Streamers on the Rise: PointCrow’s goldfish beat Malenia. Also, he’s building a massive business across YouTube and Twitch.

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.

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If you don’t know PointCrow (which is unlikely considering he has 602,000 Twitch followers and 2 million YouTube subscribers), you probably know his goldfish Tortellini.

Tortellini, you see, is the fish who beat Malenia.

Back in July, Tortellini went viral after PointCrow (aka Eric Morino) rigged a controller that would translate his swimming movements into game input and set him loose on Elden Ring‘s notoriously difficult boss, to incredible results. Tortellini’s debut was part of Morino figuring out where he wanted to go next with content. He got his start streaming with the Zelda game Breath of the Wild, and had completed numerous grueling challenges on stream, including full playthroughs where he couldn’t walk and couldn’t turn left. But he didn’t want his entire online presence to be dependent on a single game or games from a single studio, especially when Nintendo is known for being anti-mod and for filing takedown notices against content about its games.

“I took all of the effort that I was putting towards modding Nintendo games and I was like, ‘What if I just took that and then put that towards everything else?'” he says. “I was like, ‘Okay, I have a goldfish and I love him more than life, I wonder if I can do something with that?'”

Then Morino remembered Mutekimaru, a streamer who got her goldfish to play Pokémon (and also, uh, accidentally commit credit card fraud).

“I was like, ‘Okay,'” he says. “What if I can also do that?'”

Tortellini was–and continues to be–a big hit, but his presence on Morino’s channel is also a good representation of how Morino is consistently growing his content and his channels on both YouTube and Twitch. He was an engineer before he started making content, and he approaches everything as problem-solving. It’s clearly working out for him, because in the last couple months, his channel jumped from an average of around 10 million views a month to more than 40 million. He’s also actively growing his behind-the-scenes team, is thinking about launching another channel, and wants to build a brand–and all of these things are challenges he’s eager to tackle.

Check out our chat with him below.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tubefilter: You’ve actually been on my radar for a while–your channel is having huge growth.

PointCrow: Oh my god. I’m flattered. Thank you so much. Yes, the channel is like, it’s crazy. I literally tweeted out recently, the last month, I received 10% of all my video views ever. The month before that, it was the same, and month before that, it was also the same. It’s exponential.

Tubefilter: Huge! Like I said, I’m really familiar with you, but I’d love to start with, like, pretend somebody is watching or reading this and they’ve never seen your stuff. Give me a little bit of intro about you and where you’re from, and how you got into gaming in the first place.

PointCrow: Sure. Hi, I’m PointCrow or Eric Morino, and I do crazy things on the internet. That’s the best way I can put it. It’s essentially challenges or things that you think are impossible, and then I do them because I think they’re fun. Anywhere from having my goldfish beat an Elden Ring boss, to eating water with chopsticks. It’s just weird crazy things that I think are a lot of fun. A whole bunch of people think they’re fun too. It’s insane. Is there anything else you’re looking for with that?

Tubefilter: I’m in awe. I just picked up my first FromSoft game, I just started playing Armored Core 6 and I have new appreciation for your goldfish, to say the least.

PointCrow: Thank you. He beat Malenia, the hardest boss in the game.

Tubefilter: I know! Wild. Where did your passion for gaming originally come from? Was it Zelda?

PointCrow: My intro to gaming in general actually started with Pokémon rather than Zelda, which is very interesting. I haven’t really told the story too many times, but essentially I was on vacation with family when I was very, very young. It was the first time they could really go on vacation after having me because I was finally old enough to go out in public and not be a menace, and one of my cousins who works for a now major video game publisher actually was playing Pokémon Red, I believe, and handed me his Game Boy and was like, “Hey, look at this,” and we would play it together a little bit during that vacation. I just fell in love with that game. A couple months later, Christmas happened and my parents ended up getting me a Pokémon Fire Red. I played the living hell out of that thing. I have I think 800 hours on the cartridge for Pokémon Fire Red.

