'Roblox' Streamer 'PowEnvy' On Having The Most Viral Dirty Room On TikTok

PowEnvy is a Roblox streamer on Twitch who has been playing the game since the mid-2010s. Recently, he found viral success on Instagram and TikTok after he started posting videos where he cleans his incredibly dirty room for all his viewers, often showing off his roach infestation in the process and grossing everyone out. With millions of views under his belt and videos that have been shared across social media by the likes of Keemstar and Joe Bartolozzi, PowEnvy is quickly climbing the clout ladder on TikTok for better or, in Chief Keef’s opinion, worse.

We connected with PowEnvy to discuss his recent virality and learn all about the lifestyle behind TikTok’s messiest Roblox streamer.

Q: Great to talk with you, PowEnvy. So what is it that you do online?

A: I'm a Roblox streamer and most people know me now as just a guy with the dirty room, but I promise I'm more than that.

Q: How did you get into playing Roblox and making content?

A: I don't know what a nicer word is for poor, but I would like always go to the public library so I could use a computer. I started playing Roblox in 2008 when I was six years old. Ever since then, it's just what I've always played. When I moved in with my mom, they had a computer at the house and since then, 2012, I've wanted to stream and make YouTube videos.

Q: Why Roblox?

A: I think it's just like an unhealthy obsession with the first thing that I ever played. I play a lot of League of Legends too. I definitely have like over 5,000 hours in Roblox. I've been playing Roblox now for 15 years. I'm 21. It came out in 2006.

Q: One of your first popular TikTok videos is a clip of you getting run over by streamer xQc during a game of GTA V online. How did that happen?

A: So the story behind that was I was living in a hotel 'cause my house flooded. 'Cause Hurricane Harvey. I live in Houston and that flooded people out. I was living in a hotel room for eight months and I was super depressed, lonely. I had no friends. I had no job, but I had a bunch of savings. So I, when I heard they were making a NoPixel server where you could pay $250 to be able to play, I was like, oh, maybe I could try this.

So I bought the ticket to join the server. When I got run over by xQc in that clip, I genuinely had no idea it was him. I literally was just like, “who's got a Lamborghini? The server's like a day old.” So I was just amazed someone had a Lamborghini. That's why I was like, “yo, nice Lamborghini.” I only found out later because I looked at his stream and saw him driving the Lamborghini and I was like, that's the one that ran me over.

Everyone thought I was stream sniping, but I was living in a hotel room, I was playing 12 hours a day. It's only a 200-player server. Like you're gonna run into the same people.

Q: Your first viral room cleaning video popped off around the end of 2022. What was the inspiration behind that video?

A: So most of the time I'd be streaming and I'd show my chat my room and they'd be like, “Dude, you gotta clean it up.” So I'd say, okay, if we hit a 100 subs total, I will clean my room. Then I just figured I might as well just make a TikTok 'cause I wanna have other platforms. That video went and got like 4 million views and then it happened again. This time I posted it on Instagram too and it got 8 million views. Then I just kept posting on Instagram and TikTok, even though the TikTok wasn't getting that many views. Then for some reason they switched; Instagram died and now my TikTok is doing great.

The first one that got 4 million views was literally like same day, overnight kind of thing. It didn't have to like simmer at all. But the Instagram one hit 8 million in like five days as well. At best I expected 50,000 views, 100,000. I'm not super optimistic like that. So it's really surprising when it happens.

Q: One of the most surprising aspects of your content is the roaches, but you say they’re not due to the room. What’s the deal with the roaches?

A: People could not believe that I had roaches, but I don't know. I think it's like a different life because when you're in Texas, everything has roaches. You go to the bathroom at a gas station, there'll be a roach crawling on the hand dryer. So I mean, we did have an infestation, but we got it taken care of. I only see them every now and then now.

They were always downstairs behind the fridge. It's just that there were so many downstairs, they also came to my room. Your neighbors could have roaches and you'd get roaches too. I had a friend who had these crusty roommates move in next door and then he started seeing roaches every day.

Q: Do you believe your room is indicative of the typical Roblox streamer?

A: There was this one guy who duetted my very first room cleaning video that got 4 million views. He had like a million plus subscribers on YouTube. He's a Roblox YouTuber and he was like, “That's not indicative of how we are at all,” then he showed his room and it was also a mess. So I don't know. I know plenty of people with clean rooms, I know plenty of people with dirty rooms. If I say it's every Roblox streamer, every Roblox streamer is gonna hate me. So I'm going to avoid saying that one, I'll leave that to the audience.

Q: DramaAlert, run by Keemstar, has shared a few of your videos and misgendered you in them. What’s the story behind that?

A: Well, I only found out because I had like all my friends DM me and be like, “DramaAlert posted you.” That was the first mainstream place to post my video. So at first I was super geeked out. Then I saw him just calling me a girl. I was like, “it's okay. I will stay positive about this.” But then he did it again. I was like, “okay, Keemstar enough's enough.” Then he did it a third time. He's called me a girl in every single one.

I think it's engagement bait. Maybe he did it on accident the first time, but I think the other times he was definitely just getting engagement off of it 'cause all the comms are just like, “she?” So I think he's just baiting for comments, which do your thing Keemstar, but at least tag me.

Q: What do you do to combat the cockroaches?

A: I don't really do any preventive, I just try and kill them. I have a clip from my stream where I was literally streaming and one must have fallen off my desk or something. It looked like it jumped at me and it landed right in front of me. I was like, "look, chat, a real one. They're not CGI." I've had them get underneath my keyboard between the keys and you can't get them out of your keyboard. 'Cause if I press the key to squish it, now I've got a dead roach in my keyboard. I genuinely think they were living in my keyboard 'cause when I replaced the keyboard, a lot less appeared on my desk.

