This is an excerpt from my full-life memoir, Un Fn Myself — my real story of addiction, recovery, fatherhood, and everything in between from 1984 to 2026, including the parts most people would cut out.
Right before I got the partner agreement, my performance in Call of Duty: Warzone went to another level. I started having live streams where I’d win four or five games in a single session. I got really good. Remember when it took me eighty-two games to get my first win? I decided to see just how far I could take it, and the answer was very far. That’s also when I started noticing something uncomfortable. A lot of the top Facebook streamers appeared to be cheating. Not all of them, but most of them. They’d get called out live. Clips would surface where their cheats slipped on stream. They were usually very good at hiding it, but sometimes it showed. There was one guy in particular who was blatantly cheating. Everyone knew it. His cheats would occasionally glitch on stream, and he’d immediately delete the VOD. People would repost clips, and Facebook wouldn’t do a thing about it.
That started to piss me off more and more, especially because I was building a massive following without cheating. There were stretches where I was the top Facebook Gaming streamer on the entire platform. I remember Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in 2020 vividly—I was number one both days. My streams pulled hundreds of thousands of views. I had two thousand, three thousand concurrent viewers regularly. I felt like a god. This was exactly what I had wanted for years.
The money was pouring in. Fifty dollars here. One hundred there. Ten, twenty, thirty-five, nonstop. New followers flooding in. New likes. New donations. New supporters. The club growing every week. Everything exploding at once. I remember how incredible it felt to be crushing it on Facebook Gaming instead of being with my family. I remember thinking the other streamers were idiots for choosing family time over these easy views. Christmas and Christmas Eve were absolute gold, and I was cleaning up while everyone else logged off. At the time, that felt amazing.
When I was starting out again back in August 2020, those first several months on Warzone blew up because I was genuinely having fun. I loved playing the game, and that joy was obvious. But eventually, something shifted. Once I got to the point where I could win three, four, sometimes five games in a single live stream, the excitement started to drain out of it. My streams would run anywhere from one to three hours on the short end and six or seven hours on the long end, and a single win could take around thirty minutes. On a stream where I won five games, that meant two and a half hours of straight winning. I was winning almost as often as I was losing, and even in the games I didn’t win, I was finishing in the top ten most of the time. I had gotten insanely good at the game.
At the same time, I was getting increasingly pissed off about hackers. At least half the games I lost felt like they ended because I ran into someone cheating. I’d get wiped by a hacker, over and over, and when I looked at the people above me in the rankings—the ones who were bigger streamers than I was—I became convinced that a lot of them were cheating too. That anger built up fast. I kept thinking, This is rigged. I remember having the thought that if I really wanted to get to the next level, I’d have to start hacking myself. With the strategies I was already using, if I’d added wall hacks or a bit of aim assist, I probably could have won eighty percent of my games instead of ten or twenty. And even a ten-to-twenty percent win rate in a 150-person free-for-all battle royale is insane. I was objectively very good. But despite that, I was bored.
I blew up on Warzone because people were shocked to see someone having that much fun. I was like a kid again, genuinely enjoying video games. But after several months and hundreds of wins, the fun turned into something else. There were streams where I wouldn’t win a single game, where I’d place second, fifth, third, tenth, fiftieth, second again, and I’d end the stream feeling like absolute shit. I’d shut it off hating myself, feeling like I hadn’t properly gotten high that day. That’s when it hit me that Warzone had become a drug. I was using it to get high, chasing that rush. When I got a win, I’d scream with joy but when I didn’t get that fix, I felt awful. I’d even had a policy early on that I wouldn’t swear or go crazy on stream, but I watched a few other streamers blowing up by swearing nonstop and acting unhinged, so I started doing it too.
Right before I got the partner agreement, I also started experimenting with other games. I tried playing Rise of Nations, a game I loved from years earlier. That game carried a very specific memory for me. Back in college, when I was in the police academy, my girlfriend at the time came over one night clearly wanting my attention. I was drinking and playing Rise of Nations, and I told her, Hold on, I just need to finish this game. It was a four-on-four match, and my team needed me. That wasn’t a five-minute delay either—it took another thirty minutes to finish. She was furious. I chose the game over her, and not long after that, I lost her.
So there I was years later, thinking it would be fun to play it again, to reconnect with that part of myself. I went live playing Rise of Nations, and my stream absolutely tanked. I’d have three, four, maybe five viewers. I was livid. If I took my shirt off and played Warzone, I could pull tens of thousands of viewers per stream, sometimes hundreds of thousands of views total. But the moment I tried to play a game I actually wanted to play, I was down to a couple hundred views at best and single-digit live viewers. It felt like a trap. I realized I was roped into playing Warzone exclusively if I wanted success, attention, and money. And I hated that feeling.
All of a sudden, I was making thousands of dollars a month from people paying to play Warzone with me, on top of thousands more coming in from subscriptions, donations, and general support. People got insanely toxic about the fact that I charged for it openly. I didn’t hide it. It was right there on jerrybanfield.com. Click a button that said play Warzone with me, pick a day and a time, and that was it. I eventually raised the price to $300 for a three-hour live stream, and people kept buying it. I sold so many of them. There were stretches where five or six days a week, someone had paid $300 to play Warzone with me live.
