Tyler Blevins

American streamer and professional eSports player Tyler Blevins, more commonly known by his online alias "Ninja", was born in Grayslake, Illinois, to Chuck and Cynthia Blevins. He starred in the A Gamer's Life (2016) as himself. It was his father, Chuck Blevins who introduced him to video games. Ninja began playing Halo 3 professionally in 2009. He played for various teams including Cloud9, Renegades, Team Liquid and Luminosity Gaming. Ninja became a streamer in 2011 first with Justin.tv, then moved to Twitch.tv. He began playing H1Z1 at the start of its early access program with Steam, then moved to PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds when it also entered Steam's early access program. He joined Luminosity Gaming in 2017 first as a Halo player, then to H1Z1, later moving to PUBG, where he won the PUBG Gamescom Invitational in the 3rd Person Squads classification. He began streaming Fortnite regularly and his viewership began to grow, which coincided with the game's growth in popularity in September 2017, he had 500,000 followers; in six months, that number grew by 250 percent. In March 2018, Ninja set the Twitch.tv record for a single individual stream while playing Fortnite after he hosted a game with Drake, Travis Scott, and JuJu Smith-Schuster. In April 2018, he broke his own viewing record during his event Ninja Vegas 2018 where he accumulated an audience of 667,000 live viewers. Ninja has over 21 million subscribers on YouTube and he has become the 2nd most subscribed Twitch streamer; after fellow Fortnite streamer Tfue passed him as of January 2019. He credits the game's free-to-play business model as a growth factor. On June 17th, 2018, he has announced that he partnered with Red Bull eSports. On August 1st, 2019, it was announced that Microsoft has signed an exclusive contract with Ninja for its own streaming platform and therefore he left Twitch to stream exclusively on Mixer. But shortly after the shutdown of the Mixer, he returned back to stream on Twitch.