Tubefilter: Oh, wow. You were serious.

PointCrow: I loved it. That’s where my passion for gaming really started. Eventually I’d go to my other cousin’s place, we’d play Halo and Majora’s Mask.

Tubefilter: The opposite spectrum.

PointCrow: Yes. Pokémon, Halo, a little bit different. [laughs] That’s where it maintained. I had that spark from Pokémon and I just got introduced to everything else afterwards and I loved it. For streaming itself, I just started with Zelda.

Tubefilter: How did you get online?

PointCrow: Yes, for streaming stuff, I started with Zelda: Breath of the Wild, just because I really liked the Zelda series. I thought it was just a really fun thing and I wanted to try out Breath of the Wild pretty much for the first time, like really just dive into it, and what better to do it on stream?

Tubefilter: Very brave.

PointCrow: Yes.

Tubefilter: I’m playing Starfield right now and the amount of doors that I’ve walked fast or things I’ve not been able to Digipick, I can’t imagine having people watch me fail.

PointCrow: Insane. I played Starfield I think yesterday and had a lot of fun. I quite literally had to force myself to continue on with the quests because I was so busy just trying to pick up everything around me. I have 10 mugs in my inventory.

Tubefilter: Me too. It’s so bad. I keep trying to put stuff on Vasco and Vasco’s overloaded. I’m like, “Please.”

PointCrow: It’s like, “Oh god.” It’s really fun.

Tubefilter: I need my 10 helmets. Like, I really need them. Anyway, I would love to hear, I think a lot of people who have watched you or who have seen your stuff are just amazed at the stuff you’re able to pull off.

PointCrow: I love doing it.

Tubefilter: What drives you to make yourself have a very difficult time?

PointCrow: [laughs] I actually don’t find it to be that difficult when I do the things. Most difficult thing is coming up with the ideas.

Tubefilter: There’s something wrong there. [laughs]

PointCrow: Yes, I’ll watch ice melt for 10 hours straight and it’s totally fun for me. I don’t know why it is, maybe it’s the content brain rot as it is, but I just like it. I’ve beaten Pokémon, I believe it was Pokémon White, with only level one Pokémon. That took a lot of effort and a lot of planning and a lot of time, and you can do it, but it was just a lot of fun. It’s very weird.

Tubefilter: You come up with the idea and then do you lean on a lot of planning and then when you actually go to do it, you have the strategy in your head already?

PointCrow: Sort of. I come up with the idea, or I come up with a statement or something of like, “Can you actually beat Pokémon with level one Pokémon? Is that possible?” and then I will start with an ideation phase where I’ll explore it a little further and be like, “Okay. I’ll start with the beginning of the challenge, the game. Does it even have legs to even start?” Then if it does, then I’ll be like, “Okay. Stop looking at it. Stop exploring it. Let’s do the rest of it on stream. Let’s actually try the challenge on stream.” Then a lot of the time, I’ll get stuck, and then we’ll have this a sitrep side quest session of, “Okay, how do we get past this? We have to do problem-solving on the fly.” That’s actually what helps make the videos even better.

Tubefilter: Yes, that’s a huge amount of interactivity.

PointCrow: Yes, because I don’t go into it just knowing exactly everything that’s going to happen. It’s that spontaneity that really makes it pop.

Tubefilter: Take, for example, the one you did for Breath of the Wild and you couldn’t walk. Can you describe to me how you planned for that?

