Photo of City College student Henry Moran, also known as Bricksway on YouTube. Photo by Alex Gibson-Daley
Henry Moran was simply a player for CCNY’s esports club team. However, he had an idea: He would turn his experience of playing the video game Valorant, a technical shooter competition set in the near future, on a collegiate level into something bigger – allowing interested gamers outside of the college to watch.
“I just thought of the perfect video idea,” says Moran, 19, who has been creating and editing gaming videos on the YouTube video sharing platform for the past six years under the name Bricksway.
Beginning near the end of 2022, Moran, who lives in the Bronx, spent several months crafting what he hoped would be the most entertaining video he could imagine for Valorant. By July of 2023, he uploaded the final version to YouTube where it became an overnight success – almost 200,000 views within the span of a month and nearing 300,000 views at the end of the year.
Now, as he watches growing interest in his newest video titled, “What Mirrored Valorant Looks Like…”, Moran took the time to sit down and discuss his current happenings in the content creation space and how he will decide to maintain this momentum.
Q: What made you want to become a content creator for Valorant?
A: Honestly, it just started with my love for the game, just watching people play and then I thought to myself, “I want to do it as well.”
Q: Cool, cool. If you didn’t enjoy the game, would you be still doing videos for it, or would you move on to like other games?
A: I wouldn’t have done videos for it. I would definitely still be doing videos, but just for other games. I have attempted other genres like Super Smash Bros. and other stuff, but it just so happened that Valorant was just one of the games I fell in love with, so I just pursued that.
Q: What made you come up with the username Bricksway? What were the origins?
A: It was simply because I was in a car and I saw a “one way” sign. And I was like, I’ll just take the “away” from that and like let’s just build on it. One of my original interests was Legos. So I took “bricks” and I just combined the two. It’s a little childish, but that was just what I thought was cool.
Q: That’s actually fire. What do you think is the hardest aspect of content creation?
A: Consistency is probably one of the hardest things that eats me away every time. Life takes over a lot of the time. I focus on that and then school. Being a full-time college student is not easy either. And stacking that on top of being a content creator and being in a relationship is so much work that I don’t often find time to record videos or think of ideas, but I try my best to manage it as much as I can with all the free time I have.
Q: Yeah. And I saw that first Valorant video, it took you like a year to make, right?
A: Almost nine months, so almost a year, yeah.
Q: That’s dedication right there. Did you ever think that your Valorant video would blow up in that way?
A: Uh, no. Honestly, I wouldn’t have been surprised if I got 1,000 views on it, but I never imagined 300,000 views from that one video.
Q: What advice would you give to someone that is starting out on YouTube and wants to make videos?
A: Find something you love and just give it a try. My first video on my channel wasn’t my first attempt at YouTube. Even though it looks like I have only made one video, I have like a ton of videos that are private right now and they weren’t the best. I just kept on developing my skills and listening to people’s critiques.
