Welcome to Streamers on the Rise, where we find streamers who are growing their channels, content, and audiences in extraordinary ways. Each week we’ll talk with a creator about what goes into livestreaming–both on and off camera.
Squeex is competitive.
Like, very competitive.
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That used to be a bad thing (at least, according to his mom and all the childhood friends he trounced at Mario games), but these days it’s helped him secure a spot as one of Twitch‘s top party game speedrunners.
For those not familiar, “speedrunning” is a type of gaming where a player tries to complete an entire game as quickly as possible. There are some speedrunners who focus on completing specific percentages of a game in order to consider the run “complete,” but many others consider just getting to the end by any means possible a win. And (depending on the game) there are people capable of achieving those wins in mere minutes.
Squeex is one of those people.
His early love for Nintendo games led him to ye olde digital text gaming guides, back when video content wasn’t really a thing and when you were stuck on a level, you had to go looking for an obscure website and hope someone else had already figured it out and written about it. Once video content was a thing, Squeex found his way to YouTube, and then to Twitch.
“Basically, what propelled me onto Twitch is taking some of these party games a little too seriously,” he says. “The one thing that broke me out on Twitch was taking the game Super Mario 64, a game that I used to play in my childhood, as seriously as possible, and trying to speedrun it and beat it as fast as I can. From there, a lot of people loved to watch. Then I started playing games for enjoyment. But that was the first breakout on Twitch, with speedrunning. Now I just play a whole slew of variety games or try to speedrun a bunch of other games that catch my attention.”
Squeex didn’t really mean to become a streamer full-time, but after he was laid off, he figured, why not?
Data from Streams Charts
Now, he has nearly 115,000 followers on Twitch, and on top of being one of the platform’s preeminent party game speedrunners, he’s also dipping his toes in multi-creator collaborations, hosting, and interviewing at major events like the Streamer Awards.
Check out our chat with him below.
@curiousjoi My precious bean always…. #myheroacademia #naruto #deathnote #sailormoon #spiritedaway #bakugo #deku ♬ Pink Venom
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tubefilter: I would love to get some perspective from you about just your whole journey as a creator and what it’s like behind the camera. Let’s just start with, say somebody’s reading this and they’re not familiar with you, give me a little bit of background about you and your journey up until joining Twitch.
Squeex: Basically, a little background about me is, I am 29 years old. I’ve been gaming since I’ve been a child. Admittedly, I’d been taking a lot of party games a little too seriously at a very young age. You can imagine a lot of friendships were made and more were broken during a game of Mario Party when I was a kid. Unfortunately, unlike most people, I never broke that habit. [laughs] Basically, what propelled me onto Twitch is taking some of these party games a little too seriously.
The one thing that broke me out on Twitch was taking the game Super Mario 64, a game that I used to play in my childhood, as seriously as possible, and trying to speedrun it and beat it as fast as I can. From there, a lot of people loved to watch. Then I started playing games for enjoyment. But that was the first breakout on Twitch, with speedrunning. Now I just play a whole slew of variety games or try to speedrun a bunch of other games that catch my attention.
Like, recently, me and a bunch of streamers started speedrunning Mario Party to try to beat it as fast as possible, the mini-games. That was a huge fun thing that we traveled around to compete for a tournament in L.A. I would say, now, I’m mainly a competitive party game player.
Tubefilter: See, it all worked out.
Squeex: Yes, exactly. Tell that to my mom. It’s not a waste of time! [laughs]
Tubefilter: How did you first end up on Twitch?
Squeex: I ended up on Twitch because I loved watching Twitch. When I was a kid, there was no way of watching people play games, even game guides. I remember reading Prima Games guides or I’d have to read game facts or whatever, so when video content came out, I was obsessed. First, it was YouTube, and then Twitch, where it was live, and was the best place to watch other competitive gamers. I was such a Twitch fan for years and years and years. It’s like a dream come true to be a Twitch streamer and get to collab and talk with the people I used to watch so much of. I started on Twitch because I just loved watching it. I just loved video content regarding gaming.
Tubefilter: Is this your full-time thing now?
Squeex: Yes, full-time thing now. It’s been my full-time thing for, gosh, two years. It wasn’t exactly by choice, because I’ve been streaming on Twitch for six, seven years, but it’s just that no one really started watching until two years ago. What really kicked it off was, I actually got fired. There was this viral Zoom firing. The CEO fired 900 people on Zoom. I was one of the 900. I just continued streaming on Twitch, and I got really lucky. After I got fired, things started picking up and that was what led the way to full-time streaming.