PointCrow: Yes. God, that one was a lot of fun. Breath of the Wild, but I can’t walk. I would just hop everywhere. I just front flip, back flip, side hop everywhere. I thought of it and I was like, that is such a crazy idea where you’re like, “Can you beat Breath of the Wild without walking?” That’s the most basic thing that you do. It’s like, “What? Can you be beat Breath of the Wild without breathing next? Like, what’s going on?” That’s maybe a future thing. Anyways, without walking, it was just a fun idea. Then along the way I figured out, I’m like, “Oh, we have cliffs that we have to do.” It’s very strange to come up with stuff like that. The one that actually is even worse than no walking for Breath of the Wild was without turning left, like beating the game without turning left. What I had to do was literally had to take a cardboard box, a little cardboard box, and tie it to my controller with rubber bands so then I physically couldn’t turn my joystick to the left, and that was awful because I– you don’t think about it, but you turn left all the time.

Tubefilter: Yes. What a luxury to turn left after all that, though.

PointCrow: Right. No, actually though, because the next challenge I did, I was literally like, “I’m never doing a challenge like that again.” It was great, it was a good video, infuriating.

Tubefilter: Yes, but it did well, I remember.

PointCrow: It did well, yes. It was a fun watch.

Tubefilter: That was the first one I think that popped up organically on just my YouTube.

PointCrow: It’s crazy to hear all of the intro and origins of where people saw my channel for the first time because it’s always different. Every single video is someone’s first video.

Tubefilter: Do you feel like the majority of your traffic comes from YouTube and then people trickle over to watch Twitch?

PointCrow: YouTube is where a lot of people find my channel, and then if they like it, then they’ll go check it out live. I think it’s a really good funnel for viewers. Just think about any creator, any streamer, you probably didn’t find them on the actual website. You might have, totally happens. For example, I found Squeex, a really awesome and hilarious, witty guy, I found him on TikTok. I wouldn’t found him on Twitch at all. I found Ludwig on Reddit. It’s very interesting because the majority of the streamers that you’ll find aren’t actually on the streaming website that you watch them on, and so YouTube is my funnel. That’s the main thing where people find me from.

Tubefilter: Yes, Squeex is cool. The discoverability thing, especially re: Twitch, is something I’ve been talking to a lot of people about.

PointCrow: I will say, YouTube is easier than you think. It’s just I think a lot of people, I put it in this way, they’re lost sauce. They think too much about, “Oh, when should I post?” or, “What’s the optimal SEO strategy and stuff?” It’s like, no. Yes, you think about that, and that’s like…You should think about that, but you should think about that after you’ve made something that you are proud of and you think is really good and people would want to watch. I know it’s a very generic statement, but you can’t build on anything if you don’t have a foundation of like, are you proud of what you did first? Then if you are, okay.

Tubefilter: Yes. I’d also love to hear about the goldfish escapades. How did you come up with the idea for that?

PointCrow: First of all, I wish I got the video out sooner. I really wanted to make it good, so I think it happened the whole clip. What you’re talking about is essentially I posted a clip of my goldfish beating Malenia on Twitter and it went viral and everyone picked it up. I think that was in July, and I just released the video of it and it’s September, so a little bit farther, but I really wanted to make sure the video was good so anyone who would watch it in the next couple of years would be like, “That happened and I really love that video.” The ideation for that spawned by– I was wondering of things I could do for other games besides the Nintendo games, because, as we all know, Nintendo was like, “No modding,” and I was like, “Ah, that sucks.” I took all that effort–

Tubefilter: You had some takedown issues with them too, right?

PointCrow: Yes.

Tubefilter: Yeah, they’re like that.

PointCrow: Exactly. I took all of the effort that I was putting towards modding Nintendo games and I was like, “What if I just took that and then put that towards everything else?” I was like, “Okay, I have a goldfish and I love him more than life, I wonder if I can do something with that?” It’s literally just random stuff around the house, I was like, “Can I do something with that? Can I do something with that?”

I remembered that I saw a TikTok a while ago of a goldfish unintentionally committing credit card fraud and I was like, “That is hilarious.” It was from a streamer, Mutekimaru, I believe, where they had their goldfish attached to Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, the game crashed and then it went into the eshop and bought a whole bunch of things and leaked the credit card info. It’s hilarious. I was like, “Okay. What if I can also do that?”

