EPTWARNING - This will be a moderately long read.
My first game occurred in a quite shady situation. Some background first - I moved from China to the US in 1992 at age 3, settling in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. If you didn't know, that place is about as southern as it gets, though perhaps with a higher black % than the stereotypical southern locale. I estimate that the demographics at the time in the area I lived was about 90% black, 10% white, and 1 other Asian family.
The SNES was released in the US in 1991. By 1995, it was decently old, and I had never heard of it. Hell, I had not yet even heard of the concept of playing games on a digital platform, not that I even knew what digital was. So, I got my introduction to gaming in a rather nontraditional way. I wandered into some big fat black guy's apartment and played against him in a SNES football game. Keep in mind I was only 6 at the time - pretty sketchy eh? He probably let me win since I did win most of the time... in fact I can't even remember ever losing.
Enter the PC. By the time I had my first PC, I had become rather adept at console games. I'd been introduced to the wonder world of Street Fighter and abused Dhalsim's long as hell reach on all my friends. Looking back on it, it was pretty much scrub piling on scrub, but it didn't matter to us. All that mattered was the fun of the game and the intensely competitive yet amicably social aspect which was rivaled only by anime roleplay.
My first PC was a 1996 Micron computer. It had an amazing 1 gb hard drive, 8 megs of RAM, and 2(!) mb of VRAM. What an awesome machine. The 15" CRT was the perfect 40 pound fit to round out the whole package. I spent evenings preparing the new demo I would download, be it Sierra Baseball or some other random thing I found on CNET. Do you remember dial-up? The cranky noises, the oh so slow 56k connection that sounded so great until you had to get a download manager, and they all displayed in kilobytes - not bits - and thus you got stare at a lovely 6.6 kB/s download speed at best... and downloading a demo took all night... and then some.
But I digress. Those demos were pussy shit. The first REAL man's game I played was Doom. Awwww yea. You are lying if you were not scared shitless when your first pink fat blob monster ran at you at full speed. You'd probably been used to shooting slow retarded zombies before then - but the pink blobs! Holy shit! Doom was the first PC game that actually got me involved - and the first one I spent the time to fully defeat. Can't beat my 9 weapon oh no you can't. Curiously, I didn't play Doom on my own computer. I actually played it on a friend's computer, and his computer was very queer. See my computer had C drive, D drive, and I forget what the floppy drive was. His computer had drives A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z. What the fuck.
I soon discovered another interesting genre of games. You see, I had a PC but no SNES. But wait! Some smart guy wrote an emulator... yata~! I don't remember how I discovered the world of SNES roms, but I came across it by myself and that pretty much made my phone line utterly useless lol.
Oh! During this period, the N64 came out, and while I didn't play it much, I sure as hell played a level of Goldeneye completely wrong. It was a Siberian level, out in the snow, in the open. I know I horribly fucked it up because I ran around shooting and killing people for a good 45 minutes while repeatedly running out of ammo and resorting to scavenging dead bodies for their munitions. But, I was definitely doing it wrong.
One other thing - during this time, I played my first RTS. Command and Conquer: Red Alert. My strategy consisted of one of the following:
1) Play Soviets and play a metric shitton of tanks and push.
2) Play Allies on a self made abusive island map and shell the living shit out of my computer foe with Cruisers.
I never once play Red Alert on Westwood Online. Alas, I was a nubby nub who only bashed the computer. Also, did I mention there was no such thing as attack move? Seriously, what asshole designed that UI for that game.
Somewhere along the way, I suddenly became an even more studious person than before, focusing on math and piano. I was actually pretty decent in both, getting to nationals in Mathcounts both years of middle school, as well as finishing first in state in various piano competitions. This was probably good for my finger capabilities in later games, as well as my reasoning abilities. But of course, this was only a temporary digression.
Because Red Alert 2 came out, awwwww yea. I had a bit better idea of what I was doing by this point. I didn't just tech asap and have jack shit econ and army along the way. Oh no, when my cousins in China challenged me to 1v1, I killed those fools with t1. MASS t1. Guess what, macro more macro better actually works at low level!
During my freshman year of high school, I met this weird korean kid named Young. He played Starcraft. At some point, I started playing it. And I got mass sunkened, goliath dropped, got fucked up by cloaked wraiths, reavers, carriers, scouts, I don't even want to remember the full list of obscenities which were visited upon my poor zealots and dragoons. Now at this time I really had 0 concept of how an RTS like Starcraft should be approached. I also did not know TL existed... and this was what, 2004 or 2005? I guess my excuse is that TL was relatively young still at that point and He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named was still a baby faced scrub. To think he would soon become God and be sacrificed upon Longinus, the spear which pierced God Himself, by the Revolutionist.
I still remember my first question about Starcraft's gameplay. See I didn't realize the bar under the HP bar was for energy, so as I watched my friend Peter play Starcraft and use some battlecruisers, I said: "WTF this is bullshit, units have ammo in this game?". Yea....
