Holy fuck. Vappyvap88 passed away. He's arguably the reason why the Vinesauce: The Full Sauce channel exists - he was archiving Vinny's streams around the time when he was playing Tomodachi Life, and those stream archives got super popular.
I remember the day that Vinny announced Full Sauce, and he hired Vappy on to maintain the channel as equal partners - it was partway through the Tomodachi Life playthrough, which is what made it so huge. Vappy went legit after uploading all these Vinesauce stream archives, and I was really happy for him.
He spent years uploading and editing streams for Vinny, and I think he was the primary editor for the official Vinesauce highlight page for a while too. He spent years doing this and getting paid for it - idk if it was his only source of income, but it was absolutely his job to keep Full Sauce streams uploaded. Vinny streams every day, and he streams several things - so Vappy would have to get the recording, edit it into multiple videos, possibly cut out some stuff if something particularly screwy happened and upload them to the channel. Every single day. For years. He even kept uploading pre-stream content to his YouTube channel - he was like a butcher, chopping the stream into bits and using every cut in a way so it wasn't wasted.
He left about a year ago, I dunno why. I think it was work related, so he might have been juggling a few things at once. I was kinda bummed out when it happened, because again - this legacy, the Full Sauce channel, started with Vappy's uploads. But he's gotta move on, so there's no sense getting bummed out about it - John Fullsauce, the new channel manager, keeps the uploads consistent too.
It's a year later, and the news has come down. I heard about it from a Full Sauce video called "About Vappy". According to what Vinny said, he died from "complications from cardiac arrest and coronavirus".
And I'm honestly pretty gutted. Vappy didn't introduce me to Vinesauce, but at a time where streaming wasn't a viable method of entertainment for me, he uploaded Vinny's stuff to a platform where I could access it. I think I downloaded a few of his videos using a youtube-to-mp4 webpage at the time, because I was on a slow broadband connection with a tiny data cap and I couldn't even stream YouTube video consistently.
The official Vinesauce YouTube channel always left me hungry for more content. 5-10 minute corruption highlights never left me satisfied, I always wanted more Vinesauce. Vappy's stream uploads gave me access to that content, and it was through these uploads that I became more of a diehard Vinesauce fan. I saw Vappy rise from a bootleg uploader, carving his niche in the fanbase with consistent hour-long stream uploads of Vinny's most popular stuff, to an official member of the Vinesauce team. That was always inspiring to me - sometimes I'd check out his channel and smile, remembering where everything started.
And it hurts to think that he's gone.
Vappyvap88 has been an invaluable member of the community, and I'm truly upset to hear about his passing. My thoughts go out to his friends and family, as well as to members of the community who are as shaken up about his passing as I am. To the Vinesauce community, he leaves behind a legacy in the Full Sauce channel - with his actions helping to bring Vinny's streams to a wider audience, bringing happiness to an untold amount of people who discovered this community through his work. He will be sorely missed.
