Stampy Cat: Minecraft vlogger Joseph Garrett is the name on every child’s Christmas list

It's nearing midday on Saturday, and on the top floor of a shopping centre in Kingston, south-west London, there is a commotion. How people are responding to it rather depends on their age. A queue comprising pre-teens (with dutiful parents in tow) is snaking outside Waterstone's, on past the surrounding shops and out into the car park. For the next four hours, the queue persists, getting in the way of all the retail therapists. Excitement runs its entire length, at least for some.

“What's going on here?” somebody asks.

“Stampy!” says a small boy.

A frown, then: “Who?”

An hour later, Stampy – a guru of the smash-hit computer game Minecraft and one of the most popular YouTubers in the world – arrives. From the cognoscenti come whoops; from everyone else, bemusement. He takes his seat and begins, in earnest, to sign copies of his book, Stampy's Lovely Book, for children whose faces light up in a manner they might once have reserved for Father Christmas.

“I'm not really good with crowds,” Stampy had told me earlier, “and events like this can drain your energy.” Nevertheless, the 24-year-old seems in his element, full of the sherbet enthusiasm of a children's entertainer as he signs books, poses for photographs and answers the endless, and highly specific, Minecraft-related questions his fans pose.

And of course he laughs. Stampy laughs a lot; it's his identifying trait: a helium honk that sounds as though he has swallowed Jimmy Carr and is burping him up one hiccup at a time. Hic hic. Children respond wonderfully to the laugh; parents less so.

You may have to be part of an exclusive club to be aware of the cult of Stampy, but it is a vast one. In real life, this regular young man goes by the name of Joseph Garrett and uploads videos daily to his YouTube channel in which Stampy – a cat character with big feet “who likes to stamp them” – takes the viewer into his Minecraft world, where he embarks on virtual adventures, builds ever-more ambitious projects, interacts with friends and commentates on it all incessantly.

You might think it curious to watch someone else play a game rather than play it yourself, but to people of a certain age, it's addictive. “My audience is children between the ages of six and 12,” Garrett explains, “because Minecraft is essentially a children's game now.”

You can fight other players, explore their own constructed worlds, or construct your own. In this last mode, it's an online children's game like no other, helping to transform the formative mind into a highly organisational one. By building their own worlds, brick by brick, building by building, players learn how to plan, to design. They are essentially architects, and the game is being used as an educational tool in classrooms around the world. How popular is it? Stampy's channel has 6.6 million subscribers and his videos receive a cumulative 150 to 200 million views a month. That's more than Justin Bieber, more than One Direction. Not bad for a young man who was working in a bar until two years ago.

And, thanks to advertising on his page, he is making a fortune out of it. He has recently gone into partnership with an affiliate of Disney, so the fortune will only grow as he branches out. Hence Stampy's Lovely Book, a Christmas annual featuring 72 pages of games, jokes and recipes for cake. It's a bestseller already.

“I'm lucky,” he says. “I've been in the right place at the right time, and I'm able to do for a living what I had always hoped I might just be able to do as a hobby.”

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Joseph Garrett does not much look like a superstar, not even a YouTube superstar. He's quite unlike the Zoellas and Alfie Deyeses, with their cheekbones and hairstyles. Instead, he looks like precisely what he is: a shy, good-natured games geek – and a little pale, perhaps. The limelight, he says, was unanticipated. He is still blinking in its glare.

Born and raised in Hampshire, he is the son of a graphic designer and a stay-at-home mum. He has two older sisters, one also in graphic design, the other following Garrett's lead into the world of Minecraft vlogging.

Though a decent-enough student at school, he preferred to play computer games. As far back as 2006, he was recording himself talking about them and putting the videos up on a new online platform called YouTube. “It seemed like a fun thing to do,” he says.

His parents, initially, were concerned. Shouldn't he be spending his spare time more wisely? “They didn't quite understand it, but they didn't discourage me. I could see how the channel was growing, and I knew that if I got fully into it, I might make it work for me.”

