Sacriel’s guide to surviving the zombie apocalypse (and connecting with brands while doing it)

It was in pre-recorded content where Sacriel got his start professionally gaming more than a decade ago. In the early 2010s, Sacriel—then just Chris Ball—was working as a product manager at an internet service provider in England. He’d started at the company as customer support, where he’d answer phones and explain what was going wrong with customers’ broadband. He had a knack for explaining very complex technology to regular people. Sacriel had been a gamer his whole life, playing on an old Commodore with his dad as a kid. So, as a hobby, he began putting videos of himself playing video games online. “This was really early in the day before mainstream content creation was a thing,” Sacriel remembers. “And people started commenting like, ‘how did you use that item?’ And I would sit there in the comment section rapidly typing to them using the skills I had from my job.”

Today, Sacriel’s wife Shannon Plante (who also streams on Twitch as ShannonZKiller), remains part of her husband’s streaming enterprise, along with moderators, coders, artists, managers, and more. As Sacriel’s community has grown, so has his streaming operation. It began humble enough in the early days of Twitch, but Sacriel quickly established his streams by innovating with a homemade overlay that scanned his Twitch Chat and notified him when viewers subscribed. He credits these innovations with some of his early success, helping his channel stand out. Right now, he’s working on more innovations like filters that let his viewers change his face and voice.

This is all part of how Sacriel has continued to build his audience and his brand on Twitch. For him, the cornerstone of his brand has always been education—a thread from those early days as an ISP project manager. “One of the primary things that I feel is one of my unique selling points is my ability to educate,” he says. “I don’t just play and do well in the game and at the end show the scoreboard. Every time I do something well in a game I’ll analyze it, and I’ll literally load up Microsoft Paint and draw it. People realize that ‘oh wow, not only is he good at the game he’s making me better.’”

As he’s established himself as a leading voice on Twitch, Sacriel has turned his success into meaningful brand partnerships. One of his favorites was a partnership with Paramount to promote a new Mission Impossible movie. As part of the campaign, the studio brought Sacriel into an indoor skydive wind tunnel to play games while free falling. “My community was fully enthralled with it,” Sacriel remembers. “Then intermingled in the content with me skydiving were trailers and segments from the movie. It was just such a natural and engaging way of working together.”

Another one Sacriel remembers is working with Intel, which was something of a childhood dream, as he’d grown up using the brand’s CPUs since his first computer, he says. “20 years later to have that company say they want me to represent them … it kind of makes me feel like this can’t be real,” Sacriel says. “I’m just a dude playing games. It’s kind of strange to think about really. If I could go back in time 10 years and say ‘Hey, 10 years from now you’ll be sponsored by some of the biggest companies in the world and you’ll have your own house and a wife,’ I’d say ‘no way, you’re thinking about someone else.’”