CT: At what point do you consider launching the OpTic house?
H3CZ: It took about two years to do that, simply because I didn’t know any better. I just didn’t know any better. I knew that we were making money on YouTube and some through sponsorships. That was the business. Then one day NaDeSHoT’s like, “Yo, I’m going to move to Schonberg.” And I was like, “Oh, man, what the fuck? For what?” He’s like, “So we can be together, we can create content.” And I was like, “You know what? Fuck it, let’s go.”
So he moves into an apartment. My wife and I cosigned for his apartment. And we started creating content in my basement. And we were like, “Oh, this is pretty dope, it could be something.” Then he had the idea, he’s like, “Yo, why don’t we do a house, like a team house?” And I’m like, “What do you mean a team house?” He’s like, “You know, like we all live there, we all create content together.” And I’m like, “Yeah.” I had already heard about Korean houses doing that. We had a house, but nobody was doing content in this house, everybody was just practicing for tournaments. We had a different model and a different approach to this thing, as we always have. When everybody’s going right, we’re going to go left. If you’re following someone, you don’t know if you’re following the right path. If you’re paving your own way, you see where you’re going and what steps you want to take and what turns you want to take.
So we said, let no one be in front of us. Let’s be the trailblazers in this thing and go do it our own way. So instead of having this practice house to be better Call of Duty players, we had this house of content that was going to separate ourselves from every other team house. And sure enough, day one of us turning on the livestream, every single one of those four players, Big TymeR, MerK, Scumpii, and NaDeSHoT, launched their streams, and it was the first time ever that Call of Duty was at the top of the Twitch page as the most viewed. And we had all four of those top spots. So it was Call of Duty, League of Legends, and fucking everything else at the time. And at the top of that channel were my four players. And I screenshotted that shit, sent that to Sundance, sent that to Seth. I’m like, this has never fucking happened before. There’s something fucking here. What do I do next? And the rest sort of became history.
Read the full interview in Chapter 65, available here.