There’s an irony in what I do because I’m quite an introverted person. Even going back to when I was a kid, I was the quietest person in my family. I just wouldn’t talk much. Even in school I wouldn’t talk much. And now, here I am in an online field where all I do is talk.
It all went wrong when my mum got me a copy of Pokémon for Game Boy Colour and I’ve never been the same since. I was four or five and she brought it back from Canada, and I remember being so excited. It felt like a second Christmas. She had one for me and my brother.
It’s been 25-odd years since then; she probably regrets that decision. There’s a lot of other stuff I could have gone on to be and here I am – I play video games on the internet. I live stream myself playing the games and just have a bit of craic with it all.
I stream everything I do. On average I work around 40 hours a between editing for YouTube and being live on Twitch. It can push well above that some weeks. I go live four or five times a week; usually I stream for six or eight hours. I just really enjoy it. I always have.
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Playing games would have strictly been a hobby until 2011. I was 16. I was supposed to be doing my homework after school, but I was like, “nah, I want to play games like Minecraft and Pokémon”. My parents were so frustrated with me. I think it’s understandable at that age. I decided to pick this up as a hobby when I was supposed to be doing my Leaving Cert. We joke about it now.
When I started, I played games with my friends. I did that because I would have been too shy to do it by myself. I would have thought in my head: “I’ve got nothing worthwhile to say by myself, so let’s just have some fun”. I really loved it and watched a lot of other creators online like Kevin, Jerma and Yogscast, which motivated me. I just find there’s an authenticity to it. A kind of humour that comes from the back-and-forth. It’s almost like an interactive kind of theatre. You’re watching a TV, but the TV screen can yell back at you. There’s something really compelling in that.
It wasn’t until 2018 that it took off. I was living in Japan at the time. Everything started to get 10 or 20 times more views than it normally would before. I went from 100,000 followers on YouTube, to a million that year. I was gearing up to teach English as a foreign language over there, but I ended up skipping that because YouTube did so well. I just got very lucky since then. I’ve been blessed with a lovely community; they’re a really good bunch. I know it can be rough in the online field and there are all sorts of crowds, but I’ve been blessed with a very good one.
I love Irish literature. I studied Joyce and Beckett in college. I’ve always loved books and always loved to read. I get that from my dad. He introduced me to Dubliners by James Joyce, when I was 12, and I really became interested in Joyce and have read a bunch of biographies about his life.
In his time, he would have been grappling with a lot of new technology and that had an influence on me. He tried to give new formats a chance. He opened the first cinema in Ireland way back in the day. He believed in travelling but was still haunted by Ireland. For myself, I tried living abroad just to try to get some of that outside perspective because, you know, we have got to go see the world when we can.
I moved to Japan because I simply had the chance and I didn’t have a good reason to say no. For me, it was: “let’s try to just have that sense of adventure, so I’m not just stuck in Ireland forever”, as much as I love it here. We need to get out and about and see the world.
Being Irish I love being able to describe some of the weird oddities that we have here to a broad and foreign audience. The amount of times I have to describe what a spice bag is or what is a chicken fillet roll is, it’s very fun. Sometimes I get to speak a bit of Gaeilge.
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I was able to buy a house recently, shockingly, in this economy and I’m very thankful for that. To be honest I didn’t expect to be able to live in Ireland at all, just because of how things are here. I have a lot of friends who moved over recently to Zurich in Switzerland, because it’s cheaper. Which is very telling.
I still have to remind myself that what I do is a real thing. Just working on an online sphere people are disembodied, so we’re just text messages in a chat box ultimately. Whenever I show up at a convention and real people are lining up to meet me I think, “Oh my God, what is this? What are you doing here?”
For me, in a lot of ways, this is still the after-school hobby. And I think that’s how I always will treat it. It will never really feel like I work when I do this. I think that comes across even in my content. I am just having silly fun at the end of the day.
In conversation with Fiona Ellis. This interview is part of a series about well-known people’s lives and relationship with Ireland. Follow Daniel RTGame at youtube.com/rtgame and twitch.tv/rtgame.
