Popular video gaming streamer Tyler Blevins, known as Ninja to his millions of fans online, shared on Tuesday that he has been diagnosed with skin cancer.
In a post on X, Blevins, 32, who is the most followed person on Twitch, said he is "still in a bit of shock" about the news, which he learned during an annual skin/mole check appointment with his dermatologist.
"There was a mole on the bottom of my foot that they wanted to remove just to be careful," he wrote in the post. "It came back as melanoma, but they are optimistic that we caught it in the early stages."
There was a second dark spot near the mole, which has also been biopsied, he said, and that doctors "removed a larger area around the melanoma with the hopes that under the microscope they will see clear non-melanoma edges and we will know we got it."
He urged his followers to get their skin checked.
"I’m grateful to have hope in finding this early, but please take this as a PSA to get skin checkups," he said.
A representative for Blevins did not immediately return a request for comment.
Blevins, who has been a streamer for more than a decade, is one of the most popular personalities in esports and gaming. He has 19 million followers on Twitch, where he often plays titles like Fortnite.
He became so synonymous with Fortnite that, Epic Games, the developer of the title, eventually released a Ninja "skin," which players can purchase and use to look like Blevins when they play the game.
His popularity has transcended the gaming sphere — in 2019, he appeared on the popular reality competition series “The Masked Singer.”
Blevins made headlines when he left Twitch in 2019 for Microsoft's short-lived streaming platform, Mixer. But he returned to Twitch in 2020 after Mixer shut down.
