CrankGameplays

Background

Ethan Mark Nestor, famously known as CrankGameplays, was born in Cape Elizabeth, Maine to Mark Nestor and Annie Darling. Nestor also has an older half-brother named Andrew Nestor, with whom he spent a lot of time during his childhood. Ever since an early age, Nestor had a love for the cinema, spending his youth making home videos with Andrew and taking improv classes. Nestor was also very dedicated to gymnastics for 10 years. However, his grades started to decline at the same time he started a YouTube channel. Forced to choose a priority, Nestor decided to drop gymnastics as he thought he wanted to focus on his YouTube channel. After graduating from high school, he decided to take a gap year to focus on growing his channel. He moved to Portland, Maine with the thought that he could always come back to his studies if his YouTube career failed. During his stay in Portland, Nestor worked as a waiter at a B.B.Q. restaurant and was later promoted to manager.

On August 29, 2012, Nestor thought YouTube would be a great platform to express himself, to which he uploaded his first video called “Dirty Mic and the Boys-Happy Wheels Gameplay Numero Uno.” In the video, Nestor and his friend played the game “Happy Wheels” while doing gaming commentaries, a format that YouTubers like PewDiePie helped popularize. In 2013, he created a second channel named CrankyVlogs, where he would document his daily life and talk about his interests other than gaming. Nestor knew that to get popular, he needed to differentiate himself from the average gaming channels. Hence, Nestor had the bright idea of featuring his grandmother in his videos. However, not wanting to feel like he was exploiting his grandmother, he decided to move to a new channel. Besides, Nestor felt that his channel was slowly dying. He reportedly had 25,000 subscribers, but only 200 of them were active and engaged with the channel. For that reason, Nestor launched another YouTube channel called CrankyVODs in 2015, which contained a library of stream highlights that fans could access on demand. However, it was just sitting for years until he finally uploaded a video on it five years later, in 2020. He then made another channel under the name CrankGameplays in the same year. Sure enough, with hard work in making quality content, CrankGameplays reached one million subscribers in early 2020 and grew to two million by the end of the year. In 2014, Nestor also met Markiplier at the Markiplier and Friends PAX yearly festival. The two kept in contact over the years, leading to Nestor getting hired as one of Markiplier’s video editors and moving out to Los Angeles in 2016. A year later, Nestor stopped editing for Markiplier, choosing to focus on growing his channel further. The friendship, fortunately, had never died as Nestor was a part of Markiplier’s You’re Welcome Tour (2017 to 2018). They also proceeded to collaborate on a joint channel named Unus Annus in 2019. The duo had a goal of uploading one video per day consistently for the whole year. Once a year passed, they deleted the channel as well as its content, believing that it should be a once-in-a-lifetime experience only for their fans. For this collaborative work, the two won Best Collaboration in the 11th Annual Streamy Award (2021).

When he was in seventh grade, Nestor was diagnosed with A.D.H.D. and had to use prescribed medication. Additionally, Nestor has mild dyslexia, which means that he has difficulty reading and memorizing extensively. To help with all these conditions, Nestor liked to keep a Rubik’s cube around, which he claimed to have helped his focus. In 2018, Nestor started dating Twitch streamer Mika ‘RIPmika’ Midgett. The couple broke up in 2020 but later got back together in 2021.