Nintendo streamer PointCrow talks about his work modding Zelda games

Addition of new rules to a playthrough or the modification of a video game will make a well-known classic exciting and fresh. In some cases it can even feel totally different. This is the approach that streamer Eric “PointCrow” Morino has taken. His name has been made by playing games that are extremely popular, such as The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild and Pokémon with special rules or mods. Polygon spoke to him about his career and his approach to playing some of today’s most popular games in new, creative ways.

Morino began streaming his stream on Twitch during the winter of 2019. He then started sharing clips from those streams on YouTube in the summer of that year. Since then, he’s grown his audience to include over 2 million subscribers on YouTube and roughly 600,000 followers on Twitch. Before he began streaming, he was a speedrunner himself.

“One of the earliest videos that I remember really falling in love with was a long commentary of a speedrun of Majora’s Mask — this is back before they found arbitrary code execution. “And I was just like,” What would I do? What if, instead of putting my daily challenges towards video games, I used them to play the game?” Morino said via video chat. “And so I just started with Breath of Wild. I love Zelda games. It’s one of the games that I fell in love with when I was a child, so I could kind of take the open world as it were and create new puzzles for myself.”

Morino, a virtual-world expert who has managed to carve a successful career out of Hyrule’s well-worn paths and others popular worlds. His accomplishments range from beating Breath of Wild Without walking, streamers are trying to feed as many dogs as they can. Morino reverse-engineered the core concepts of games and tried to visualize how they would play without specific mechanics.

“Whenever you come across the game, you always have to think, like, what are the core components of the game? Can you play without the core component of that game? As climbing is the new revelation, it’s everywhere. [Breath of the Wild]. You are free to go anywhere and do anything. Then, what would you do if your only restricted yourself to What if I can’t do that?It makes the whole puzzles different. It’s a really cool problem to have. And it’s a really cool sort of thing to do.”

Morino’s main focus these days is on playing mods for popular games, which amplifies the whimsicality, as well as interactive streams, where he relies heavily on Twitch chat to force him into a particular way of speaking or acting. On one occasion, Morino playedBreath Of The WildIt was the same as normal, but every time he used a particular word, enemies would appear. So if he said the word “bear,” it would spawn 20 bears, or if he said “worm,” it would spawn a Molduga boss. Link will explode if you chuckle. Notably, he hosted a Twitch channel that let his Twitch subscribers collectively play.Breath Of The WildBy entering commands in chat.

Morino revealed to Polygon he uses both mods that are already available and those he has ordered from developers. When him and a developer make a mod for a stream, the two will research what’s been done before to get a proof of concept. In the best situations, they’re able to edit and build upon previously published mods to create something tailored to Morino’s needs. Melon and Morino, for instance, added heart rate information to a stream using an app called Health Data Server. Melon then altered the game’s exploration. Terraria so that the character would explode if the streamer’s heart rate exceeded a certain threshold.

Making content about modded games hasn’t always been smooth sailing. Morino, who has streamed mods for popular Nintendo games in the past and Nintendo protecting its properties by shutting down fans projects and enforcing their copyright. Morino’s November 2021 challenge was to encourage his fans to modify a popular Nintendo game. Breath of Wild Four-player multi-player is available. Morino discovered a developer in April who created a multiplayer version of the game. The creator then shared this with the Morino community. During the same period, however, Nintendo’s lawyers issued a DMCA strike on several Breath of the Wild Video on YouTube.

The content strikes on Morino’s Zelda content have changed his work considerably. “Ever since the Nintendo stuff I’m not gonna be playing any more Zelda mods,” he told Polygon. Now, instead of instead of playing games with modded content or editing the games themselves, he’s focused on mods that change how he plays the game.

“The games themselves, from now on, will mostly be normal, but the way that they are played or the way that things are done around them will probably be different,” Morino said. He used goldfish in a video to demonstrate how to play. Elden Ring. “The Elden Ring What a boring game! But then the thing that’s crazy is the external factors around that.”

Morino has declined to provide any further comment on the status of the Multiplayer Breath of WildHe spoke to Polygon on the importance of game developers and communities.

“I mean, the goal of my job and pretty much most content creators that just exist is to create entertainment for others, right? Like, at the very baseline, we want people to click on a video, and then watch it all,” Morino said. “When it comes to things like fun ideas and challenges, it’s not a replacement for the game, right? It’s just an addition. It’s a different way to do it. Another way to get interested in the game, another way to play it, to get your brain thinking.”

Overall, Morino sees his, modders’, and other content creators’ work as playing a large role in building out the worlds of the games themselves.

“I think content creators, at least in this day and age, are an important aspect of the life cycle of a game. At the launch of a product, you’ll see a boost and everything because everyone’s trying it out. But in the next couple of years, the only way for your game to really stay alive is to have an active community behind it that really cares about the game,” he said. “Content creators are a really big aspect of that. The modding community is another really big aspect of taking your game that you’ve made and then twisting it around to be something a little bit new. I think that’s also really important, especially for games that don’t update constantly or not online.”