Xell
Other Interests
Family
He has a younger sister and a cat.
Gaming Origins
Xell’s father introduced him to video games, as he enjoyed playing them himself. He think that his first game was either Pokémon on his Gameboy or possibly Final Fantasy on the PC. He grew up playing single-player RPGs, such as The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, Metal Gears and Xenogears. As a teenager, he became more focused on Super Smash Bros., as well as paper Magic: The Gathering and continues to collect cards and play IRL, as well as online. He discovered League of Legends (LoL) while he was in college. He became really passionate about the game and wanted to become involved as an influencer. This inspired him to begin creating YouTube LoL videos.
Professional Gaming
After graduating from college in 2013, he launched his own website, ‘League-Central.net’ (now defunct) which focused on League of Legends news, analyses and events, much of which focused on the Challenger series. He struggled to find a job in his field and wasn’t sure what was going to happen with his future. He heard about an opportunity with Team Curse on Twitter and applied. They hired him, which lead to further opportunities in the eSports scene.
This included Riot Games who asked him to act as a host their show, All Chat, starting in 2014. From there, he started also acting as a producer for the show. Xell worked for them for two years, while also freelancing as a video editor for a few major eSports organizations, including Team Curse, Quantic Gaming and others. While he no longer hosts for Riot Games, he does still write content for their website. He also worked as the Creative Director for OfflineTV, whom he met through his job at Riot, for a couple of years, before leaving to focus on his own content. He still co-hosts an anime-focused podcast with Lilypichu, though.
In April 2019, he decided to leave Riot in order to attempt a fulltime career as a streamer and YouTube content creator.
Prior to focusing on a career in the eSports and streaming scene, he completed his BA in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Southern California. Although his parents were originally not happy with his decision to pursue a gaming career over Engineering, they have since become supportive, with his father even regularly watching his vlogs.
Streaming Hours
- Sunday – Wednesday: 09:00 UTC onwards
- Thursday: 17:00 UTC onwards
- Friday – Saturday: No stream
Quotes
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I actually think Twitch is a terrible platform for people to expect to grow on, especially if that is like your first form of social media or, you know, being in the public spotlight. Twitch streaming is a complete grab-bag if you want to grow on there, for any game. If you’re someone who has no viewers and you’re trying to break in, you should just go to any category in Twitch and try to get down to a 1 – 0 viewer game. It’s really difficult to find any one person that way. I think it’s better that you find a different platform that’s easier to grow in like… Instagram or YouTube or whatever, and then take that following and see how many of those people you can convert to a regular stream and then go from there.