Sometimes people split the cost. I allowed up to three people to play with me at once, so a group of three would each pay $100, and the four of us would stream together. For a lot of them, it worked beautifully. They picked up a ton of new followers, got donations, and made their money back almost immediately. Other times, it was a complete disaster. If the audience didn’t like the person, the stream was miserable, and I hated every second of playing with someone I didn’t even enjoy being around. It became clear very quickly that this wasn’t just about gaming anymore; it was about managing energy, personalities, and expectations nonstop.
I also partnered and played with other top Facebook gamers, including the same girl I’d judged earlier. I did a live stream with her, and one of my viewers wandered over to her stream and dropped $200 on her instead of me. I remember thinking, Really? Fuck you, bro. None of the people coming over from her stream gave me big donations, but one of my guys dumped money on her immediately. She actually lived nearby, and technically we could have met up, but I had zero interest in that scene. Hard pass.
By the summer of 2021, from the outside, I was absolutely crushing it. Inside, I was miserable. I hated that the only thing that worked was Call of Duty: Warzone. I burned out fast. After weeks where more days than not involved someone paying $300 to play with me, I felt exhausted and trapped. The worst part was that when I wasn’t playing with other people, all I wanted to do was play Warzone solos. Solos were my game. I hated four-player Warzone. I was bad at it. The strategy was completely different, and I couldn’t stand the revive mechanics. Solos were pure. One life. One mistake and you’re done. That was where my skill actually showed, and being forced into squad play for money made me resent the whole thing.
By June, I snapped and posted one of the most toxic live streams I’d ever done. I ripped the entire Facebook Gaming ecosystem apart. I talked shit about everybody. Even some of the most respected top streamers caught strays. I said they sucked, that they were useless, and that people were pathetic for crediting streamers with getting them through hard times. I remember saying something like, How bad is your life if you’re thanking some guy playing video games online for being there for you? Get a real life. I went all the way off. Ironically, some of my closest followers later told me that was their favorite stream I ever did. Out of everything, that was the one that hit hardest for them.
What makes it even funnier is that I wasn’t even playing Warzone during that rant. I was playing some old SimCity game—SimCity 2000 or something ancient like that—just zoning out and unloading everything I’d been holding in. Looking back, it’s wild. Within a year of that vision I had bouncing on a trampoline, I had gotten everything I thought I wanted. If you’d told me a year earlier that I’d be making $5,000, $6,000, $7,000 a month just by showing up and playing Call of Duty: Warzone for three hours a day, I would have thought that sounded incredible.
Then I actually got it, and I was often unhappy. I was stressed consistently. The game felt like a drug. It got me high, jittery, shaky. I’d forget to eat. I learned pretty quickly that I didn’t even want to go on stream after eating, because food would bring me down and make me feel depressed. I needed to be slightly hungry, amped, wired—basically cracked out. I was completely sober, but the game itself was producing the same effect. Warzone was getting me high, and the more I depended on it, the more trapped I felt by something that had started as pure joy.
We had some genuinely great times on the stream. There were a lot of laughs, a lot of shit-talking, and moments where everything just clicked. I did these stand-up-comedy-style streams where I’d go completely off the rails, saying the wildest things, riffing nonstop, and people loved it. Those were fun. But by June 2021, I was burned out. Even with the income, the followers, the reach—everything I’d been chasing—I felt exhausted and restless. I was obsessed with becoming the top Facebook gamer, constantly looking upward, constantly measuring myself against whoever was ahead of me, and getting pissed that my growth wasn’t accelerating fast enough. I had everything I said I wanted, and it still wasn’t enough.
That summer, I went on a two-week road trip with my family, and somewhere in the middle of it I had an insight: what I really wanted to do was play retro games. Earlier that year, I’d actually experimented with that. I’d gone to a local game store, bought a Nintendo 64 and GoldenEye, and streamed it along with a couple of other retro games. I’d ended up returning the console because the live viewership was way lower than Warzone, so I wrote it off at the time. But something stuck with me. When I looked at the analytics later, I noticed that the GoldenEye livestream behaved differently. Unlike Warzone streams—which would spike while live and then die almost immediately—the GoldenEye stream kept getting views after I went offline. That was unusual. That’s when a light bulb went off. I remember thinking, I think I just found something special.
When I got back from the road trip in July 2021, I leaned into it and started playing retro games seriously. Almost immediately, things went nuts. I streamed Duke Nukem, which I was ridiculously excited about. I played NBA Jam, Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, and other old classics, and within the first two or three weeks some of those streams exploded. I went back to GoldenEye and even brought over the same guy I’d paid $100 an hour for life coaching earlier. We streamed GoldenEye together, and while the live viewership was nothing special, the replay absolutely detonated in the algorithm. Around the same time, a new Space Jam movie came out, and I streamed NBA Jam, intentionally using keywords to tie into the movie. That stream went crazy too, pulling in close to a million views. The followers poured in.
Because I was a partner by then, my streams earned ad revenue after they went live, which non-partners didn’t get. That GoldenEye stream I did with my friend ran for a couple of hours and ended up making $3,000 in ad revenue. I made three grand streaming GoldenEye for a few hours. I felt like an absolute god. It was finally clear: this was my thing. I’d cracked another code.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Games playlist.