John Bain

John Bain was born on 8 July 1984 in Spennymoor, County Durham, the UK. He attended De Montfort University where he studied law. He was married to fellow YouTube personality Genna Bain whom he had first met in 2005. He had one stepson from this marriage.

From 2005 to 2010, John Bain ran the World of Warcraft Radio station and received special recognition and acknowledgment from Blizzard Entertainment, the publisher and developer of World of Warcraft. After his tenure at World of Warcraft Radio, he launched a website Cynicalbrit.com, where he began to share more generalized gaming content. It was also during this period that he launched his own YouTube channel, TotalBiscuit.

In the year 2010, John Bain was laid off from his job due to the Great Recession. As a result, he decided to earn money through YouTube. He began developing videos of himself talking over “World of Warcraft: Cataclysm” gameplay on the social platform. Within a period of weeks, many of his videos went viral and their popularity skyrocketed. Soon, Bain was contacted by HuskyStarCraft, a StarCraft 2 commentator who asked him to join the gaming network, The Game Station (now Polaris). In 2012, Bain collaborated with Sony Online Entertainment for the E3 event and played the game PlanetSide 2 at the Sony Online Entertainment's booth.

Apart from his popular "WTF is...?" series, John Bain also hosted the "Content Patch" program. He hosted The Game Station Podcast as well as the Co-Optional Podcast where he discussed video games and gaming news with fellow YouTube personalities Brooke "Dodger" Thorne and Jesse Cox.

In August 2012, Bain offered to sponsor gamer CranK (now AxCrank) to play in the MLG Pro Circuit 2012-Summer Championship. The following month, Bain announced the creation of Team Axiom, with him and HuskyStarCraft as sponsors and AxCrank as their first player. Their group joined Team Acer and formed the team Axiom-Acer to compete in GOMTV Global StarCraft II Team League.

Talking about his YouTube channel’s popularity, TotalBiscuit was the top Steam curator for many years, with over 800k subscribers at the time of Bain’s death. Also, prior to his death in May 2018, the game critic and commentator had over 2 million subscribers on his YouTube channel. Because of his fame, Valve Corporation invited him to their headquarters to talk about Steam's storefront and discovery tools.

In late April 2014, John Bain announced that he had developed symptoms of bowel cancer. The following year, the cancer metastasized to his liver and was declared inoperable. His doctors gave him a life expectancy of two to three years. On 23 September 2016, Bain reported that the cancer had mutated and his treatment had contracted his liver tumor by over 50%.

In November 2017, he tweeted that his chemotherapy treatment had stopped working. He also noted that his cancer hadn't spread but its growth had started again. In April 2018, the gaming commentator/critic was hospitalized due to his worsening health. His doctors found that the cancer had become resistant to medication and conventional chemotherapy would no longer work for him. On 24 May 2018, Bain's wife Genna announced on the social media that her husband had fallen into a "hepatic coma" and died.