In the days leading up to Destiny 2: Shadowkeep last fall, I was determined to get back into Destiny in a big way. This time, it would be different. This time, I’d finally understand the notoriously convoluted lore, the bits of inscrutable storytelling many Destiny fans swear by. Things have changed since Destiny once locked critical parts of its world building inside collectible cards, but Bungie’s never provided an easy path for newcomers to catch up on the past. The answer, most told me, was to watch the intricate videos by My Name is Byf .

Byford started their channel at 16 years old, and has amassed 758,000 subscribers in the eight years since. The channel started with Byford uploading random videos from Halo and other video games, before Byf landed on something that worked: Destiny analysis. It wasn’t a home run at first, with most videos amassing less than a thousand views, but Byford’s audience began to skyrocket around the time of the Destiny beta and its eventual launch, when he started publishing exhaustive analysis videos and guides to the game’s weapons.

It nonetheless remains incredibly hard to follow, but that probably has less to do with the work of My Name is Byf than it does with the often rickety foundation he’s working with from Bungie. But I’ve watched a lot of lore videos, and most are nonsense. There’s a reason My Name is Byf, otherwise known as James Byford, has become a household name for the most dedicated fans of Destiny. It’s how one ends up affectionately called “Lore Daddy.”

Around this time, My Name is Byf had released their magnum opus, a four-hour epic that promised to walk through the entire confusing story of Destiny, including events that predate the timeline of the games by theoretically millions of years. The video isn’t just rambling commentary layered over footage of someone shooting up monsters in Destiny, but a moody walkthrough of Destiny’s layered history, complete with original artwork bringing things to life.

The four-hour Destiny take, according to Byford, “took months” to complete, requiring a document with 28,500 words, 48 hours of voice recording, and splitting editing into 15 different sections because otherwise it’d have crashed the computers it was being made on.

Making videos like this is Byford’s full-time job. It should, perhaps, not be a surprise it’s possible to carve out a successful career making lore videos about a popular video game, but I also can’t help but wonder more about his work. It’s why I reached out to Byford, which got us talking about his process, how he’s able to keep all of Destiny’s lore in his head (there’s a reason!), and why the complicated story of Destiny has entranced so many.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

VICE Games: How'd you originally get into Destiny? What drew you in?

James Byford: I remember being a huge fan of Bungie back in 2013, thanks to Halo: Reach, and I still remember when I saw the first Destiny trailers. I was instantly hooked by the premise. The sentence “Bungie is making an FPS RPG” was like a siren’s call to me. I knew immediately that I was going to play it. Halo: Reach had mostly reached the end of its life cycle, and Halo 4 didn’t grip Halo fans in the same way. As we moved on, so did my content. (Not to disrespect the hard work of 343, just the sentiment of the time).