I was introduced to Stephen King by a friend at the bookstore where I worked during my college years. She handed me an unabridged hardcover edition of The Stand and told me it would be one of the scariest novels I’d ever read. She was right. Of all the horrific events that transpire in a novel rightly considered one of King’s masterpieces, the ones I found most chilling were those that tracked the spread of the super flu—from innocuous exchanges such as an infected man handing cash to a server at a diner, to scenes that had major ramifications for the main characters, such as Frannie Goldsmith carrying her father’s body down the stairs and burying him—burying it—in his flower garden.

After I finished, I bought a paperback copy for my youngest sister, who appreciated horror as much as I did. She took that brick-sized book everywhere: in the car on family trips, in bed late at night, in the tub to keep reading and re-reading while she soaked. A year later, it looked like it had gone through a wash cycle. I was fastidious about the condition of my books back then, and I asked her how she could have mangled such a great book. The answer was that she loved it. Dog-eared pages, creased covers, notes in margins, water stains—all evidence of a well-loved book. (I still refuse to dog-ear pages, but you do you.)

The evidence of a well-loved video game takes forms other than physical wear and tear. It could be the hours you’ve logged in Team Fortress 2, or your win-loss record in Street Fighter VI, or your kill-to-death ratio in your favorite online shooter. Other games, such as installments in the Resident Evil franchise, offer unlockable content as proof of your devotion to mastering every room, every corridor, every boss fight. The greatest reward one can unlock in most RE titles, and tradition since the inaugural title, is a rocket launcher with unlimited ammo. In 2006, CarcinogenSDA would finish his homework after school and then drop an hour or two into Resident Evil: Deadly Silence for Nintendo DS. (Deadly Silence, DS. Get it?)

Eventually, inevitably, he got his hands on the one-hit-one-kill weapon. Shouldering it and blowing zombies into bloody bits made him feel like he had climbed the Mount Everest of Resident Evil.

“I'm like, well, okay, I unlocked the rocket launcher. Now what do I do?” he says.

To get your hands on the rocket launcher in Resident Evil DS, you must finish the story as Chris Redfield or Jill Valentine in under three hours. With that challenge crossed off his list, CarcinogenSDA, better known to his Twitch and YouTube communities as Carci, invented ways to test his mastery. “I started going through the game, trying not to take any hits. Eventually, I got my completion time to under 50 minutes. Then I tried completing it faster and faster and faster until I was finishing the game in under 40. Okay, I have, like, 39 minutes and 58 seconds. I want to see if other people are doing something like this.”

Carci had proof of his skills. He had been recording gameplay for first-person shooters by connecting a VCR to a capture card. Capturing video using a DS would be complicated, but recording a run of the PlayStation One version of Resident Evil wouldn’t be a problem. Out of curiosity, he searched the internet and read through forums centered on Capcom’s survival horror games and was floored by the talent of other players. “I ran into someone who talked about how he got a knife-only speedrun of Resident Evil Director's Cut standard mode in one hour and nine minutes.” He was also speedrunning the game on Nintendo DS within 31 minutes. “I'm like, whoa—what? I'm using the rocket launcher, and this guy’s time is, like, eight minutes faster. How's he doing this?”

Although intimidated and awed, Carci felt right at home. He had played every RE game released to that point, from the original in 1996 to 2002’s Resident Evil Zero and the critically acclaimed remake of the original for GameCube, to 2006’s touchscreen-enhanced version of RE 1 for DS, and he had conquered them all. “Every time a new Resident Evil game came out, I bought it, I played it, I got 100 percent in it, and just had a lot of fun. I’ve always enjoyed the games’ mix of action and exploration. Everything about them became a logic puzzle to me.” Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, released in 1999, became a particular favorite. “By the time I was 18, I’d probably finished Resident Evil 3 around 20 times. Every few months, I would think, I want to play that again just because I was having fun with it.”

Despite his prowess at evading zombies and felling monsters such as Mr. X in Resident Evil 2 and RE3’s Nemesis, going online showed him that he was a small fish in a Raccoon City-sized pond. “My relationship with the games developed from, ‘I enjoy playing these because they're fun’ to ‘I want to do cool and interesting things with the games and entertain people.’”

