Thomas George Cassell[1] (born: June 23, 1993), better known online as Syndicate (also known as ProSyndicate, Life of Tom, and formerly TheSyndicateProject), is an English YouTuber, gaming commentator, and vlogger. His channel was opened on September 3, 2010,, and he quickly grew to become one of the largest gaming channels on YouTube, with nearly 10 million subscribers as of October 2020.
The channel was originally focused on Halo and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 videos, but came to prominence with the release of Call Of Duty: Black Ops Zombies and further grew due to the series The Minecraft Project. He is also known to have been friends with another YouTuber called 'Dillan Tucker' YouTube name 'mrdilpot' but they stopped talking for an unknown reason. He and CaptainSparklez were in close competition for the 3rd most subscribed gamer, but CaptainSparklez ultimately won.
His YouTube success is heavily outweighed by his Twitch.tv success, as he was the most followed player on the website; before being taken over by various other twitch streamers in the second quarter of 2017. He also has his own clothing line, called SyndicateOriginal. It was closed for a year and reopened as a family run store in the UK and US.
Biography[]
Tom's Minecraft character
For a while now, Tom has lived in his house in England that was built by his father. Tom used to switch between the US and England every month but now only lives in England, and visits the US and travels quite a bit. When Tom was younger, he went to Blue Coats High school, Located in Oldham, Greater Manchester. Tom also has a lizard named Steeve, which is a Bearded Dragon. Before Tom had Steeve, he had another Bearded Dragon called Spike, since 2011, he has died, but he continues to live on in our hearts. He also frequently travels to see iiJeriichoii, GoldGlove and Muzzafuzza in LA, but now Muzza and Goldy have both moved out of the house, leaving Jericho by himself with his Chow Chow, Grizzwald, which Tom extremely hates.
He had a girlfriend that he met through Minecraft named Kaitlin Witcher, known as Piddleass on YouTube, after burning down her house on a Minecraft server. Tom and Kate broke up after a declining relationship, there is much unknown around the entire break-up process. He dated another girl named Jess Hollingworth, before breaking up in early 2016. Announced after his Ibiza trip in August 2017, he is now dating a Dukinfield teacher and longtime friend, Lydia Hewitt-Lee. Tom and Lydia split up but remained good friends, simply due to Tom requiring time in the USA and Lydia having a full time traditional job meaning they couldn't spend time together. Tom and Lydia are now back in a full time relationship, and in a recent vlog (Early 2023), mainly showing his holiday with his family for his birthday, they announced that Lydia is pregnant and they are expecting a baby. As of November, 2023, Tom and Lydia welcomed their baby boy, Alfie (Alfred), to the world.
Minecraft Championship[]
In 2020, Syndicate participated in Noxcrew's and Dangthatsalongname's MC Championship event, an event where YouTubers and streamers would come together to play a wide variety of fancy minigames. The tournament consists of 10 teams and 40 players, featuring a variety of custom minigames. The prize is a special MCC coin by Noxcrew.
Syndicate debuted in MCC8. Syndicate replaced Joey Graceffa for that MC Championship.
- MC Championship 1-7: Did not participate.
- MC Championship 8: Team Orange Ocelots. wasn't supposed to play, but replaced Joey Graceffa, who was supposed to play, but got kicked out.
- Teamed with ShubbleMC, RIPMika, and Strawburry17.
- Placed (Unknown) Individual and the team placed 2nd overall.
- Teamed with ShubbleMC, RIPMika, and Strawburry17.
- MC Championship 9-13: Did not participate.
History[]
Logo
Tom originally intended for TheSyndicateProject to be a vlogging channel, uploading 3 vlogs, only one of which remains on the channel, his very first video: "Seananners Stole My Style !". SeaNanners is another YouTuber, and the title relates to the way in which Syndicate moves his eyebrows in the video, which resembles the way that SeaNanners moves them. After he reached 5 million subscribers he posted one more vlog in the same spot on the same day, three years later. His enjoyment of videos by the gaming community on YouTube led him to change the direction of his channel, and he soon began uploading Halo Reach videos, of which over 15 are still available on his channel. By the end of the series, Syndicate was a Machinima Director.