Tubefilter: Also commit credit card fraud?

PointCrow: [laughs] Also create a goldfish controller and see if he can do whatever the hardest thing I could think of, and I was beating Malenia, so I was like, “What if he can do that?” I remembered that Michael Reeves did something similar as well, and then I was like, “Okay, this is a good baseline of where we can build up this controller.” Now Tortellini can pretty much control any game that you want him to.

Tubefilter: Do you have plans to do more with him?

PointCrow: Yes, there are plans.There’s one that is out there already. It’s not a video, but it was a stream where I had him play Mario Party versus my Twitch chat. My Twitch chat would type in chat like, “A, B, left, right, start,” and they would control their character, and Tortellini would control his character. Tortellini almost won actually. In the first two turns, he got a star. He beat some mini-games as well. It was actually insane, and I plan on doing that more in the future, because I want to see what the extent of a Mario Party-playing goldfish could be.

Tubefilter: I think maybe you need to talk to Loaded about signing Tortellini, because that’s the next step here, man.

PointCrow: [laughs] Yes. Maybe we put Tortellini on his own channel and just have him control that, start an empire, be bigger than me. It would be great.

Tubefilter: Billion-dollar idea. We talked earlier, you said you’re playing Starfield. How do you decide what to play on stream? Or do you have something consistent that you go back to or are you all about exploring new games? How do you approach your strategy for streams?

PointCrow: I like that question a lot because it’s a very interesting question and a very interesting answer. I’ll put it like this, I have played like 150 hours of Baldur’s Gate 3. I love the game, but I would not stream it though. It’s 150 hours. Like, why not stream, that’s content? When I think of a stream, I think of the average person that watches a stream. It is so hard to do a story-based stream because if your average viewer who’s never played Baldur’s Gate before comes in at the apex of Act Two, you’re like, “What is going on?” and then they click of, because the average person doesn’t want to spend a good 10 minutes watching something just to try to understand what’s going on.

Whenever I stream, I think of things that’s like, okay, within the first like 30 seconds to a minute, you’ll get the idea, like you understand it. Goldfish playing Elden Ring, you obviously don’t understand the inner workings of it, but you can get it. You understand that this pet is controlling a game, so it’s something like that. Then there has to be a goal involved as well normally. Like– I’m trying to think here. Like can you beat Tears of the Kingdom with your meat? I just looked, that’s the first video I see. It’s like that has a goal, like beating the game under a certain condition, so there’s always something to look forward to, to strive to, because otherwise, what’s the point? There’s no stakes, there’s no challenge to it. There’s no reason for you to watch, other than my charming personality and devilishly good looks.

Tubefilter: Both accurate, I won’t lie. But I see what you’re saying, especially when those narratives are that tight, it just is very difficult. With stuff like Starfield, there’s always a research station to raid or somebody to go talk to and it’s not necessarily world-shaking if you don’t understand this one line of dialogue.

PointCrow: Yes. I was testing it out yesterday just to test it out and see how it goes, because I might want to mod it in the future and do a challenge with it, but that’s…It’s just a very interesting problem that a lot of streamers have to solve because they see a lot of people that just play a game and then like two viewers and they’re like, “Why am I not growing?” I’m like, “First off, you’re still on Twitch and you’re not doing anything else. Second off, why would I want to watch you over anybody else?” It’s like that.

It’s the same thing with me. I think about that every time I go live. It’s like, why would anyone want to watch this? Then if I have an answer, then it’s like, okay, cool. We have a reason to stream it. Otherwise, why?

Tubefilter: Yes. What is your production schedule behind the scenes? How often do you go live, and then how much time are you spending on videos per week? Do you have a goal to post X number of videos on YouTube? How does it work for you?

