MatPat

Matthew Robert Patrick (born November 15, 1986), known professionally as MatPat, is an American internet personality, political advisor, and former YouTuber. He is the creator and former host of the YouTube series Game Theorists, and its spin-off channels Film Theorists, Food Theorists, and Style Theorists, each analyzing various video games, films alongside TV series and web series, food, and fashion respectively. Each of the different series is posted on individual channels, each named after the respective series. In addition to the creation of his channels, MatPat narrated the majority of the videos presented on his channels before his departure on March 9, 2024.

MatPat has also created the gaming channel GTLive and hosted the YouTube Premium series MatPat's Game Lab and the 2023 Streamy Awards. As of May 2024, MatPat has amassed over 40 million subscribers, as well as over nine billion total views across all five of his channels. He departed the channels as a regular host in March 2024, although he continued to make minor appearances and host GTLive until October 2024. In June 2025, he helped establish the Creator Economy Caucus in the United States House of Representatives.

Matthew Robert Patrick was born on November 15, 1986, in Medina, Ohio to Linda (née Kosarek) and Robert "Bob" Patrick. He has Polish, Czech, and Slovak ancestry. He was nicknamed "MatPat" by his friends in sixth grade. An only child, MatPat was interested in video games, theater and school early on. He was the valedictorian of his high school and received an academic scholarship to Duke University, graduating in 2009 with a double major in theater and psychology with a concentration in neuroscience.

To fulfill his dream of becoming an actor, MatPat moved to New York after graduating and performing in theater productions to little success, spending two years unemployed. His first YouTube videos were auditions for stage plays. In 2011, he decided to revamp his channel as a "portfolio" which could demonstrate to potential employers his ability to write, research, and edit videos online. Inspired by an Extra Credits episode on tangential learning, MatPat uploaded the first episode of Game Theory on April 18, 2011. It discussed the idea of time portals and quantum mechanics in the 1995 video game Chrono Trigger.

The channel slowly gained subscribers and his videos were posted on the front pages of sites such as ScrewAttack and GameTrailers. In 2012, MatPat introduced two new segments hosted by fellow YouTubers Gaijin Goombah and Ronnie Edwards (the latter of these two would also become Game Theory's first editor), and Austin Hourigan's "The SCIENCE!". In 2015, MatPat launched the spin-off channel Film Theory, which covers movies and television. This channel reached over one million subscribers in a month.

He occasionally uploaded videos commenting on the gaming market and gamers, as well as on other matters that he deemed noteworthy. MatPat started a Let's Play series called GTLive on August 26, 2015, where he posts gameplay and video reactions with his wife Stephanie. Starting on October 3, 2016, the Monday streams became part of YouTube Gaming Primetime, and were therefore scheduled for 3 pm to 5 pm PST. It also included a voting mechanism, which can be used by MatPat to conduct quick polls. As of March 2022, GTLive had 2.94 million subscribers and over 649 million views. As of 2022, the GTLive channel continues to upload mostly unedited, pre-recorded content.

On June 8, 2016, MatPat posted via his YouTube channel a new show, MatPat's Game Lab, on Google's paid subscription service, YouTube Premium. The show mainly focused on placing video game players in real-life scenarios mimicking scenarios that occur in video games, such as bomb defusing, parkour, survival and military training. Despite MatPat's interest in developing a second season, YouTube did not announce any further development into the project. He was also a part of the YouTube Premium series Scare PewDiePie (2016), created by PewDiePie, and the third season of Escape the Night (2018), created by Joey Graceffa, in addition to cameo appearances in Markiplier's YouTube Original films A Heist with Markiplier (2019) and In Space with Markiplier (2022).

On May 29, 2016, MatPat and eleven other YouTubers met with Pope Francis for an hour. MatPat asked the Pope to encourage others to "fight for what's right" and gifted him a copy of Undertale (2015), saying that its recurrent theme of mercy fits the Pope's proclamation that 2016 would be the "year of mercy for the Catholic church".