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GAMING FOR DOLLAR$

A Look Inside the Professional Competitive Gaming Scene

MLG on the Old TV

The weekly MLG series—which ran on Saturday mornings under sponsorship from Boost Mobile, Red Bull and Scion automobiles this past winter—was the most successful attempt yet to transform the thriving competitive gaming scene into a TV-level spectator sport.

The dark horse team in the 2006 finals was Carbon, a foursome that had executed a major personnel change in midseason, after which it went on the rampage, posing the first serious challenge to Final Boss, the iconic 2005 MLG champions led by rising superstar Dave "Walshy" Walsh.

In the finals, two teams of four players go deathmatch on one another, and the first team to score 50 kills is declared the winner. As the sixth game wound down, Carbon—which had upset Final Boss earlier in the season—was on the way to repeating its success in the finals. At 43 kills, Carbon was a mere seven well-placed shots from vaulting to the MLG Championship and scoring $100,000 in the process.

Final Boss was stuck behind Red Base when Saiyan, one of its players, suddenly came to life. He had been struggling all day against Carbon—and especially its team captain, Shock- wave—but now, along with Walshy and twin brothers Ogre1 and Ogre2, he began to fight back. The score was soon 45-40, still in favor of Carbon. Then Walshy decided to lift Final Boss on his shoulders and went on a spree that eventually tightened the score to 47-44. Final Boss needed to come back and win this game in order to force a seventh confrontation.

Suddenly Karma came alive and scored a kill, putting Carbon within two kills of victory. Carbon´s Ghandi then turned off a member of Final Boss and, miracle of miracles, Carbon stood one kill away from seizing top honors in the ´06 season. Coming so close to such an improbable victory seemed to transport several members of Carbon into a state of momentary vapor lock. Team members began standing up, as if the match was over. The crowd was going wild as Walshy and Ogre1 got it together and started hitting targets. When Walshy caught fire and took the score to 49-47, Shockwave suddenly asserted his authority as captain of Carbon and began barking orders at his teammates. "Sit down!" he screamed. "What are you doing? It isn´t over!"

As if snapped out of its trance, the rest of Carbon took their seats as Shockwave blasted Walshy for the final kill…and this time, nobody complained when Carbon rose up in triumph and exulted in this unexpected victory. Final Boss, meanwhile, tossed their controllers away in disgust, in a manner familiar to every frustrated gamer since Pong.

Meet Walshy

Final Boss, on the precipice of becoming a dynasty, had faltered. But then, that´s what makes for the drama that is sport. When I spoke to Dave Walsh just months after the defeat in the finals in Las Vegas, he had already mustered a wait-tillnext- season optimism. (In fact, next season starts April 13th in Charlotte, NC.)

Things are, after all, pretty good for Dave "Walshy" Walsh. His MLG spotlight has placed the charismatic 22-year-old who graduated from a southern Michigan high school in 2003 onto the media radar. His estimated income from gaming, sponsorships and prize money is pretty close to six figures, and he´s even launched his own clothing line—Kiaeneto—for the kind of people who like to play video games all day.

But before we get into the details of his history and life as a professional gamer, I must ask him The Question: How badly does he rib his parents about all the times they told him to stop playing those damned video games and do something useful?

He laughs. "It´s bad, because these days they give crap to other parents! They tell them, you know, ´We used to tell him to stop playing and I guess we were wrong.´" In fact, Dave has been playing video games for as long as he can remember. He grew up playing his parents´ Atari VCS and Nintendo Entertainment System and moved on from system to system as he matured.

Playing competitive team FPS (first-person shooter) games requires the kind of dedication a concert musician could respect. Walshy estimates that he spends about 20 hours a week practicing during a typical week, but can double that during the run-up to a major tournament.

It has become part of gamer lore that Counter-Strike or Halo 2 pro players can´t afford to play any game but their specialty. Dave, however, just got a Wii and admits to playing Zelda on it. "As far as Xbox," he said, "I mainly play Halo 2. When I´m done with that, I don´t like to play a lot of other first-person shooters because I´m kinda burned out a little bit and I like to relax."

Walshy realized he was good enough to compete at a fairly high level from his very first tournament in Nashville. "I´d only had [the original] Halo for about three months and the game had been out for more than a year," he explains. "I´d only played with my local friends and I went to this tournament over spring break because I had nothing going on. So I drove down with three of my friends and there was a 1V1 tournament and a 4V4 tournament. In the [singles] tournament I took fifth out of like 300 people, and in the 4V4 tournament our team ended up finishing around 17th, but that was playing with [neighborhood] friends. It was apparent that I was pretty good and I just took it from there."

