Spragels Interview: How The Pokemon Unite Youtuber Speedran His Way To Casting The World Championships

thegamer.com:

A year ago, comedian Jake “Spragels” Sprague had just started experimenting with his gaming YouTube channel. Today, not only has he become one of the biggest Pokemon Unite content creators, but he also casted the $500k Unite tournament at this past weekend’s Pokemon World Championships. I sat down with Spragels at the conclusion of the Unite Grand Finals to find out how he managed to achieve so much so quickly, and what it was like to provide commentary for this historic Pokemon Unite tournament.

TheGamer: I'd like to start by tracing your journey here by starting back before the game came out. Your channel was relatively new, and you were kind of experimenting with different kinds of content, playing different games, and doing sketches. Were you looking for a game to just pour all your energy into?

Spragels: No, I had no idea how content creation in this sense would exactly work. I didn't know what would be popular on YouTube or anything like that. I was just like many people, at home. I had done live comedy for years, so I performed around Los Angeles, and that was all shut down, everything was shut down. I've loved games forever, so I just started putting some energy into games, having fun with it and seeing where it went.

I was making content for a few different games and I was so excited about Pokemon Unite, which is the game that I basically cover exclusively now. I've always loved Pokemon and I'm a huge MOBA player. So I've played all of the other big MOBAs, big into League of Legends, big into Smite, Heroes of the Storm, all that. I thought [Unite] would just be so cool. The game came out and I just started making a ton of videos on it. I got very fortunate because there weren't a lot of people in that space.