VaatiVidya

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About

VaatiVidya, real name Michael Samuels, is an Australian YouTuber best known for explaining the lore and other secrets and easter eggs of FromSoftware video games Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. He has generated over 1.4 million followers and is often cited as one of the best gaming channels on YouTube.

History

VaatiVidya joined YouTube on March 1st, 2012.^[1] His first video, posted September 16th, shows off a 60 FPS mod of Dark Souls (shown below, left). His earliest video to gain over 1 million views was posted September 25th, and gained over 2.6 million views. The video was the first of his "Prepare to Cry" series, wherein he explains sad backstories of Dark Souls characters whose backstories are not readily available in the game (shown below, right).

To date, his most popular videos are his explanation of the Bloodborne story, which gained over 5.8 million views (shown below, left), and his video explaining the lore of the Dark Souls 3 main bosses, which gained over 5.6 million views (shown below, right). As of December 11th, 2019, VaatiVidya has over 1.47 million subscribers.

Reputation

VaatiVidya is regularly cited as one of the better gaming channels on YouTube. He has been cited as such by The Sun Best^[2] and PC Gaming.^[3] BandaiNamco partnered with him to explain the lore between Dark Souls 3 and Dark Souls: Remastered.^[4]

Plagiarism Controversy

On July 8th, 2015, Aegon of Astora published a video accusing VaatiVidya of plagiarizing research done by other Souls lore researchers. It was ultimately taken down but reuploaded two years later by Done Playing^[6] (shown below).

VaatiVidya responded to the accusations in an Evernote post,^[5] writing.

I've failed to credit people in the past. I learned how bad this is when I used Deddan's work when I was a smaller channel. These are the mistakes that formed the base for these accusations to stand upon, and I take full responsibility for them.
But i'm confident in what i've done. I know exactly what mistakes i've made, and haven't made. I didn't plagiarise from Aegon's two similar scenes, nor Redgrave's work. I hope the hundreds of videos i've made for years are more than two similar scenes, and a couple of similar conclusions.

Online Presence

On Facebook,^[7] VaatiVidya has gained over 24,000 likes since his page's creation on May 9th, 2013. On Twitter, he has gained over 100,000 followers since joining in October of 2012.^[8] On October 22nd, 2019, he announced a $2000 contest for artwork imagining FromSoftware's upcoming game, Elden Ring.