🎮 Why I Started De Tom Plays

🌍 A Life That Used To Look Very Different

I'm 54 years old, and I've managed to pack quite a lot into those years. I left school and trained as a chef, eventually spending more than 20 years working professionally in kitchens. I served in the RAF, climbed some of the biggest mountains in the world and travelled to numerous countries, sometimes for a holiday, sometimes simply because I wanted the experience of seeing somewhere different, and occasionally because work took me there.

I've had adventures, stood in some wonderful places and done things that required considerably more physical effort than sitting in front of a computer moving a mouse around. Then, at around the age of 40, an unfortunate chain of events that began with something as mundane as doing a neighbour a favour changed things. There's no need to turn this into my medical history; suffice to say, my health isn't what it once was. These days I don't leave the house very much and spend considerably more of my time sitting down than I ever imagined I would.

When your body starts placing restrictions on what you can do, you adapt. Fortunately, I've had one hobby with me for more than 40 years that doesn't require climbing a mountain.

Gaming.

🎮 Gaming has been part of my life since I was a child. I've watched it change from arcades and early home computers into the enormous industry we have today. I've played across generations of computers and consoles, watched genres appear, disappear and come back again, and accumulated more gaming experiences than I could possibly remember individually.

For most of that time, however, those experiences were simply mine. I played the games, formed my opinions and moved on to the next one. I had more than four decades of gaming experience sitting inside my head, but I'd never really considered doing anything with it.

Until one fairly ordinary day in March 2026.

⛏️ It Started With Minecraft

I was sitting comfortably on my settee playing Minecraft on my Xbox. Breaking blocks, collecting blocks, placing blocks, avoiding creepers, building things and generally allowing Minecraft to do what it does particularly well for me: provide somewhere to disappear into for a while.

Then a thought occurred to me.

Nobody else ever sees any of this.

I could spend hours building something, exploring somewhere or creating my little world, but ultimately it existed almost entirely for me. That thought stayed in my head for the next few days, and before long another one joined it. I've been playing games for more than four decades, yet all of that experience was essentially sitting inside my head gathering dust. I wasn't sharing it, I wasn't using it and nobody knew about it.

📺 Around the same time, I was watching some of the YouTubers I enjoy. I watched ThomasXplores playing Fallout 4 and GeminiTay playing Minecraft, and somewhere along the way the penny finally dropped.

I can do that.

Not in the sense that I wanted to become them. I didn't suddenly decide that I wanted to be a YouTube personality, nor did I have dreams of millions of subscribers and internet fame. I simply realised that I could share what I was already doing. People could see the games I was playing and the things I was building, while I could talk about what I liked, what I didn't like and why.

Then the idea grew again. There are thousands of games being released by developers who struggle to get anybody to notice them. Some are made by tiny teams, some by one person, and some are genuinely wonderful games that can disappear almost immediately underneath everything else being released. Maybe I could help with that too.

Not in some grand, world-changing way. Simply in the way I know best.

Tom's way.

🎨 If I was going to do it, though, I wanted a fresh start. I'd used the same online identity for many years, but that belonged to a different chapter of my life and I was happy for it to remain there.

So De Tom Plays began with nothing. Zero subscribers, zero followers, no website, no videos and no established audience waiting to follow me somewhere new.

Just a blank canvas, an idea in my head and an increasingly long list of things I was discovering I needed to learn.

🎥 Learning Something Completely New

The website wasn't particularly frightening. I've been building websites in one form or another for more than 30 years. Video, however, was completely new territory. I'd never recorded a gaming video, edited one, made a video intro or even uploaded anything to YouTube.

So I did what I've always done when I don't know how to do something.

Research.

I needed recording software, editing software, hardware and storage. Lots and lots of storage, apparently. What started as needing somewhere to keep a few recordings has now become more than 70TB of storage, and somehow I still feel as though I'm only getting started.

