Etika American YouTuber and Twitch Streamer (1990–2019)

Early life

Etika, whose full name was Desmond Daniel Amofah, was born on 12 May 1990 in Brooklyn, New York, and lived in the borough for most of his life. His father, Owuraku Amofah, is a Ghanaian politician and lawyer who served in the Parliament of Ghana from 1992 to 1996. His mother, Sabrina, is of Haitian descent. Through his family he was also a grand-nephew of Nana Akufo-Addo, who was president of Ghana from 2017 to 2025. He attended the Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice and was about 198 centimetres tall.

Before he became known for video games, he rapped under the name "Iceman", uploading videos between 2007 and 2009 and releasing an independently produced mixtape, Written in Ice, in 2007. He also worked as a model from his early twenties until 2015 and held a job at the clothing retailer Uniqlo, which he left to stream full time. He said the name "Etika" came from a cheat code in the 2003 game Sonic Battle, which he rearranged because he preferred the result.

Career

Amofah began posting online in 2007. In 2012 he opened the main YouTube channel EWNetwork, short for Etika World Network, to share gaming streams and reaction videos. The channel reached 100,000 subscribers in 2015 and eventually passed 800,000. Across all of his channels he counted more than one million subscribers and 146 million views.

His content centred on Nintendo. It began as gaming news and developed into playthroughs and reactions to announcements such as Nintendo Direct presentations. His reaction videos were known for exaggerated physical energy. The channel grew considerably in 2014 through videos about the then-unreleased Super Smash Bros. 4, and his reaction to the announcement of Mewtwo as a downloadable fighter became his most viewed video on EWNetwork and was shared by the game's creator, Masahiro Sakurai. A similar reaction to the announcement of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate spread widely in 2018.

He called his audience the "JOYCONBOYZ", a name taken from the Nintendo Switch controller and tied to a November 2016 livestream in which he showed a model of the console before its release. Viewers in Japan often referred to him as "Guile-kun", after the Street Fighter character whose hairstyle his resembled. He closed videos with a recurring sign-off wishing viewers a "damn good one". Although Nintendo dominated his output, he also played titles such as Call of Duty, Overwatch, Undertale and Doki Doki Literature Club!, and he streamed anime series including Attack on Titan.

EWNetwork was terminated by YouTube in October 2018. He started a new channel, EtikaFRFX, which also ended in April 2019, and he kept uploading reactions to a third channel, TR1Iceman, until June 2019. His last videos included reactions to the Nintendo Direct for E3 2019. He died in June 2019.

Recognition

Amofah received the Silver Play Button from YouTube in 2015, the year his main channel reached 100,000 subscribers. After his death, he was given the Best Reaction award at the third annual Smashies Awards, held during Super Smash Con in 2019.

Public roles

Following his death, the community around him organised several tributes. Fans left letters, fan art and Nintendo merchandise at a memorial on the Manhattan Bridge walkway. An online Super Smash Bros. tournament was held in his honour, featuring Ridley from the Metroid series, a character he often played. Fundraisers were run for a mental health charity in his name, including a project by the creators Abe Hunter and Double-A that raised 11,315 dollars, and a Minecraft stream by Felix Kjellberg and Jack Black that raised more than 30,000 dollars. A mural in Bushwick, Brooklyn was completed on 6 November 2019 and was later added to Pokémon Go as a PokéStop.

Journalists and gaming outlets also marked his influence. In December 2019 the video game site Kotaku included him in its list of the top gamers of the year, and a BBC News review of technology stories that year cited the tributes to him.