Gab Smolders

About Gab Smolders

Her name is Evelien Smolders, born September 11, 1988, in the Netherlands — but the internet knows her as Gab Smolders, formerly GirlGamerGab, formerly GG Gab, and currently one of YouTube’s premier horror-game creators, with well over a million subscribers and hundreds of millions of views. If you want to watch someone play the scariest games on earth without flinching, there is a short list. She is on it, near the top.

What separates Gab from every other horror channel is the Japanese. She studied the language at Leiden University, lived in Japan, and speaks it fluently — which means she can play, translate, and contextualize Japanese horror games that almost nobody else in the West touches. Fatal Frame, Ikenie no Yoru, Clock Tower: the deep cuts of J-horror, delivered with live translation and genuine cultural fluency. It is a genuine competitive advantage — a whole library of terrifying games, unlocked by a degree — and it made her channel a destination for horror fans who had exhausted everything in English.

The catalog is a horror education in itself. Full playthroughs of Fatal Frame 5, the original Clock Tower, the Wii obscurity Ikenie no Yoru, Resident Evil Revelations 2, Outlast (the DLC alongside Metal Gear Solid actress Stefanie Joosten), Until Dawn, the original Metal Gear Solid — and newer nightmares like Mouthwashing, whose “Not for the squeamish” playthrough was good enough to get written up by the gaming press. ScreenRant once named her among the YouTubers with the best horror walkthroughs, praising her nerves of steel and a pace of two to three videos a week that never lets the channel go quiet.

Even the name has a story. “Gab” comes from her original Dutch handle, GebrekAanBeter — “for lack of better” — because every username she actually wanted was already taken. It stuck, and so did the community name: her fans call themselves Gabbers. It is the kind of origin story you cannot manufacture, and it fits a creator whose whole brand is unpretentious competence.

She is also a node in the horror-creator network. Over the years she has collaborated with John Wolfe, MrKravin, Suzy Berhow, Arin Hanson, Stefanie Joosten, and TheRPGMinx — the loose constellation of creators who turned scary games into a genre of entertainment. Horror YouTube is a community as much as a category, and Gab has been one of its load-bearing members for the better part of a decade.

The personal chapters are public record. She married fellow YouTuber Pyke, known as TaiyouInc — fans knew him as “Gab-Man,” a fixture of her early videos — and the two divorced in September 2018. In March 2019, she and Irish YouTube giant Jacksepticeye went public as a couple, making them one of gaming YouTube’s most-watched pairings. She has always kept the focus on the work, but the audience has always cared about the person behind the playthroughs, too.

Then there are the cats. BB — a stray who became her companion of eight-plus years and a recurring co-star of the channel — turned Gab into one of gaming’s most visible cat people, and she put that platform to use. As part of Cats Protection’s Pawsome Players community, she has run annual charity streams for four years running, raising more than £40,000 for the charity’s Lifeline service, which finds temporary homes for the cats of families fleeing domestic abuse. It is the rare creator-charity fit that feels completely genuine, because it is.

Here is why she matters: horror is YouTube’s most personality-driven genre. The scares belong to the game; the entertainment belongs entirely to the player. A horror creator needs composure, timing, curiosity, and the ability to talk through terror without breaking character — and Gab’s calm under pressure is the whole brand. She does not scream for the thumbnail. She plays, she translates, she survives, and millions of people find that more watchable than any jump-scare compilation.

Still uploading, still streaming on Twitch, still finding horror games the rest of the internet has not heard of: Gab Smolders found her lane early and never left it. In a creator economy built on pivots and reinvention, there is something quietly radical about that — a decade of scary games, played well, by someone who genuinely loves them.

The Twitch side of the operation deserves its own mention, because horror plays differently live. On stream, there is no edit to save you — the scare lands in real time, the reaction is unfiltered, and the chat becomes a second audience, screaming on her behalf. Gab’s streams carry the same composure as her videos, which is precisely why the Gabbers show up: watching someone stay calm inside a haunted house, digital or otherwise, is its own kind of thrill.

She shares the page’s “more like” rail with John Wolfe and Markiplier — fitting company, and a useful contrast. Where Markiplier turned horror into blockbuster entertainment and Wolfe into gothic theater, Gab turned it into a discipline: the scholar’s approach, the translator’s ear, the steady hand. A decade in, she is the proof that horror YouTube rewards depth as much as volume — and that the scariest thing on the platform might just be consistency.

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