PointCrow: I don’t really have a goal of like I need to post once a week or anything on YouTube. My goal is to post when I have a video. I constrict it to the highest quality that I can put out. If I don’t have a video that has that, then nothing is getting posted, sort of like that. For streaming, I normally stream Sunday through Thursday at 1:00 PM Pacific Time, but if I don’t have a stream, then I don’t stream that day. It’s the same thing of high quality. If I don’t have a high-quality idea, high-quality stream, I’m probably not going to go live.

Tubefilter: I wish more people did this. I think mental health would be better across the whole industry if people did this.

PointCrow: No, exactly. This is a recent change that I’ve done where I used to be like, I’m going live every day, regardless of what it is, and I found myself just being like, “All right, I’m just going to toss an idea. It’s not even going to be good, but it gives me a stream at least,” which is totally…

Tubefilter: People can tell when you’re upset.

PointCrow: Exactly. It’s like, if I’m not going to like streaming, then everyone else is going to realize that, and then why would they want to watch somebody that doesn’t even want to do what they’re doing right now? Then ever since I’ve made that change, I’ve been happier. The content, it’s been amazing, and it’s just a better time for everyone that has existed in my channel.

Tubefilter: It’s working. It’s doing fantastic things for your growth.

PointCrow: Yes. Thank you. I’ve recently had a popular stream idea grow of Ironmon, Kaizo Ironmon, which is a extremely hard Pokémon challenge, and people really like it.

Tubefilter: You have this obsession with challenging yourself. I respect it, but man.

PointCrow: It’s fun. I know it’s weird, but it’s just like–

Tubefilter: It’s not weird! I just ragequit easily.

PointCrow: No, I get you too, but consider as well, if I didn’t change things up as much as I do, I’d just get bored of YouTube. One of the reasons why I have a couple of years ago moved away from doing pretty much exclusively Zelda stuff is because I get bored of it too. Or I’ll do a challenge that I’m like, “Oh, god, this sucks,” and I’ll just get frustrated and just not want to play Zelda, but then I have to go live with more Zelda, so I’m like, “No, I got to do variety. I got to expand. I got to do more.” That’s how things like Mario Party in real life came to be, or Terraria, but if my heart rate increases, I explode. Just crazy things that are totally different ideas.

Recently, I’ve been working with a couple of people and we’ve successfully developed the ability to take your heart rate as it were, and then what I did, which is–I’m so proud of my coding expertise for this–what I did with it was I was able to take a heart rate and then attach that to a power function basically and then increase or decrease the speed of your game based on how fast your heart rate is. Literally, it took everything for my math degree–

Tubefilter: You have a math degree. That explains so much.

PointCrow: –exactly, to be able to do this because it’s like how do you…The problem is, let’s say your average heart rate is 75, how do you input 75, return 1, and then input 80 and have that return 1.5. You have the inputs, outputs, and then what is the actual mathematical function to do it? Anyway.

Tubefilter: This explains so much about you.

PointCrow: I know this is like a really nerdy response, but…

Tubefilter: No, it’s great.

PointCrow: That’s a really cool idea that I’m doing in the future.

Tubefilter: Is this something you want to keep doing where you can build tools and mods for people in your community and outside of your community to be able to replicate your challenges?

PointCrow: Yes. Literally anything I do, if someone asks for the program behind it or how I did it or anything, I am more than happy to let anyone do it. It is so fun to see other people try the things that I do as well.

Tubefilter: Have you thought about getting into game development at all?

PointCrow: I have thought about it, actually. Yes. The thing is, I am just a guy and I have only so many hours in the day. I work about 100 hours a week and I am trying to build out currently a merch arm of the whole business where we can make high-quality merchandise. We’ve released the plushies, which are really cool, but I want to actually do some fashion, really just– because everyone does a t-shirt with logo printed on it and call it a day. I want to make stuff where you can wear it and then people will be like, “Wow, you look great. Where did you get that from?” Then they’ll refer like, “Oh, I got this from pointcrow.shop. By the way, he’s also a YouTuber and streamer.” It’s like, “Oh, I wouldn’t expect that.”