Livestreams would come later. Long before then, Carci was perusing videos of other players tearing Resident Evil games to shreds on Speed Demos Archive. Founded in 1998 and abbreviated SDA, which CarcinogenSDA pays tribute to through his online handle, the website started as a repository of Quake speedruns and morphed into one of the first hubs where players could share recordings of their accomplishments in any game. The process of submitting a run to SDA was appropriately arcane given the technology of the 1990s and early 2000s. After performing some spectacular feat, players would mail VHS tapes to Nolan “Radix” Pflug in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. “This was before speedrunning popped off on YouTube and before live streams,” says Carci. Nolan would capture the contents of the tape to his computer, ensure its visual quality and the veracity of the recording, and upload it to the site. “Granted, the rate at which things got published on Speed Demos Archive usually took anywhere from one month to three months, but because it was the only website where people could publish their world records, it was a huge deal."

Early on, Carci got to talking with 19Duke84, a runner who uploaded frequently to SDA and Twin Galaxies, a database of video game records dating back to 1981 and the official supplier of accomplishments to the Guinness Book of World Records. He asked Duke if he’d mind giving feedback on Carci’s project, a speedrun as Jill in Resident Evil that clocked in at under one hour and 17 minutes. Duke agreed. It was a “bad ending” run, meaning Carci had performed (or failed to perform) specific in-game actions that triggered the worst of the game’s epilogues. In those days, YouTube permitted videos no longer than 10 minutes. Carci had split his run into segments of 9:58 each, and passed along all the links to Duke, who turned out not to need all of them.

This run sucks, Duke pronounced. You made so many mistakes. You didn’t try hard enough. I can’t watch the rest of this.

Carci admits “it was an awful run. I got bit by Yawn, the giant snake, so that added on at least three minutes, and I didn't really know how to dodge zombies, so I was shooting zombies I didn't really need to shoot. But I was still happy that I recorded something that looked cool and badass.”

Carci pushed himself to do better. Over time, he uploaded runs of classic RE games that were as fast and efficient as they were badass. “When it came time to record a speedrun of Resident Evil 3, that’s when I started taking it seriously. I beat the best time for Resident Evil 3 that was published on Speed Demos Archive; that was my first world record. I just kept going from there.”

Carci was having as much fun sharing his runs, world record-setting and otherwise, to YouTube. Although Resident Evil remained his focus, he branched out to become a variety streamer, playing games such as Final Fantasy VII and Super Mario Bros. Setting records was a long-term goal. To achieve it, he had to knock out short-term goals, the most important of which was refining his mechanics with every run—optimal movement, jumping, attacking, routing, wherever he needed to tighten screws in his approach. Those videos received some attention, but not as much as his runs of RE titles. “I was afraid people wouldn't watch me for other things, so I kept grinding away at it,” he says.

By April 2014, a set of circumstances slowly coalesced to afford Carci a chance to stream full-time. He was getting decent viewership on Twitch; a few viewers clicked his PayPal donation link and chipped in a few bucks. Feeling like he was in a rut, he moved to New York and kept playing. A friend of his who worked as an audio engineer followed his exploits and convinced him to try streaming full-time for a month. If it worked out, Carci had a career on his hands. If not, streaming his gaming sessions could remain a hobby. “My grandmother had just passed away, and I had a pretty decent chunk of change from her inheritance. I decided, what the hell. I have a means to support myself. I'm just gonna do it.”

When I was a kid growing up in the ‘90s, my friends dreamed of playing in the NBA. I don’t know a single one who made it, but that’s okay. Everyone has a dream, and becoming a pro athlete was and is impossible or as good as for most of us. Entertaining audiences and making your living as a streamer, the new “I want to become a basketball player when I grow up” for kids of the 2010s and today, feels equally out of reach. But if you want to make a go of it, as Carci did, there are habits you have to form and routines that would be perilous to break. Perhaps the most important is setting a schedule and sticking to it. If you want to attract an audience, they need to know where and when to find you.

Carci committed to livestreaming five days a week starting at 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Gradually, more viewers took notice of his skills and clear times, particularly Resident Evil, and tuned in. His concurrent viewers climbed to 300, then 700, a number that, assuming it remains consistent, is the point at which it’s fairly safe—though never guaranteed—to call streaming a career. That didn’t happen in a month, although that trial period gave Carci the confidence he needed to keep at it. “It wasn’t until about four or five years in that I reached a point where I could break even, so I always tell people, ‘Don't make streaming your full-time career. I got insanely lucky. If you’re going to do content creation, just do it for fun.’ This is not something to throw away your life to do.”

Over several years, CarcinogenSDA had gone from obliterating Resident Evil clear times, to performing challenge runs such as knife-only playthroughs and escaping Raccoon City without so much as a scraped elbow, to building an audience of viewers who made his streams appointment viewing, no different from prestige television shows like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad.

The next step was to appear at the venue where the best of the best showed their skills to arguably the largest audience in livestreaming: Games Done Quick.