You're a man who needs no introduction on TL. However, you've been largely inactive for some years now and yet decided to dust off your keyboard and mouse for the last TSL. What made you take the plunge?

Nazgul had some videos of me doing "things" in korea. He promised to burn them if I participated. It's been a while since I've played. I am pretty horrendous now, but it should be a bit of fun to have a go at it. Hopefully I can share the love around, and let everyone have a chance to beat me.

How about we take a moment to (re)tell the tale of Korea - how and why you went, and what happened, in brief.

I went to one of the WCG's, did fairly badly, but the best of the Australians, we had a showmatch vs some Koreans set up and I was the only one who won a match (against Ssamjang on his return to progaming match). They offered me (quite stupidly) to stay on in Korea, but I didn't realize how big it was back then and turned it down. I then practiced a lot more for the next WCG, and took a gamble, and extended my visa for the full 3 months. Fortunately I was picked up by a sponsor, which I stayed with until I made the top 8 of the 512 person, MBC amateur tourney. I did enough to impress the POS [Editors Note: Pirates of Space] (awesome awesome guys) team, and I moved to be with them. After that I had a lot of fun, traveled a lot playing computer games for a living, met a lot of fantastic people and all in all had a blast.

You had a blast and all killed Toona in the process? Tell us a bit about the smackdown you delivered to Silver /Ogogo /Goodfriend / Nal_Rock and the events that surrounded it.

It was a showmatch, between POS team and TOONA (pre nada). The team decided to throw me out first to have a bit of experience playing up on stage, and so I went out not expecting much (even less since my first opponent was a Zerg). I was actually really relaxed because everyone including myself thought I was going to get demolished. Being so relaxed probably helped.

First game against Silver I almost lost straight away when I let some zerglings in, but managed to destroy the other guys main with some nifty reaver shuttling with zealots and DTs. Then after that the first game was fairly much over.

Second game was on the volcanic 4-player map (I forget its name, its on youtube I think) vs ogogo, who I'd played with a bit online in practice games. I went sair DT and expanded -- it was a long game -- and I had some pretty nice micro in it. The best part was the final storm, which killed every zergling of his final attack. Picture perfect way to see "GG" come up

Then I took on Goodfriend (I can't remember much about this match) and Rock, who I took down with reaver / carrier work. It was fairly weird, I couldn't believe that I kept winning. I'm sure the manager bribed Toona team to let me win! I think being so relaxed and calm about it all, and just thinking about strategies helped a lot. Its definitely good advice for people when the play. Oh yeah -- It was the first ever Protoss All-Kill!

Wow. Which year was this again?

Must have been back in 2002? (FYI Game vs ogogo was on Dark Sauron, 4-part series on Youtube... yes I just Youtubed myself).

Let's talk a bit now about Korea at the time. Today, when we tune into the OGN/MBC streams, or just watch the VODs we want on Youtube, the games, players and scene we see is no doubt very different to what you walked into when you first stepped off that plane in Seoul.

When i first went to Korea, everything was about Boxer. Yellow was a distant second. Elky was doing fairly good. And it was when Nada was starting his rise. Oh and Reach was still a love muffin. Back then, it was pretty much Z > P >= T > Z. And you could still get away with some funky builds.

Funky? Do tell us more.

Sair DT into Reaver then Templar expansion from 1 base (think of the gas) vs Zerg could work if you did it well (vs 2nd grade pros). Yet nowadays trying to do that would get you annihilated. Gundam rushes were in fashion. Man he was good -- until he fell out of bed one time and broke his hand. An unlikely story that one, I think he and Elky were doing something kinky. People just became so much better so fast.

Haha, the amount of dirt you have on ex-progamers must give you considerable leeway with them.

Blackmail always works... just ask Nazgul. He knows how to use blackmail well...

Hahaha, OK let's get back to progamer gossip in a bit. Right now, give us your thoughts on gameplay. You said everyone got better fast. However, one might also argue that 'creative play' has suffered because of this.
Agreed. Of course the game always evolves (Stork / Bisu style PvZ etc), but I never would have thought it was possible when I was playing. I think replays killed creativity more than anything else, as it made everyone improve and learn faster than they would have normally.

That's interesting, Boxer said the same thing in a recent interview. Since you mentioned that the progaming scene you stepped into was all about Boxer and the rise of Nada, why not tell us a bit about your interactions with Lim Yo Hwan and Lee Yoon Yeol and what it was like to rub shoulders with them at their prime?