Tubefilter: That’s cool. I mean, getting fired isn’t cool. You know what I mean.
Squeex: Yes, I know. [laughs]
Tubefilter: It’s cool that you were able to go straight into something you were really passionate about.
Squeex: Yes, I definitely got very lucky after that.
Tubefilter: What’s your streaming schedule look like now? What’s your production time that you put into each week?
Squeex: My streaming schedule for Twitch is I try to stream every day at 4:00 PM Eastern. That being said, I’m always late. Sometimes I’ll go early. Sometimes I don’t show up. I’m like, “No wonder I got fired.” My streaming schedule is that, but then also making sure we have YouTube content as well. I would say I stream almost every day. Maybe trying to put my foot off the gas a little bit on the weekends but, yes, almost every single day.
Tubefilter: Since you do a variety of games, how do you balance what you decide to stream each day? Do you take any kind of advice from chat or is it just what you’re feeling that day?
Squeex: Yes. I don’t listen to chat at all, to be honest, because my philosophy on streaming is just try to do whatever I want. If I want to do it, chances are I’ll have fun doing it and if I have fun, chat has fun, I think so. I would say my thinking is if something just catches my eye, it could be any genre of game, whether it’s a first-person shooting game or a strategy game, if it’s a good game, I’m going to play it, I’m going to try to make it as fun as possible and whoever watches, watches. I feel like viewers are really smart so they can tell if you’re streaming for them rather than to them.
Tubefilter: Got it. I did want to talk a little bit about growing your community, because I’ve asked every single person for this column so far and every single person has talked about the difficulty of growing on Twitch compared to other platforms. How has your experience been with growing? Is there anything that you did to grow that worked well for you?
Squeex: Yes, sure. It would be dishonest for me not to say a big part of growing on Twitch is luck. I’ve been streaming for seven years. In my concurrent viewers for five full years is four. It’s not like anything radical changed but what I would say for an aspiring streamer is stream because you like it. Don’t stream because you want to grow your channel. I think it’s so obvious when someone just either is streaming to grow or streaming to become famous versus streaming because they’re trying to make a good stream. If you focus too much on growth, what happens is you become– That’s your barometer of success, is viewership number. I think the nature of the business is that just frankly will fluctuate just based off factors, like, “Oh, school’s out. This game is trendy now. This person’s live at the same time.” I think that’s a good way to go a little bit insane is to focus on that.
In terms of growth, if we’re talking about pure numbers from a business point of view, I would say the biggest thing would be collaborating. I was really lucky in that sense because I had a lot of streamers that would watch my stream so collaborations was an easier thing for me. That would be number one. Then number two would be consistency. I think if you want people to know you’re live, you should go live right at the exact same time every single day and become a reliable source of entertainment. My number one would be, stream because you want to, and make your stream the best possible no matter who shows up or how many people.
Tubefilter: The last person I spoke to also said that it was really unhealthy for her mentally to trace viewers. If she also paid too much attention to what viewers were looking for, then it strayed from what she wanted to do. I feel like that’s an interesting balance to have to walk.
Squeex: I think it’s the same with, I’m not calling streaming an art, but a lot of artsy industries, where if you focus too much on what people think they want, then I feel like you often cater to the general instead of your niche. I think that, at least, for me, the movies that I like watching and the TV shows I like watching are more pointed and are more directed toward what I like.
Tubefilter: I do think streaming is an art for sure. I think you’re selling yourself short there.
Squeex: Sure. Well, playing Mario 64 for seven hours is more of the torture sometimes.
Tubefilter: It’s a skill!
Squeex: Sure. It’s a skill to do that, to sit down for so long. Yes, fair.
Tubefilter: What kind of equipment do you use? What’s your setup?
Squeex: My setup is bare bones. Basically I would say that I’ve had this setup for the whole time streaming. Like if you see my oldest clips to my recent clips, usually I have the same mic, same headphones, same everything, because I don’t have these crazy– I don’t have like a device to switch scenes or three monitors. I have two monitors. My thinking regarding setup is just go for a high-quality products that last a long period of time instead of getting the new hot thing because I feel like in this space there’s a lot of garbage, a lot of things that people just want to peddle.
