The Twitch streamer Tyler “Ninja” Blevins dominated the online shooter Fortnite in 2017 at the age of 26, became a star on Twitch, and wanted to be the “David Beckham” of gaming, the very best. In 2024, he is 33 years old and the Fortnite world looks different. Kids challenge him. But Ninja just can’t keep up anymore.
This is Ninja’s problem:
- Ninja comes from games like Halo and is a classic shooter player: He is quick to react, has good hand-eye coordination, can aim well, and react to situations.
- But in Fortnite: Battle Royale, that was no longer enough from mid-2018. To be among the best, you need to practice “building.” You have to perfect building sequences to create cover for yourself or to “build up” during building duels. Experts not only build but also edit the structures to create shooting holes to shoot through briefly and then close them again.
- The really good Fortnite players meticulously train building and have perfected it. Ninja never managed to do that. Therefore, he was unable to qualify for the Fortnite World Cup in 2019 despite all his efforts. By then, younger players had already surpassed the “David Beckham” of gaming.
“Please, play the building mode!”
That’s what he’s being teased about now: Young players in Fortnite repeatedly challenge the 33-year-old to dare to play the building mode. But he prefers, since its inception, the “No Build” mode, where Fortnite works like a classic shooter.
In a Fortnite match, where Ninja is clearly recognizable as “Ninja,” another player writes to him, “Please, play the building mode.”
Ninja immediately thinks he is “at most 12 years old.” Because the request to play the “build mode” is something Ninja has heard many times and he is clearly fed up with it.
“I’m 33 years old – I can’t keep up anymore”
This is Ninja’s response: Ninja clearly states that he cannot play “build” anymore, and it annoys him that “kids” try to convince him that he still can:
I am 33 years old, I have a maximum of 40 ping – I will never play the building mode again! I can’t keep up anymore and I’m proud of it.
The site Dexerto quotes the streamer in his anger. He is upset about “brain-dead kids.” He would like to yell at their parents about what kind of children they raised, saying their brains must be “rotting.” He, anyway, is now playing for a different generation.
This is also ironic because at the height of his career, critics accused Ninja of having an audience primarily made up of children. Just because of the kids, the notorious flamer even stopped cursing in 2018.
Well, it seems someone is “Too old for this shit.”
Ninja seems to have really entered a different phase of his life. When you listen to him, much sounds like “Everything was better back then”: He has also spoken disparagingly about the current streaming landscape and criticized many newer developments that did not exist “in his time” in such strong form: The streamer with the most followers on Twitch says: “Streaming has become bad and is getting worse”
