KSI angered a collective of gamers who played Halo by stealing their name before becoming one of the most recognisable YouTubers on the planet. Here’s a video in which he explains how he did that.
Yes, we all know KSI nowadays, even if we’re not the sort of people who are interested in gaming or watching videos on YouTube.
Completely outside of that he’s got a boxing career – he fights tonight, as it happens – a music career, and a burgeoning Prime energy drink business that is making people lose their minds.
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Honestly, it’s turning people into morons, despite KSI pleading with them to have a think about what they're doing.
Anyway, he made his name in the first place by playing games online and then uploading the videos and gaining a following.
His FIFA videos are legendary among his fans, but way before even that he was just a kid who wanted to play games online.
The big game of the time was obviously Halo, and the young KSI – real name Olajide Olayinka Williams "JJ" Olatunji – wanted to join a group of gamers – a clan, if you’re into that sort of thing.
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That group was called KSI, and they said to him that if he wanted to join them, all he had to do was add the letters ‘KSI’ before his Xbox gamertag and he was in.
So, that’s exactly what he did.
Changing his name from just OlajideBT to KSIOlajideBT was all he needed to do in order to gain access to the plan, which was a bit of a dream come true for the young gamer.
However, as the years went on, he started to build a bit of a platform for himself and move up in the world, eventually getting his name out there on YouTube.
As things progressed for him, he started to just go by the name ‘KSI’ instead of the full thing, although people do also call him JJ as well.
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That – according to the YouTuber – left those in the Halo clan ‘fuming’ because he’d nicked their name and also made it seem like they were all just ‘fanboys’ for him.
It’s quite funny, really.
KSI explained: “I remember going to this chat and being like ‘oh I want to be part of this KSI clan’.
“They were like ‘OK, you’re going to have to change your name to KSIOlajideBT…
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“I changed it, oh my God, am I part of the clan?
“They were like ‘yeah welcome’ and I was like ‘yo, this is sick!’
“Obviously the whole Halo thing went and I was just stuck with this name, so I kind of just kept the KSI part and just made it my own.
“Now it’s crazy because this clan is fuming because they all just look like fanboys of me.”
Tom Wood