Q: There’s one viral video that Joe Bartalozzi reacted to where you find a roach on your toothbrush, then wash it off and brush your teeth. Was that real?

A: I genuinely had a roach on my brush, which was kind of gross. But I did need to brush my teeth that day. So I just washed it off, I put soap on it. I brush once a week. I've never had a cavity in my life.

Q: Some people seem to think your videos are stage. Is there any truth to that?

A: No. I've had people say like, "Prove it's not a movie set." Is this not a house? Like this isn't a movie set. I have so many comments, at least like five per video saying “that's gotta be a movie set.” Like what's the point?

Q: There’s a video where you find a rat in your room. Was that one real?

A: Yeah. So one of them we found and I did my research, apparently it is a fancy rat, so it was someone's pet, but it did show up in my room. But then the other rat I adopted, because I knew it needed a second one. People release them all the time.

Q: Rapper Chief Keef actually commented on one of your videos once. What’s the story behind that?

A: So that was the one with the dead roach, I think, on the brush. It was me showering as a Roblox streamer. Unfortunately TikTok took that video down for animal abuse. I don't know why they never put it back, I appealed it, I don't know what animals I was abusing. But anyway, he commented, “nah, fix it, bro.” Then he commented again, “that's not right, “or something like that.I found it hilarious.

People still comment like, “Isn't this the guy that had Chief Keef pressed?” Chief Keef, if you ever wanna play “Halo” or something, hit me up, man. I know he sits around playing Xbox. I remember back in the day, it was a meme, “I wanna be like Chief Keef, get rich and just stop making music, buy a house and buy a bunch of Xboxes.” So Chief Keef, you ever wanna have a LAN party hit me up.

Q: You only shower once a week on Saturdays. Why?

A: I don't really sweat much. I'm just a very low maintenance person in my head. I showered the day before the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie, or the day of, I wasn't gonna go to FNAF looking greasy, so I made sure to be cleaned up for FNAF. I'll shower if I'm gonna hang out with someone, but if I'm just sitting in my room making TikToks, once a week's fine that meets the quota.

But, I do not recommend it. I'm not gonna tell people to live like me. I genuinely believe you should not shower every day. You should at least shower every other day. It is so much better for you. And that's just proven, unless you're someone who just gets greasy really quick.

Q: Do you have a job outside of streaming and content creation?

A: No, I dropped out of school. I have no job. I play League of Legends all day and make TikToks. I can afford to live like this because of how my TikTok's been doing. When I dropped out of school back in 2020, I told myself, “I'm gonna make content forever.” If it works, cool. If it doesn't, I'll just keep trying. 'Cause I knew that if I reached like 40 years old and I didn't do it, I would just hate myself. So I was like, “I might as well just at least be glad that I tried.”

Q: You recently had maids come and clean your room. Why?

A: It had gotten so bad that I seriously could not do it. It was so much stuff. When the maids got here, I had to pay like $500 for the whole house. My parents loved me for it, 'cause they cleaned everything, but when they got here, they were cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. I finally left my room, I went downstairs and within five minutes I got a call from corporate.

They were saying the maids are letting me know it's gonna take longer than expected. I had to pay an extra $100 'cause of how bad it was. So yeah, they made me pay extra because it took an extra hour to get my room clean.

Q: Do you get recognized in public? What’s that like?

A: It has been weird going out in public, getting recognized. Like I go to Chick-fil-A and the whole staff team are looking at me and coming up being like, isn't that you? I went to HEB to go shopping 'cause we were gonna do a video. We scrapped the idea.

But all these people were recognizing me and asked to take pictures and it's just so weird 'cause I have no idea how to take pictures with people. I have no idea how to stand. I'm doing the idol animation in a game. I don't know what to do. I always get so scared when someone who's handling my food recognizes me. Like, what if they don't like me? What if they like spit in my food now? That's like the scariest thing.

Q: What about family and friends? Are they aware of your virality and why you’re viral?

A: Oh, they're all laughing. The only people who had been like, weirdly concerned, I had this one friend who didn't like me in high school and his girlfriend hit me up and was like, “How about you focus on the roaches instead?” and then they like left the group chat. Like, I haven't talked to you in like two years. You're still like passive aggressive.

Q: You said during a stream that you have no trouble getting girls. Do you get lots of DMs from girls?

A: I have a lot of, a lot of girls in my DMs and they're usually really weird. Even if they aren't, like, I'm not interested in people who just hit me up 'cause of my TikTok. I'm not a CallMeCarson. No offense, CallMeCarson, but come on, man. I just, delete the DM. Like, I don't even answer. There's no point. I find it more interesting to meet a girl who doesn't know me and likes me for me. I don't want a girl to like, have a first impression of me cleaning my room. They'll never let that go.

Q: Does it ever bother you that you’re essentially known as the guy with the messy room?

A: I've grown up on the internet. I know how short-term a memory they have. Like, CallMeCarson. Nobody cares that he groomed a girl. Nobody cares that Keemstar said the words he said. There's such short-term memory on the internet. I know that this is just something that nobody will remember in a few years. I just hope I can keep my success going. I've never been someone who gets hung up on the present like that. I've been trying to be a content creator for 10 years. If this fails, I'll still keep trying.

Q: What’s your advice for aspiring content creators?

A: Don't get stuck doing the exact same thing like I did. I did that for six years, just doing the same content thinking, “oh, I just gotta get the right video out and then it'll blow up and I will be blown up forever.” You gotta actually find something that people wanna keep watching. If they don't wanna watch your content, stop making that content. People always blame the TikTok algorithm, but I genuinely believe that if your video does bad, it's because the algorithm knew that it wasn't making people to wanna keep watching.

You can follow powEnvy on TikTok, Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram @powenvy.