Chapter One: Community chapter one community Some people just look the part of what they do. There''s no universe in which Beyoncé doesn''t become a pop star. The Rock appears to have been hewn from solid granite. Nicholas Braun, aka Cousin Greg on the HBO show Succession , was born to play that exact kind of guy. As far as people who''ve worked at Twitch go, this is Marcus "DJWheat" Graham. Whether he''s broadcasting from his office or chilling on his couch, the now-forty-five-year-old, salt-and-pepper-haired livestreaming pioneer is all wide expressions and big gestures. He moves like a cartoon character, as though he was animated to captivate. His voice booms no matter what he''s discussing, the volume knob on his enthusiasm level evidently stuck at 11, never to so much as glance at 10.
You can just see , almost immediately, why this person in particular was one of the first successful video game streamers, predating even Twitch itself. Graham can talk for hours and hours and hours, and then more hours after that. He will ; it''s just who he is. But you''ll find it impossible to look away, like a snake under the spell of a master charmer. Right now, he''s talking about pinball machines, which he''s turned into the centerpiece of the lower floor of his Nebraska home. "You never have the same game twice. So the adage of ''Once you get a pinball machine, they multiply'' is totally true," he says, gesturing toward favorites based on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Mandalorian . "They''re amazing, and they''re actually better investments than, say, an NFT or something.
They have been skyrocketing in price over the pandemic, partially because manufacturing costs have gone up and they produce less machines, but also people are like, ''I want things to do.''?" Graham''s appreciation of these machines is infectious. The craftsmanship of a good pinball machine, he explains, is a thing of beauty--a clockwork assemblage of flippers, knobs, springs, switches, lights, and speakers meant to spirit you away to some fantastical realm (or a sewer where giant turtles eat pizza) amid the din of a crowded arcade or bar. This passion, this attention to detail, is what turned him into one of the first prominent esports commentators, one of the first well-known gaming livestreamers, and eventually, one of the first Twitch employees. Where Graham goes, people gather to listen--a quality that came in handy back when he began his career. In the late nineties, when Graham first started commentating over competitive games, there was barely an American esports scene to speak of. There certainly wasn''t software designed with the idea in mind or an easy means by which to broadcast online to more than a small handful of people. This eventually led him to streaming, which he also got into when the medium was in a larval form.
Graham''s career was only possible because of the people he was able to draw to his early, hacked-together broadcasts. He owes everything to the community he helped build, which in turn built him. This, more than anything else, is the lesson he''s taken to heart: Community is key. It''s the soul of his operation, the gasoline that fuels his passion. It''s why he joined Twitch. It''s also why he left. THANKS TO HIS dad, Graham grew up with a keen interest in radio. This led to a broadcast journalism major in college, which in turn led to a realization.
"I realized that radio was fucking dumb," Graham says. "And what I mean by that is, radio has such a limited audience. And I''m discovering that as I''m realizing the internet is the future, right?" So in 1997, after he''d graduated and begun working an IT job, Graham went to his local Best Buy and picked up a gadget that claimed it would let him start his own radio station online. Unfortunately, its audience was significantly more limited than radio''s. "One of the bullets on the back of the box was ''Start your own radio station'' with an asterisk next to it," Graham says. "Like, you know, you need to have this stuff to run this, and of course I''m like, ''Well, fuck the asterisk.'' I took it home and realized I could have five, at max ten people listen. But getting those first ten people for esports stuff was amazing.
