Violence becomes him. Stalking through the wild grass and brutalist concrete wilderness of Tarkov, hes implacable, the unstoppable force youve always secretly wanted to see come up against an object that claims to be immovable. He sees an enemy unaware. He snarls. The sights come up instinctively. In the pause before the man drops, you can see the Doc smile and his mouse twitch.

If youve ever seen an action movie, you already know Dr Disrespect (no dot because, if what I overheard is correct, the medical profession does not like those outside it stealing its valor). The army boots. A jet-black mullet wig and a dyed mustache. Mirrored sunglasses. A villain thats as familiar as he is menacing. We know him. We know what he wants. And thats why hes probably the most important persona in the internets extended streaming universe: the Doc is the future of live entertainment.

Currently, the Doc is in a nondescript building in Glendale, California. Over the course of two days, the cockpit of a helicopter has taken shape in the middle of a very large soundstage, an assemblage of 80s-era buttons and dials and a generous amount of black paint. Its all because Doc is here to shoot a hype video for his latest announcement: hes re-signed to Twitch for an exclusive two-year contract for a lot of money.

The precise figures havent been disclosed. Heres what he has to say about it: Lets just say, when I first started streaming, was something like this fathomable? If it was, youre dreaming really, really big. To me, its pretty shocking, and its very obviously life-changing, rewarding.

When the mullet wig comes off, the man underneath has fashionably cropped salt-and-pepper hair. This is Herschel Guy Beahm who stands 6 feet, 8 inches, taller than a 2017 Toyota Sienna. Or a pony. As Dr Disrespect, Beahm is somehow even taller, though that could just be the army boots.

You could sum up Docs appeal with one of his catchphrases: Violence! Speed! Momentum! Twitch, on the other hand, is harder to explain. Its a platform that lets anyone stream themselves doing just about anything that falls within the companys terms of service which is to say, if youre following all applicable local laws, youre probably just fine. (Though nudity, even if its partial, is frowned upon by the powers that be.)

But if you log on to Twitch right now, what youll mostly see is people playing video games. The view counts vary, but the basic visual format is pretty much the same: most of the screen is taken up by the game. And then, in an unobtrusive corner, you can see the streamer, live, wherever theyre broadcasting from. Most people are playing themselves.

Beahm, on the other hand, is playing the Doctor, which means theres a real distance between the mustache and the man behind it. As the character, his broadcasts combine a mix of over-the-top CG graphics, played over a series of green screens in his house; they show a nightmarish cyberpunk-y landscape, all blacks and grays and reds, where Doc seems to live. Theres a sinister sports stadium with a locker room that Doc hangs out in; he sometimes appears to drive a 1990 Lamborghini Diablo VT, though it never goes anywhere, not really. The landscape is totally devoid of other people, and it is always night. It looks like an adolescent boys id.

And as a character, Doc is purely id. Hes based on the bad guys, on one bad guy more than any of the others: Fender Tremolo, the archvillain of 1989s Cyborg. Fender leads a gang of pirates; hes ripped but not roided out, with dreadlocks and intense blue eyes that peer from behind blacked-out sunglasses. He has authority, and he uses it to literally crucify Jean-Claude van Damme. It was like a post-apocalyptic world and hes the one that dominated this world. There was just something about him, Beahm says.

In the end, Fender dies impaled on a meat hook. Ive always wanted a movie where the bad guy came out on top. It would shock the world. Dr Disrespect is the villain who could finally win.

Over the last four-ish years, the Doc has risen through Twitchs charts to become one of the biggest streamers on the platform. He performs to a live audience of more than 20,000 people during any one of his regular streams, which is good enough to make him the 10th-most-watched channel on Twitch, according to Twitchmetrics, a site-wide stat tracker. Hes racked up nearly 4 million followers there since he joined the site about four years ago, and his streams have landed him a TV development deal with Skybound.

That leaves Beahm and Steven Stev Lawson, Beahms manager and a business development executive at Boom.tv, dreaming about the characters potential. I think the brand is going to become the Batman of the future generations in 10, 15, 20, Lawson says. Now I dont know how long its going to take to get there, but thats where I see the brand going.

