Jordan Maron (born February 10, 1992), known online as CaptainSparklez, is an American YouTuber and Twitch streamer mainly known for his Minecraft videos.
After thirteen years, Maron decided to stop uploading Minecraft gameplay content on his main channel in December 2023.
[‡ 1] Maron then went on to pursue higher education at the University of California, Santa Barbara as a chemical engineering major, but switched to computer science during his freshman year because he realized that video games could be a viable career.
[3] That month, in February 2010, he created his first YouTube channel, ProsDONTtalkSHIT, to upload Call of Duty videos and "show off" his scores.
[12] His gameplay videos are the focus of his main YouTube channel, while he uses his Twitch livestreams to try out new games, where he has a smaller audience.
[14] In December 2023, Maron announced he was retiring from uploading Minecraft gameplay content on his main YouTube channel.
The animation is spearheaded by the pseudonymous Bootstrap Buckaroo, and the vocals by Igor Gordienko, who creates video game-based songs online as TryHardNinja.
[17] On August 19, 2011, Maron uploaded "Revenge", a Minecraft-themed parody of Usher's "DJ Got Us Fallin' in Love", to YouTube.
[19][20] Maron's parody of Taio Cruz's "Dynamite", titled "TNT", surpassed the UK music video for the original song in April 2019.
[21] Later that year, "Revenge" received renewed attention as an internet meme which challenged group chats to type the lyrics one-by-one and in order.
[‡ 7][23] "Fallen Kingdom" is a parody of Coldplay's "Viva la Vida" sung from the perspective of a king who loses his castle,[15] while "Take Back the Night" debuted at No.
[2][8] Fortress Fury was originally going to be titled Fortress Fallout until ZeniMax Media, the parent company of Fallout series developer Bethesda Softworks, sent a cease and desist letter to XREAL ordering them to rescind a trademark application for the game and cease using the title in future promotional material.
[26][27][28] Maron said in a later video that the letter was sent to prevent competition for their mobile game Fallout Shelter (2015), which Bethesda kept a secret until its release.
[‡ 8] Fortress Fury was downloaded over two million times in its first three months, but did not make a proportional amount of revenue or enter the 200 top-grossing iOS games in the United States.
Tasos Lazarides of TouchArcade suggested that this was because of Maron's attempt to make the game player-friendly by lessening in-game purchases, as well as the competitive App Store market, while Stuart Dredge of The Guardian speculated it was because many of his followers were children.
The server-client architecture instantly converts the phone software onto in-game blocks, using a web application developed by Verizon, Blockworks and Wieden+Kennedy called Boxel.