So I installed the game using Young's cd key, which I still remember btw and recently shared with Piqliq because I was very amused by the fact that I could actually remember my Starcraft cd key after years of not having typed it in. Contrast this with the fact that I have no idea what my Warcraft 3 cd key was despite way too much DOTA.
As every new scrub does, I did not play 1v1. I played.... Big Game Hunters, Ultimate Micro Jail, Fastest Map Possible, Zero Clutter, Diplo 7.7 Gold, and of course.... Helm's Deep version Annatar. Back then, I played the game purely for the random fun of it. I didn't even play the game that the designers necessarily had in mind - my main focus was on custom games, those unexpected creations of unexpected people. Such great times. Oh! There was also Turret Defense by ghost[yoon] or something like that.... how could I forget? There was another map that involved some guy named Cygnus, which curiously led me to search (was it Yahoo search back then?) what a Cygnus is, which led me to the black hole and a deep interest in astro...
As they say, time seems to get denser and more full of eventful events the further you get into the future (or in our case, the present). The same will happen here.
In my junior year of high school, I successfully entered an application-only boarding school. It was THE state funded school, which accepted a class of 300 each year from around North Carolina. Yep, it's the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics (NCSSM). Here we had a veritable school of nerds. Jocks too of course, but more importantly, nerds!
Now there's one thing you should know about this school before we proceed. Friendships developed at this school are really deep, because the class is so small that you literally know everyone at school. Remember that each class is 300 people, and you can only get in for your junior and senior years, so we have a total of 600 students at the school at any given time. It's really quite exclusive. So you could see all sorts of funny things going on on hall.... for example once some guy was knocking at the door (I was busy playing techies) and then when I looked over to see who it was, I saw someone who will not be named, but he was full naked and waving hello with his penis. Fun times.
But we digress. Back to the gaming components. There are two halls that are very far apart. 4th West and 2nd Bryan. Basically, it entailed walking down from the top floor of one dorm building, walking all the way across campus, then going up to 2nd Bryan (which is where I lived). Now 2nd Bryan is a relatively isolated place as far as guy's halls go. In fact, it was a girl's hall. Sometime for 2 years between renovations it was turned into a guy's hall, before it later reverted back into a girl's hall. So, we were surrounded by girls on all sides while the guys were on the other side of campus.
There were actually a lot of gamers on campus. Quite a few Counterstrike players, a whole triple (room for 3 people) full of them in fact, and by that I mean you can stuff the room full with them. I only rarely occasioned into that crowd though. I usually stuck with the SC/WC3 crowd. Now I should mention that Dota was the rage. I mean sure, we played ICCUP and shit, but we were D+ noobs. Dota however was hilarious, because we would play full 5v5 inhouse with observers.
Another thing you should know about our school. After midnight, you were supposed to be in your room. That means if there are 15 people in a room playing Dota or watching 300.... well you can get into serious trouble if you're caught. There was also this SLI named Creech who was definitely out to catch you, but oh we were sneaky. Very sneaky except for one case where a guy left his door open... so Creech saw no one was in there. Since we were prime candidates when it came to illicit covens, we were immediately searched and caught -_-. Great, more work cleaning the stairs fml.
But speaking of illicit gatherings - another rule is that we're not allowed to have people from the outside in our rooms overnight unless we filled out the paperwork to do so. However, we needed a guy for SC/Dota fun one night. So, we just snuck him over ^__^. This time we held the lan in Bryan, which had markedly smaller rooms. We needed more computers, so we actually lugged some desktops across campus... and since the desks wouldnt fit them all, some people happily played on the bunk beds themselves, and others on the futon (myself included).
I don't know if you've ever played that easter egg bunny map that comes with WC3 TFT, but if you haven't, you should. "Hippity hoppity, hopping on the bunny trail." "I got sharp, point teeth!" Fun times ~
It was at NCSSM that I first ran into TL. One day in our nerd room, it was mentioned how Savior was so great and invincible. The next day was GOM MSL. Yep, THAT one. Somehow that led me to TL, and 4 months later I signed up! I immediately started playing PvZ only on ICCUP, since the Bisu Build was the greatest thing since sliced bread. I managed to get to about 3800 points with a 70%+ win ratio before stopping for the season, doing nothing but FFE into mass corsair zealot archon.
I was getting more and more into the competitive aspect of games, mainly Starcraft thanks to TL. I watched every finals from GOM MSL onwards for something like 3 years. I was so dissapointed when Bisu failed to win his 3rd straight MSL, falling to Mind, who then never won another MSL -_-.
I took a break from SC and divulged into the depths of WoW. I played a hunter in TBC but didn't really play it, was pretty casual. During WOTLK I played hardcore starting from Ulduar, taking a break in TOGC and then resuming somewhat in arena during ICC. Racing for Ulduar top 10 world dps meters on the hardmodes was curiously enticing - such a fun race, except for when I got shit drops occasionally and thus fell slightly behind in gear. But, since my guild was well progressed, I ended up being close enough to stay competitive on dps. In the end, I had top 10 on half the hardmodes and had achieved #1 on 3 or so of them.
