Steven Spohn describes himself as a “twice-over terminally disabled individual” with spinal muscular atrophy who, according to doctors, shouldn’t be alive. He also describes himself as someone deeply dedicated to advocating for people with disabilities who want to play games.
He turned 40 last year and despite feeling the friendly pressure to celebrate it in a big way — “It’s like a rite of passage, right?” — that was never a reality for him. The COVID-19 pandemic threatened his existence, something spinal muscular atrophy was already doing. Instead, he channeled his love of games and advocacy for the disabled gamer community into a charity drive that managed to raise more than $1 million.
“I am extremely grateful right now,” Spohn said. “But you know, I’m someone who’s also never satisfied with what I’ve done. My personality is always looking for what’s next and I’m just someone trying to figure out how to do more good for the world. I’d love to give you the perfect sound bite — ‘I’m going to Disney World’ — but the only thing on my brain right now is, ‘Ok cool, we managed to do this really cool thing, and here’s what this money is going to do. What’s next?’”
How The Charity Drive Came to Be
Spohn became especially interested in a fundraising effort like this after someone he looks up to named Benjamin Lupo (aka DrLupo) raised millions of dollars for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Lupo showed Spohn that one person can start something that can make a massive difference.
Disabled gamers can face a plethora of challenges when it comes to gaming depending on their disability, such as being unable to use traditional controllers. That’s why AbleGamers works to raise money to purchase items like Microsoft’s adaptive controller for disabled gamers. Spohn himself plays games with a mouse and an infrared hat that uses the pitch and yaw of his head to select preset keyboard buttons.
Many people have a disability like blindness that makes seeing what’s on the screen difficult, or deafness, which can affect one’s ability to hear what’s happening in a game. AbleGamers works directly with developers to help them build options in their games to make them more accessible for people with these kinds of disabilities, and others too.
Spohn’s $1 million charity drive was started to continue all that AbleGamers does, be it remain afloat with paid employees, purchase controllers, create new courses for developers, or hire occupational therapists.
The official fundraising effort began on Spohn’s 40th birthday on September 15 last year and Spohn’s fundraising effort became formally organized under the “#SpawnTogether” hashtag the day the drive began. From there it grew more and more popular throughout the fundraiser.
Spohn says it was always going to be a grassroots effort because he wanted the wider industry to see that people care about people with disabilities.
Before the first 24 hours were up, more than $130,000 had been raised. By the next day, other content creators had raised over $10,000 under the #SpawnTogether Tiltify effort. By the end of that month, almost $150,000 had been raised. The number continued to rise and then on November 14, during GlitchCon, Dr. Lupo informed Spohn that Twitch was donating $1 million to AbleGamers.
Technically, Spohn had hit his $1 million goal at that point, but during the excitement and happiness of the moment, he decided right then and there that he wanted to raise another million.
“I said, ‘thank you for the million and now I’m going to go out and raise another,’ and then we raised $1 million from the community,” Spohn said. “Because here’s the thing: Let’s say I live for another 20 years, or maybe I die in three months. Either way, the charity is going to go on. I knew that it couldn’t be as simple as just convincing a big conglomerate owned by Amazon that they need to hand over a million dollars every year. I needed to show people that it’s something we can all do together.”
Spohn’s Riders of Rohan
And show people #SpawnTogether did. Sure, some bigger names helped out, including game developer Alanah Pearce, streamers Bruce Greene and BloodyFaster, and even State Farm and Felicia Day. Spohn, who had received support from people like actors Dwayne Johnson and Ryan Reynolds in the past, saw his fundraiser reach the likes of actor Brie Larson, too. But Spohn is just as proud of the hundreds of other names that helped out by donating, streaming for the fundraiser, or even sharing a link.
All told, about 250 streamers and 50 teams joined Spohn’s fundraising effort through Tiltify. Whether they donated a dollar or $10,000, partners urged their communities to donate or helped people learn what AbleGamers is about. They pushed forward Spohn’s mission to prove that making gaming more accessible is a cause worthy of the world’s attention.
Spohn said steamer Lilsimsie was one of his main rocks throughout the effort. He called her his Pikachu, always there when he would say, “I need you,” much in the same way Ash Ketchum relies on Pikachu to pull him through the toughest of challenges.
The toughest challenge of all was actually raising $1 million — which is no small sum. Lilsimsie raised $150,000 alone for #SpawnTogether. Halfway through the year-long goal, #SpawnTogether had raised $300,000 since the $1 million donation from Twitch. That topped Spohn’s wildest expectations, but with just six months to go until his next birthday on September 15, there was still a lot of work to be done. Hundreds more, however, helped him smash past that goal, weeks before the year was up.
Then, there’s also the extra attention the fundraiser brought to Spohn, his disability, and AbleGamers as a whole. There were positives, of course. Namely, people learned more about video game accessibility and what AbleGamers is trying to do. Unfortunately, it also led to people mocking Spohn, but he saw those moments as teaching opportunities, sometimes successful, sometimes not.
“We’ve [disabled gamers] kind of become masters of taking a negative and turning it into a positive because people with disabilities have been so looked down on in our society,” Spohn said, reflecting on how his disability led him to a place in life where he can do something like raising $1 million. “All of this was a grassroots effort. This was a Steven Spohn thing at first because this was not an AbleGamers-sanctioned event, there was no marketing budget put into this, nobody was paying me to do anything…this was about people doing something out of the goodness of their hearts and simply helping out one another.”
What’s Next for Spohn and AbleGamers
Spohn hasn’t quite figured out what’s next. He knows how the money will immediately help AbleGamers, where he’s the chief operating officer. It’ll help purchase more accessible controllers for the organization to give to disabled gamers. It’ll allow AbleGamers to hire occupational therapists and more to help the organization reach the 46 million disabled gamers in America. It’ll help AbleGamers continue to teach developers how to develop games with accessibility in mind. But for Spohn, looking five years into the future isn’t easy.
“Where we’ll be in five years, I have no idea,” Spohn says. “I couldn’t have told you I’d be doing this interview even a year ago. However, I’m always somebody who wants to figure out how to help the most people in the most efficient ways and I think we’re slowly figuring out how to do that. I think in five years, you’ll see an organization that is raising millions of dollars, an organization that the industry respects because of how transparent we are with where our money goes and…generally, how we don’t leave any ambiguity as to what’s going on behind the curtain.”
Spohn said he’s incredibly grateful for all of the congratulations and buzz around the $1 million achievement, but he doesn’t want people to think of the achievement as his. He just wants to be known as the person that lit the fire. He’s the person that lit the beacons of Gondor, he says. Every single person that donated to his cause is a Rider of Rohan.
“I think that’s my general advice for anybody out there who’s currently looking at me as their inspiration to do something like this,” Spohn says. “Move forward. When we join this world, there’s a lot wrong with it and there’s a lot of things that can be done better, and we can’t fix everything. But you can pick a couple of things and you can make them just a little bit better.”
“Now we can say to the industry, ‘people with disabilities are important, and they’re so important that we banded together to raise a million dollars.’ That validation of gamers with disabilities is important…and the games industry needs to keep paying attention to it.”
The #SpawnTogether charity drive for AbleGamers is still live and if you’d like to donate, you can do that here.
Wesley LeBlanc is a freelance news writer and guide maker for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @LeBlancWes. You can also follow Steven Spohn on Twitter @stevenspohn and AbleGamers on Twitter @AbleGamers.
