Bizzle’s love-hate relationship with Fortnite

It took Timothy “Bizzle” Miller only a handful of matches to realize he hated Fortnite.

“I tried it, and then uninstalled it,” Bizzle remembered. “I thought it was too cartoony. At the time, [PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds] was pretty popular and everyone liked how realistic it was. No one thought Fortnite was going to turn into something as big as it is now.”

Although Bizzle uninstalled Fortnite as quickly as he installed it, the game was harder to remove from his memory. A few weeks later, without quite understanding why, Bizzle gave Fortnite a second chance. And now he has a good shot at a share of the $30 million Fortnite World Cup finals in New York in July.

“I don’t know what changed, maybe I won a game or something, but I just fell in love with Fortnite,” Bizzle said. “Over the next couple weeks, I found myself playing more Fortnite than Counter-Strike. My team was pushing me to choose one or the other because I couldn’t do both.”

Drawing upon the same competitive zeal he used to excel in traditional sports like soccer, golf and badminton, Bizzle got better as he played more. His drive intentionally mimicked the OpTic Gaming Call of Duty team he supported through Ghosts and Advanced Warfare. Bizzle devoured the OpTic house content while in middle school, learning what it took to be a pro gamer from stars like Matt “Nadeshot” Haag and Seth “Scump” Abner.

“Watching how their lifestyle was playing games all day, enjoying that whole experience, just fueled me up and got me into that competitive mindset,” Bizzle said.

Soon, Bizzle found his place among the North American Fortnite elite, gaining access to the exclusive Discord pros were using to organize scrims.

“All the players would ready up, and one person would count ‘3, 2, 1, go,’ and hundreds of people would click go at the same time, hoping to get into the same match,” Bizzle said. “If we got five to ten squads in the same game, that was good. Getting 20, 30 player endgames was hard at the time, which is pretty crazy to think about. You see 60 to 70 now.”

Some of the friends Bizzle made in this new community, like Dylan “Dmo” Moore and Enzo “Enzo” Simonette, eventually become his teammates on Ghost Gaming. Bizzle thinks Ghost signed the squad in part because of FaZe Clan’s Dennis “Cloak” Lepore’s recommendation.

“If you won two or three scrims a night, that was really, really good,” Bizzle said, “and that was something we were averaging. [Cloak] knew that we were a good team, underrated, didn’t…