Manuel Otto

Otto died on the evening of Tuesday 20 October 2026, aged 30. On 20 October the official Stick Run account said it was aware of a livestream on Twitch involving its creator and owner, in which he appeared to have taken his own life, and that Twitch had removed the stream and associated video. The team asked for privacy, urged people not to spread unverified information, and asked anyone with relevant information to contact the team or local police. On 21 October the team confirmed the death of its creator, developer and fellow player, Marc-Manuel Alexander Otto.

The Upper Bavaria South police reported that at about 7.45 pm on 20 October a fire broke out in an attic flat in the centre of Breitbrunn am Chiemsee, in the district of Rosenheim. A resident put out the flames before firefighters arrived and suffered mild smoke inhalation, but the person inside the flat could not be saved. Police said the dead man was very probably the 30-year-old occupant, that formal identification was still pending, and that there was no indication anyone else was involved. The criminal police in Rosenheim took over the investigation together with the prosecutor's office in Traunstein. Police did not name the man, but news outlets including Dexerto and TMZ noted that the age, place and timing matched the information released by Stick Run.

No official cause of death had been published at the time of writing, and no funeral arrangements had been announced. If you are struggling, help is available: in the UK call Samaritans on 116 123, in the US call or text 988, and in Germany call the Telefonseelsorge on 0800 111 0 111.

Manuel Otto was born in 1996 and grew up in Staudach-Egerndach, a small municipality in the Chiemgau region of Bavaria, in the district of Traunstein. As a child he loved watching animated films and began making small animated sketches of his own on the computer. He had no formal training in programming or design, and he later explained that he taught himself the skills he needed by trial and error. He attended a Gymnasium, the academic secondary school, and was still a pupil when his first game became an international success.

Otto spent about four months building Stick Run, a browser game in which the player steers a stick figure through an endless obstacle course, collecting experience points and coins until a missed obstacle ends the run. There was no finish line, only a high score table, and up to four players could race against one another. He published it on Facebook in August 2010, when he was 14, and later said he had never imagined it would be such a success.

The player count kept climbing. Within about a year the game had around four million monthly active users on Facebook, and it regularly ranked among the ten biggest games on the platform in its categories. Players could dress their runners in new clothes and trade items in a real-time marketplace where the community itself set prices. Otto liked to say the marketplace worked like a free market economy and taught players to be more careful, because they could also be badly cheated.

As the game grew, Otto founded a company, TigMar GmbH, which his father managed while he was still at school, and he had the name and logo of Stick Run legally protected. In 2013 the games publisher Nekki, which the German press described as a large Russian online games company, offered to work with him, and within weeks the game was adapted for smartphones. The Android version was released on 13 September 2013, followed by an iOS version. By then Stick Run was reported to have been played by more than 43 million people worldwide.

Otto remained the creator and owner of Stick Run for the rest of his life. In later years he also appeared on the livestreaming platform Twitch.

In August 2013, aged 17, Otto gave an interview to the Traunsteiner Tagblatt and the Chiemgau-Zeitung, in which he said he intended to concentrate on school and sit his Abitur before allowing himself to rest on his success. His great dream afterwards, he said, was to travel the world, and he had plenty of ideas for new games. He kept his private life largely out of public view, and little about his family life as an adult was made public.

Stick Run was one of the best known games of the Facebook gaming era, and its story, a teenager in a Bavarian village building a hit played by tens of millions, was widely told as an example of what a self-taught young developer could achieve. After his death, players around the world shared memories of the game as part of their childhoods. In its tribute the Stick Run team wrote that it mourned not only the loss of its creator but also a fellow Stick Runner whose work had become part of players' lives, and that his legacy would live on through every memory, every run and every player who grew up playing the game.