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GrandPOOBear: "I thought I was going to die. Now I've achieved my dreams"
I wanted to be an elite snowboarder, but a horrible accident on the slopes in April 2013 almost killed me. Here's how those events set me on course to become a world record-holding gamer.
My memory of the accident is a little hazy.
April 2 2013. I got off a lift at the Heavenly Ski Resort in Lake Tahoe and was crossing the slopes when, suddenly, I heard a scream – I got smashed into by another skier and we rolled down the hill together for a while.
Once we stopped, I tried to stand up and I couldn’t, and I fell down and started puking blood.
Next thing I remember I’m at the bottom of the mountain, with no idea how I got there. I tried to stand up again and I couldn’t, and that’s when I realised my leg was screwed.
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At South Lake Tahoe Hospital they ran lots of tests. At first it was my knee – they found I had a torn medial collateral ligament and a broken kneecap. Then I told them my stomach hurt and they did an ultrasound – it was then that we realised how many internal injuries I had to my intestines, spleen and digestive tract.
They thought my spleen was going to burst so I spent the first 10 days in ICU waiting for my spleen to explode. My spleen didn't explode, so they moved me into a regular hospital room. That’s when they gave me my chart and I discovered I had a broken L vertebrae in my back.
My doctor said, 'You have a massive infection and we need to go into surgery right now'
Next time I saw my doctor I was like, "What do you mean I have a broken back?" And he was like, "Yeah, don’t worry about it. If this was your only injury we’d do surgery but you’re going to be in bed for a looooong time so don’t really worry about it."
South Lake Tahoe Hospital, Nevada, April 2013
© GrandPOOBear
South Lake Tahoe Hospital, Nevada, Summer 2013
© GrandPOOBear
After 17 days, I got out of the hospital because I was just going crazy. I decided I'd rather be home if I was just gonna be lying in bed.
Five days later I had a 105.2 fever, so I went back to the hospital and they did an ultrasound on my stomach and realised I had infections everywhere, like a V shape of abscesses inside me.
The doctors thought I was going to die, my fiancée had been told I was going to die – everyone thought I was going to die
My stomach was huge, I looked pregnant, but I was losing weight. We went into hospital at 10:30am and I remember me and my then-fiancée – we're now married – were sitting there talking about what we’d have for dinner. Then the doctor came in and he had obviously been at a golf game because he had his golf glove on, and he said, "You have a massive infection and we need to go into surgery right now."
That's when things got really wild.
As they were prepping me for surgery I was getting super weak. I could feel my body breaking down – they put three pints of blood into me because I couldn’t lose any more blood. The average body holds around 10 pints and they put three in me because I’d lost so much.
The next thing I remember is waking up and instantly feeling better. I looked over and saw my fiancée and her mum, who had driven five hours to us because she thought I was going to die. The doctors thought I was going to die, my fiancée had been told I was going to die – everyone thought I was going to die.
I said to my fiancée, "I feel so much better." But getting all of the infection out was a very long process, and this started another two-month stint in the hospital where I was having surgeries and they were cleaning me out trying to figure out what was wrong.
It turned out I had salmonella. And a salmonella infection in the gut for blunt force patients has only ever happened to patients in Africa with AIDs. I am the only person in history who has had that who didn’t have HIV. So initially they thought I had AIDs.
This was my lowest moment. The docs were pretty sure I had it because they had no other explanation. I thought I had given it to my partner and ruined her life, and I thought she would think I was out doing something I wasn’t doing. On top of my injury I thought I had this whole other thing that would have drastically changed everything about my life. But I didn’t, and they actually never figured out why it was salmonella. I guess I had it before the crash, that’s probably the only way to explain it.
When I first got home all I wanted to do was to stay alive
I had two months of surgeries, and they put four tubes with little balls at the end inside me. You’d squeeze the balls and as the balls opened up they would squeeze the blood and puss from my stomach, and once the tubes filled up we’d clean it out, it was so gross. They were in me for two months in the hospital, then for another month and a half at home. At home my fiancée would just wash the blood and puss down the sink. It was super gross. I was doing this continuously for months. It was wild.
