Megabonk and the mystery of the missing YouTuber – is creator Vedinad actually Danidev?

It all began innocently enough. It was September and Megabonk was blowing up on Steam, and I was curious. What was this game that had arrived without a formal introduction and raced to more than 100,000 concurrent players? It was the latest in a line of unpredictable viral hits, and I wanted to know more. I wanted to know who it came from, whether it was a slapdash cash-grab made by an opportunistic company, or whether there was something, or someone, more genuine behind it.

At a glance, Megabonk looked derivative. The Vampire Survivors template was obvious. Auto-attack, level-up, choose powers, survive: it was the same. The only difference seemed to be rendering the game in 3D. But was that enough? My first impressions weren’t great. The game looked rough (though Vampire Survivors is no looker) and it irked me how aspects of the experience were locked away – padlocks prevented powers from being used until I’d played for long enough. It felt like mobile gaming design. But the more I played, the more my scrutiny softened.

Megabonk gets it. Vampire Survivors is about thrilling players by throwing everything at them – filling the screen with overwhelming numbers of enemies and saying, go on then, survive that. Megabonk does this, and it does it much quicker than Vampire Survivors. And the 3D aspect introduces a potent extra dimension. Even the crude appearance becomes endearing after a while – characterful, distinctive – and the held-back powers start to make sense by way of elongating the experience. I warmed to it. Megabonk began to seem more earnest in its approach.

The clinching factor was discovering who made it. Megabonk is not made by a company but by a solo developer who goes by the name of Vedinad. Eager to find out more, I approached them, and after a bit of persistent knocking on various doors, found myself in a conversation. “Hello! What did you wanna talk about? :)” they asked. I had lots of questions, but I began with some obvious ones.

Are you the only person working on this game? “Yeah, I’m the only developer working on it,” they said. “I have outsourced the music though!” I asked how long Megabonk had been in development and was told, “I started working on this project in August of last year so it’s been about a year.” How many copies had the game sold? “About 920k copies, so almost at the 1 million mark! Very unexpected to say the least,” Vedinad said, adding a mind-blown emoji. And when you consider Megabonk sells for £8.50, you can understand why.

So far so breezy, but I was about to ask a question that would jeopardise that

Gradually, I started working towards chewier topics. I know this kind of success can be disorientating, as I found out talking to DayZ creator Dean Hall recently. Has the success of Megabonk affected Vedinad’s life in any way? Note: Steam earnings arrive a month in arrears – a detail I learned from Phasmophobia creator Daniel Knight, so Vedinad was probably still waiting for a paycheck when we talked, but I was eager to get an answer nonetheless. “A severe case of impostor syndrome,” Vedinad answered, “a lot of gratitude and a ton of stress haha! All in all, I don’t think the success has impacted me much, I will just keep developing Megabonk all the same, without having to worry about money :).”

So far so breezy, but I was about to ask a question that would jeopardise that. You see, while I’d been speaking to Vedinad, I’d become aware of a mystery surrounding the game. Or rather, I’d become aware of a mystery surrounding Vedinad, the person making the game, and the question of who they really were. And the collective finger of suspicion seemed to point one way: towards the missing YouTuber and game developer Danidev.

I didn’t know anything about Danidev before writing this piece, but it didn’t take me long to realise how popular a figure they were – and still are. A glance at Dani’s YouTube channel shows 3.57 million subscribers, which is enormous even before you consider they haven’t posted anything there for three years. The follower-count may well have risen since they left. Maybe it’s the mystery of where Dani went that fuels this; no one seems to know. There’s an entire The DaniDev subreddit awash with theories and possible sightings, but no one’s seen any overt Dani activity, on YouTube or the Karlson stick-person shooter game they were making, for a couple of years at least.