" Graham''s game of choice at the time was Quake III , a multiplayer-focused entry in a classic sci-fi first-person shooter series without which modern genre pillars like Halo, Destiny , and Apex Legends wouldn''t exist. But at the time, online gaming was still relatively new, and competitions with money up for grabs were a niche within a niche, especially in North America. Big matches were infrequent and inconsistent, and central sources for news about them were difficult--sometimes impossible--to come by. Initially, Graham commentated largely for the benefit of a Quake team he was coaching; he''d watch their games and record notes for them about how they were playing. It was a teammate who gave him the idea to start broadcasting to the (relative) masses. "[My teammate] was like, ''Hey, you should do this live like you''re covering sports,''?" says Graham. "And I was like, ''Yeah, why not?''?" With the help of an old friend (who''s since gone on to work at Meta), Graham managed to set up a server on a media service called Shoutcast that allowed him to reach more people than his previous, severely limited approach. At the time, this was about as good as it got.
"We filled up that five-hundred-person Shoutcast server almost right away," says Graham. "And it was, like, the most atrocious thing ever. I had no idea what I was doing. I wasn''t even really thinking about it, right? It took me a little while to go, ''Oh, now let me take my knowledge of radio and apply that to making an opening intro, [explaining] why you should care about this game, post-game interviews--you know, getting it all together actually.''?" Radio expertise proved valuable on the tech side of things as well. Though Graham''s setup at the time was rudimentary, the bones of it were not so different from hardware utilized by modern streamers. "It was hard as hell back then," he says. "Even trying to get mics to work and stuff was unbelievable.
Nowadays everyone''s got a [studio-quality microphone], and back then we were getting stick mics from Walmart. But because of all the radio experience, I basically built a radio console that I could plug into a computer, which is what a lot of streamers still do today." What Graham and his friends didn''t recognize was that by broadcasting to nascent gaming audiences, they were also tapping into a force that would become essential to the DNA of livestreaming as we now know it: interactivity. Quake fans would gather in text-based internet relay chat (IRC) rooms and react to what was happening in matches, offer their own opinions, and of course, tell Graham when he was screwing up. (The latter desire, it should be noted, has powered far more pivotal instances of human ingenuity than anybody is willing to admit.) "Someone could be like, ''Wheat, you''re an idiot,'' and I could respond to them immediately," says Graham. "We had a little bit more delay back then, but I was blown away by this instant interaction that we saw take place. So it wasn''t just the commentary part of it.
Once it got tied to IRC, suddenly it became the interactive experience that I think people really love today." It''s this alchemic reaction of broadcasters and viewers/listeners creating collectively--cheering, jeering, and building on each other''s ideas in real time--that would later go on to define livestreaming as a medium. No longer was a broadcaster like Graham simply talking at audiences and occasionally taking listener calls or running contests. The two sides of the equation had become connected, tethered by a moment in time regardless of space. Graham knew he was onto something. But the road to fully realizing his vision of the future would prove longer than expected. And much, much bumpier. IN THE EARLY 2000s, Graham took his first crack at making a career out of this whole "talking over video games" thing.
He''d been commentating on larger and larger tournaments, and people with deeper pockets had begun to take notice. In 2004, Graham hit the jackpot: an American esports upstart called the Global Gaming League. Its owners, flush with investment cash, convinced Graham and his wife to uproot from Nebraska and move to Los Angeles for the purposes of taking esports and video game content to the next level. "GGL let me experiment with livestreaming like crazy," says Graham. "They were helping me pay bandwidth bills that were absurd. I went to them and said, ''I want a livestream from [annual video game news conference] E3,'' and they were like, ''Great, what do we need to do to make that happen?'' I said, ''You just gotta get a $25,000 internet pipe to the booth on top of [what you''d already normally pay to be there].'' They''d be like, ''Awesome!''?" Even mainstream celebrities were beginning to suspect there might be gold in gaming''s still-untapped hills. "GGL let us put together a hip-hop gaming league that had Snoop Dogg as a commissioner [and] Method Man and Eric V.
playing Madden against each other," says Graham. "We were doing shit way, way, way ahead of its time." However, this also marked the beginning of a pattern that would ultimately echo forward to Graham''s time at Twitch: a company making good, forward-thinking decisions, followed by bad decisions, followed by decent decisions, followed by worse decisions. For Graham, it was whiplash indu.