Around the same time, Syndicate turned his attention to Call Of Duty: MW2, starting by uploading a few gameplay clips, before uploading full gameplays as part of his series "Nuking The Fridge", in which Syndicate aspired to get at least one Nuke every day from the date of the first release until Black Ops was released. The videos were also featured on Machinima Respawn, and Syndicate's channel soon grew rapidly to have over 1000 subscribers.
It was Black Ops, however, which caused his channel to explode. At the time, it was uncommon to reach Round 20 solo on the Zombies game mode. Syndicate proceeded to release strategy videos, releasing a Round 60 playthrough at about the same time as he gained 10,000 subscribers, just before the end of 2010.
Syndicate continued to grow incredibly quickly throughout Black Ops's time as the latest Call Of Duty, but also turned his attention towards Minecraft properly for the first time, as Zombies begun to get boring, leading to the release of the first "Minecraft Project" episode on the 30th August 2011. The series now has 400 episodes, and is the main source of his views today (thought it is about to come to an end following the release of episode 400). He has done many more series involving Minecraft, such as, "Lonely Island" where he played on hardcore on an island. He has done a series with OpticNadeShot, and Bigtymer where they tried to kill each other called "Hunting Optic".
Syndicate has uploaded many videos of Black Ops 2 Zombies. In the videos he gets up to wave 40 on original. He has played with Mr. Sark in a couple of his videos where Syndicate was the good Zombies player, while Mr. Sark is not good at Zombies.
Syndicate got a recorded record of reaching round 115, Getting 27, 890 kills in total and finishing with 3,590,080 points. This video was uploaded on the 3rd of November 2011 after his round 100 and 110 videos were released.
He also did a zombie stream marathon on Twitch where he went through playing one round till he died on every zombie map made, and reach over 100 thousand people watching him, being 65 thousand as his old record. The hashtag was also #CodZombieMarathon that got trending on Twitter.
One of the more recent series Tom has done is a new series on Minecraft with fellow YouTubers called Mianite in May 2014. This series is done with JerichoAFK, OMGitsfirefoxx, CaptainSparklez, 16bitdec, OpTic_Nadeshot, Champwan, and a few others including Pirates and the Wizards of Mianite. It contains elements of story, mostly revolving around the three 'Gods' of the world: Mianite, Dianite, and Lady_Ianite. This series was a livestreamed series on Twitch, livestreamed every day at 8pm UK time, 12pm PST and 3pm EST. The streams are recorded by them and uploaded to YouTube usually the day after 2 hours before the stream for the day starts, although Tom has an issue with missing days and using the wrong episode number. This series is massively popular, with an average of 25,000-50,000 live viewers every day, and about 40,000-80,000 live viewers every Saturday/Sunday due to this thing called 'The Purge' they do every weekend. In Mianite, they do adventures and such and have fun overall. They have also gotten many things trending on Twitter throughout the series, the last being #MianiteFinale. During the series, Tom had reached a whopping 100,000 viewers on one stream for Mianite. So far, Season 1 and 2 have ended and season 3 is not a certainty as of yet.
After the season finale of Mianite, the group quickly made a new series called "Trinity Island" with fellow Mianite stars JerichoAFK, OMGitsfirefoxx, and CaptainSparklez, which takes the place of Mianite for the between-season break. Trinity Island is basically hardcore on survival island where the goal is to kill the Ender Dragon, the Wither and the Elder Guardians. If they die, it's all over, which means that if someone dies, they get kicked and banned from the server. The series ended with Sparklez taking the win. Jericho died first on Episode 3 by a creeper, followed by Firefox dying on Episode 23 by a Guardian. The last episode shows Syndicate and Sparkles battling it out to be the ultimate Trinity champion. Sparkles defeated Syndicate in the 1v1 and took the win.
Deaths of Trinity Island[]
- Tucker (Episode 3) Whilst the rest of the group were above ground, Tucker went down to the mine for resources, only for a creeper to fall down from the ceiling through a single hole and explode, killing Tucker in the process. Tucker's animation of his own death can be found here.
- Sonja (Episode 23) The three remaining survivors ventured into the Ocean Temple to slay the guardians but Sonja got overwhelmed and died to the numerous guardians.
- Tom (Episode 32) Tom died on the last episode of Trinity Island from a 1v1 battle with CaptainSparklez to see who would be the ultimate champion of Trinity Island. This is after they defeated all 3 bosses. Sparklez is the last remaining player of Trinity Island, and is deemed the champion.
