GrandPOObear

He and his wife have been married since October 20, 2013. They have a son. He has an older sister as well as a niece and nephew.

The mysterious origins of his handle are an ongoing in-joke on his channel.

GrandPOObear was introduced to video games by his older sister, who received and Nintendo Entertainment System as a present in 1987. So, he started playing it when he was really young and already managed to beat the original Super Mario Bros. game when he was three years old. He continued gaming throughout his childhood and high school years, and even went on to participate in a couple of inter-university Madden tournaments on the Xbox during his time at the University of Colorado in 2004.

Outside of video games, he grew up playing a variety of sports, and took a special interest in snowboarding when he started college and was exposed to the Colorado mountains for the first time. When he was older, he even dropped out of college a semester before completing his journalism degree in order to pursue professional snowboarding tournaments. While he was doing that, he worked as a snowboarding instructor as his main job, while selling waterproof shirts on the side. In his second year, he moved to California. Even then, he would play video games in his spare time.

During one of these tournaments, he injured himself, broke his knee as well as other bones and was hospitalized for around a month and a half. However, his recovery was slow and although he could still snowboard, he could take it as seriously as he could in the past. He became very bored, so when one of his friends invited him to watch him playing Halo on Twitch, he agreed, even though he didn’t know what Twitch was.

After a day of watching in mid-2013, he decided to try out streaming himself because he thought that it looked like fun and he was spending a lot of his time gaming anyway. He started out with FIFA on his Xbox. He temporarily moved to Hitbox for a while and then moved back to Twitch, where he streamed various survival and variety games for a couple of years.

In 2015, he started watching speedrunners and was inspired to also focus his attention on a single video game and to become the best at it. He decided on Super Mario Bros. 3 because it was one of his favorite games. Many other speedrunners came into his stream to help him, including Mitchflowerpower with whom he is still friends. His initial goal was just to beat the score of the lowest person on the leaderboards. One day, one of his viewers recommended that he try out PangeaPanga’s Mario Maker Levels and GrandPOOBear became addicted to those challenges.

During this time, he was only streaming part time while acting as an events announcer at snowboarding events and casinos. As he defeated more and more Mario Maker levels from different creators that people considered to be impossible, GrandPOOBear’s follower and viewership count finally started to climb. After two and a half years in mid-2016, his channel’s earnings reached the point where he was able to quit his jobs to focus on fulltime streaming.

He was partnered with Twitch on December 12, 2015. His language isn’t so clean. His parents are very supportive of his career path and often watch his stream and participate on his chat.

According to his chat bot, he has~5,430 subscribers. This means that he earns at least $19,000 USD per month. This excludes other income that he receives from tiered subscriptions, sponsorships, donations Twitch cheer bit contributions, merchandise sales and advertisements.

• Monday – Saturday: 20:00 UTC onwards
• Sunday: No stream