Interview with Spencer "NerdSwagger" Thompson

"My gaming history goes way back. I always go back to when I was 5 when my parents got me a super Nintendo with Donkey Kong. If they would have gotten me a football or baseball glove, how different I would have been. From there, I played that until my family got a computer - that's when I became a blizzard fanboy: I played Diablo, WarCraft, and Brood War. When I was really young, I use to play the WarCraft 3 tournaments they had online but always lost either 1st or 2nd round and I never knew why. I Wasn't quite patient enough to remember builds or timings or have any sort of micro. But, throughout middle school I played Halo at an amateur level, I would say. I was the best Halo player in my town (probably still am ) so I constantly played that game and was always trying to get better. I was so excited when Halo 2 came out so I could start beating people online [rather than] just my friends. Halo 2 opened a lot of doors for me, as I was able to meet some other really good guys and we formed a team for while. But, Halo was always a hard game to keep a team, as you can see from the circuit now with players always changing teams. My best memory of it was going to tournament in Kansas when I was 15 and getting 2nd place in 2v2 match with my partner, that we had never practiced together. It was the best because our other 2 teammates had practiced a ton and thought they would win the whole thing, but got knocked out right away, and us being the underdogs and not caring to much were able to make it to finals no problem. But sadly we got our butts kicked in the finals to a former Halo2 Pro, Mimic. Our team did quite poorly in 4s as it was our first event and one of our teammates had really bad rage issues with losing so it did not help team moral. After that I went into Halo3 quite loosely playing just Gamebattles with friends from town that were fairly good, and still followed the scene at MLG. From there, I just kept up with when the events were going on and moved into High school where I played WoW for 2 years (Not my finer moments in life but I wasn't old enough to drive so why not) Once I was able to drive I became a lot more social and got out of games most of my junior and senior year, just playing Halo/COD on Gamebattles again with friends nothing too serious. Then I came to college where I did the same thing my freshmen year just played Halo/COD on and off. I amazed other guys in my dorm with my dominate console FPS skills.

Funny story about SC2 - I refused to play it for the longest time. My buddy, Austin, had told me about it randomly about 2 months before it came out when Beta streams were going on. So I typed in StarCraft 2 streams in Google® and found Team Liquid right away, and started watching beta streams and brood war streams like crazy. And I mean like crazy 3-5 hours a day of just constant watching figuring out why players were doing what they were doing. My friend had opened up a worm hole for me cause I was hooked. I would almost say from that day fourth there hasn't been a day that's gone by that I haven't watched a stream for at least 1-2 hours. I got the game right away played random for a long time just so I could figure out all of the races with their strengths and weaknesses. And I never really decided back then what I wanted to play and near the end of my first semester as sophomore I had put the game down for while to concentrate on school, but still watched streams. 2nd semester, I was still just watching a lot more than playing as I was trying to do school work while I had it on in the background. I had bought a VGA cable just so I could hook it up to my 42" TV, and after that moment I really have never watched regular TV again unless I wanted to watch some golf " -NerdSwagger