To keep the theme of childhood going, I am going to tell a story from my childhood, specifically when I was in middle school around the ages of 9-14. The timeline is fuzzy, so read with grace.
My first memory of CSGO is very fuzzy. From what I can recall, which may be wrong, I was playing on the map de_nuke with Quentin, Lucas, and maybe some others (asian john? [for those who know]).
I was horrible. I had no idea what was going on, and I felt humiliated because I'm pretty sure I did not get a single kill. But this did not sit right with me. I've played Cops n' Robbers on minecraft hypixel, and seen Youtube videos of CSGO, but I still sucked ass. I had to be better.
For the next few months, I would play casual on de_dust2 all day long. I learned the map, and with some courage I started to play competitive.
I still sucked ass, but I atleast understood the game. I tried my best, gave decent callouts, but ended up getting kicked almost every match for either being a squeaker, or for being complete dogshit at the game. Sometimes, it was both. Regardless, this cycle continued and eventually I begged my dad to buy me CSGO on an alternate account because I got so many 7-day comp bans for getting kicked.
I kept grinding, and started to queue with some friends. I started to get a little better at the game.
As my prefrontal cortex was early in development, I ogled at the site of shiny gun/knife skins that our occasional random player in our lobby had. I began to wonder, why would people every spend money on pixels in a video game? But even worse, I began to wonder, why do I want to spend money to get these shiny pixels for myself?.
Regardless of the reasoning, the inkling was swimming around in my adolescent mind, and I was hooked. I started to watch Youtube videos of CSGO players unboxing knives and screaming into their microphone. I did research on what made certain patterns of these skins more desirable and thus more expensive. I knew the case system to unbox these rare skins were literally just gambling, but truly I did not care. I was just a naive little squeaker.
On my 11th or 12th birthday I received a $50 Steam gift card from my parents. A spark was ignited in my mind instantaneously. I knew exactly what I was going to do. I invited an old neighbor to my house, Seth Merrill, and I ripped the entire $50 gift card into CSGO cases. I sat on the edge of my shiny bright red plastic chair, and Seth derped around in a random kitchen chair I pulled up for him next to my computer. It was time. Case after case, key after key, I essentially donated my birthday money to Valve (the creators of CSGO). I got absolutely nothing. My total unboxed skins totaled an astounding $3. I felt defeated. My birthday was ruined. The spark began to dim.
A year or two passed, but I continued to play CSGO pretty much all day everyday. My prefrontal cortex was developing rapidly and I was beginning to realize that cases are literally just a scam. But that did not stop me. It's gambling after all. I watched more CSGO on Youtube, and lots of these Youtubers would also make gambling videos. Some would just open CSGO cases, and others would post videos of them winning thousands of dollars on online gambling websites that used CSGO skins as their form of currency. As the sands of time revealed the truth, it turns out many of these Youtubers actually owned the sites they were winning on, essentially creating false gambling advertisements targeted towards children. But again, this did not stop me. The fire raged on.
I am not trying to frame this as if I am a victim of this. In fact, I believe I got the good ending of this story. For this next part, you will see how my good ending may have come at a truly sinister cost greater than I could ever fathom.
I'd like to zoom into one specific Youtuber: McSkillet. He was a pioneer of his time, creating the infamous "Top 10 Most Expensive Skins & Rare Weapons 2015! Counter Strike Rarest Knives & Skins". This video put CSGO skins on the map, and from the day this video was uploaded the skin community exploded in popularity. People could not wrap their heads around why people would spend millions of dollars on purely cosmetic pixels in a video game.
Much like other CSGO youtubers in his time, he would also go on to make his own gambling website and help a lot of other creators with their sites. His site was called CSGOKingdom. A fun little trick that these websites would use to to make gambling an actual habit of its users, would be to introduce free daily cases for every user. These cases were pretty much guaranteed to pay out a grand total of a few cents per open, but I believe the real motive was just to get as many repeat website visitors as possible.
And therefore, it worked. Everyday I would play CSGO and find a new gambling website to open my free cases on. Everyday I would get a few pennies richer. CSGOKingdom ended up making McSkillet hundreds of thousands of dollars every single month. Its gambling after all.
But one day, something was different. I did my usual routine. I go on CSGOKingdom, open my free case, and click around to the live opening feed of what is being unboxed currently on the site. I vicariously won and lost thousands of dollars through the live opening feed.
But after scouring this live feed for some time everyday, I always I watched the same user, open the same case, and receive the same outcome. On this day I decided to click on this specific live opening and see what it was. As it turns out, CSGOKingdom had a neat little feature where you could actually make your own case and choose the skins you wanted to unbox, in which the site would calculate the odds for you. Of course it was still rigged heavily against you, but its the same little gimmick that carnival games use to make you feel like you have more control than you really do.
