Tyler Blevins

Richard Tyler Blevins was born on June 5, 1991 in Greyscale, Illinois, USA, to Chuck Blevins. He has two elder brothers, John and Chris Blevins. He studied at the Silver Lake College in Wisconsin. It was his father, Chuck Blevins who introduced the boys to video games. A great lover of the sport, he would buy the latest games released. However, young Tyler recounts that while he and his siblings would go off to sleep by 8 at night, his father would play the game until the wee hours of the morning. The family owned all the latest gaming consoles including Microsoft Xbox and Sony PlayStation games. When Halo, a multi-player, futuristic war game was launched on Xbox, young Blevins asked his brothers to play the game. Admonishing him off as ‘too young for the game’, his brothers disallowed him. After much pestering, when Blevins got his hands on the remote, he virtually ‘destroyed’ them. It was then that his skill for gaming became evident. However, the path wasn’t an easy one.

Blevins struck a deal with his family according to which only if he did well at school and maintained his job at the Noodles & Co would he be allowed to play as many games as he wanted. Realising there was no way out, he worked hard and was rightly rewarded. Blevins would stay past the wee hours of the morning and just keep getting better at it. What worked for him was his intrinsic nature to be the best at his job. His hunger for emerging out as the No. 1 made him reach the top spot. Realizing his potential for the game, he soon talked it out with his family who were more than supportive to help him turn his passion into his profession.

Just when Tyler Blevins seemed to be at the peak of his career, a major downfall in the form of health issue turned out. He almost lost his vision, before a surgery corrected his retinal defects. The phase was a tough one. For months he was bedridden. On the career front, from having 4500 viewers a stream on twitch he had a meagre 400 viewers. But his inherent drive to excel helped him make a strong comeback. Blevins shunned all his critics by nailing it yet again. He has been playing big tournaments ever since and has become the big ‘hero of e-sports’. Talking of his love life, Blevins married fellow gamer, Jessica Goch, in 2017. The two of them have been in a relationship since his early years in gaming.

Tyler Blevins journey from being a ‘leisure’ player of videos games to a professional gamer is one of great interest and admiration. After all, not many can claim to turn their pastime or hobby into their profession. Blevins first played competitively in 2009 by entering a Halo 3 event in Orlando to small success. Almost immediately he realized that the road to victory wouldn’t be an easy one. He had to play better than hundreds and thousands of people to win money from tournaments. Though the task was an uphill one, his love for challenges and desire to be the best in whatever he did made him surge upwards. By then, he had played for various key e-sports teams including Cloud9, Renegades and Team Liquid. In 2011, Blevins became a streamer for Justin.tv but soon moved to Twitch.tv. By 2012, his team won the Halo 4 2012 MGL Fall Championships, with Blevins notching the highest score in the final game.

In 2017, Blevins joined Luminosity Gaming as a Halo player. Later, he moved to Battlegrounds, where he won the PUBG Gamescom Invitational in the 3rd Person Squads classification. By the time, he began streaming Fortnite regularly; his viewership rose astronomically, corresponding directly with the game’s popularity. When in September 2017, he had about 500,000 followers, by March 2018, the number exploded by 250 percent. At the same time, he set the Twitch.tv record for a single individual stream while playing Fortnite after he hosted a game with Drake, Travis Scott, and Juju Smith-Schuster. In the following month, he broke his own viewing record during his event Ninja Vegas 2018 by accumulating an audience of 667,000 live viewers.