I practised recording, made test uploads and built a very basic version of the De Tom Plays website. I made my first video intro, then my second and very quickly my third. I've since replaced those with something considerably simpler because, as I've discovered repeatedly while building DTP, sometimes less really is more.

🎙️ Then there was the question of commentary. My first couple of videos didn't have any. I have a very real fear of public speaking, so the idea of sitting there talking while knowing complete strangers might eventually listen wasn't particularly comfortable. But I also knew that if De Tom Plays was going to represent my experience and opinions, eventually people probably needed to hear Tom.

So I tried, and then I tried again.

Slowly it became easier, although talking while playing a game is considerably harder than it looks. You're concentrating on the game, trying to explain what you're doing, noticing what's happening and attempting to form vaguely coherent sentences at the same time. In my case I'm also regularly adjusting my sitting position because being comfortable isn't always an option.

And yes, my gaming chair squeaks. A lot.

It's either the chair creaking or my joints creaking. You'll have to take your pick.

💜 Over time I began finding my own way of doing things. I'm not interested in shouting at games for entertainment, manufacturing excitement or telling somebody their game is wonderful simply because they gave me a key for it. I play games, talk about what happens and give my genuine opinion.

If something makes me laugh, you'll hear me laugh. If I'm confused, you'll see me confused. If something doesn't work particularly well, I'll say so. And if I discover something wonderful that hardly anybody seems to know about, I'll probably become annoyingly enthusiastic about telling people.

That's De Tom Plays.

🌱 Five Months Later

More than five months later, De Tom Plays looks very different from that first basic idea. The website has grown enormously, I'm approaching my first 100 videos and I've found the types of games I particularly enjoy sharing. My social accounts are still relatively small, but they're growing, and I've recently passed 1,000 followers on X.

My Steam library has also gone from somewhere around 400 games to more than 1,900.

My bank account would probably like a word with me about that one.

De Tom Plays doesn't currently generate an income. Everything I've put into it so far has come out of my own pocket, whether that's games, equipment or the frankly ridiculous amount of storage now attached to my computer. But I'm not particularly worried about chasing numbers. Time has a way of sorting these things out, and I'd much rather have somebody discover a game through one of my videos and decide it's exactly their sort of thing than spend my days worrying about whether a number went up quickly enough.

🧑‍💻 Some of the things that have already happened mean considerably more to me than a subscriber counter ever could. I've been able to give useful feedback to indie developers, and sometimes that feedback has resulted in something being changed or fixed before a game was released. I've watched developers take suggestions onboard, solve problems I've encountered and make their games better.

I've also been able to put games in front of people who might otherwise never have seen them. I'm not under any illusion that De Tom Plays is currently capable of transforming somebody's commercial fortunes overnight, but if a few more people discover a good game because I played it, reviewed it or wrote about it, then I've helped.

That's enough.

🏡 There's another part of this that means rather more to me personally.

People have now seen my Minecraft world.

That probably sounds like a very small thing compared with some of the experiences I've had during my life, but remember where all of this started. I was sitting on my settee playing Minecraft and thinking that nobody else ever saw any of it.

Now they do.

People have watched me wander around that world. They've seen things I've built and shared a little piece of something that previously existed entirely as my own private escape. It isn't just something locked away for me anymore; it's become a shared experience.

🎮 I don't know exactly where De Tom Plays will be a year from now, and that's part of the fun. I have ideas. Lots of them. The website will continue evolving, there will be more videos, more reviews, more articles and inevitably considerably more games.

There will probably be more hard drives too.

What I do know is that I'm enjoying myself. After more than 40 years of gaming, I've finally found somewhere useful for all that experience to go. I get to discover games, share them, help players find something they might enjoy and occasionally help a developer make something they care about a little bit better.

I'm not trying to change the world. I'm simply doing something I love, sharing what I've learned along the way and hopefully making a small difference while I'm doing it.

Recording and reviewing great games, one game at a time.

That's why I started De Tom Plays.

And more than five months later, I'm very glad I did.