With nearly 7 million subscribers on YouTube, Fortnite content creator Tiko has achieved incredible success in his five years of creating videos for the platform. With a channel consisting of Fortnite gameplay, skits, challenges, music videos, and more, all of his videos with his fishy Fortnite persona feature the channel’s trademark feature: a voice-changing effect that pitches Tiko’s voice up to sound like a little kid.
Tiko went viral after the success of his voice changer videos, in which he used a device to sound like a child while playing games like Fortnite in order to make jokes with his friends or mess with his teammates. The success of these videos marked the creation of the character "Tiko," identifiable by his Fishsticks Fortnite skin and high-pitched voice. Game Rant recently spoke with Tiko about what inspired him to start making videos with the voice-changer and how they changed his channel.
Tiko had been making YouTube videos for a while before his fishy persona's viral success. “I made videos because I liked seeing people’s reactions. I would make videos for my classes when I was a little kid, and just seeing people laughing at my video playing up on the screen made me really happy. It just kind of sparked something inside of me,” Tiko explained. “Ever since then, I’ve just been really driven. I just love making videos and putting them out there for people to see.”
Tiko made his first voice-changer Fortnite video in 2019, but it did take some time before it went viral online. It was titled “FUNNIEST little kid voice changer! (7-Year-Old Voice Changer!),” and at the time, he promised to make a part-two video when it hit 80 likes.
“The original video with the voice changer was one I made as a joke with my friend. I just found this voice changer one day and I thought it was funny. I noticed that a lot of people can’t actually sound like a little kid when they used it, but I kind of could."
It took his original video eight months to hit 80 likes and honoring his promise, Tiko soon afterward posted a part two to the video. “Posting a part two made part one go viral, and it kind of went viral overnight. I remember waking up, and I was like, ‘what the heck, a million views!?’” Tiko decided to continue using the voice-changer for “trolling” videos in which he would mess around with people on various games and websites, but comments encouraging him to keep using the voice-changer convinced him to start using it in his normal videos. “Over time I kept using it, and that’s how Tiko kind of came to be.”
Tiko was in eighth grade when his channel started to blow up, and three years later, his main channel has amassed over a billion views, with his recently growing music career granting him over 500,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. Tiko’s voice has become one of the most iconic parts of his YouTube persona, and with plans to produce more music as well as expand into the world of voice acting, Tiko fans have plenty of fishy content to enjoy over the coming year.