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Try NOT to Play Minecraft CHALLENGE

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Markiplier just made an entire video out of refusing to boot up Minecraft.

On August 10, 2019, Mark Fischbach — better known to thirty-plus million subscribers as Markiplier — dropped a video with a title that reads like a dare: “Try NOT to Play Minecraft CHALLENGE.” It’s not a fitness gimmick or a screen-time detox. It’s a comedy bit built entirely around the fact that his fans, his fellow YouTubers, and seemingly the entire internet spent the summer of 2019 begging him to go back to the game that made him famous.

• The video, uploaded to Markiplier’s channel on August 10, 2019, is titled “Try NOT to Play Minecraft CHALLENGE” and plays the “challenge” format for laughs rather than as a genuine self-improvement exercise.
• The description leans all the way into the peer-pressure joke: “Come on Markiplier, just play Minecraft! Everyone’s doing it! Don’t you wanna be COOL? You’re not a SQUARE are ya?”
• The bit only works because of history — Markiplier co-starred in the 69-episode “Drunk Minecraft” series with Bob Muyskens (Muyskerm) and Wade Barnes (LordMinion777) from 2012 to 2015, then largely stepped away from the game, right as Minecraft exploded back into relevance across YouTube in 2019.

The Joke Behind the Title

Anyone expecting an actual abstinence challenge is misreading the room. Markiplier built his channel on horror games, personality-driven Let’s Plays, and self-aware bits that mock internet trends as much as they participate in them. “Try NOT to Play Minecraft CHALLENGE” belongs squarely in that second category — it’s a wink at the “Try Not to Laugh” and “Try Not to Sing” challenge formats that flooded YouTube for years, repurposed to poke fun at how hard the platform was leaning on him to return to the blocky sandbox he’d mostly left behind.

The setup only lands if you know the backstory: Markiplier isn’t some rando resisting a video game. He’s one of the people who helped make Minecraft content a career path in the first place, and by 2019 the algorithm and the audience wanted him back in it.

Come on Markiplier, just play Minecraft! Everyone’s doing it! Don’t you wanna be COOL? You’re not a SQUARE are ya?

The Drunk Minecraft Pedigree

Before Fischbach was doing horror playthroughs and cinematic story games, he was one-third of “Drunk Minecraft,” a 69-episode run alongside Bob Muyskens (Muyskerm) and Wade Barnes (LordMinion777) that ran from 2012 through 2015. Anyone who followed Markiplier in his earlier years knows the series as a foundational piece of his channel’s identity — chaotic, unscripted, and built on the three of them getting increasingly loose while trying to survive in-game. After 2015, he mostly moved on to other franchises, which is exactly why fans spent years asking, half-jokingly, when he’d go back.

Viewers curious about that earlier chapter of block-based content, or looking for something closer to a straight survival run rather than a bit, might get a kick out of a series like 100 Hours In Minecraft Hardcore: Episode 1, which takes the exact opposite approach — full commitment instead of comedic resistance.

Riding the 2019 Minecraft Wave

Minecraft’s popularity on YouTube didn’t fade after Drunk Minecraft ended — if anything, 2019 saw a fresh resurgence, with creators across the platform diving back into the game and pulling in huge numbers doing it. That resurgence is the actual engine behind Markiplier’s video. The title and description aren’t describing a real initiative; they’re dramatizing the exact kind of comment-section badgering (“just play Minecraft, everyone’s doing it”) that creators get when a game trends without them.

It’s the same instinct that fuels a lot of Markiplier’s non-horror uploads — take a real, slightly annoying internet phenomenon (in this case, relentless fan demand) and turn it into the premise of the video itself, rather than just complaining about it off-camera. For a channel built on giant stunt videos too, like World’s Largest Challenge!, leaning into an oversized bit is just part of the house style.

The Effectiveness of Resistance Training

The humor hinges on Markiplier playing the reluctant holdout against a game he clearly has history with, rather than a stranger to it. He’s not avoiding Minecraft because he dislikes it — he helped build an audience around it years earlier with Muyskerm and LordMinion777. The “challenge” framing lets him acknowledge the pressure everyone can see in his comments and Twitter mentions without actually having to commit to another long-form Minecraft series on the spot.

That’s the whole trick of the video: it turns “I don’t feel like playing Minecraft right now” into a full bit, complete with a mock-motivational title and a description written like a peer-pressuring friend. Whether he actually caved and booted the game back up is, fittingly, left for fans to find out for themselves.