But this one case was... different. By some miracle, whether he was a site administrator flying under the radar, or he just found some bug in the calculations used to create your own case, the odds actually favored you. To be specific, the case had a 99.9% chance of unboxing a $50 skin at the time, a Desert Eagle Blaze. The weird part was that this case costed $40 to open. Therefore, you were almost guaranteed to profit $10 every time you open this case. Being a little wiser at this time, I assumed nothing of this, and went to bed.
7 days passed.
Roughly a week later, I was playing duo-queue with Kyle Musto and I nonchalantly mentioned this funny little case I found to him. He instantly asked me to find the case so he could see it for himself. So, I went back to the live feed, and there it was. The same guy, opening the same case, getting the same outcome. I sent Kyle the link and without hesitation he goes "alright I deposited my knife into the website lets open these cases". I was dumbfounded, but watched his screen in disbelief. It actually worked. Every time he opened this case, he profited $10. Without much thought I instantly deposited my knife as well, worth around $70 at the time.
We were fucking ecstatic. The fire was not just raging, it was a fucking inferno.
CSGOKingdom had a feature where you could open 10 of the same case at the same time, so we were essentially making $100 every single time we clicked the yellow "Unbox" button. Our balance on the website grew to thousands. I couldn't believe it. As soon as I hit about $3,000 of site balance, I withdrew one of the most iconic CSGO skins from the site, an M4A4 Howl in field-tested condition. This skin is really something special but that's for another blog. Regardless, it was fucking working. The only thing between us and 100 more dollars was waiting on that stupid case unboxing animation to be over.
Kyle was a bit more timid with his withdrawals, and he was simply just stacking up site balance. I need to fact check with him, but I believe his site balance peaked at around $7,000.
Editors Note: As stated before, a single Desert Eagle Blaze was worth around $50 back then. Today, a single one is worth $700. If we just simply decided to withdraw the $7,000 worth of Desert Eagle Blazes, they would now be worth $98,000. Oh well, we all should've bought bitcoin too.
But alas we were blinded by the inferno. The live opening feed quickly turned into chaos. This case was not only being spammed by us, but now with it littered all over the live feed, I'm absolutely sure that others caught on as well.
Our site balance was frozen before we could withdraw anything else. But the damage was done.
A lingering thought I have always have to this day was: who was the Robinhood that created this case, and how much money has he made? He was disciplined, not cluttering up the live feed, and I can only imagine how much money he stole from this online casino.
The truth is, I felt guilty. Casinos are not the most ethical business, however being so young my moral compass was spinning. But truthfully I did not care because I was able to make more money than I knew what to do with. I was like 13 what the fuck do you even do with $100 at that age?
We made some good money, and this loss was really nothing compared to the millions of dollars that McSkillet would go on to make with various different gambling websites.
But now, we have to talk about McSkillet. This is where it gets grim.
He was only about 16 when he started making youtube videos, and was millionaire from creating gambling websites at 17. He bought a 2014 McLaren, and on the outside, everything seemed fine. But as the world would soon be horrified to find out, he was not fine. Maybe it was the fame, maybe it was the money, but his mental health deteriorated very quickly. His family started to notice, and even tried to get the police involved after he started to imply he was invincible and how he can do whatever he wants, stating "the cops bullets cant hurt me anyway". Despite this, the police did not do anything, somehow stating that there was no clear intention to hurt others or himself.
On August 23rd, 2018, 18 year old Mcskillet, real name Trevor J. Heitmann, purposefully drove himself onto the wrong way of a highway and quickly reached speeds of over 100mph. He crashed, resulting in not only his death, but the death of a mother and her 12-year old child. May they rest in peace and I truly hope all the surrounding people and their families are remaining strong to this day. This should have never happened, and it's a shame that the police department did not fully grasp the severity of the mental-health situation that Trevor was in. Regardless, I think such an act of negligent endangerment of other people is not excusable no matter the circumstances. He should have gotten the help he needed, but of course its never truly that simple. Again, rest in peace to those who lost their life.
Now I do not want to be insensitive to the tragic loss of life that happened by making my blog about this subject, but after this news came out in 2018 I had no idea how to feel. Was I somehow to blame? Was he secretly in debt and I contributed to his monetary losses? He was making millions of dollars, surely I didn't contribute to any potential losses, right? What was the real cost of that M4A4 Howl? Was it really just a mental health issue that went unnoticed for far too long? Am I somehow an accidental accomplice to this horrific event?
These questions used to haunt me everyday. It wasn't until about 8 months ago when more information came out on his mental health situation that gave me some clarity. If you are reading this and hate my guts and/or you are a certain someone with connections to federal investigators I urge you to please watch this video(embedded below) for more information on the topic. In reality I am in no way involved in this event and I just wanted to selfishly mention that to clear my name. Since then, I have came to the conclusion that I was not an accidental accomplice to this, and that his deteriorating mental health was the sole contributor to his horrific actions.
But no one will ever truly know. All we know is that McSkillet's passing and influence will forever be remembered by those that played CSGO in the early days. As for the mother and daughter killed, and their family, my heart and the CSGO communities heart will aways be there for them.
May they rest in peace.
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