You can often find 20-year-old Lucas Desgrosellier sitting down with friends in his Spokane Valley pad, frantically yelling and making jokes while playing the video game Fortnite. But unlike most of the 650 million or so estimated players who fire up the wildly popular free-to-play shooter game to unwind after a day at school or work, this is a day job for Desgrosellier — better known by his YouTube handle Ghoulz (pronounced "goals").
Watching Ghoulz videos would be jarring to most folks alive in the pre-internet age, but it's totally clear why young audiences connect with him. Desgrosellier's Ghoulz persona is a pure dose of Gen Z hype culture. He's relentlessly positive, his voice always hovering at a 9/10 volume. His most popular videos tap into a digital form of prank culture, where his character — a blue-coiffed, pink-skinned female "Ghoul Trooper" — exploits cheats and hacks to execute hijinks on other unsuspecting players. Ghoulz videos often feel like the audio-visual equivalent of eating an entire tub of Sour Skittles dust.
As gaming and streamer culture has boomed over the past decade, Desgrosellier has turned Ghoulz into a bonafide content creation business, boasting over 2.65 million subscribers and over 1 billion views on YouTube. And he's not just a young man winging online celebrity — GhoulzTube LLC now has a full team with five employees, its own warehouse/office and plenty of plans to charitably give back to the community.
While the natural assumption might be that Ghoulz is a byproduct of a kid who grew up obsessively spending hours blitzing through Super Mario levels or sniping n00bs in Call of Duty, that's never really been Desgrosellier's style. He was all about internet videos, getting extremely into YouTube personalities like Preston [Arsement] and Casey Neistat and the way they seemingly felt like authentic parasocial best friends to all their subscribers.
"When people see my gaming channel, they think that I've been a gamer my whole life," says Desgrosellier, who's much more soft spoken and less amped up when he's not in video-making mode. "And the crazy thing is, I never really played video games growing up, and I never really had much interest in them, but I always just loved YouTube. So I started a YouTube when I was 6 years old. I taught myself how to edit on my dad's laptop."
And while he'd eventually become someone his classmates would envy, his early days in content creation didn't earn him many fans in real life.
"It was really hard in school, for sure, because everyone was just a jerk about it. They would play my videos in class in front of everybody, laugh at it, say it was stupid, a waste of time," Desgrosellier says. "But my dad was always super supportive. Like, I couldn't afford my first computer when Fortnite came out, I was like, 'Dad, if you could just lend me the money for this computer, I promise I'll pay you back one day,' and he was kind enough to actually do it. And then that same week that he gave me the computer actually was when I blew up."
That turning point came when Desgrosellier was a freshman at University High, after he realized that Fortnite might be his path to a wider audience.
"Fortnite was a massive trend for my generation: Every single kid was playing, every single kid was talking about it. So I was just like, I'm gonna take my passion for YouTube, mix it with this trend, and hopefully I can make something happen," he says.
He adopted his Ghoulz handle from a random Fortnite generator and began trying to figure out unique ideas for videos within the game.
Noticing that the game's free-to-play model pushes players to buy skins and outfits to customize their characters, which otherwise have no gameplay value, he decided to host Fortnite fashion shows. Followers would come show off the digital attire they spent real money on and get entertaining feedback. It actually gave players' purchases some sort of value. On the strength of one such video, he jumped from 3,000 YouTube followers to over 100,000 in a single week. But that was only the start of the real grind.
"My biggest fear was just being a one-hit wonder. I always knew as a kid I wanted this to be my career. I never wanted to go to college. I wasn't good at school. I just had a different type of brain: I wasn't school smart, I was very like creatively smart," Desgrosellier says. "So like every single day after school, I would just run home from school, I would just film videos every single day, edit them myself, make the thumbnails and post it. So I did daily videos for like two years straight. My key definitely was just being super consistent, and building a business behind it instead of just being a content creator."
The Ghoulz Studio in the Valley is the dream of any 20-year-old who enjoys professionally goofing off. The large warehouse space — which boasts an amusing prop-laden storage closet — allows for all sorts of video shenanigans.
"We wanted to create this giant Disneyland for content creators, pretty much," Desgrosellier says. "So whatever crazy unique idea we have, we can kind of pull it off."
During my visit, a boxing ring-like setup around some gaming PCs was set up to promote a new Ghoulz 1-versus-1 map within Fortnite that launched on March 1. The map in question — built by mapmaking company Gridsnap — gives players full access to the Fortnite arsenal from the jump, basically allowing players to try the type of in-game trickery that's become Ghoulz's brand.
"Something that's super unique is you can go and put in these secret codes and get these cheats to kind of troll your friends or kind of mess with them. That way they kind of feel like they're playing as me within my videos," Desgrosellier says.
But the Ghoulz Studio is also very decidedly a business, with multiple office spaces and a conference room lined with colorful charts breaking down trends, analytics, and more. The Ghoulz team beyond Desgrosellier includes five full-time employees: creative manager Ryeder Nelson, lead editor Peter Houston-Hencken, cutting and assembly editor Jamal Waterford, in-house Fortnite map builder Nick Parkman and COO Julie Delaney (who local news viewers might recognize as the former host of KREM 2's Inland Life).
"When I tell people that I left my job to go work for a 20-year-old YouTuber, people are like, 'I'm sorry, what?!'" Delaney — who has helped Ghoulz land brand deal with companies like Best Buy, NASCAR, and Meta Quest VR — says with a laugh. "But I've known Lucas' family since before he was born, and Lucas' business acumen... drew me to it. This wasn't a frat house where content was being created, this was a business, and he had a plan and a vision."
It's certainly a unique working environment but also a decidedly stable one.
@Ghoulz on YouTube, ghoulz.com
"It's typical that it's not going to be a typical day," Nelson says. "Every day you're walking to something new. I mean, we definitely have our basics we need to cover, but some days we're lighting off fireworks. Some days we're pulling a prank in a video game. Other days we're having a chicken being delivered to the studio for content."
"I think the job makes me feel simultaneously old and young. It's such high energy here, so there's always something new going on," the 33-year-old Houston-Hencken says. "In YouTube years, I'm 80 years old, but it's so fun to stay on top of internet trends and humor. We have such freedom to kind of flex our comedic editing, and so it's exciting to really put that to use in this kind of content."
"I wouldn't have expected this job to feel like my most supportive job," Waterford says. "I've worked in a lot more 'professional' scenarios. But I feel like with the team here, I've only been pushed to grow."
The next big thing on the team's horizon is the launch of a "private community" Ghoulz subscription app to provide fans with much more behind-the-scenes content to show off what the life of a YouTuber is really like and to showcase Desgrosellier's efforts to impact the world beyond the digital realm of Fortnite.
If you spend any time talking to Desgrosellier about his Ghoulz goals, it quickly becomes clear that his Christian faith is very important in his life (he plays drums in his church's worship group) and that he envisions his YouTube channel as an avenue to make the world a better place through charity. It's not a coincidence that he signs off each Ghoulz video with "God bless. Peace."
When he was 17 years old, Desgrosellier donated $17,000 to the Sacred Heart Children's Hospital. This past Christmas, Ghoulz partnered with brands like Moose Toys and Insanely Clean to donate toys, clothes, hygiene products and more to support local charities like Sally's House and Cup of Cool Water.
It all feeds into part of the reason why Desgrosellier hasn't bolted the Inland Northwest for a bigger media market. Sticking around his friends and family keeps him grounded and focused on his mission to make a real impact on the place he calls home.
"I just feel like I was given this platform for a reason," Desgrosellier says, "and so I want to be able to use my platform to help change the world as much as I possibly can." ♦
