Interview: Starforge Systems' Latest Creator Collaboration Features Prolific Streamer, CaseOh - And His Cat

Starforge Systems’ latest collaboration with a well-known streamer threw me for a loop when I was first approached for this interview. 

I’ll admit: I’m an almost 38-year-old man who doesn’t really watch a ton of game streaming, so a lot of times I live vicariously through my 16-year-old daughter and who she watches, even if I can’t always remember their names. 

CaseOh, whose collaboration with Starforge Systems sees a new custom artwork PC case emblazoned with his streaming buddy, Kitty,  and dripping with references that his fanbase would appreciate, is one of those streamers. 

Hailing from a small town in Arkansas, CaseOh has made quite a name for himself thanks to his humor, his authenticity, and, I believe, the fact that his story is so relatable to so many of us. Growing up watching streamers like Nadeshot and other prominent streamers, Case dreamed of growing up and streaming himself. 

“I started working technically when I was 13,” CaseOh told me in an interview earlier this week. “I started cutting grass just to have some extra money because I like playing video games and I would see people playing Counter Strike back in the day. And I didn’t have enough money for a PC, I would have the consoles and stuff.”

He would go on to work at a golf course at 15, saving for a summer to buy an old Dell gaming rig (been there, mate - my first real gaming PC was a Dell as well), only to, in his words, suck at Counter Strike (been there too). But watching these streamers sparked an interest in CaseOh’s desire to become one himself, though the path wasn’t that straightforward.

As he says in a podcast appearance with fellow creator Jynxzi, CaseOh’s decision to go into full-time content creation came at what seems to have been a real crossroads in his young life. Before he started to stream NBA 2K, and eventually go viral with Hogwarts Legacy on TikTok, CaseOh was at a Family Dollar where his card was declined while just trying to buy some noodles and Pringles.

CaseOh’s path to streaming became a way out of jobs he was miserable in daily. As he told Jynxzi in the podcast, his mom was a massive source of encouragement to give streaming another try after the Family Dollar incident. 

“The reason I gave it another shot again in general was because of my mom,” CaseOh told Jynxzi in the podcast. “I was miserable at work, you know, she’d hear me complaining like, ‘Oh I hate my job, I want to go do something else.’ And she told me that week [...] the reason I even tried it again was because that weekend she said, ‘Why don’t you give streaming another try? Just upload some clips, you’re funny, see what happens.’”

And so he did - and thankfully it stuck. As CaseOh put it to me, it was “never about getting rich.” 

“All I wanted to do was quit working at the rice mill, quit cutting grass, quit doing maintenance work every day.”

Despite the early success, the struggle didn’t necessarily end when he started streaming. Coming from a small town in Arkansas, high-speed internet wasn’t necessarily available right away. So CaseOh got creative: he streamed using a Verizon Jetpack Hotspot from the first.

“When I first blew up on TikTok, because that’s where everything originated from, I didn’t have fast enough internet to stream. So we had a Verizon Jetpack Hotspot that would get five upload on a good day. I would boot up the Verizon Jetpack, and if a cloud went over the house, [the] stream [would] crash. If it was raining, stream crash. But I started streaming on five upload speed. [I] did that, believe it or not, for almost the first entire year of me streaming was on a Verizon Jetpack. And then [I] finally got fiber and I was able to stream at 1080p. 

“And the weirdest thing that happened is, I remember one day I was streaming at 720p, quality was buns (Editor’s note: that’s Gen Z for “bad” for those of us who aren’t hip and with it). It was crashing every ten minutes. Some random dude came in, first time chatter. He said, ‘Man, if bro could actually stream in high quality, he’d have 20,000 viewers.’ And at the time, I had like 10K. Then, a month later, I got the high quality and that’s when everything started. I was like, ‘Wow, bro was right.’”

He tells me that it’s really not about the numbers, and in fact, Mama Case, CaseOh’s real mom and manager, tells me that the YouTuber turns down 98% of the sponsorships he’s offered. 

This, to me, is a wild number, and it also speaks to his desire to ensure that the brand he’s built is his authentic self, not simply a way to churn out profit. That authenticity is one of the more attractive parts of his content to his audience, alongside his humor. 