Many of the top Halo teams were attending that tournament as well and Walshy quickly began receiving invitations to jam with these quartets. "I realized that I was a lot better than my friends and I should be looking to get on a top team."

This career as a pro gamer has basically snuck up on Walshy. Does he see himself eventually becoming the Tony Hawk of competitive gaming? "I don´t think that´s gonna happen," he said. "You know, I always treated this…even in the first year or two when I was doing this professionally and I was starting to make a decent amount of money off it, I really still treated it like a side thing. I said, ´I´m still going to college, I want to get a business degree—I´m not sure what kind of job I want yet—but this is definitely a hobby and I enjoy it.´ But once it got to the point where I was making more money [in competitive gaming] than I was at my summer job, I thought, ´wow, maybe I should take this a bit more seriously.´ I´m trying to take it step by step."

Changes

In a move guaranteed to start the storylines spinning in the upcoming season, Final Boss dropped Ryan "Saiyan" Danford after losing to Carbon in Las Vegas and replaced him with Michael "Strongside" Cavanaugh. Strongside, in turn, had been dropped by Carbon in the middle of the ´06 season and replaced by Eric "Ghostayame" Hewitt. The move paid off big time for Carbon, which then went on a run that took them all the way to the championship title.

Strongside, meanwhile, had moved on to the team Legendz, where he sharpened his 4V4 skills to the point where Final Boss became convinced that he was the key to regaining their status as the top 4V4 Halo 2 squad in the 2007 MLG season. "Ironically enough, we wound up picking up a teammate that Carbon dropped in mid-season: Strongside," Walshy explained. "We picked him up after Vegas and we´ve been practicing with him ever since."

A team, it seems, is sort of like a band. A great bass player may not do his best work even when playing with other skilled musicians if their styles clash. Thus, Final Boss believes that Strongside is the answer to its problems.

"Obviously, Carbon made a good move dropping Strongside, because they were really dominant toward the end of the season with Ghost," Walshy conceded. "But we feel like Strongside fit on our team really well. He´s a bit more aggressive than Ryan ["Saiyan" Danford]. Saiyan would sit back and he´s a really good score player, but it just seemed as if we needed a bit more firepower. In those times where everyone is just running around and we don´t have any kind of setup, we just need someone who can outshoot everyone else and just get those kills that we need. Just like a baseball team might need a stronger pitching staff and they´ve already got a good [offensive] lineup, they might trade one of their hitters for a new relief pitcher. It´s just a matter of finding the right balance for your team."

The Leagues of Extraordinary Gamers

MLG is hardly the only organization that sponsors game tournaments and boasts star players. By the end of the ´90s, the legendary Johnathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel had become the first competitive gamer to gain a degree of mainstream recognition. He has subsequently appeared on an installment of 60 Minutes on the subject of professional game players and his game name is familiar to anyone even remotely familiar with the competitive gaming scene.

After decades of random tournaments staged by a rainbow of game producers and competitive organizations that held competitions in everything from air hockey to pinball, regional LAN tournaments began to morph into organized leagues at the end of the last century. Today we see a wide range of competitive electronic game leagues, from old-school Counter-Strike playing, PC-based organizations like the venerable Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL) to omnibus groups like the Global Gaming League (GGL), which embraces both PC and console competition and now even owns Snoop Dog´s Hip Hop Gaming League.

And the phenomenon is hardly unique to the U.S. (where gamers would generally rather not mess with the feared Korean and Pacific Rim gunslingers). Then there is the near-mythical Tougeki Super Battle Opera (better known in some quarters as the Arcadia Cup) in which players compete in nearly a dozen different games from multiple genres in a grueling, three-day gaming marathon that features some of the most masterful video game players in the world.

But the MLG, and its co-founder Sundance DiGiovanni, have one potent advantage: TV exposure which creates the public perception that MLG is indeed the "major league" of competitive gaming. When the typical American sports fan discusses mixed martial arts (MMA), they think of the Ultimate Fighting Championships (UFC). Of course, there are many MMA groups, several of which (such as Pride and K1´s Heroes promotion) are arguably superior in terms of talent and financial resources. But UFC established itself first on U.S. television via Pay- Per-View and then snatched a regular slot on Spike TV, from which it created stars who, to the uninitiated, became the biggest names in the sport.

MLG not only has TV exposure and star charisma in players like Dave Walsh, but DiGiovanni, who also serves as the Joe Roganesque color man for the MLG broadcasts, possesses just the skills needed to sell competitive gaming to the mass market. And given his stint as the gaming commentator on ESPN´s Cold Pizza, Sundance is rapidly becoming the face of pro gaming in North America.

