My Goals and Vision

Of course as a Gaming YouTuber my immediate goal is to make entertaining and inspiring content. Ideally, I would like to merge my programming passion with my videos to make unique and fun videos, especially in Hytale. Beyond that, it is a goal of mine to release games through ButtonPress Studios LLC, and use the funding to fuel developments in AI. It is my belief that the “singularity” is an important next step for humanity. A self aware, self learning AI can come up with the cure for cancer, design nanobots that maintain our insides and quickly point out illness or malnutrition for doctors, revolutionize construction, end world hunger, etc… Humans aren’t smart enough to do this in any reasonable amount of time, so why not automate innovation!

My Story

I grew up with divorced parents (starting at the age of 3), living with my Mom and visiting my Dad bi-weekly. My Mom rented housing, and would move often (typically once a year). This may have contributed to my anti-social behavior due to being uprooted and changing school districts 4 times. Luckily, once we moved to Warwick NY in 2009, I got to stay in the same district through moves. I was always excited to record myself and share my life experiences, despite my not being social. For years I recorded myself on my Dad’s Sony Handycam tape camcorder, and in my 250k sub special video (coming soon) I show a unique view of what life was like for me in the mid 2000s. I would often build vehicles and “robots” out of KNEX, explore box forts, and try rudimentary editing effects such as spinning, cutting the video, then spinning & continuing to record somewhere else as a “smooth transition”.

I owe my passion for programming to Minecraft and Ulster County BOCES (CTEC). In 2010, upon being amazed by the complexity and infinite nature of Minecraft’s random terrain generation, I was inspired to teach myself Java. Using Bucky’s Beginner Java Tutorials, at the age of 12 years old I taught myself Java, and C++ soon after. 3 years later, at CTEC I was taught Visual Basic, HTML, CSS, and JS. My professor, Earl Hopper, was hands off with me specifically, and allowed me to complete each short project through adding a feature to my “game”, rather than making a new project every day like the typical academic schedule. That was how the RPGamesEngine was born. “Windows Forms” was my first experience with seeing the results of my programming visually, and using it I reverse engineered features from the Pokemon games. I used no tutorials, and would often come up with my own way to render terrain, follow the player with a camera, handle collisions, animations, etc… This started my journey to “real” game dev, as I upgraded from VB with Windows Forms to VB with GDI+, then to VB with Monogame, then to C# with Monogame.

I started YouTube in 2010 as a way to document fun and interesting events in my life, similar to my experiences with the Camcorder, to then show to my friends. By this time my passions had shifting to gaming, especially for games such as Tank Trouble, Halo, Gmod, Call of Duty, and Minecraft. Although I was aware of the up and coming Let’s Play channels at the time (Seananners, PaperbatVG, SlyFoxHound, etc…), I didn’t immediately show interest in joining them. Only when my videos started to get attention from YouTube viewers did I show any interest in making content specifically for my subscribers. My YouTube journey is a long one (10+ years!) and I show it in This Video.

The Archive Era (Nov 2010 – Feb 2012): At this point of my channel’s history, I uploaded videos so that I had something cool to show my friends. I recorded projects I made with redstone, new Minecraft features that I felt the need to document, and my take on games that were popular at the time.

The Classic Let’s Play Era (Feb 2012 – Jan 2013): This is when I decided to give YouTube a try as a regular thing, and played through some games in the classic “Let’s Play” format. I wasn’t sure what I wanted from YouTube yet, but I thought it was cool to interact with the small audience that took notice of what I was doing.

The “Becoming a YouTuber” Era (Jan 2013 – April 2014): This is when I decided to take YouTube “seriously”. I tried many recording softwares, editing softwares, games, etc… and I started to get into a regular schedule of daily uploads. I edited all videos myself!

The Experimental Era (April 2014 – July 2016): I gained more confidence as a content creator, and decided to bring some of my favorite games to my channel with weird and funny videos. I continued the daily upload schedule while having fun with my friends in games popular at the time (call of duty zombies and multiplayer, sumotori dreams, tank trouble, of course Minecraft, as well as mod packs). I also started going public with my programming projects and plans for the future. Even with large responsibilities going on like scouts and martial arts at the time, I still found time to do what I love!

The College Era (July 2016 – Dec 2018): As I got older, my life became more and more busy. I finished scouts and martial arts, as well as high school. As college classes became more and more difficult, I found it hard to focus on my channel. Growth of the channel stagnated, and inspiration was tough to come by. With the end of my first relationship I hit my lowest point. Depressed and stressed, I almost quit YouTube. Even through everything, I still found time to stream and upload videos, and what got me through these times was the support of some amazing people in this community (who are still here today!)

The ThirtyVirus Reawakening (Dec 2018 – March 2020): With the reveal of Hypixel Studios’ game “Hytale”, a ThirtyVirus renaissance began. As I covered more information about the game, my channel started to see significant growth, the best I had seen in years. After that hype died down, a little gamemode on Hypixel called SkyBlock was unveiled. Doing a let’s play of this game in my usual format, with the addition of Fezzy the Frog as my gameplay partner and video editor, the channel saw insane growth that still surprises me to this day. This is when I started daily streaming, and uploading video highlights of the streams rather than from recording sessions. I became closer than ever with my community, while growing it beyond the fabled 100,000 subscriber mark.