My Journey Back to Retro

I've had a weird history with streaming. My start was unintentional—I technically started by streaming directly from my PS4 to show my brother games I thought he would be interested in. I somehow made affiliate that way.

When streaming is not in your game plan, you don't put any thought into what you're doing when you go live. I just wanted to share games with my brother and some friends.

The streamer bug bit me somewhere around here while playing Borderlands 3 for nearly a year on Twitch.

It wasn't until Borderlands 3 was released in September 2019 that the streamer bug bit me. I streamed that game almost exclusively for about 10 months after it launched. It was the first time strangers started coming into my streams to talk about the game, skill tree builds, loot farming, etc. It was the first time I felt I could build a community.

*presses fast forward on the VCR*

It's 2023. At this point, I had played my fair share of new releases on stream. And while I enjoyed the games, I was starting to feel burnt out and unsure of what I wanted out of streaming. I was just about ready to quit altogether. Just as I was feeling unsure of myself, the launch of the Unity Guilds were announced at TwitchCon. I wondered if that sense of community I had been chasing could be cultivated there, so I applied to the Women's Guild.

Getting accepted into the Women's Guild completely changed my trajectory. Building a community is one thing, but I didn't have a community of my own peers to talk to. I never realized how important that was until then. And it was there that I realized it was my content that was burning me out, not streaming.

Within 6 months, I starting shifting my content from story-driven narratives to retro story-driven narratives. A pretty miniscule shift in the grand scheme of things, but it unlocked something in my brain and things instantly felt more fun to me. I already had a decent starter collection of older games and consoles, so I began with that.

In 2024, I played through my three favorite games of all time (Skies of Arcadia, Grandia II, and Shenmue) back-to-back. It felt so nice to not only revisit games that really shaped me as a gamer, but to also share my thoughts on these games I knew so well with my community. This was when I realized the chokehold that childhood nostalgia had on me. Being able to share my upbringing with others was a path to sharing who I was and where I came from. We finished 25 games on stream that year.

My ever-growing collection of PlayStation 2 games. It's my largest collection of games on any one console.

In 2025, I let my community recommend some of their favorite RPGs. It was so fun to see people getting excited over games that tapped into their childhood memories. It also helped me learn a lot more about each of them! I loved hearing their stories about playing through games with their siblings or friends.

My plans for 2026 are to continue down this path; to just do everything bigger and better. With the help of my community, we made a roadmap of 32 games for me to play on stream. While I doubt we'll get to all of them, I'm genuinely excited about the path we're carving together.

I've never been excited about streaming in the way I am right now. I'm so excited for the journeys we have ahead of us. Streaming energizes me now. Playing new (to me) games brings me back to sleepovers in 1996 when we were hopped up on Surge and way too much pizza; passing the controller over to a friend when something got too tough. I love that feeling of experiencing a game alongside friends.

My channel finally feels like our channel.