The Docs rise, however, couldnt have taken place without online streaming. He has a long history with Twitch; he joined as a viewer when it was called Justin.TV to watch Call of Duty pros throw down. (The name change occurred in February 2014.) Historically, Twitch has been the best place for people to live-stream themselves playing video games twitch referring to the term twitch gameplay, which is gaming that tests a players reaction time and their lives, too. In the beginning, Justin.TV was a place where the founder, Justin Kan, streamed himself live just about every minute of every day. By the time of its acquisition by Amazon in August 2014 for nearly a billion dollars, Twitch had focused entirely on capturing the nascent live-streaming market.

Of course, Twitch isnt the only live-streaming platform, and lately, its been fielding some real competition. Theres Mixer, a streaming service Microsoft acquired in 2016 back when it was called Beam. Theres Facebook, which has begun to throw its weight around in Facebook Gaming; Fox has backed another competitor called Caffeine. DLive is a blockchain-based platform that doesnt yet make sense as a business, a value proposition for creators, or a place for audiences that appears to be going after the segment of audiences who like to hodl. And then theres the real elephant in the room: YouTube Gaming, which already gets most live-streamed content from creators as VODs uploaded to those creators channels.

Demand for streamers, naturally, has shot up, which has kicked off a war for talent. And Microsoft fired the first shot.

In August 2019, Tyler Ninja Blevins, the most famous gamer in the world, announced he would stream exclusively on Mixer, reportedly for a figure between $20 and $30 million. Felix PewDiePie Kjellberg, the most famous YouTuber in the world with 103 million subscribers, signed an exclusive deal with DLive in April 2019. YouTube Gaming stole Jack CourageJD Dunlop from Twitch at the beginning of November, and Facebook Gaming picked up Jeremy DisguisedToast Wang at the months end.

Streamers are valuable because they make everything people want to consume on a platform. That means the stakes are existential for platforms. Twitchs default partner contract has an exclusivity clause, but when those contracts expire, anything goes. Many of the biggest names on Twitch have left for greener pastures literally. Besides Ninja, Cory KingGothalion Michael, Michael Shroud Grzesiek, and Soleil Ewok Wheeler have also departed after being offered extravagant sums of money.

In January, reporting in Kotaku broke some of the secrecy around these deals. For Blevins, Twitch counter-offered $15 million for a three-year commitment; Mixer and Facebook, on the other hand, came in around $20 million per year. Grzesieks deal was worth less than Blevins but was still worth tens of millions. In response, Twitch has been re-signing its own streamers, Doc included. Imane Pokimane Anys, one of the most popular variety streamers on the entire site, re-signed with the platform for a reported $4.5 million. It also kept Ben DrLupo Lupo, Timothy TimTheTatman Betar, and Saqib Lirik Zahid all huge names who draw big audience numbers whenever theyre live.

Sometimes it seems like anyone whos amassed a following can get themselves to the bargaining table and then win or at least cash out. That brings us to Beahm: if Dr Disrespect didnt re-sign with Twitch, it would have been a real sign of the companys vulnerability.

Beahm is important to Twitch because hes important to millions of people around the world, and that makes his decisions worth millions of dollars. Twitch is also important to Beahm. Its the platform of my choice simply because its embedded, he says. Beahm was approached with a partnership relatively early, in February 2016, a little under a year since his first stream on Twitch, which was in May the year before. He cites it as a sign of mutual respect. They just saw the potential of this guy, he says, meaning his spirited alter ego. Because, again, hes such a different type of streamer. Hes unique, hes over the top and can feel like he might be a little threatening or dangerous, in terms of an investment.

Thats true; the character does feel dangerous, even if that danger is mostly to the flow of brand dollars on the platform. Last year, the Doc got banned from Twitch for two weeks and had his E3 pass revoked after he ventured into a bathroom while he was live on Twitch. While he was live, it didnt even cross his mind that streaming live from a bathroom was wrong; now, Beahm says he understands why what he did was wrong, even if he didnt intend to do anything wrong. If my kid was in there, I wouldnt want him to be filmed by this guy and his camera crew, and it actually goes out, its a live stream. It could have been a lot worse. It could have been. It was also solidly on-brand for the Disrespect persona; transgressing is something that fans of the character like. And its their feelings that propel the character.

His fans send Doc donations on Twitch with notes attached; some tell him that hes helped with their depression, anxiety, and PTSD, he says. I think they see a lot of confidence in him. I think they feel empowered by him, Beahm says. Theres something there where they see this guy and hes so cocky, so confident, so over the top, but he can still relate to you. The streams are a safe space. The reality that the character of the Doctor means a lot to a lot of people, however, does seem to take Beahm aback. Its hard to gauge that, because Im sitting in my room all alone... Screaming.

