Freddie Wong

About

Freddie Wong is a YouTuber and filmmaker who is best known for making videos with elaborate action scenes and CGI special effects. Since 2006, Wong's channel has amassed more than 900 million views and as of February 2013, it is ranked as the 8th most subscribed YouTube channel. In the late 2000s, he was also a well-known competitive Guitar Hero player, winning the World Series of Video Games in 2007.

Online History

Freddie Wong launched his first YouTube channel^[3] on February 22nd, 2006 with a cinematic short film about a poker game titled “Aces,” (shown below, left). He began attracting more viewers after posting a video of himself playing Rush’s song “XYZ” on Guitar Hero (shown below, left) on October 28th, 2006. As of February 2013, this video has amassed more than 8.8 million views.

The popularity of his Guitar Hero video led to a brief stint of competitive gaming, during which Wong won the 2007 World Series of Video Games^[6] and made an appearance on YouTube Live with famed guitarist Joe Satriani in November 2008. The same month, he uploaded a video showing himself playing Guitar Hero in expert mode (shown below, left) in response to a vviral commercial by Activision, which soon became another viral hit for Wong. By 2008, stories about Wong’s Guitar Hero expertise had appeared on Seattle Pi^[7], Gay Gamer^[8] and CNET.^[9] In October 2009, he traveled to Finland to challenge the country’s best Guitar Hero player^[10] and beat him. (shown below, right).

In March 2010, Wong uploaded a video showcasing his special effects by creating real life portals after receiving a toy Portal gun in the mail (shown below, left). As of February 2013, this video has more than 11.8 million views. Soon after its upload, the video was featured on The Awesomer^[11], Kotaku Australia^[12] and Joystiq^[13], among others. In the following month of April, he uploaded a parody of Standing Cat (shown below, right), turning the cat into a version of Puss in Boots from the Shrek franchise using Adobe After Effects. As of February 2013, this video has more than 5.1 million views.

Throughout 2010, Wong continued to draw attention from a number of Internet news and culture blogs including Disgrasian^[14], Geekosystem^[15], Smosh^[16], Gigaom^[17] and the Creators Project^[19], among others. Also that year, Vice went so far as to dub Wong “King of the Internet.”^[18] In February 2011, Wong had another viral hit (shown below) with a Real Life Mario Kart video. By February 2013, Wong had uploaded more than one hundred videos to his main channel^[3] and another 160 behind-the-scenes videos to his secondary channel^[4], with a combined 5.7 million subscribers and more than 929 million video views. He also has more than 551,000 likes on his Facebook fan page.^[25]

Reputation

Video Game High School

On September 21st, 2011, Freddie Wong launched a crowdsourced fundraiser on Kickstarter^[20] to fund an action/comedy video series about anelite high school dedicated to hone the skills of the best video game players in the world. The nine episode season broke its $75,000 goal within the first 24 hours^[21] and finished with more than $273,000. The series premiered (shown below, left) in May 2012, each video amassing more than 2.3 million views.

In January 2013, Wong launched another Kickstarter^[23] to fund a second season of Video Game High School, looking to create six TV-length episodes of up to 30 minutes each. The original goal was set at $636,010, which was the amount the group spent on filming the previous season. Before the Kickstarter finished, season two began filming (shown below, right) on February 6th, 2013. By the time the project closed on February 12th, 2013, Wong had raised $808,341, becoming the most-funded project in Film & Video category on the crowdfunding site^[24] and surpassing the previous record of by nearly double the amount.

Notable Videos

Personal Life

Freddie Wong (born September 13th, 1985) hails from Seattle, Washington and studied at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. Wong launched a media production company called Overcrank Media with his brother Jimmy^[5] in 2009, releasing their first independent horror film Bear^[2] in June 2010. As of February 2013, he resides in Los Angeles, California.

Search Interest

External References