In December 2023 he announced that he would stop uploading Minecraft gameplay to his main channel. Since then he has concentrated on live-streamed series on a second channel. His main channel had more than 11.4 million subscribers in mid-2025.

Recognition

YouTube presented him with its Silver Play Button in 2011, the Gold Play Button in 2012 and the Diamond Play Button in 2017. "Revenge" holds Guinness World Records for the most watched Minecraft video on YouTube, the most watched machinima on YouTube and the most viewed fan film based on a video game. In 2015 he and SethBling also set a Guinness record for the first working mobile phone in Minecraft. In 2016 he was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in games and was nominated for a Shorty Award in gaming.