When Minecraft launched in 2009, he was an early enthusiast. He says he could see potential in what, to non-gamers, looked curiously retro, like two-dimensional Lego with clunky graphics that could hardly compare to high-spec hits such as Call of Duty. But it was addictive. He was still addicted to it while studying TV and video production at university. “So I thought the fact that I was writing, editing and providing voiceover for online content might look good on my CV,” he says.

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As its popularity grew, so did Stampy's. Yet such popularity is no assurance of happiness: in 2014, Minecraft's 36-year-old Swedish creator, Markus Persson, sold the game to Microsoft for $2.5bn. Earlier this year, he tweeted: “Hanging out in Ibiza with a bunch of friends and partying with famous people, able to do whatever I want, and I've never felt more isolated.”

Might a similar fate await Garrett? Possibly not. For a start, partying with the famous isn't remotely on the agenda: he goes to great pains to protect his privacy, and rarely gives interviews. We meet shortly before his marathon signing session, and it is explained to me that we will not be alone. His book PR will sit in, likewise his American manager (a smartly dressed woman who shakes my hand with both of hers, very firmly), and another woman whose identity isn't made clear. Garrett seems nervous as we speak, his eyes wary, his right leg vibrating wildly.

Though still a one-man operation – he works from home, alone – Garrett now has corporate muscle behind him: a US company called Maker Studios, which is part of Disney. He brought them in to help manage his growing profile. He works at least 11 hours a day, every day.

“I'm sometimes envious of people who have a 9-to-5 job,” he says. “People who can just come home and switch off. I never can.”

Rumours suggest that he makes at least £200,000 a month via Minecraft, though you wouldn't guess it from his dress sense alone. His sensible sweater might just be from M&S. I am asking him what it's like to be better paid than the majority of Premiership footballers when from across the room his manager speaks up. “I'm sorry,” she says, “but he is not answering any questions regarding finances.” I explain that I need to address his wealth and would rather not rely on online inaccuracies. “We can get an official line to you,” she offers, “but at this time we won't be answering any financial questions.”

(The official line comes a week later: it is that management does not share information about the income and/or earnings of their talent.)

I ask whether Garrett is at least enjoying his wealth, and his answer sounds rehearsed. “I'm happy I'm able to do what I do without having to do anything else.” He insists that money hasn't affected his social life and that, besides, most of his friends are vloggers too. Does he, I wonder, have a girlfriend? “I do, yes,” he says. “She is also a YouTuber, and she is sitting there.”

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He points to a young, bespectacled woman sitting on the floor. She looks up, distracted. “Sorry, I was playing Minecraft,” she laughs, showing me her tablet. Her online name is Sqaishey Quack. “I'm a yellow duck who loves playing games,” reads her website, on which she does pretty much what her boyfriend does. I ask if it's OK to mention her in my piece. She says yes, then asks Garrett if that's OK.

For a moment, he looks conflicted. “If you don't mind, I don't mind.”

They live together just outside Portsmouth, from where they oversee their growing empires, although Garrett increasingly travels to Los Angeles for meetings. Back at university, he'd had hopes of becoming an editor, perhaps a vision mixer; he liked making stop-motion films. “What I really wanted to do was create online projects entirely by myself.” Well, I say, he's certainly done that, so what's next? TV, a film, more books, an even greater online presence? He glances at his manager. “There are things in the pipeline, but nothing I can talk about at the moment, I'm afraid.”

Earlier, we had spoken about his trademark laughter. Not a fake laugh, he insisted, but perhaps a nervous one. “I sometimes laugh to fill an awkward pause,” he'd said. There is an awkward pause now, the gaming entrepreneur with the online world at his feet, obliged to keep schtum to build anticipation, perpetuate the buzz, and safeguard other sundry American-designed business incentives. Hic hic, he laughs, hic, hic.

' Stampy's Lovely Book' (£7.99, Egmont) is out now