“I don’t like to bombard the viewers with ads,” CaseOh tells me in a follow up email to our conversation.

That authenticity helped to attract Starforge to the streamer as a collab partner. And it helped CaseOh that the company sent him a PC before they ever signed on the dotted line.

“I think the thing with Case is thaty he’s built such an amazing community,” Starforge Systems’ creative director Adam Bamonti tells me in the interview. “That’s what we look for with content creators a lot of the time is how the community reacts to them. You know, when he’s talking he creates a place [where] people can come hang out and feel no pressure to buy anything or be a certain way, or anything like that. We really value the authenticity.”

Part of the equation is also finding something that will resonate with the community the collab is targeting. While Starforge acknowledges that it helps that CaseOh is one of the biggest streamers on the planet when deciding to do a collaboration with him, they still, at the end of the day, want to do right by his community by offering something that will mean something to them.

“Our goal when making any computer, whether it’s for [CaseOh], whether a game IP, we want to make something cool that people are going to like. And, along with that, we want to do right by the community that we’re making this product for. With Case’s computer and the whole collaboration, we wanted it be something that resonates with the community. And the biggest thing for that, right off the bat, was Kitty.”

The artwork on the CaseOh Case, wall art, desk mat, and more, all feature Kitty predominantly. And Kitty’s personality comes through in each part the cat is included in, whether it’s playing with a fast food cup that could easily be knocked off a desk, or sitting inside a basket of fries on the front glass of the case artwork. 

The collaboration also includes Starforge Systems’ iconic case platelights, which include the popular caseohLife artwork (as well as the wall art as part of the collaboration). It all just works well together, and highlights just how down-to-earth the streamer feels, whether you’re watching a clip, a stream, or just having a 25-minute conversation with him like I have. 

Over 7 million people have subscribed to him on YouTube (and the same over on Twitch), and it’s helped to catapult CaseOh into the stratosphere, as the YouTuber took home last year’s Content Creator of the Year at Geoff Keighley’s The Game Awards. 

“First off, couldn’t believe I got nominated to start with,” CaseOh said when asked what it was like to win the honor. “And then the immediate thought was, ‘There’s absolutely no way I win the thing.”

However, despite the success and the win, CaseOh says he doesn’t feel like he “deserved it,” because to him, he’s just “having fun.”

And indeed, after just under half an hour talking to him, I can tell he’s living the dream. That comes through so completely in the collab artwork as well - staring off into a beautiful sunset while Kitty lounges around on the desk inside the house. 

I think what makes CaseOh so popular and endearing (he earned a fan in me after just our brief chat) is how relatable his story is to so many of us. As a journalist, we’re taught to be skeptical, and I’ll fully admit I entered this interview expecting to see a much different side or version of CaseOh than what I saw when I researched the streamer ahead of time. But, as he tells it, “what you see” is the “same thing you’re gonna get” whether you interact with him through a chat window or at a nearby restaurant. 

“Everything you see on [stream], same thing you’re gonna get with me when I’m off stream. I wouldn’t ever want to put on an act on stream to start with anyway, because imagine I’m one way on stream, and somebody meets me in person [and] I’m an entirely different way in person. So I wouldn’t just for that aspect alone. I would never want to put on a fake persona.”

CaseOh is a big personality, and I keep coming back to the word “authentic” when talking about him and what he has built. Nothing feels forced, nothing feels fake - he exudes this feeling that he’s having the time of his life, and, as someone who has started to watch his content, I’m now along for the ride.

Though to hear CaseOh tell it, he “just be chilling,” while Mama Case does all the hard work.

Starforge Systems’ Kitty Collection is available now, and can be purchased as a Case Bundle for $399, which includes a Lian Li 011 EVO RGB Dynamic emblazoned in the Kitty PC case artwork, the caseohLife Wall art, caseohLife Platelight and the Troublemaker Desk Mat. 

If you’re shopping for a new PC, you can upgrade to the Kitty Case with either Starforge’s Voyager line of PCs which will include the Lian Li case upgrade or the Navigator PC, which features a Phanteks NV5 case. Both upgrades will include the wall art and deskmat, while the Voyager upgrade also includes the Platelight.