Meet the streamer who went from hunting video game ghosts to IRL ones

Nothing moves until Jordan “Detune” DiSorbo enters the room. When one door closes, another opens. It doesn’t fly open, like something out of a horror flick. It opens slowly, with a creak, before DiSorbo notices. One camera directs to the door and the other faces the filmmakers, the live audience in Villicare can see their stunned reaction when something even creepier happens: The music box starts playing.

DiSorbo started streaming in 2018, and is seriously pursuing it as a career in 2019, Polygon said. He has seen success over the years, transitioning from Overwatch such as horror games when building a community. The hallucinatory show’s ironic comedy is twinned with horror. And in 2022 he started an investigative series called IRL Paranormal Detour. He built a large, portable kit and began touring various locations across the United States.

Beyond streaming, DiSorbo balances Twitch and YouTube while leading the US as a musician with the post-hardcore band Glasslands. Before TwitchCon, Polygon spoke to DiSorbo about how he built this career.

(Ed. note: (This story has been edited for length and clarity.)

Polygon: When did you start streaming? Has it changed for you over the years?

DiSorbo: I started as a hobby around 2018. It was an escape for me because I was a full-time music producer. Until he had to drink. And when I was at home, I was producing music by writing for other people. And the grind began to happen. I was working 14-hour days, almost every day I forgot the length of the days. Two years in a row, my mother’s birthday and Christmas were the only days I took off. and I was like; I must change, because I’m going to end up looking down on music; it’s all going to happen.

So I turned to twitch because me and my friend were talking about streaming games. As it was in my brain Well, it looks like you can grow. I can pretend that a small part of my brain is like a workaholic; Play video games and have fun.

I started with OverwatchI did, which I did semi-pro for a while, and then I turned to horror games, because I hardly felt love. That started the trajectory of the rest of his streaming career. I didn’t do it for real and actually try to do this career until 2019, the beginning of 2020. I was really leaning into community building. I wanted to create a space on the internet because I didn’t grow up to be a pansexual person of color. I could not walk very comfortably at intervals. I want to build what I don’t have.

Last year, I started a paranormal series IRL. It was a funny idea that I once had and even some members of my community remember about turning the light bulb on itself. (…) I spent a year and a half researching how to pull that off – how to create a backpack, tech, in multi-cam. It contains duct tape, but it does.

He set another new path in his streaming career. I’m the only one in VELLICO who does that, especially at this level of production, even with a single person. But I absolutely love it. I meet my friends around town. I make different guests and it’s like meeting internet friends for the first time in real life.

I wanted the hunt to expire, for I had seen nothing like that which I had seen before. How do you pull it off?

Thanks to me, I got to use the camera and make my bride’s wedding films. They understand how everything works. I sat down and I was like; “I would love to set up my paranormal IRL streams to make my gaming streams feel at home.” And the biggest thing I wanted to do was face the camera because that’s the point of any stream – they want to see your reaction.

I take that bag and all the gizmos and gadgets in there, I load it into a server, (then I send that data) to my computer at home, I control everything from my phone. My computer at home does all the streaming. Four consecutive streams to the same OBS. And then I was changing and moving them around and noting everything. It leads to some really, really deep moments of a camera closer to the source than where it was downstream. When we all look at the footage later, we can pinpoint where it all started. We were doing it that night, and it was absurd that we were saying goodbye to other cameras.

What have you learned since you started building your own circle? This sounded like a natural progression to go from horror games to IRL ghost hunting.

The community is what makes Twitch special. Other platforms don’t have the flickering that it has; he built it into culture. Having the image of the community that you want it to be, that you put love and time and care into it, really shows at the end of the day. When we do not live, everyone hangs in discord. Or, I say, tech issues happen in paranormal streams, and everything goes downhill. There was five minutes of dead air, which can be the worst thing for a live show. Everyone there talks to each other for a killing time until everything comes back. And I don’t think that’s going to happen unless you have what it feels like to find the kind of family that I really want to carve out.

Is this time of year—near Halloween—especially busy for you? Surely people want this content all year round, though.

People really want this content all year round. Usually people who never play these games. They live vicariously through someone doing it and seeing the reaction, so they can barely do it, but then they also laugh at me or at me depending on what happens. It’s like watching a horror movie with a bunch of friends. It’s never as scary as doing it alone. But it’s always either funny or scary or just exhilarating to see something happen and everyone reacts the same (sort of). There is comfort in him.

This is the time of the year for me the most, especially with the paranormal, because I try to protect it. I did four places within five or six days, I think. I did one for YouTube, a live stream on a site called Clown Motel. I’m afraid of the devils, I don’t know why I did it. Then I went back to the desert where I did the prison and then the 1917 YMCA. Tell me why the YMCA is one of the scariest places I’ve ever been. We used to joke like, “The YMCA is worse than prison.” And we get there and we’re like, “Oh it is.” We crossed two whole streams for several feet and didn’t even scratch the surface. We go ahead and try to debunk everything. And then we have a pile of things we can’t explain. I’m like, “What happened at this YMCA?”

I am a YMCA member. I have to wait, what are you waiting for?

It was the only place — or I guess the second place — I was where I was almost like, “Leave my weapons. I will return tomorrow. And if it is not here, we will chalk it up to loss. We gotta get out of here. This idea was terrifying. ”