10 Years Creating Content

I’ve been making content online for the better part of a decade.

It started when I picked up a camcorder and began recording my brother and me playing Modern Warfare 2, making sniping montages that were… well, terrible. But I was hooked. I quickly realized I needed better gear, so I asked my mom for her old laptop, the one she never used, and got to work.

Camcorder pointed straight at the TV (circa 2009)

We’d spend hours recording, editing, and cutting clips together. Those early montages are long lost to time, but one or two little fragments still survive somewhere online. Eventually, I saved up enough money to buy a Dazzle, an old-school capture device that connected to both the TV and Xbox. Once we had that bad boy, we were unstoppable (or so we thought).

My first real capture device

We formed our own sniper clan, S4H, and I even made a little animated intro using that dying laptop that sounded like it was about to explode at any moment. We didn’t have much money, so I found a way to “crack” an ancient copy of Sony Vegas. That software became both my best friend and my worst enemy.

Sony Vegas was notoriously unstable. It could crash under the lightest workload, and when it did… everything was gone. Hours, sometimes days, of editing vanished in seconds. I’ll never forget the time I proudly called a friend over to show him an edit I’d spent an entire week on. I hit play, the playback glitched, and my entire project corrupted before my eyes.

All I could say was, “...and it’s gone.”

Young Tony cried that night. empty tears, the kind you can’t even feel anymore. After losing so many edits, I started to grow numb. But it was all I had, so I kept going. Somehow, several of those montages made it onto YouTube (honestly, the copyright gods must have been sleeping, because they stayed up for years).

I still have one surviving montage, just one, saved only because I tweeted about it back in the day. The YouTube channel is long gone, but that tweet is like a little time capsule from another life.

The Last remnants from my first YouTube Channel

Back then, our clan had around 20 members (all friends from school), all wanting to record clips for montages. Word eventually spread through school about what we were doing, and that’s when the bullies showed up.

Every single day, I was mocked for making videos. It got mean. And no matter how much I loved creating, it started to break me down. I was the only one editing, the only one keeping the dream alive. After countless crashes, lost projects, and days of unwarranted ridicule, I finally snapped.

I deleted the YouTube channel. Just like that, years of work disappeared, except for what still lingers in my memory.

A few months later, I started high school. Everyone else seemed to forget about the whole thing… except me. That creative itch never left.

I got my first job (working at McDonald’s), before almost anyone in my grade, and worked every single day after school for years until I graduated. I saved up every paycheck until I could afford a real gaming computer. It wasn’t great, and it barely ran games, but it was stable enough to edit without constant crashes.

I went back to recording and uploading gaming videos, mostly Call of Duty and other shooters. And for a while, I was happy again. Creating. Building. Learning. Over the next few years, I kept working, getting better jobs, upgrading, and eventually built my fifth version of my (current) setup.

My current work setup.

Today, I have everything I once dreamed of: The best PC setup, my Sony A7IV camera, and a decade of hard-earned experience.

But something’s missing.

After ten+ years of creating, I have the tools, the skills, and the discipline, but the passion that used to burn so easily feels faint now. I’ve shifted my focus over the years, from gaming to self-improvement, but I still haven’t found the success I imagined when I started.

Luck was never on my side, but creativity always was. And even if that well feels dry some days, I’m still here. Still creating. Still chasing that next story, that next idea, that next spark.

At the end of the day, that’s all I can hope for. Making better videos, ones that have meaning and worth behind them.

Because maybe success isn’t about views or fame. Maybe it’s just about not giving up.