My handle is yetieater, first used in online gaming with Command & Conquer: Renegade.
I wouldn’t accept any 1337-speak derivative of a common word, and trailing numbers didn’t interest me.
I decided on yetieater because it was so absurd that no one else would think to use it. What I envisioned was a being so mythical that it hunted down and consumed the elusive yeti as a staple.
I knew that it was a success when, in one match, a player on the other team said to hide all of the yetis in the barracks.
I’ve been using this handle since 2002. Over the years, I took pride in seeing the number of search results for the term grow, knowing it was something that I had brought into the world.
I suspected that only a rare stroke of luck would see anyone else competing with me for the name. Unfortunately, someone else beat me to it on both Xbox Live and Twitch!