Ready or not, welcome to 2018—the year that the hottest emerging entertainer is a 26-year-old man who wears a yellow headband and goes by the nickname Ninja. His job? Broadcasting himself playing video games in the basement of his suburban Chicago house.
This once-in-a-lifetime surge of mainstream fame isn’t all the result of dumb luck. Blevins has been served well by a combination of superior hand-eye coordination, onscreen charisma, and dogged perseverance. His professional gaming career began almost a decade ago. The young Illinoisan competed in Halo tournaments for cash prizes starting in 2009, but eventually left the grind of what’s now dubbed “eSports” to focus on the pursuit of streaming games.
@UMBCAthletics knows how to get ready @FortniteGame @Ninja @Drake they’re here for ya @kmbc pic.twitter.com/ZyBoyhSvkz
— Steven Albritton (@StevenAlbritton) March 17, 2018
The free-to-play Battle Royale mode exploded in popularity in December after taking home the prize for Best Multiplayer Game at the 2017 Game Awards, and as of January it had been played by more than 45 million people worldwide and upwards of 3.1 million players concurrently on PC and console systems. Of the 26 Xbox consoles available to play at Ignite Gaming Lounge in Avondale, Fortnite is being played on an average of 20 of them, said Matt Garrity, Ignite’s general manager. “It’s growing massively and quick, we have calls about it all the time. We’ve had whole parties of 20 people and it’s the only game they play,” says Garrity.
LEGENDARY @drake @ninja @trvisXX pic.twitter.com/PNLfgRFutu
— JuJu Smith-Schuster (@TeamJuJu) March 15, 2018