Portland, Oregon, March 9 2019
© Cameron Baird / The Red Bulletin
From April to August I was bedridden. When I first got home, around July/August, all I wanted to do was to stay alive. We were getting married that October so my only thought was, ‘I want to be able to walk at my wedding.’ I was on crutches but I wasn’t moving a lot, just going from couch to bathroom. I had an oxygen tank too and a little pulley thing so I could drag it behind me.
I knew I was never going to be the same. My knee surgery and rehab and my back rehab got severely delayed, because I was having all these other surgeries. It was incredibly frustrating.
Eventually, the infection was gone and I got my tubes and staples out and started rehab.
As soon as I got out of hospital I was gaming constantly
By this time I realised how much my fiancée had gone through in those three months, and my sole focus was to spend the rest of my life repaying her and making her as happy as I can, starting with looking normal at our wedding. And the wedding was great! By October I was walking and I danced all night. My suit was big on me because I’d gone from a muscular 160 to a scrawny 105, but I wanted to wear that suit because I was super broke.
From then on it was just rehab, three hours a day, four days a week. There was a bit of weight training but mostly lots of bike riding.
It was December 2013 that I started video game streaming on Twitch. We had a Nintendo in our house when I was two, so I’ve always loved gaming, and as soon as I got out of hospital I was gaming constantly. My buddies would visit but then the snow came and the mountain opened and they all had to either work or ride, so I was very lonely.
I said, ‘I’m gonna do this with my time and maybe people will watch me and give me money'
My friend took a day off from riding and he’d been streaming on Twitch every once in a while, and he sent me a text like, ‘Hey I know you’re know home, you want to watch me play Halo online?’ And I responded, ‘Why the f*** would I watch you play Halo online? I lived with you. I know you suck at Halo.’ Just as a joke. He’s actually really good at Halo – he laughed and sent me the link and I watched him play for a couple of hours. Then he quit and I was like, ‘Well what else is on this crazy Twitch website?’ I got sucked into a Magic: The Gathering tournament for three hours, then watched someone play Mario for a couple of hours. My fiancée got home and she sees me sitting there watching someone else play video games, and I said, "I’m gonna do this with my time and maybe people will watch me and give me money." She said, "Whatever you can do to keep busy, do that."
The first game I played was a survival game called Rust, then DayZ, then classic games like old Zeldas and old Marios. No one watched me at first. I don’t think I broke 10 viewers the first year, or 20 viewers the first two-and-a-half years. It was a hobby. I literally was just looking for someone to talk to while I played video games all day because I was lonely.
At home in Portland, December 14 2018
© Aaron Rogosin/Red Bull Content Pool
I started speed running when Mario Maker 1 came out in December 2015, and I was super into it right away. I grew up on Mario so I was like, ‘Oh my god unlimited Mario.' So I’m playing it and this one level took me an hour and a half to beat, and I said to my chat on Twitch –where there were 11 people – "Guys, I can beat any single level in this game, it doesn’t matter." Just joking around. And this guy was like, "Here’s this one by this guy named Panga." This was the first time I’d seen a Kaizo level.
In snowboarding you spend hours and hours trying to do one trick –this game gave me that same rush
I’d seen this guy named Dram run a Kaizo game at a Games Done Quick charity event and I was obsessed with his run, I thought it was the coolest thing. But it was the first time I’d ever played anything like it, and it took me four-and-a-half hours to beat the first Penga level called Skyzo. Beating it was the first time gaming gave me the same feeling I got when snowboarding. In snowboarding you spend hours and hours trying to do one trick, and that feeling when you get that trick is what kept me snowboarding. This game gave me that same rush.
So I was like, ‘What else has this Panga person made?’ I started playing every hard level he had. A month later I was spending eight or nine hours on his levels, streaming them every day, and getting 25–30 people watching because not many people were attempting to beat these long, hard levels.