I would say my products are just very basic. If you’re an aspiring streamer, don’t let not having a product stop you from streaming. Some of the biggest streamers have the worst webcams and stuff like that. Mine is extremely bare bones. I like it like that. It is more homey for me.
Oh, and I use a Nintendo 64 for my gaming. I’m on original hardware.
Tubefilter: What, really?
Squeex: Yes. Here’s my controller right here. I got my N64 controller. I play on a legit N64, which I connect Super Mario 64 to.
Tubefilter: That’s rad. I haven’t seen one of those in the wild in years.
Squeex: Yeah, so that’s something cool. People are always asking, how are you playing these games? I’m saying, “I’m blowing in the cartridge.” Don’t you guys remember? [laughs] It’s cool to play on original hardware.
Tubefilter: What’s, in general, been your favorite part of being a streamer?
Squeex: Well, I always like trying to be funny, so my favorite part of being a streamer is like having the platform to just do stupid stuff. My favorite part is literally just trying to make people like laugh or confused or something. I don’t know. I just like getting that rush of dopamine, I guess, from doing something silly and seeing the chat respond. That has to be the stripped-down, bare-bones version of why I like streaming. I just like being as entertaining as possible and everything. That was apparently not a skill that my boss valued when I worked in finance.
Tubefilter: Oh, it’s so funny how many people in finance become creators.
Squeex: Oh, yes.
Tubefilter: It’s really weird. There’s some kind of direct pipeline.
Squeex: Yes. Well. I don’t want to read too much into the psychological report about that.
Tubefilter: Deal. Are you working on any cool projects? Do you have any goals for this coming year, any kind of plans you’re working on?
Squeex: Yes! Something that I did in the last year was collab with just a bunch of people, try to go on other people’s streams and make their streams really good or fun. I want to keep doing that. There are some things in the works that haven’t been finalized and I can’t say specifically, but whether it be like a game show or some gaming tournament, definitely it’s going to be a year full of traveling and a year full of working with other creators to see what we can do.
That’s the one thing I also really like is hosting something. I got to host the red carpet interviews for the Streamer Awards, and that’s something that I hold very near and dear to my heart. Hopefully, more opportunities like that coming up as well. Going back to, I’m just the most massive fan of Twitch. I feel like by watching Twitch, you learn a little bit about what makes a good event or a good stream. It’s cool to be the guy who I feel like the representative sometimes for the average viewer. I love doing that, love just like going into other people’s streams, and then stuff like that.
Tubefilter: I think that’s very valuable. Something I’ve learned from doing these interviews, is that a lot of Twitch streamers, when they start off, it’s very lonely and they don’t have any mentorship. With YouTube, there’s this vast repository videos about people who are, “Oh, my first YouTube video. Oh, here’s what I did in my first year of YouTube.” Twitch doesn’t have that crystallized history of content and so people just have no idea what to do. No baseline.
Squeex: Honestly, I think you hit the nail on the head, but I almost think, in some way, that’s a positive for Twitch, because one big criticism that I have for Twitch is, and I’ll draw a parallel for YouTube, is YouTube, I feel like at the top level, there’s a lot of clones of each other in terms of content because it’s like…solved. They’re like, this is the path you take, this is the version of a thumbnail you need, this is the type of title, this is the type of pacing. But with Twitch, I feel like it’s a good platform for true diversity, and, I mean, diversity of type of character, type of person you are.
On Twitch right now, because there’s no algorithm, which is a negative, but an unintended positive consequence of that is we have so many different types of people, and that’s what makes these collabs interesting, is seeing like, how would a Mario speedrunner interact with an IRL hot tub streamer, or how will this person interact with that person? Because at the top level, every streamer is so unique. That’s something that I think Twitch does really well, is giving a microphone to a diverse group of personalities. That’s something that I really, really appreciate about Twitch as well.
Tubefilter: Gotcha. Anything else that you want readers to know?
Squeex: No, nothing in particular. I would just say if a reader’s trying to become a streamer, keep enjoying streaming as long as you can and hang in there. You don’t hope to be a streamer, you just are one. You just go live and put on the best show for anyone that shows up, or if anyone does show up at all. That’s what I would say. Just go live. Go live on your laptop camera. Do something unique with it. It’s funny because playing Mario on an N64, it’s really hard to capture video for new people. Some of my favorite streams are just streamers sitting on their sofa with a camera pointed at the TV, so you really have no excuses. Just go live.