But what’s all of this got to do with Megabonk? Well, look again at that name Vedinad. Read it backwards and it’s Danidev. Could it really be? Some supporting evidence: listen to Vedinad’s voice in a Megabonk video on YouTube, and compare it to Dani’s voice in any of Dani’s videos. It’s very similar. Also, consider information shared about Dani a year ago by someone who apparently knows them, or him, as he’s referred to. This person said Dani was well but had stepped back from public life to deal with other things, and to focus on game projects, one of which had grown in scope to become “pretty big” and was nearing a playtesting. This roughly aligns with what Vedinad told me about Megabonk: that it had been in development since August 2024. The timelines work.

Vedinad could be a pretender, of course, but it’s a curious choice of name if you’re a fan – and there are plenty of people you could class as fans, who care about Dani’s work, and about Dani. And for what it’s worth, the videos I’ve watched of Dani show someone who’s silly and creative and likeable. I can see what’s magnetic about them and why they have the following they have. To name yourself Vedinad as a fan – something so obvious as Danidev backwards – would be a confusing thing to do, particularly if you were invested in the collective search for them.

This mystery of ‘is the Megabonk creator Danidev?’ quietly took hold of me while I was speaking to Vedinad, and I figured there was one blindingly obvious way to solve it: ask them. Incidentally, my first more covert way of answering the question was to suggest we talk on a video call because then I would see if Vedinad was Danidev or not. But no go: they declined. Suspicious. My next approach was to be more direct. “I think a straight question is best here,” I wrote in an email. “Are you Danidev?” And I waited for a reply, and waited, and waited. But Vedinad had disappeared.

I think a straight question is best here, I wrote in an email. Are you Danidev?

Perhaps it was for the best. It wasn’t lost on me that there were some ethical concerns here. If Danidev had wanted to get out of the public eye for whatever reason, who was I to jeopardise that? Clearly they had needed to get away. But why reinvent yourself with a name as thinly disguised as Vedinad if that was the case? I did ask if they’d rather I dropped this whole thing, but like all other inquiries made after I’d mentioned Danidev’s name, this went unanswered. Vedinad had retreated from view.

However, this week Vedinad reappeared, making headlines by declining a prestigious nomination by The Game Awards for Debut Indie Game. The reason given was that Vedinad had made games under different studio names in the past, which I’m still not sure rules you out of that category. But The Game Awards organiser Geoff Keighley soon tweeted to clarify that Vedinad had “reached out to clarify that he is an established solo developer who had been presenting himself as a new creator under the name Vedinad”. “He’ll share more about his story when he’s ready,” Keighley added.

Look at that with our established tin-foil hat on and could Vedinad be wriggling out of the awards for fear of having to appear in public? Mind you, it’s worth pointing out that secretive Balatro creator LocalThunk, who won Debut Indie Game last year, did not appear in person to collect it. But why would you turn down an award and recognition like this? I can’t see any evidence of Vedinad’s other games, and I don’t see why Danidev’s body of work would rule them out. But if it does, isn’t that also suspicious – doesn’t it also point one way? The mystery lives on.

There’s a part of me that’s glad I never got confirmation of this, one way or another, partly because I like mysteries, but partly because there’s a cautionary tale here about the reality of living as an influencer in today’s society. Danidev was one of the people who rode that first wave of YouTube popularity, back when the idea of a games-related influencer was unfounded and unprecedented, as was the life they would then go on to lead – a life of intense scrutiny and feedback about everything you do. A constant din of opinion directed at you, which, certainly if you don’t have a team acting as a buffer around you, I imagine can be withering.

There’s talk of Danidev making a public return – that’s what the person on Reddit said, who apparently has contact with them – but I wonder about this, because if Dani really is the creator of Megabonk, why return? Dani will have made a fortune from the game that they can live off without needing to face the audience they once left behind – without needing to let them back in, to entertain that noise. Megabonk’s income offers a quieter life for years to come. Megabonk achieved success without Danidev. Dani didn’t need to leverage their brand to make it fly, which I admire. Megabonk was judged for its own merit, which is, perhaps, a much nicer way for things to be.