I want to build that out first. I want to do that but in my own way, and maybe even better. There’s an idea that we have that I think will make it better, or at least unique in its own way.

Tubefilter: You don’t have to tell me about it, but now I’m curious.

PointCrow: It’s not launched yet and it’s not totally announced, so I unfortunately can’t leak it, but stay tuned for that.

I’m trying to do that, and then I’m trying to make all the videos that I produce even higher quality. I’m hiring new editors right now. Basically, once those are done, then yes, I’ll probably look into game development for another thing and see how I can solve that problem.

Tubefilter: “Solve problems.” The math degree!

PointCrow: [laughs] Yes, it’s engineering. That’s what I did before YouTube and Twitch.

Tubefilter: Also makes sense. How many people is your team now, and how many more are you looking to bring on?

PointCrow: We’re currently six full-time employees, but that’s full-time. For part-time or temporary contract work, it depends on what we’re working on at the time, but it can balloon from six to 20, 25. For major productions like Mario Party in Real Life, everyone that touched that project, I think it was like 30 or so.

Tubefilter: You’ve grown this into a major business for you.

PointCrow: Yes. I am very happy about it. It’s very nerve-wracking being– I mean, I’m 25. I’m a CEO, I guess, and I have to build out a business. It’s a company. It’s not just like me who puts out all this stuff. I don’t do everything that you see. It’s in large part thanks to the people that I’ve hired and worked with, and it’s very nerve-wracking because not only am I hiring these people, but they’re also putting their trust in me in their careers themselves. The internet entertainer is such a new concept for the entirety of the history of the world that it’s like they’re willing to put a risk and a bet on me and I just want to treat them the best as possible as well. I try my best to be like, “Okay, we’re all in this together High School Musical style.” I want to treat them well. Ideally, for some of them, I don’t want them to work another job in their life. I want to set everyone up for success as much as possible, and I think so far they have. Any editor that’s worked for me, not only do I believe they get paid very well, but they can go to anyone and be like, “I can produce videos that perform millions and millions of views. Hire me.” That’s the easiest step through the door that you can.

Tubefilter: It really genuinely is nice to see somebody who’s so invested in their employees and their careers.

PointCrow: Thank you. We’ve already gone through applications and everything, just to answer the question. We’re looking to hire about two to three more editors. I might be starting a new channel too.

Tubefilter: Interesting. You keep tossing out these tidbits and then you can’t tell me anything.

PointCrow: [laughs] I haven’t told many people that part. We’ll see. I have an idea for a really cool, interesting channel that I think a lot of people have been wanting and looking forward to and we’re building it out. Pretty cool.

Tubefilter: My last question is usually, “Do you have any plans or goals?” but I think you just took me through it, unless there’s anything else you want to bring up, anything you feel like you want readers to know about you or your stuff or, I don’t know, you in general?

PointCrow: You see, I get that question asked a lot of, “Is there anything else?”

Tubefilter: Yes, it’s a standard one.

PointCrow: I’m like, “I don’t know. There’s so much.” I guess if I had to impart something on any reader is, “Follow your dreams.” No. Just have fun with it, I guess. Just go do that “crunchy peanut butter or something is better than smooth.” I don’t really know what to say here.

Tubefilter: Give me a Tortellini fact.

PointCrow: Let’s see. Tortellini was $6 from the pet store and I love him more than life.

Tubefilter: Six dollars. How old is he?

PointCrow: Just $6. He’s a little bit over a year. But he’s grown so much though. He’s in a 20-gallon tank. We had to take everything out for the stream when we did the Elder Ring stuff, but he has a little house, he has like a little TV and couch, and I really want to get him a little– I want to custom commission a little streamer setup to put into his tank. I think that’d be really cute. We’re probably also going to get a 40-gallon tank for him soon because he’s getting big. He’s getting really big. He’s beautiful.