First time i ever played Boxer, was on my birthday (pre Korea) a Korean friend set up the game. He did hidden factory, built 2-3 vults and ran into my undefended main on LT (my goons were attacking his main). GG in under 6 mins.

Yellow was by far the friendliest of all of the top progamers, he went out of his way to try and talk to you and say hi. (I sat next to him at one of my first tournaments). Nada was pretty cool, I practiced with him on some maps when i was practicing for the ITV league (July and I dominated that league early on and we took down some of the top team, we made it to the finals, or semi finals). I didn't hang out with them too much socially. After all... they were the enemy.

Who were you with on POS at the time then, and how was the team in general? Tell us a bit about practice and of course, play.

BlueK (old school first generation terran), JulyZerg (prior to his Domination, ie pre 2 Hidden Lurker zergling rushes he did every game), TerAtO (good protoss), Junitoss (good PvZ player), then some cool dong sengs, Shark, and a few others. The team was awesome, players were great, everyone was friendly, they all had an amazing drive to win, and all wanted to learn and get better.

I was fairly lazy in comparison. Junitoss and Shark would play 30+ sometimes 40 games a day. It was amazing. The team was fairly poor as they had no / or minimal sponsorship, and they were just trying to survive. In the end that's what forced us (Brian - Assem and myself) to leave.

We used to have "Team matches" where everyone in the team played everyone else and we'd rank ourselves. If you lost you had to clean up the house! It was a good motivator. Everyone lived in a sort of dorm style accommodation, and had a big LANset up in the lounge room, fun times. Some of my best times in korea were in that team.

So back then, would it be fair to say that there was no "foreigner scene" per se? If so, how did one evolve?

The foreigner scene was very fragmented at the time, everyone played on the Korean servers, with everyone pretending to be a Korean so that the real Koreans wouldn't just leave the game before it started. If you had Korean friends you could set up games, but beyond that you were excluded a bit from the Korean scene, just from skill difference / latency issues / language barrier.

So, this in a way led to foreigners playing among themselves?

I think as WCG and other tournaments made some foreigners more famous, it sort of helped integrate everyone playing together, the better community servers and other things also helped. Oh shinji (old school z) was also on POS. He just sent me an email! Ahhh.. spam... just what you like to see in your inbox thx Shinji.

Apart from WCG though, what sort of tournaments did the foreign community have in its early years?
They had their own tournies, like Australia had their own server that we all played on, there wasn't really too much. WGTOUR and other ladders came along a short while later, and that helped out as well. Quite a few Koreans played on WGTour in the early days. Junitoss and July were right up there at the top of the ladder.

OK let's time travel a little. The TSL was called the first tournament of its kind in the foreign scene. What "kind" would that be?

Large prize money, well organised tourney for foreigners. Simple as that.

Having said that, how would you summarise this second TSL?
Larger prize money, well organised tourney for foreigners? (Which had some Protoss's luckbox their way through to the top group!)

Haha. Alright, let's talk about the ladder. Apart from Nazgul's "persuasion" why did you decide to play the ladder, both in the last TSL and in this?

I was bored, I hadn't played Starcraft for a long time, and I felt like seeing how well I could do. And its always good to participate in foreigner tournies, it has a good atmosphere mainly because they get so few opportunities to experience something like that. And this one, as I heard players had difficulty finding easy opponents last time, I've been put into the tourney to help out and provide free wins for whoever wants them.

As someone who experienced the "real deal" in Korea, how would you rank the TSL ladder in terms of being a gaming experience?

In Korea its all about the competition, and the pressure and anticipation really mount. As I said the atmosphere is different for the foreigner ones, as although the competition is still there, everyone is more eager and have more fun as its more of a unique experience, just because there are so few opportunites like it. I think its fantastic that these events can still occur for such an old game. Fantastic props to the TL staff who made this happen, and thx to PokerStrategy.com for their support.

With so many top foreigners on the ladder, why should Joe Noob even play when he can barely break D+ on ICCUP?

J Noob vs ex progamer Legionnaire. 3:0 whitewash! Joe Noob wins!

It's a free tournament, in something that will be talked about for a long time to come. Why wouldn't you participate? Its definitely an experience people should try out no matter what their skill level. They can learn new things and improve their game, or at the very least have some fun trying

Alright, that's about it! Thanks for talking to us, and good luck on the ladder!

Thanks a lot, it should be a lot of fun. Good luck to all who participate.