“Say I created something really awesome, I’m not sure there’s many situations where I’d want to distribute it anywhere other than my own channel.
The content is completely ours: we decide how we create it, whether it’s with a team or by ourselves, and it’s free to consume for everyone,” he says. “I feel that what we’ve got as YouTubers with our own channels is always going to be the perfect outlet. Like Garrett, who recently told the Observer that “YouTube isn’t a stepping stone”, Middleton doesn’t see his future in traditional broadcast television. Middleton is keen to maintain a creative quality control of “passion projects” like the live show and book, which extends to his views on how his videos may develop. “It’s properly scripted and fully rehearsed, with a team of about 25-30 people behind it. “It’s about the adventures, but taking away me behind the computer and making it completely interactive, with the characters involved, and gaming running through it all as well,” he says. Again, they’re led by storytelling: “A mix of maybe a panto and gaming. The long queues for meet’n’greets at games conventions is proving intensive training for DanTDM, Stampy and their peers, but Middleton is also meeting his public at his own live shows, which have been touring the UK. The DanTDM tour has been selling out UK theatres. “The security for me is that if I meet someone on the street or at a convention or signing, there’s that connection: we can have a chat about what I do, their favourite things, my favourite things. I’m naturally quite an introverted person, so I’ve had to almost train myself to be able to deal with these situations,” he says. If people turn up to an event and are really excited to meet me, if I think about it properly it baffles me. The last time I interviewed Joseph “Stampy” Garrett, another prominent child-friendly British YouTuber, he told me that he worries his real-life shyness might be misinterpreted as standoffishness by fans.
Plus there’s the fact that while the default persona for a YouTuber is ‘HEY GUYS’ exuberance, that’s not always mirrored by their off-camera selves. Not an idle comparison, by the way: if you go to a games convention or book signing, the fan excitement around online stars like Middleton is absolutely comparable to traditional celebrities. Especially as few YouTubers will receive formal training in what to expect as a celebrity in the same way that, for example, a boy-band member or teenage soap star would be expected to receive. So the main story videos are still in Minecraft because that’s the perfect game to do them in, but it’s cool to also take those characters into other games.” People have been starting to connect not just with my stories, but with me as a person. “I haven’t uploaded a Minecraft video for about a week actually. “At one point, I was doing two Minecraft videos every single day, and while it’s kinda possible to do that, I wanted to expand, and my audience really wanted to see me play other games,” he says.
Although often described as a Minecraft YouTuber, Middleton now makes videos using other games too: Roblox and Nintendo’s Tomodachi Life for example. Middleton’s own back-story started as a viewer on animation website Newgrounds, which inspired him to start making his own stop-motion animations and uploading them to YouTube: “The only way to show other people your videos without literally sitting them in front of your screen!”Ī keen gamer, he also started a Pokémon-focused YouTube channel in 2010 – Dan Plays Pokémon is still online – before discovering Minecraft, which was initially a side-project channel. The characters have evolved over time, with some of their traits generated by Minecraft’s quirks – Trayaurus’ clumsiness comes from the character’s habit of blundering into lava pits and other obstacles, out of Middleton’s control. So I started introducing him into more videos, then we went into a lab and found Grim, and it grew from there,” he says. “People really connected with the story of Trayaurus going through that video: it made it less of a tutorial and more of a story, even though they were still learning about the mod.
For one mod based on dinosaurs, Middleton used one of Minecraft’s villager characters to help him explore the world.
Middleton says his focus on narrative and characters was a “happy accident” that sprang out of his videos showcasing Minecraft mods – downloadable add-ons that customised the game. His young audience aren’t just watching him play Minecraft: they’re watching him tell stories using the game as the backdrop. Those characters have been key to the growth of Middleton’s fanbase on YouTube. The first DanTDM book is a graphic novel rather than a standard annual.