The Idea
After many years of growing experience in the restaurant industry, starting from when I was delivering food on foot in my youth, to dishwasher, prep cook, line cook, expeditor, shift supervisor, dining room lead, assistant manager up to restaurant manager, I started to really reflect on where I saw my life going.
Sure, the responsibility was increasing, depending on the establishment or group, so did the salary, but aside from enjoying the sheer organized-chaos that is restaurant operations, I was really starting to drag through weeks at a time that felt like it had been years. It’s a very rough industry, with almost no job security among lots of variables that could alter the course of your career.
I knew from the many-years of using babysitting my nephews as an excuse to play lots of video-games with them, that the digital possibilities of monetization only just started to begin.
Around the time that the Xbox group we started called Marvel Un1verse blew up, options started to open. Never before could regular consumers pick-up and get paid to entertain other gamers with watch time. It just started as our group reached a peak, before you go dismissing our group as just some group of button-mashers, let me elaborate about how extensive things got.
When we started it, it was me using a headset with a mic talking to my nephews in the same game server from upstairs to downstairs. I’d customize the options in-games to resemble Marvel characters, it caught on quick. Almost accidentally, it went from jokes to a movement.
It grew from the 3 of us in a lobby, to over 600 players from across the globe. From there, I had to start assigning administrators to form smaller groups among us. The management started coming into play when players began entering other games on the platform and expanding our community. We were spread over 10 or so titles, one of which was the official ‘DC Universe’ game. Of course, hundreds of Marvel characters in games they didn’t belong caught lots of attention, this is when a literal career idea began coming to life.
DC Official began Tweeting us, friendly taunts about how ‘we were representing the wrong universe’, I’d reply from our Twitter handle with snarky one-liners and we’d entertain hundreds of users in-the-middle. We’d recirculate that attention, and the members started going even harder to spread, it was a literal e-family of marvel fans.
Things got so loud, that we would be contacted by game ambassadors during live Xbox play throughs on a very regular basis, to crowd control points in which there were ‘too many of us’. It grew so big, I couldn’t play without twenty people joining a lobby instantly, we ran house. They built me a giant monument of the replica of ‘The Stark Tower’, but renamed it ‘Mark’.
We collaborated with professional musicians and artists to reuse content to run through the Xbox Feeds.
Hundreds lived in my Xbox for years, I recirculated social content until I ‘e-tired the suit’.