Among the Docs fans are two of the actors on set, Mike Ferguson whose card calls him a scumbag for hire and Will Mann. Ferguson, a grizzled, tattooed graybeard, is playing the seasoned PILOT (50s); Mann, fresh-faced and seraphic, is his starry-eyed CO-PILOT (30s).

After lunch, Ferguson steps outside for a pre-take cigarette. This isnt his first time working with the Doc: in a commercial for G-Fuel, an energy drink that sponsors a lot of big streamers, he loses an arm-wrestling match to Disrespect. His kids are fans of the Doc character, too. Ferguson on Dr Disrespect: Hes the fucking man. He dont give a fuck. You know what Im saying? Literally, he doesnt give a fuck.

Mann loves Twitch because he grew up watching his brother and friends play video games and finds watching gameplay comforting. The 26-year-old is also a Disrespect fan. I guess he provides a little more escapism for Twitch, because a lot of the times youre just watching a real dude play a game, which is great, he says. But you go in there and its kind of like, oh theres this character dude, thats obviously like a character. But you get to watch him for like five hours do his thing and kind of get invested in that.

On set, everything has been built around Dr Disrespect. Lena Lollis, the red-headed costume designer, has sourced each piece of Docs costume individually aside from the wig, sunglasses, and custom headset, which the Doc has generously provided himself. The hardest thing to find, though, was a copy of Docs red flak vest. As Lollis points out, red is not a popular color because, generally, you dont want your camouflage or armor to be seen by the enemy.

Once Doc has left hair and makeup, he heads to the part of the cavernous studio where hes been rigged up in a harness. (The Doc does his own stunts.) He is floating above a blanket-covered crashpad in a faux-wingsuit that Lollis made by hand out of neoprene, black with red elastic detailing. He looks relaxed; it seems like hes done this before. Tim Hendrix has directed the shoots director of photography, Powell Robinson, to get a close-up of Docs snarling face after hes punched a hole in the helicopters roof and then jumped out as hes soaring through the night sky.

Hendrix got the job because he got an email out of the blue from a creative consultant at Twitch in the middle of December. I came in knowing very little about the Doctor or Twitch, he says. As Hendrix describes it, Docs idea was fairly complete creatively the character was going to jump out of a helicopter and fly down to a purple-hued city so his task was to figure out the execution.

It seemed an interesting challenge for Hendrix, whose background is mostly in music videos. (Hes most famous for directing the music video to Panic! At The Discos Dont Threaten Me With A Good Time, which features an interesting take on tentacle porn.) Directing music videos and directing a hype video for a streamer are similar because theyre about taking performers who are known quantities and showing them in a new light.

There is one crucial difference, though: Twitch pays better. Its very different from music videos in that this will actually let me eat, Hendrix says. A person in the room points out that Brendon Urie, the lead singer of Panic! At The Disco, also streams on Twitch. Oh, Hendrix says. Maybe someday hell pay me a living wage, too.

The next day, Beahm performs the Dr Disrespect character in 90-second chunks, over and over and over again, because Hendrix wants coverage but also because its hard to get everything right. Watching him in the monitors behind the helicopters cockpit, the character feels undiluted. I can see why his manager is comparing him to Batman: it might be that the characters real essence is meant for the big screen not lots of little ones.

Guy Beahm, the man behind the mullet and the mustache, is 37, and his first two loves are sports and video games. His grandfather gave him his first computer when he was in second or third grade. At the time, his favorite game was Asteroids, which changed after his grandfather bought him a NES. He was online at an early age, an only child looking up cheat codes on Prodigy when he wasnt hanging out with his parents and their friends. Beahm went to college because he wanted to play basketball, and the team he played on at Cal Poly Pomona was good. (Education, he says, was secondary, though he did study business and marketing.) After college, he took a few random jobs because he wasnt sure what he wanted to do. He was a temp administrative assistant at Stanford, a sales rep for a roof tile company, and a mortgage consultant, all in quick succession after he graduated.

Dr Disrespect was born during that time as a disembodied voice in Halo 2s lobbies and in its proximity chat. Even then, it was clear hed hit on something special; other players wanted to be on his team, after witnessing him barreling through his enemies and then roasting them when they died.