Then he made this level called P-Break, which was considered at the time the hardest level in the history of Mario. So I joined in on the race to be the first person to beat it. There was six or seven of us across the US, Canada and Japan, and that week I got noticed by a lot of the bigger Mario racers. I wasn’t the first person to beat it but, when I did beat it, it put me in the minds of people as one of the better players.
So that’s when growth started happening. By then it was 2016 and I was going to events and to Games Done Quick and getting a little more exposure.
Then I took on a level called Val’s Airspace that was so hard it took over 100 hours to complete – one month of my time. And during that month my stream went from maybe 80 viewers to around 400 because it became like, ‘Well, I want to see what happens when this guy finally beats this level.’
I got to the last trick about 30 hours in, then it took me another 70 hours to do a full run and beat the last trick. So that gave me a reputation – people thought, ‘Not only is this guy a pretty good player, he’s not going to give up.’
I ran out of Panga levels to play on Mario Maker 1, but found out that he had made this entire Mario World game that’s all really hard levels and named after this guy Dram who was the first person I’d ever seen play these really hard levels, and my inspiration to start speedrunning. So I decided I was gonna speedrun the game and try to become the world record holder.
It took me three or four weeks, but I got the world record. Then the guy who held the world record previously got it back the next day. We had a battle where we were going back and forth for the world record for the next three or four months. His name is Dode, and this became a super friendly rivalry that furthered both our careers.
I gave this heartfelt speech about how two years ago I was almost dead... And look how quick that changes, look at what gaming can give you
This culminated with Awesome Games Done Quick, which is like our Superbowl, and me and Dode both ran a portion of the game at that event in front of a packed crowd. It was a big turning point for me. You get exposed to 200,000-ish people during your run and I knocked it out of the park, I f***ing slayed it.
At the end I gave this heartfelt speech about how two years ago I was almost dead and then I saw Dram run this Kaizo game at GDQ while I was in the hospital and that led me to wanting to speedrun, and now I’m sitting here running a Kaizo game named after Dram made by Penga, all these people who were just myths to me. And look how quick that changes, look at what gaming can give you, look at what GDQ can give you.
That speech resonated with people and I blew up and became a 1,000+ viewer guy. I realised I could make a living doing this, so I quit my job. This was January 2017. The way we make money on Twitch is viewers like your content so much they’re willing to pay $5 a month for it. So, for me, when I hit 1,500 subs I felt like, ‘Alright you can go six months here and you can live, not thrive or anything, just pay your bills and not lose your house.’
MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada, June 1 2019
© Marv Watson/Red Bull Content Pool
Since that time I’ve held 20 world records and lost maybe 15 of them, I’ve had two Mario games made by this guy Barbarian named after me – Grand Poo World 1 and Grand Poo World 2 – and they’re considered the greatest games in that genre of all time. I’ve held the World Record in GPW2 – which is kind of the holy grail of what we’re doing right now – and, at one point, I held every world record for the game and I’m the only one who’s done that.
Today I’ve got 8,000 or so subs and I play six days a week. Seven days a week I put out a video.
I don’t think I’m considered the greatest player in the world anymore, but I’d probably be in everyone’s top 10. There’ll never be a consensus greatest player because so many people are so great at so many different things, but I think between 2017 and 2019 a lot of people would have had me number one on their list.
I am significantly better at this than I ever was at snowboarding.
I am significantly better at this than I ever was at snowboarding. All I wanted was to ride with Travis Rice, John Jackson and Mark Landviq. I wanted to get dropped off in that Red Bull helicopter, which is funny now considering I am a Red Bull athlete.
At home in Portland, December 14 2018
© Aaron Rogosin/Red Bull Content Pool
At home in Portland, December 15 2018
© Aaron Rogosin/Red Bull Content Pool
John Jackson gave me my hat on my first day of being a Red Bull athlete. And for my birthday this year my wife got me some video messages. John Jackson and Travis Rice, the two people that inspired me most in my adulthood, both did one. I was like, ‘Holy god, all I ever wanted to do was be noticed by Travis Rice as a snowboarder, and now he noticed me because I played video games.' It was such a cool way to achieve my dreams.
