Luke Lerdwichagul

Luke Lerdwichagul (born May 24, 1999) is an Australian YouTuber, machinima artist, director, animator, video editor, and actor who created the popular parody web series known as SMG4 (2011). Alongside the web series, he is the co-founder and CCO of the animation company Glitch Productions, the headquarters of which is in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. He is also the younger brother of Kevin Lerdwichagul, who is the acting CEO of Glitch Productions. He also has a younger brother named Max and a younger sister named Tish. He has understandably revealed very little else of his life story without getting into specifics, very likely for privacy reasons. What is known about him is that he grew up with his parents, who owned a food shop in Australia. He has said that he first took interest in the Mario Brothers franchise as well as Nintendo as a whole while he was living there, as his parents owned a Nintendo 64 with such games as Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, and a few other titles. He went to an unnamed elementary school and later attended an unnamed private high school that was, in his own words, "very strict with bullying and uniform". During his high school experience, he was evidently regarded as a friendly person and a hard worker by his fellow peers, even though he apparently received the nickname, "Squidge", which he says was because the "Wich" in "Lerdwichagul" rhymes with "Squidge". He started the SMG4 series in 7th grade, which he continued to work on new videos for every weekend. He also says he never missed posting a new video unless he had exams. However, he also has said that he never missed a single day of school from grades 7 to 12, even if he was ever sick in any way, simply because he didn't want to break his streak. He has admitted this wasn't very smart, even though his school gave him an award for not missing any school days for so long. In late 2017, he began working on a new series eventually known as Meta Runner alongside his brother Kevin, and he was also now attending an unnamed university studying "Media Arts". Luke has mentioned that he didn't actually know what "Media Arts" meant, but there were no other courses he was interested in, and the only reason he signed up for this course was that the words "animation and games" were mentioned somewhere in the course description. He also quickly discovered that his course had nothing in them that he wanted to do, such as essays and research, but only after he had already signed up. Even so, he also entered a course that actually did teach how to do animation properly. To put it in his words, "It was here where I got a glimpse into this magical art form. I wasn't really doing any animation on SMG4, and Meta Runner was still being planned. So it was all new to me. And I enjoyed every bit of it." He says he first utilized his newfound knowledge of animation in SMG4 in the episode, "The Ultimate Smash Bros (2017)", and shortly after he used all of his knowledge of animation as a whole in the episode, "SMG4: If Mario Was In... Splatoon (2017)". He says that eventually, his older brother Kevin asked him if he would want to do animation as a career, to which he responded by saying "yes", and as a result, Kevin was able to talk to their mother about dropping out of Luke's current university, and soon after, he attended an unnamed art college. He has said that what he learned there helped him greatly when making Meta Runner (2018), which was evidently in the middle of production at this time. However, it was also due to it being mid-production that he dropped out again so he could have more time to work on Meta Runner with his team at Glitch Productions. He has been working on YouTube videos ever since.