In his first video posted a full decade ago Docs first words, spoken directly to camera, show an unpolished Disrespect, though the character is nevertheless familiar: People have gotta understand you gotta attack. Attack. Attack. But dont get it mistaken. Certain individuals you dont attack. You run from. Aggression radiates from behind his mirrored sunglasses. The video cuts to him playing Call of Duty.

The YouTube videos continued, and subscriptions began to roll in. At first, it was one or two videos a month; Beahms real goal was to get into game development. Eventually, he found a role as a community manager at Sledgehammer Games, a studio that had just finished developing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, and from there, he became a multiplayer level designer on Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.

After the games release in 2014, Beahm began work on the next Call of Duty game and then had a moment of clarity. From there, as he saw it, the future was pretty mapped out: hed go from associate level designer to level designer to senior level designer. It was a career, sure, but one that he wasnt so certain he wanted to pursue. I saw the path in the next five, 10, 15 years. I just was like, I dont know if this is it. I decided to just like, you know what? Let me look somewhere else. Beahm quit and went looking for other jobs in the industry. Eventually, he managed to wrangle an offer from another big game developer.

That was when his current business partner, Sumit Gupta, came to him with an offer to work at his startup Boom.tv where he was developing some new streaming tech based around VR. But it wouldnt be a desk job; Beahm would be helping Gupta figure out the streaming landscape, starting with setting him up to stream on Twitch. And so Gupta said: Hey, what do you think about reviving your old Doctor character?

He was in his 30s; he wasnt a kid anymore. He was choosing between another Triple-A job and an as-yet-unknown momentum, and the week Gupta gave him to decide was up. Ive already offered this. Either youre on board or not, Beahm recalled him saying. And its like, fuck all right.

The gambit worked, and the fans began to trickle in, which is the hardest part of doing anything on the internet; that goes double for Twitch. Finding an audience there is a mysterious business, maybe more than anywhere else online. Part of that is because you have to convey the force and depth of your personality to other people, live, and part of it is because its exceedingly difficult to get people to care about what youre doing until youre already far enough along that it doesnt matter. You have to bet on yourself, again and again and again. And even then, it might not work. You almost never get to quit your day job.

Reflecting on what hes accomplished so far, Beahm says he feels like hes getting closer to what he wants to do. The pistons are moving. The momentums you can feel it, right, but were not there yet, he says.

The problem with being a villain is that the hero always wins. See, after Doc punches a hole in the helicopters roof and jumps through the glass as the pilots cackle themselves into a tailspin, the rotorcraft is supposed to crash.

A few weeks after Doc leaves the soundstage, Kobe Bryant was flying with his daughter to his youth basketball academy in a helicopter that never made its destination. The day after the tragedy, I get a call from Docs publicist: the announcement is going forward, but his original video will never see the light of day. (Eventually, a modified version is released, months later, featuring a military-grade spacecraft.) No one wants to make light of a real death.

This makes sense. Beahm is a father, too. And though Disrespect is what hes famous for, Beahms alter ego exists to let him do things he cant do as himself. Personally, theres no way I could sit here as Guy Beahm, and sit in front of a camera and stream, he says. Not that I cant do it; Im not interested in it. When hes out of character, Beahm is a little fidgety, and his voice is pitched just a bit higher. The Doctor, on the other hand, doesnt fidget; hes almost unnaturally still, except for when hes baring his teeth. There is a barely suppressed rage in him, as though hes waiting to strike or be struck.

On his stream that day, the day after Kobe Bryant died, was the first time Ive ever not known whos on camera whether the man speaking on stream was Guy Beahm or Dr Disrespect. He addresses the situation with his hype video shoot obliquely, while hes not playing anything at all: I dont even know if that video will ever make it out simply because of the content thats involved. But that got me trippin, man, he says, though its clear that the ultimate fate of the video isnt whats bothering him. Im a little upset today. Im upset. Im sad and Im getting upset.

The donations keep flowing in, all $8.24 in honor of the numbers Bryant wore while he played for the Los Angeles Lakers, and he reads nearly every one: theyre all about people who are gone now, both loved ones and celebrities. Docs stream that day is a site of collective mourning. Finally, he boots up Escape From Tarkov. On-screen, his boots crunch as he steps out into the maps wildness. And then his figure stills as he begins to perform.

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Twitch star Dr Disrespect on life-changing money, gaming, and being a villain - The Verge