By

Zealously

Artosis once said that all kings must die. The quote became somewhat infamous, though for its humor rather than its wisdom. After all, the fact hardly merits speaking out loud at all. Starcraft is a high-stakes stage where players square off in matches decided by the most minute details. Like all such competitive mediums, every king—even those considered untouchable during their respective ages—must eventually crumble and fade away from the spotlight. All that remains of those once-great kingdoms are the legacies, the leftover memories that sustain and direct the next generation of conquerors.

If the king is fortunate, he leaves behind a victorious legacy. A panoply of victories for his oeurve leave behind an almost palpable memory of success, and subsequently an arresting imago. We remember Boxer and Mvp for their seemingly superhuman abilities both when they were supposed to win and more so when they weren't. More than anything else we idolize these champions, the ones whose identities were defined by their preternatural ability to win.



We raise high those who stand above their peers by virtue of their victories alone, their impossible successes and unlikely championships immortalized. These players are the greats of our game, defining each generation of players by driving the game — sometimes alone — the game into a new era.

This article is dedicated to the ones that were on the cusp, who laid the groundwork of kingdoms never finished, the ones that fell on the finish line just before they could create lasting legacies. This article is about the tragic almost-heroes of Starcraft, those whose legacies came to be tainted by their losses instead of defined by their victories. The perpetual kings of silver: the kongs.

To understand the identity of a kong we must first attempt to understand what creates the perception of the kong as something completely unique from other players.

It is in the very nature of competition to break the hearts of many competitors. Inevitably, every one of those who partake in the competition must eventually lose. If this were not the case, there would be no purpose to the competition. This is the essence that draws in those who would compete with others to prove their superiority and the reason that so many would give up thousands and thousands of hours in their quest for championships, and the reason that so many abandon their passion after coming to terms with the fact that they may never be the best.

Starcraft fans do not see results the same way fans of traditional sports do. Given the short lifespan of a game such as Starcraft, the even shorter careers of its players, and the lack of quantitative data besides placements, fans flock to champions and quickly move on when those players stop winning. Winners are easy to admire and require no effort to understand. They win, therefore they are worthy of respect. There are many examples of players that won a single championship and maintained a strong presence thereafter; however, they were discarded and forgotten once the novelty wore off. Conversely, there are precious few players that garnered significant fan followings without making multiple finals.

This isn't to say that fair-weather fans don't exist in traditional sports, but their persistence is greater in comparison. Streaks of dominance often span years instead of months (the Pep Guardiola era of FC Barcelona is roughly comparable to a Summer of Taeja). When periods of dominance end fans do migrate and seek the next big thing, but they do not do so before having suffered at least a fair share of defeats. In Starcraft, only the players that win championships are paid the respect given to those who play well in traditional sports. In Stacraft, the players that play well but do so away from the very biggest championship stages receive cult followings at best and suffer premature retirements at worst, never having been given the opportunity to prove that they could rank among the game's best. There is not enough room for all these players to get by simply by playing well. More is demanded.



Forever immortalized: Fruitdealer


This obsession with trophies and championships, more than anything, is what creates our kongs and silver surfers. Complete U-turns in fan approval are not rare, so the players that do not follow up on their successes can be discarded at flukes at a whim. It is much easier, and far more comfortable, to label a player either a fluke or a kong than it is to appreciate the difficulty of producing such a fluke in the first place. The ubiquitous demand for championships tells the players that unless they win, they are inconsequential and forgettable. For some this might be a motivator, but for most it threatens to break them.

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Those who fully dedicate their lives to competition take their losses the hardest. 200 Butterfly is "just a race" to Michael Phelps about as much as a nuclear firestorm is "just a spark" and Phelps' loss to Le Clos at the 2012 Olympics was, as he himself later admitted, a much bigger disappointment than it "should be". Second best in the world, leaving behind the greatest legacy of any athlete in the history of the sport, yet not nearly enough.



This is the mindset of a true competitor, and it is the driving force behind both history's greatest competitive leaps forward and the most devastating collapses in sports. It brings with it the pressure to perform, which brought up as the primary reason behind disappointing losses and surprising slumps. When you both expect to win and are expected to win, second feels pitiful and weak. This builds an expectation, a personal demand that cannot always be met. Players push on, partly driven by the pressure, but very rarely fully embracing it. Usain Bolt may thrive in the spotlight and feed off the pressure ("I got no nerves, no nerves!"), but he is an anomaly who stands apart rather than the norm. To the vast majority, pressure is an obstacle that limits their ability to perform. This is why many players* are rumored to perform better in practice, where they are out of reach from the demands placed upon them.
*Known in Starcraft as "practice bonjwas", many players have been pegged as future champions by their more succesful teammates due to their prowess in practice. Frequently, these expectations are not met until much later, if ever.

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What can be said about the kong that has not already been talked and written about in-depth? Every competition must have its first loser, and even the best players will sometimes fall short of the mark. But these players hardly seem worthy of the same admiration, crushed as they are beneath the expectations and the pressures of competition.

I offer an alternative view. I invite you to consider the immense significance of the kongs and try to envision Starcraft without them. Their stories may be few, but they are both powerful and distinctive. In a manner identical to that of the greatest champions, the kongs define their eras and provide us with the stories that keep us interested. After all, would Boxer really be the same without YellOw? What would you remember most clearly about GSL 2014 without soO's dominance and subsequent failures? What jokes could you make about aLive if his crowning achievement had not been taking one of the most dominant bracket runs of all time away from an exhausted Squirtle?

It is easy to flock to the champions, to identify with their successes and simply go along. It is much harder to support a player defined by his adversities, more comfortable to simply pity them than to identify with their humanity. That is the essence of the kong: the humanity. They are not the revered champions standing above the competition, seemingly unbeatable. They are those we can identify with on a more basic level, the players we can truly understand. We see their struggles and follow them, every step of the way, fully conscious that a big break may not ever come.

Without YellOw, Boxer loses many of the moments that defined his career. Without Squirtle, Mvp no longer stands alone in the world as the most cold-blooded and calculated player in Starcraft II. Without soO, there is no centerpiece to hold 2014 together, no consistency in an otherwise chaotic story. That is the role the kongs have had to fill. They strove for greatness and in their drive to take the gold, they fell again and again and again. But it is in their struggle that their legacies have grown. They are the unsung heroes, the shadows that give depth to the Winners' light. The players who became the final sacrifices to the glory of the Champions