Tyler Blevins, professionally known as Ninja, was born in Grayslake, Illinois, to Chuck and Cynthia Blevins. His father introduced him to the world of video games, and Ninja's gaming career began in 2009 when he started playing Halo 3 professionally.
He played for various teams, including Cloud9, Renegades, Team Liquid, and Luminosity Gaming, and began streaming in 2011 on Justin.tv before moving to Twitch.tv. Ninja's early streaming days focused on H1Z1 and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, where he won the PUBG Gamescom Invitational in the 3rd Person Squads classification.
As his popularity grew, Ninja started streaming Fortnite regularly, and his viewership increased significantly. In September 2017, he had 500,000 followers, which grew by 250 percent in just six months. In March 2018, he set the Twitch.tv record for a single individual stream, hosting a game with Drake, Travis Scott, and JuJu Smith-Schuster.
Ninja's YouTube channel has over 21 million subscribers, and he is the 2nd most subscribed Twitch streamer, behind Tfue as of January 2019. He credits Fortnite's free-to-play business model for his growth.
Ninja has partnered with Red Bull eSports and was signed to an exclusive contract with Microsoft for its streaming platform, Mixer, on August 1st, 2019. However, after Mixer's shutdown, he returned to stream on Twitch.
