Popular Minecraft content creator Dream has sat down with Smosh co-founder Anthony Padilla for a tell-all interview and has finally opened up about the cheating scandal that almost cost him his career.
2020 was a huge year for Dream – whose real identity still remains anonymous despite his whopping 22.9 million followers – with YouTube even dubbing him the number one breakout star of the year.
But like many viral creators, Dream has not been exempt from his fair share of controversy, with the anonymous star making headlines over Minecraft cheating allegations.
Basically, the moderation team monitoring Minecraft speed runs published a lengthy 14-minute video in December 2020, in which they detailed a 2-month investigation into a speedrun submitted by the popular creator, in which they asserted that he cheated.
Just last week, he finally admitted to the allegations in a since-deleted Pastebin post.
“I ended up finding out that I had actually been using a disallowed modification during ~6 of my live streams on Twitch,” Dream wrote in a since-removed Pastebin post. “At the time we were just starting to record videos on [Minecraft version] 1.16, and we had just hired a developer to help with coding mods for videos because me and George had no experience with mods, only plugins. One of the mods that they were working on was an overall recording mod, that I have used in every video (with updates and improvements) since around the speedrun controversy.”
However, his new interview with Padilla is the first time he’s really discussed the situation at-length.
“It’s hard when people say stuff like that or when people use that as a reason to attack my character or my accomplishments or anything in that way,” he told Padilla in the interview.
He also added that the alleged cheating video wasn’t actually uploaded to his YouTube channel, seemingly using this as proof that he didn’t do it for clout.
“The one record that was removed from the board wasn’t even a world record, I had three other world records that I had gotten before,” he added, noting that the actual world records are not in question.
“But the thing is, I didn’t even upload a video on it that was just a run I did on my Twitch.”
Interestingly, he admitted that he should’ve handled the situation better.
“In the grand scheme of things it’s such a small part of my career, I guess, and me as a person,” he said. “I handled the situation horribly. When it originally came out my response was ‘You guys are idiots, blah, blah, blah.’”
In hindsight, he believes he should’ve just taken a breather before responding.
“I should’ve shut off all my devices for a couple of days and been like okay, let me not react with emotion,” he explained.
“That is kind of the downside of blowing up so quickly is that I wasn’t used to criticism coming in waves of tens of thousands of people instead of just one guy saying like “hey, I don’t like that you did this.”
You can view the full interview on YouTube here.
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