PixelatedFire passed away on February 7th 2022 after a lifelong battle with cancer.

He was my oldest continuous friend in gaming since the days of Halo 3 on Xbox live. I was in middle school at the time and he was a few years younger yet he was still a monster in that game…. Especially with the sniper rifle on standoff. It was in Halo 3 custom game lobbies that we had met and became friends. This friendship continued as we ventured into PC gaming initially into MineCraft where we started a server with GiantsFan99, his cousin Alex, Fire's close friend Jussaw and my friend Tigre.
Minecraft was a gateway drug to what we could play on PC coming from our early console days.

We quickly branched out into many other games and formed a small community which included other long time friends Raptok, Craigst, Ziggy1355, Serotonin Deficiency and Tazmatic. In the early days of PC gaming we played mostly Team Fortress, Starcraft and a few other odd games once we started to branch out from minecraft. Fire was BAD at Starcraft in the early days... so much so that Jussaw Craig and I were easily able to bully him with proton cannon rush to mass void ray and carriers with him helpless to retaliate. This really pushed him to get better at the game.... so much so that he ended up joining a clan (TAW) and getting really serious about climbing the ladder. Needless to say he was able to beat any of us with a couple workers 5 minutes into a game after a year.

His love of Starcraft did however keep him from trying another game that we all started to pick up during his ladder grind which was of course League of Legends. Initially apprehensive about downgrading from micro-managing a whole army to just 1 unit... we were able to convince him to give the game a shot eventually. Needless to say for those who knew him well..... Starcraft would soon become the side game to league of legends which is where we put perhaps a few thousand hours into over the next 7 years.

Throughout it all we still shared hundreds of hours outside of league playing games like Warframe, BorderLands 2, GTA 5 and Factorio, Table Top, Unturned, RS6, Minecraft and more. One of the fondest memories we were able to record happened during the PUBG craze where Fire and Ziggy were trapped in a house with me and Serotonin running to save them from a motorcade of other players.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKdNJg07xl4

Another fond memory was when he was building his new gaming PC. I had a good bit of experience with building PCs at the time so I got in a video call to help him with installing his CPU cooler. The second he showed me what he was trying to do was one of the funniest and probably embarrassing things he has done in front of me. He was attempting to install the back plate on top of the CPU and had been struggling with this for a bit before asking for my help. It was like someone trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Needless to say this was a memory we could always go back and laugh at. I could go on for pages about the great times we had together.

Through all the fond experiences and time we shared all of us in our community were aware of the health issues he was going through in his personal life. We were all aware since the earliest of our time together that he had been battling cancer from a young age. There was a long period of time where we believed he had been mostly cured of this childhood cancer but it began to resurface just a few years ago. When his cancer came back...I am not sure if we were really able to grasp the severity of his condition. When Fire told us of his condition he would always frame it in a way as to not cause us too much worry pointing out that it was caught early and that the next operation should be able to get everything. We followed hopeful through every surgery up until the point where they had to remove his eye due to the tumor and even then his condition did not improve as much as the doctors had hoped. As his condition progressed he was unable to get on as much or play though we kept in touch through Discord.

I don’t know how I can end this and I want to keep most of what I write here focused on the good times we shared. I can't pretend to understand how it would be to suffer life long with such a disease knowing that your time is more limited than others. All I can say is I am grateful he decided to spend so much of his time with us, making memories, cursing our feeding teammates, pulling off clutch plays and overall just having fun.

Thanks for all of it.