Kevin Fair Proves That Your Hobby Can Become a Career

Kevin Fair’s passion for gaming led him to start his own company. He now wants to help young gamers follow in his footsteps.

Kevin Fair holding a Nintendo arcade box, wearing a sweatshirt that reads “Naughty By Nature” and his signature bead necklace.

Kevin Fair is living the gamer’s dream. He set up gaming consoles for thousands of visitors of the 2017 New York Comic Con to play Injustice 2: a combat game in which Batman fights villains with a swarm of super-powerful robotic bats. Early this year, he organized a “Fortnite’’ tournament in the concourse of Chicago’s Allstate Arena. It quickly filled with the sounds of flareguns and boogie bombs, weapons that players use to fight their opponents in the mega-popular multiplayer game.

Fair’s career took off in 2009 when he started “I Play Games,” a company that organizes video game tournaments for public organizations, businesses and gaming enthusiasts. His business was an extension of his long hobby of hosting video game tournaments.

He also sees a greater potential in gaming and uses video games to tutor teens in Chicago’s lower-income communities.

Fair was born in 1985 during the boom of the arcade era: The screens of coin-operated machines in increasingly popular arcade bars featured chunky and cartoonish graphics that burst with color, while the sounds of bleeps, bloops and waka wakas loudly expressed game progress to surrounding viewers. Four ghosts: Blinky, Pinky, Inkey and Clyde chased “Pac-Man” on the trip around the maze, a game so popular that it led to a national coin shortage in Japan. Toward the end of the decade, electronics companies released home-video consoles that would offer experiences similar to those found in arcades. Nintendo rolled out the Nintendo Entertainment System, better known by its acronym NES, in 1985 and the handheld Game Boy in 1989.

“Gaming felt super-duper natural to me,” Fair said. “Their creators were gamers themselves.”

Fair grew up in the Morgan Park neighborhood in the far southside of Chicago. His older cousin taught him how to play video games during weekly visits to their grandparents’ house. They started with “Doom,” a first-person shooter game in which a player assumes the role of an unnamed space marine colloquially referred to as “Doomguy” by the community that sprung up around the game.

“We spent two years playing ‘Gears of War’ and three years on ‘Overwatch,’” he said. “We played five nights a week, at least three hours a night. It wasn’t just a hobby — it was a lifestyle.”

Fair recognized that gaming, a seemingly reclusive hobby, could bring people together. He began hosting gaming tournaments in college, first in dorms and then in bars and bowling alleys. However, it wasn’t always easy.

“The bar owners used to laugh at me, telling me it’s not going to work. They didn’t get gaming back then,” he said. “But when I did get the venue, we’d have a blast. The owners eventually understood that 50+ people ordering pizzas and sodas just to game for a night makes them money. That’s what started bringing me more business — enhancing other people’s businesses.”

Flyers for Fair’s gaming tournaments on his office wall.

At the age of 24, two big things happened in Fair’s life, the release of “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2,” and the launch of his own company. Unlike video games where challenges get exponentially harder toward the end, the toughest obstacles for Fair’s business manifested in its beginnings.

“When you start a restaurant, there’s already a rulebook set up for you on how to do it,” he said. “But, there was no blueprint for a business like mine. The laws about playing video games in public spaces were practically non-existent. We had to build the framework around this business model. It was a lot of trial and error, but also a lot of support from my gaming friends.”

Fair wants people to enjoy the art of gaming while meeting other people with similar interests.

What qualities does a “gamer” need? “A quick ability to adapt and nail the basics,” he says. “Onceyou know the basics well, you can adapt them anywhere, even in your personal life.”

Fair loves playing “The Legend of Zelda,” a high fantasy adventure video game featuring a fiery elf warrior inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.” Equipped with simple weapons such as a boomerang, Link fights various enemies to unlock underground labyrinths and find hidden treasure. He taught Fair how to use limited resources to fight challenges. His current challenge is ensuring access to gaming for teens in low-income, predominantly black neighborhoods.

Fair visits neighborhoods throughout Chicago and brings with him new Nintendo Switch, PS4 Proand Xbox One X consoles. He also teaches high school students how to stream video games and make sponsored content.

“My teaching method is think-games but also think-money,” Fair says. “If someone told a 16-year-old me I could make gaming into a career, I wouldn’t have to spend my high school and college worrying about what I wanted to do in life. Instead, I would have known on the spot what it was…gaming.”

His secret? “If you can make things fun, you can trick people into learning, into being nice to one another [and]into solving a problem. If you put a focus on achieving a level of fun, they’ll want to do more of it.”

His close friend Junae Bennett met Fair at a “Street Fighter V” tournament at Emporium, an arcade bar in Wicker Park. “Everytime I hang out with Kevin something crazy happens,” she said. “Some of his gaming events turn into parties, and you know Kevin’s there with his bead-necklace talking to people and keeping the atmosphere going.”

COVID-19 hardly changed his work.“The virtual sphere comes naturally to most gamers,” Fair explained. He hosts online gaming spaces, such as DePaul Esports, a student-led organization focused on streaming video games. Their last event featured “Rocket League,” a hybrid of car-racing and an arcade-style soccer game.

In the future, Fair hopes to continue working with students to make gaming more accessible and learning more enjoyable. He advises young people starting off in the industry to experiment with radical ideas, even ones with no financial success initially.

“You won’t regret even the most difficult experience if you had fun doing it. You can always take your failed experiences, dust yourself off, and get back into the game,” he said.