ONE37pm: Do you remember the very first basketball game you ever played?
RipItRandy: The very first basketball game that I played was NBA Live 06 on the GameCube with Dwyane Wade on the cover back when I was five years old. In 2012, I decided to get NBA 2K9 on the PS3 because I didn't have enough money in my piggy bank to buy the latest NBA 2K game that was out. I played that game until Christmas of 2013 when my parents got me a PS4 along with NBA 2K14.
ONE37pm: What made you decide to become an NBA 2K content creator?
RipItRandy: So basically, I've lived in Coral Springs, Florida for my entire life. I moved to Georgia in 2006 for a year, and then in 2012 again for another year for my dad's job. When I wasn't living in Georgia, I was living in Coral Springs.
One day in 2014, in the summer after 8th grade, my dad took me and my family out to dinner and told us that we were moving to Georgia once again for a longer period of time. We ended up moving to Marietta, Georgia in the summer of 2015. I had no friends in Georgia and I felt the only way to keep myself happy in a new place was by playing video games. NBA 2K15 was the current 2K game that was out at that time. Every day in the summer, I would stay inside and play the "MyTeam" mode on NBA 2K15 from the time that I woke up until I went to sleep.
I became so invested in the game that I began to watch different YouTubers play the game, such as Jesser, ThatKiddKuda, StaxMontana CashNasty, NickTheBullsFan, and many more people. I watched their videos so much to the point where I would say their catchphrases whenever I would play the game. When I caught myself doing this after a few times, I thought to myself, "if these guys are making a living doing the same thing I'm doing, then I might as well give it a shot."
I began recording gameplay footage on my PlayStation whenever I played NBA 2K16 MyCareer and posted the raw footage to my YouTube, but then I realized that I need to start editing my videos. When I first started out, I used a school flash drive to transfer my gameplay footage from my PlayStation to my mom's 2009 MacBook Pro to edit the videos. I published my first serious YouTube video on Jan 21, 2016, which is still on my channel today. I went around telling my neighbors and all of my friends to subscribe to my channel, which is how I got my first 100 subscribers.
From that point on, until I hit 1,000 subscribers, I went around messaging a bunch of members of the 2K community on Twitter, asking them to subscribe to my channel which helped me gain at least 20 subscribers per day, which was a lot to me at the time. On my 16th birthday, I reached out to one of my YouTube inspirations, StaxMontana, and asked him if we could play a few games of NBA 2K16 MyPark for a video.
At the beginning of that day, I was at 800 subscribers and continued to upload videos almost daily. Luckily, Stax replied pretty quickly and said he would play with me and upload a video of the gameplay on his channel as well, which had over 500,000 subscribers at the time. He was nice enough to shout me out in the video, which helped me achieve my first big goal and hit 1,000 subscribers on my 16th birthday, which was December 29, 2016.
On that day, I received a LOT of happy birthday messages and a lot of kind messages, which made me realize that I wanted to work hard and take content creation as seriously as possible, due to all of the kind messages and support I was receiving and the fact that I can have a positive impact on people's lives, like StaxMontana and other NBA 2K creators have had on mine.