Streaming Stats.
If you're the type of player who demands more from a Post Game Carnage Report than most - delving into the intricate numbers that serve as the detailed historical account of your Halo 3 Matchmaking experience, you're probably already familiar with
HaloCharts.com. But you may not be familiar with the man who makes the magical mathematics happen behind the scenes. Luckily, we're going to pull back the curtain for a few brief moments and give you a peek at the mathemagician powering the pedals. Try not to stare.
Firestream had been doing stats since before stats were cool. October 2007.
Represent.
Q. Who are you and what do you do?
A. I go by Firestream online and in "real" life I'm a full-time .NET programmer for a small company. My biggest hobbies are websites and art. I have quite a few sites, including my personal art site
FrontLevel.com and another site you may have heard of,
HaloCharts.com.
Q. You're quite the industrious and artistic fellow. How did you come up with your gamertag?
A. The name Firestream comes from another site that I created,
Firestream.net. It's a community of Christian Music lovers, focusing on Heavy Rock & Metal. It's a pretty active niche community site that I've been a part of for five years now. I came up with the name one night and it has just stuck since then.
Q. So, you've got the charts and the arts. Where else do you do online?
A. I'm usually lurking the Bungie.net forum, the HaloCharts forum,
Hawty McBloggy's blog and a few others. I rarely post on any of them though.
I love reading about crazy stories of things that happened in online Matchmaking. I also like seeing what kinds of things the community makes, screenshots, maps, game types, etc.
Q. You seem to already have plenty of creative outlets. What is it about gaming that compels you to invest your time?
A. I love a good storyline, so I play a lot of games for the story. I also love playing co-op games because there's just something extra fun about playing with friends. Getting the Halo 3 Annual achievement was some of the best fun I'd had online in a while. We have an Xbox 360 at work (a perk of working for a small company), so my co-workers and I game during lunch very often.
Q. Yeah? We get 360's and pizza. I digress. What was the first Bungie title you played?
A. I actually played Marathon some during High School. We had a Mac lab and the game was installed on all of the computers, so after school a bunch of us would stay after and have some LAN matchups. Later on I played some Halo: CE and Halo 2 with some friends, but didn't start playing Halo regularly until Halo 3 came out. The gameplay is what really sucked me in. I've never seen such a dynamic, balanced game as Halo.
Q. Speaking of being sucked in, are you surprised by your level of community involvement?
A. I'm very surprised of it. I never imagined that my site, HaloCharts.com, would grow to the size that it is. I started the site because I enjoy working on websites and love Halo 3, so to see it grow on a daily basis has been fantastic. I've been able to play games with some of the best players out there. I've been contacted by people I never imagined getting to meet. I'm glad that I've been able to create something that people find useful, but it wouldn't have been possible without Bungie's awesomeness.
Q. Are you involved with any other awesome entertainment-related communities?
A. As I mentioned earlier, I am also involved with Firestream.net, which is a very active Christian Rock & Metal community. So if you're into that kind of music, check out the site!
Q. Anything to add? Shout-out?
A. I'd like to say that I've never been part of a better community than the Halo Community. Also, I'd like to give a big shout-out to all of the people out there that support HaloCharts.com! There are quite a few people that spend a ton of their personal time on the site, keeping it going, keeping the peace, and providing ideas. I'm looking forward to seeing where the site goes during the next year.
Thanks to Firestream for taking time away from tinkering with his websites to answer a few questions. After spotlighting Halo3.Junk.ws we had more than a few forumgoers wondering why we weren't profiling Halocharts.com. Well, here you go. Don't say we never did anything for you.