My first time playing Starcraft was back in 98, when I was 10 and absolutely horrible. I was so bad, even my mom could of beat me and she still thought of mice as critters. However, my lack of skill did not stop me and my friend from doing a 2v1 computer; which resulted in defeat after a good 3-4 hours of building photon cannons. We actually would do a 2v2v2 "Team Melee" just so we could have a probe and SCV which would increase our unit production because well we never thought about just building duplicate production facilities.
I was addicted to Starcraft and one day my brother whom of which is 7 years older decided to remove IPX/SPX support, in attempts to free up our computers. Once I figured out the entire IPX/SPX thing, I literally thought I knew everything there was to Windows and this is where I would say I started my interest in computers. Fast forward 12 years and I am now a Sys/Net/Sec Admin and a Programmer doing contracting work.
I don't remember when I stopped playing SC, probably around Starcraft 64. But I heard about Starcraft II, joined the SC Reddit, and got addicted again. Once the Beta came out there was a post about Orb's stream which I would watch daily. Thanks to people in his chat; I found out TeamLiquid had a streams page so I could watch other streams. I got Beta around patch 5/6, back when roaches not only costed 1 food but also had more armor than an Ultralisk.
During one of the downtimes I stumbled onto Stropheum's stream of him playing Chess and talking about the game. He had asked for a Terran practice partner and wasn't responding in chat; so I ninja'd his AIM Name and messaged him. He was pretty confused because I thought I was watching a live show when it was really just a VOD, hence him not responding in chat. But we kept talking and we moved fairly high in the ladder after doing practice games with each other.
Start of Streaming.
The downtime between phase1 and phase2 beta hit and we decided to watch replays during the outage so when the game came back online we would roflstomp out of placements. He wanted to stream this however his computer could only handle SC1 streaming, so he gave me his Livestream info. The stream consisted mainly of him talking and me saying a total of 20 words during a cast.
However, one day he got kicked off the computer in middle of a game and forced me to go solo. This was possibly one of the scariest things that has happened to me this decade. To my surprise the people of TeamLiquid did not care about my Speech Impediment and thought I was pretty entertaining. So I kept commentating as it is fun and actually helps me out IRL; you have no idea how nice it is having hundreds of people listen to you, after being ridiculed for how you talk your entire life.
Meeting my first "Celeb"
While streaming, I mentioned I wanted to start running tournaments and one of my Sweedish viewers(Mindossa) put me in contact with Wolf; who at the time I thought was a pretty big celebrity. Wolf, talked about his OWC and said if I helped him out; he would let me stream any game I wanted even the finals! So my plans of hosting tournaments vanished and I joined up with Wolf.
While helping out the Wolf Cup; I let other people cover the semi's game Wolf had given me and one of those was RageQuit.tv. I hung out in their IRC a lot and we just helped each other out for a few weeks and one day they needed my help and I officially joined up with them.
48 hours for minerals
I cover many tournaments for RQTV, however the biggest thing I have done is run the "48 hours for minerals" charity fund raiser. Which involved streaming for 48 hours straight, asking people to donate to Childs Play. This was a HUGE success with a total of $4244 in donations, 45k unique viewers, 4 years of viewer time, and 700+ average viewers through out the entire event.
Well thats about it for now... Thanks again Stropheum & Wolf for helping me get big enough to where I can actually join a group and start making a name for myself.
TL;DR
My career path started because of Starcraft I and Starcraft II gave my self esteem a nitro boost; effectively making me imbalanced.
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