Why GP?

This is actually a very interesting story. Ever since I can remember about myself, I have always wanted to film videos. In fact, in our own private family video archives, as a little kid, I can be seen asking my dad for the camera most of the time, so he can let me film something – anything! And needles to say, this love for photography and especially videography has stayed with me to this very day, alongside my passion for developing of course.

So why am I mentioning my interest in making videos? Well, a bit later after I got my first Internet connection at home installed, I stumbled upon this great website called YouTube. I remember having a blast watching random videos of my favorite video games back then. And yes, I love video games too, even though lately I don’t have much time to play them, I still enjoy doing so when I have the free time.

So because it was fun watching videos on this cool website YouTube, I wanted to try and upload my own video! I couldn’t figure out how to create an account, since I was very little at the time, not even 10 years old. But luckily, my older cousin helped me in doing so, and YouTube asked us to provide a username for the account. Not knowing what username is, I typed my name Marko, and it was of course taken. So we were both confused, and decided to put something random just to create the account and then change the username later. At the time we were both playing a racing game called Grand Prix 4 Formula 2008, or shortly: gp4f2008. We decided to put that as the username and finally my account was created!

So, I uploaded my first video! A 3 second video taken with my Nokia 6300 of my Christmas Tree at home! Fast forward a couple of years later, and there were many silly videos on my channel, from mini-tutorials on how to download games on your mobile phone, to video editing tutorials, to short silly videos of me and the list goes on. I was basically learning how to film and edit videos, and then recreating those tutorials for myself in order to have some sort of a “permanent memo” of how to do the thing that I learned! And in the process, I actually helped other people with my videos, either by making them laugh or by actually teaching them something.

However, due to me being a kid, and not knowing the laws of copyright, by using copyrighted music in my newer videos, in 2012 – YouTube suspended my account. It was a heartbreaking moment for me, but also a new lesson learnt about copyright. I didn’t hesitate though to continue my journey, and in the same day when my account was suspended, I created a new one called gp4f2008respawn. The word “respawn” coming from “appearing again” in video games, known as “respawning”. I reuploaded all the videos I could find in my computer to the new channel, although 90% of them were all lost when my account was suspended. So it was a new start for me, this time with copyright infringement in mind!

Fast forward two years later, and I was feeling a bit lost. To be honest, I never created videos on YouTube as my main goal in life. It was a fun little side hobby which was inspired by all the other YouTubers I watched growing up. But I would lie if I didn’t say that it was getting pretty pointless for me at the time. There were maybe around 10 people that occasionally watched me, and all these years of making videos – I was mainly making them for fun and for myself. I didn’t mention up until now, but all these videos were in English. I was talking in English, as inspired by the creators I watched all the time.

So at the end of 2014, I noticed another person from my country, whose name was Riste, starting a gaming YouTube channel and speaking in his mother language – that is Macedonian. And to my surprise, he was getting a lot of traction. To be fair, he had a Macedonian Facebook gaming group with a lot of people, and he shared his videos there – so that is why he had a following from the beginning. And after seeing the amount of people that watched him, I thought to myself: “Why don’t I try creating my videos in my native Macedonian language?”. So I did. And I also shared my videos in that Facebook gaming group. And people actually started to watch and care about my videos. For the first time ever, I actually had real support by real consistent people! It felt amazing that I finally created content for people that cared, just like the other YouTubers I watched all the time!

And this was the time when I realized that my username is not really memorable. gp4f2008respawn? It did not make any sense. I had to do something with it. So I decided to just shorten it to the first two letters, renaming my YouTube channel to just GP. It didn’t have any meaning behind it, certainly not Grand Prix, I never played a racing game on my channel – it was just GP because of my initial YouTube username. And so, my YouTube story began!

I have never been happier in my life at the time. I have wanted to create videos for people for as long as I can remember, and it was finally happening! It motivated me so much, that I quickly went from rarely posting silly videos, to creating meaningful videos for my audience almost every day! And all those years from 2008 to 2014, all that learning on how to properly cut, edit and polish videos, combined with the consistency I was posting videos with, made my YouTube channel skyrocket.

One day I was shopping groceries with my dad at our local supermarket. At the time I remember having around 900 subscribers, when a fan came up to me and asked for a picture. This was actually the moment when that happened to me for the first time. Being an introverted person at the time, I was shaking as if I was the one asking for a picture. Little did I know, it was going to be the first of many, MANY such moments.

In fact, from 2015 up until 2022 I became and stayed the number one most watched YouTuber in my country! I made all kinds of videos, starting from gaming videos, and then expanding to vlogs, short movies, to even songs and music videos at one point. It really was a one of a kind experience! I was literally one of the most introverted kids in my middle school. And from that – to being know nationwide was just mind-boggling. I never made videos to become known or popular, but I presume there was no other way around it. Nonetheless, it was fun! I was still pretty much a kid in those years, and I had all the energy and time to keep pushing the limits, both on YouTube and in my high school.

However, 2022 came and I made a very important decision in my life. Leading up to it, I had less and less time to create wonderful videos like I always have (or at least, tried to). I managed to push through high school with A grades and being consistent on YouTube, but in 2018, when my University came – it was starting to become a problem. I was a machine, with little to no free time, and pretty much just studying-filming-studying-filming for my university and my YouTube channel. It was exhausting. Not only that, but I made so many different videos already, that I was starting to lose ideas on what to create next. And on top of that, I reached a level in popularity where not only younger audiences knew me, but even parents too. And not being able to go out of my house without being stopped a dozen times for a photo, was really taxing on my mental health. I knew that it would be dangerous for me to keep this tempo. So on February 6th, 2022, I made my last video on YouTube. It’s an hour long video where I say my goodbye and the reasons for it. It is the moment when I finally turned 100% to software development, something I have always wanted since I first interacted with a computer. I had two enormous passions and I pushed both of them for as long as I could, but I had to let one go in order to be great at the other one.

So that’s the story behind GP. I was a YouTuber under the name GP, who made around 1500 videos across two channels (GP and GP2, which I made later for gaming videos only). And for all these videos, it was always a one-man show, I filmed them myself, edited them myself, at one point I even made a short movie where I digitally cloned myself and acted as multiple people. All of that while maintaining the grades I want in my high school and university studies. With everything in life, there are upsides and downsides. But looking at the upsides, this period really helped me in managing my time, being thorough and comprehensive in everything I do, pushing my introverted nature to the side and all in all, giving me a once-in-a-lifetime experience that I will never forget. If you, the reader, are interested in checking out my YouTube story, my videos are still available on both my main and gaming channels on the following links: GP and GP2. By the way, I forgot to mention: this journey also taught me how to edit videos, not just cutting them, but also adding visual effects to them, so I would say that I am quite experienced in that as well (check out the short movie which is linked in this paragraph, it is a nice summary of all my editing skills, from audio to video to VFX)

I really went into detail, so if you have read all of this, I want to thank you for your interest and time. It was a really fun period in my life, and I thoroughly enjoyed it with all its ups and downs. I really love YouTube as a platform and I always wanted to try and be a creator there as well, and that actually happened in a magnitude I never anticipated of! And I still spend hours daily on YouTube as my main entertainment source, this time as a viewer only. So then, since I love software developing, particularly in the field of Web Technologies, and since I love YouTube so much, a job to code at YouTube would without a doubt be the dream job for me!