A teenager has made so much money playing video games his parents now encourage him to log on - instead of doing homework. Mason Bristow, 17, has earned £17k making content for Rec Room, a virtual reality game, since 2018. He has used the cash to go on holiday with pals, buy clothes and shoes and even pays for his own college education. Mason, who has dyslexia, says he wants to show anything is possible despite his learning difficulties and has encouraged his friends who struggle at school to play the game too.
The teenager lives at home in Bristol with his dad Alan Bristow, 63, a support worker, and mum Natalie Bristow, 50, a nurse, along with his four siblings. Even his parents now encourage him to play the game, with Alan and Natalie being amazed by how much money their son has earnt from his bedroom.
Now, he says he wants to carry on earning money by playing video games as he completes his studies. While he's not employed by the company, Mason makes real money - he gathers in-game currency which is then cashed out by the game developers.
He spends between 10 to 20 hours per week playing the game and creating new content. Mason said: “I used the money to go on trips with friends, buy clothes and shoes and pay tuition fees at the college I'm going to - I pay £1,200 per year.
“It’s a musical theatre course and I’m doing two years; it’s just helping fund my studies and uniform. The game has given me the opportunity to follow a dream - when you have money it allows you to do things that I wouldn’t have been able to do normally."
Mason first started playing Rec Room – a virtual reality game where users can interact with one another, create rooms, and play team games – in 2018, during lockdown. He quickly gained a following on the platform, where he now has 21,000 followers and over 1.5 million visitors to the rooms he created in the game.
He received his first payment after the games creators reached out and told him his work was so popular, they were going to pay him. In April 2021 his first paycheck for £800 landed in his bank account – with Mason saying it was the most money he’d ever had in bank account at one time.
He continued creating for the game and now receives between £800 - £1.2K monthly, earning himself £17,000 in total. “When you create a room, you get game tokens when people visit the rooms, and they reward creators who build things the community likes,” said Mason.
“Once you hit a big amount of tokens you can either use it in the game or when you have quite a few million you can cash that out for real money. When I received the first payment, I was very sceptical and wasn’t sure if this company in America would send me the money – then one month later I had my first paycheck.
“I was shocked, it was the most I'd ever had in my bank account at once, I was so shocked by the amount I had - I felt my life was going to change from that point. I can do this remote from my room when I like and get paid rather than going to a job after college.
“Throughout the whole of school, it was embedded that you need GCSEs to have a job and the better GCSEs you have, the better job you can get. I only passed my English GCSE and was at a low point when I did them and was stressing a lot.
“But then I found the video game and made money where I didn’t need any qualifications or training. I thought I wouldn’t be able to do some things because of my dyslexia but here I am with £17k in my bank account.
“I just want to break the stereotype that being dyslexic doesn’t stop you from doing stuff or define who you are as a person. I want to prove to people it doesn’t matter who you are or what disabilities you have, everything is possible - I just had a driven mindset and went for it.”
Alan said: "Mason's been under pressure with education and is dyslexic so he struggles sometimes. As a parent I'm so so proud of him - he wanted to go to acting college and we couldn't afford it as a family.
"But because he started earning his own money it's enabled him to go to the college he wanted. It was a shock and I was skeptical with the internet stuff and when he said he'd earned £3k from a company in America, I reached out to them and they showed me the details and kept in contact with me.
"They've recently sent him new software so he can design in 3D now - it's over my head how quickly you can make money online and what a massive following he has. I'm proud of him, he's up against it - it's been so many years of hard work for him and it's come good."
