EPT
I was 8 years old, and my brother was literally my best friend. We lived in Belgium, because my dad had been stationed there as part of his company, and we didn't really know anybody else but each other, except for these two kids who lived behind our back yard.
One day my brother wanted to go hang out with them. This was so long ago I can't even remember their names, and when we went into their house the older one was playing the 11th Terran mission in the single player campaign of SC. I was mesmerized. I watched him play until dinner time, and my bro did too. We played the Warcraft 2 demo, but we only cheated because we were so awful, but this game didn't look like the fuzzy daguerreotype sprites in WC2. These were graphics.
We got the game as soon as we could, in English, which took a while. And we played. My, did we play. We cheated our way through the campaign, and when BW came out we played that too, and then we played team games, 2v2s and 3v3s on BGH on bnet. We had moved back to Illinois at this point, and my older brother was beginning high school. We were playing other games, but we never had much money so we always came back to Starcraft.
We became occupied with other things, and eventually I stopped playing SC. More years passed, and then I found myself in college at the University of Iowa. And then one day I heard the SC2 had been announced. I started looking feverishly for news on it, because I had such a deep emotional connection with that game, that time in my life, and my brother. That's when I stumbled onto TL, onto the pro scene, and onto competitive BW.
For 8 months, even watching VODs and every move sAviOr made (my first hero, sad for me), I wouldn't dare try a 1v1. Finally, I got the ICCUP launcher and tried my first 1v1. I got crushed, lost my first 9 games, but I was so proud of myself for trying it. I still remember my first win, it was a ZvT on Andromeda where I went 2 hatch lurker. I remember the jubilation swelling as my lurkers crawled up his ramp and he lifted his barracks in panic.
I never broke D+, but I was proud of myself. Then beta came. My first experience was at the charity of an unnamed TL admin letting me use his account, but eventually I got nominated and selected when TL got their stacks of beta keys, and with the extra key I gave it to none other than my brother.
Now, my brother is very bad at SC. He is so bad that 3 hatch muta might have gotten to his CC before he'd thought to add an academy. Even worse, he has no time to practice or get better because he's married to a very beautiful woman (and if you'd told us, back when I was 8 and he was 11, that he'd be married before SC2 came out, we'dve laugh at you--or cried in dismay).
I knew giving him the key he was going to lose, a lot, and it was going to frustrate him, but he too feels this emotional connection to the game, and his excitement and gratitude at the key made me happy at least for a bit. And he has lost, a lot, and has been very discouraged. Meanwhile I've been practicing, a lot (I hit 1600 platinum before patch 13), and the truth is during this last game I played I realized one big reason why I've been practicing so hard.
We've been playing 2v2s, and I've been practicing so that I could carry us to victory. Because I love my brother and I want him to win. He doesn't care how, he just loves to win, just like the rest of us. I've been mass gaming partly out of boredom, partly out of love for the game, and partly because I want to get him into platinum or diamond so that he can feel like he's done honor to the emotional place the game has for him, and for me.
This game we just played was intense (rep: [url blocked] and very epic and entertaining in the way that low level games can be. He got reaper'd, had 1 probe and no nexus, I had like 9 workers, and they had no damage done to them at all, and we came back and won. If you bother to watch, maybe you'll appreciate the banter of two brothers, best friends, enjoying a game they grew up with.
If you read the whole thing, thanks. This was mainly for me to get it out. I almost wrote this because of day9 daily 100 because I get the brother-brother connection he has and how it's shaped my relationship with my brother, but I didn't because I don't pretend that random people on the internet care about my life and instead waited until it was worth it for me to get this out just for me.
Cheers.