During my arena experience, I played holy pally on either TSG or PHD teams. Also known as holy fuck keep everyone alive and active and watch shit get blown the fuck up. In 2v2 I played with a warrior from my guild, and we were both absolutely maxed in a mix of arena and hardmode pve gear. It was nice that he had Shadowmourne too ^^. We had a pretty sick record, getting to something like 2300 before losing our first game, which was to the rank 1 team on the battlegroup -_-. Fucking rogues....
But really there's not much to talk about there. WoW, despite its social aspects, is relatively barren for most in the community compared to what we have in SC today. I really do think it was the esport that never happened, because arena was actually pretty entertaining for me to watch. PvE obviously was pretty damn boring to watch, which makes me wonder why so many WoW events focused on having top guilds raid live...
In 2010 I returned to Starcraft. The reason for this was the Collegiate Starleague. There is something different between just playing Starcraft, maybe entering some tourneys, and representing your university in competition against other universities. There is something official feeling about it even though it was a totally adhoc affair. We didn't really do very well in CSL - it was the NCSSM crowd basically, having been transplanted to UNC. Since we were only about C- level, we tended to lose more than we won.
That changed however when Starcraft 2 came out. I won't bore you with the details of watching GSL, MLG, IEM, IPL, NASL, all that kind of stuff. That you are already familiar with in your own way. Starcraft 2 was an opportunity in CSL to wipe the slate clean. Sure, some people would have better mechanics than others, but in terms of knowledge, the game was new for everyone. Case in point - Artosis tried the worst 3 stargate 1 base play I've ever seen back in the beta. Except for the part where it wasn't particularly bad for the standards at the time. He actually had a decent chance of winning in that game...
We finished with a 7-6 record in our second season of CSL. Not the best record, but we did beat the #1 team in our division in the first week, which was pretty awesome. I finished that series with a 4 gate victory =)
But you see, that was still just over the internet competition. It wasn't live - it wasn't like an MLG for collegiate competition. That changed with CES (Collegiate E-Sports Series). It was an invitational of 24 teams to Indianapolis, where we competed live. I actually worked on the backend for that event in addition to playing. As a result, in the eliminating set against IU in the round of 8, I pussied out of a won position against vVvMurder and subsequently lost the game. Three hours of sleep man
. It was something like 8 stalkers, 2 sentries, a zealot, and 2 immortals + observer at the top of his ramp vs 5 marines, a banshee, and a tank (after I busted his nat).But results aside, it was amazing. For many players on our team, it was the first lan they had every been to, as they hadn't played at MLG like I and 2 others on the team had. We actually played at both MLG Raleigh and DC, and there is a certain story involving a certain incident which happened at DC which I cannot talk about, but let's put it this way - when you get your tires replaced, make sure it's not by an overeager mechanic.
You really cannot underestimate the effect lan jitters have on people who haven't competed in major lans before. Here we were, competing in a large facility containing various antique and otherwise amazing and expensive cars. There was some old but very well maintained Ferrari, ,I think it was, right behind the UNC table. We had to be careful not to run into it when walking around. Can't leave scratches on such a fine piece of engineering after all.
We drove 11 hours to get to the event. Alternating drivers, driving through a ridiculous rainstorm that had visibility reduced to a few feet, driving through mountains where we could no longer stream TSL on our smartphones and had no gps reception. It was worth all of it, such an amazing weekend.
So here we are today. UNC is currently 4-0 in our division, and 12-0 in individual sets. Admittedly our division isn't very strong, but it's still something. There are CSL lans planned for the season, and we will be getting funding to attend them as there is now an official E-Sports club at our school, with over 100 members in the Facebook page. It's nothing compared to UNC basketball, but it's a start. I would never have imagined this happening back when I first started playing Brood War all those years ago...
Whew. Short summary of my gaming history. I could have gone on for so much longer in so much more depth, but that's something more suited for video or audio format.
I would like nothing more than to work in the e-sports industry in a very personal role. I don't expect to become the best progamer nor do I intend to devote the time to become such a person, unless some random, unexpected proposal came forward. I do believe that if I dedicated myself to becoming a pro, I could do it. But I couldn't reasonably dedicate myself to that particular goal given the current window.
However, certain things are underway now that might in the end lead to an e-sports career being possible. I am by education a computer scientist, but I already know that that field is not where my passion lies. I've found it already in the fusion of the community and the game. It's really quite a wonderful thing.
May e-sports keep growing from the ground up. The addition of the collegiate field is but a measure towards that goal.
Happy 5k to me~
p.s. I've played a LOT more games too, but all in passing and in a shallow fashion. Not really worth mentioning in a short summary :D
I still have a long journey ahead of me.