Controversy[]
Withholding payment from collaborators[]
In July 2015, Syndicate was accused of not compensating or crediting an animator who had created content for an upcoming Mincecraft-based video series that Syndicate was producing. The animator, YouTuber Nicholas Deary, uploaded a video outlining the claims, which received wide online media attention on sites such as Reddit and Twitter. Whilst Syndicate initially mocked Deary about the accusations over social media, he later apologized to Deary in a tweet, and agreed to pay him the money that was owed.
CSGO Lotto[]
During the spring of 2016, Syndicate and Trevor "Tmartn" Martin both started posting videos of them using a website called CSGO Lotto, a skin gambling site where Counter-Strike: Global Offensive players could place bets with real currency for CS:GO weapon skins, both claiming they had merely stumbled across the website and, having posted several videos of them using CSGO Lotto with titles such as "CRAZY HIGH WINS" and "HOW TO WIN $13,000 IN 5 MINUTES", and during this time Tmartn claimed he was considering accepting a sponsorship from the site.
In late June, YouTuber HonorTheCall posted a series of videos revealing that Tmartn was president of the company that ran CSGO Lotto company while Syndicate was vice president, and the pair had been running the site since late 2015. In the immediate aftermath Tmartn attempted to claim he had always been honest that he owned CSGO Lotto, even he had posted videos on his channel of him saying the exact opposite, as well as accusing HonorTheCall of making false accusations. As the story gained traction with YouTubers such as H3h3Productions, Jim Sterling, Philip DeFranco and Boogie2988 posting videos to bring the story more attention, Syndicate posted an apology and promised transparency in future on his Twitter account while Tmartn posted a video (since deleted) where he apologised to his followers while also attempting to shift blame onto those who used CSGO Lotto unaware that he and Syndicate were owners of the company, claiming it was their fault for not looking up who owned the company. This controversy has lead mostly to the decline of Syndicate's main channel and Twitch channel with his YouTube channel now dipping below 10 million subscribers.
Sexual Abuse and Misconduct Allegations[]
In the middle of 2020, amidst a wave of #MeToo and other allegations of sexual abuse and misconduct against many content creators, including IAmSp00n and AngryJoeShow (the former of which has been proven true), streamer Natalie Casanova and Tom's former girlfriend, Kaitlin Witcher, made allegations of sexual assault and rape against Tom to which he responded revealing they were false, saying he was "shocked and saddened" by the actions of "two women I once called friends".
Subscriber Milestones[]
- 1 Million Subscribers: May 27, 2012.
- 2 Million Subscribers: December 27, 2012.
- 3 Million Subscribers: March 12, 2013.
- 4 Million Subscribers: June 5, 2013.
- 5 Million Subscribers: August 26, 2013.
- 6 Million Subscribers: November 19, 2013.
- 7 Million Subscribers: February 19, 2014.
- 8 Million Subscribers: September 11, 2014.
- 9 Million Subscribers: July 16, 2015.
- 10 Million Subscribers: June 22, 2016.
Decline[]
- Below 10 Million Subscribers: February 27, 2018.
Video View Milestones[]
- 100 Million Video Views: July 29, 2011.
- 200 Million Video Views: December 4, 2011.
- 300 Million Video Views: April 12, 2012.
- 400 Million Video Views: July 2, 2012.
- 500 Million Video Views: September 12, 2012.
- 600 Million Video Views: December 13, 2012.
- 700 Million Video Views: March 5, 2013.
- 800 Million Video Views: May 22, 2013.
- 900 Million Video Views: July 30, 2013.
- 1 Billion Video Views: October 9, 2013.
- 1.1 Billion Video Views: December 27, 2013.
- 1.2 Billion Video Views: March 28, 2014.
- 1.3 Billion Video Views: June 26, 2014.
- 1.4 Billion Video Views: October 2, 2014.
- 1.5 Billion Video Views: January 6, 2015.
- 1.6 Billion Video Views: April 13, 2015.
- 1.7 Billion Video Views: July 31, 2015.
- 1.8 Billion Video Views: November 28, 2015.
- 1.9 Billion Video Views: May 29, 2016.
- 2 Billion Video Views: September 1, 2017.
References[]
- ↑ Thomas George Cassell. UK Companies House.