Raysfire (human)


 * ―Sir Ray. S Fire

rayfire (real name Bald Ian) is a British Twitch streamer, YouTuber, Speed runner, and Professional Gamer TM who streams Super Mario Maker 2 Online Versus Mode (in which he possesses the desired Pink S+ Rank), although he also plays other Nintendo games (like Super Mario Sunshine, Mario Party 3, or Super Mario 64), Fortnite, and Team Fortress 2. He is well-known in the Mario Maker community for his charming personality, hilarious catchphrases and high level gameplay.

On October 26th, 2020, Rays created a brand new channel, raysfire plus, where he announced he was going to post his stream highlights from now on.

The Team Fortress 2 era
Rays created his Twitch channel on June 30th, 2011. It is unknown when was his very first twitch stream. He later proceeded to create his YouTube channel on October 12th, 2011. His first video, "bathroom break", is a 2-minute clip of his TF2 Twitch stream where he laughed at a funny interaction between his team and a Medic called as the title might suggest, bathroom break. His next videos were, like this first one, short clips from his streams that lasted between 2 minutes and 20 seconds.

Suddenly, his TF2 career changed when, on September 24th, 2012, he made a mod for the game, named rayshud. This mod consisted in a "simplistic yet bold HUD for TF2 made to cut out a lot of clutter included that of the stock HUD." In other words, it replaced the messy and rigid default HUD for a simpler, slicker and more customizable HUD. This mod gave him some popularity to his Twitch and YouTube channels. Consequently, Rays made tutorials about the game's HUD, getting thousands of views and helping many players understand the intricacies of the game's unusual inner workings. This event also started one of the longest running jokes in the Raysverse, the Shud. It originated when people misnamed Rays thinking he was called Ray Shud, in reference of the rayshud mod, that led to confusion being all lowercase. From then, he acquired the nickname The Shud.

In this time, many other TF2-related events happened, most notably ESEA S14 LAN, a TF2 tournament, which happened on August 17th, 2013 on Dallas, Texas. This tournament was the biggest TF2 event in America at the time, with more than 13 thousand dollars in prizes. Rays made several short videos with his phone, where he recorded the event.

After this, Rays kept streaming on his Twitch channel, and uploading clips and tutorials on TF2. In the summer of 2014, Rays partnered with Twitch.

Speedrunning Super Mario Sunshine
Raysfire submitted his first SMS (Super Mario Sunshine) run into speedrun.com on December 26th, 2014, under the Any% category. He got a time of 1 hour, 29 minutes and 24 seconds. He continued grinding and got himself a respectable place in the SMS speedrun community, attending SGDQ 2015, which took place between July 26th and August 2nd in. He eventually got sub 1:20 with the outstanding time of 1 hour, 19 minutes and 59 seconds, stating "I've never been more proud of any speedrun ever than I am of this run. Insane early game, no early cycle, 5th bullet bill cycle on EYG and perfect King Boo RNG". He meritoriously achieved 115th in the world leaderboard for that. He also tried out playing another known category, 120 shines. His first run was on July 24th, 2015 obtaining a 4 hour, 6 minutes and 9 seconds mark. His last recorded run was a 120 shines one, on January 20th, 2018, with a time of 3 hours, 19 minutes and 15 seconds, obtaining 34th place in the global leaderboard.

During this time, raysfire's overall style of videos and streams started to change. He stopped playing TF2 to concentrate more on speedrunning. He posted the video The Next Chapter, where he explained his situation finishing his degree at university, and he announced that he was becoming a full-time streamer on Twitch.

The Fortnite Chapter
Rays started to stream Fortnite around 2018, and posted his first Fortnite video, Insane Circle RNG (ft. RedFalcon) | Fortnite BR Full Match | raysfire stream highlight, which also was the first YouTube appearance of RedFalcon and raysfire collaborating, who will still to this day stream and play games together.

The Super Mario Maker 2 Saga
Raysfire began his current streak of playing Super Mario Maker 2 around June of 2019, when he posted clips of his first impressions video of the game's Story Mode on YouTube: super mario maker 2 story mode first impressions and highlights! though it is currently unknown when he started playing Super Mario Maker 2 on his Twitch channel. Since then, he has mostly stuck with the game as his main content. In July, the very same year, he began posting clips of his Super Mario Maker 2 Versus Mode experience, starting with SMM2 Versus Mode Is Toxic, which have since become a staple in the raysfire gaming collection.

In September of that same year, raysfire began another long-running aspect of his Super Mario Maker Maker 2 content, Endless Expert levels, which he still does to this day.

The very next month, raysfire would start his series of videos titled Road to S+ wherein he would attempt to achieve S+ rank in Super Mario Maker 2 Versus Mode, even creating a new Mii named "a fox :)", later changed to "Smile! :)", then "Dr. Smile", then "Prof Smile", and then "Champ :)", then "Esq. Smile", and then "Duke Smile", and finally, "Lord Smile" for the finale.