The Sundance Effect

If anyone can sell competitive gaming to the USA, it´s Sundance DiGiovanni. He´s been in the business for four years and he´s seen the hard times as well as the rewards.

"It´s complicated," he said of the process. "You start to take these things and put them out there in a way that your average person can kind of tune in and find something that keeps their interest for 10, 15, 20, 46 minutes, hopefully. It´s been a challenge."

One of the primary challenges is the need to create stars in an industry that gets very little respect, despite being bigger than the motion picture and music businesses. The gaming industry rarely sells the game creators as celebrities. "The game designers were mythological figures," DiGiovanni agrees. "And a lot of them were in Japan and attached to franchises that had kind of come and gone. But now you see somebody like a Cliffy B, for example, who they put out in front of Gears of War. And then you have the players and the communities. And it´s not a secret any more; everybody games. One of the things we realized right away was that these kids could be stars. If you´re truly excellent at anything and it´s enjoyable to watch and people will pay to watch it or will travel to watch it, you deserve to be put on a pedestal to a certain degree. [The top gamers] have amazing abilities and they are stars. Yes, they´re doing it with our help, but honestly, guys like Walshy and Karma are creating the star factor. The audience is going to make the decision and if it clicks, it clicks."

While MLG has been in business for four years, it´s only seen success in the past two. "The production values, the live events have gotten to the point where we´re comfortable with it. But in the beginning it was just us, carrying TVs into ballrooms and not knowing how many people were going to show up. It´s only been in the last two years that we´ve turned this into what we feel is a spectator-friendly sport."

It´s also only in the past two years that MLG has operated within a financial comfort zone. DiGiovanni doesn´t deny that the early years were indeed "educational." In fact, a trip through a search engine entry on MLG brings up any number of years-old complaints about tournament winners supposedly not being paid. But with the 2005 season, things turned around and MLG began to look like a very professional operation.

"We ran a circuit, traveled around the country," DiGiovanni explained. "In the first year we did 10 events around the country. They were small events, but through that, we learned that this could work. In the beginning we had Halo, Madden, Gran Turismo and Soul Calibur. We were all over the place, trying to figure out what would work for us. Over time, we found out what we were good at and we found the communities out there that were strong and supported competitive gaming and we sort of focused down a little bit."

While competitive gaming on the PC has been around in one form or another for nearly a decade, console-based pro competition is a newer phenomenon, much of it spawned by the arrival of Xbox Live. "Xbox Live was HUGE for us," DiGiovanni admitted. "We looked at the launch of Xbox Live and that influenced our decision [to go all-console] as well in terms of our being there from day one and seeing how it was going to change gaming."

The ability to go with console gaming was a major issue for MLG. "Access is a big thing for us. You can go and spend three, four hundred dollars [on a console system] and have the same gear as the kid down the block." The PC world, on the other hand, represents an unbalanced playing field to MLG, since a kid with a $400 eMachine can be playing against an opponent fortified with a $4,000 Alienware system. "I have a ton of respect for the competitive PC gaming world, don´t get me wrong; it just didn´t line up with what we were trying to create," he said. "You buy a console system and you have the same gear as the pros. The PC market just had too many barriers to entry if you´re a casual player who´s considering becoming more hardcore. And also, there were some established leagues in the PC world and we felt that they were doing a pretty good job."

Nonetheless, the emergence of the new Windows Vista technology on PCs will allow PC and console gamers to compete for the first time…and this has DiGiovanni looking down the road at future games that may work out for MLG.

"One thing we always do is look to expand the roster of games and you´ll see several new games this coming season, one of them being the game you just mentioned," he teased, a reference to Gears of War which I had suggested might make an excellent battleground for future competitions. "Games like Shadowrun—that excites me. Not just the [Vista-enabled] ability to play console against PC, but also because of what it´s going to allow people to do from a technological standpoint. Look at the possibility of a team of players on consoles and their coach on a PC and he´s able to call up overhead maps and do amazing things in terms of guiding guys around. I can´t wait to see what happens with that stuff. And the games do look so much better and they´re built around the idea that they´re cinematic experiences. I´ve talked to the people at Bungie and FASA [Interactive] and they get it. And they also get that it´s just as important how the game looks to someone who´s just watching it as it does to the people playing. The technology is there and I can´t wait to see what happens in the next year to two years.

"We´re not that far away from people going home, turning on their TV, turning on their Xbox and tuning into matches that are going on in the background while they make dinner."

The MLG Players´ Association

The MLG has attempted to model its finances based on the models that have evolved in other sports. "We have a Player´s Association which we created," DiGiovanni explained. "It´s the top 150 or so players based on the points they accrue over the course of the season. The idea behind that is to create an opportunity for guys who are not necessarily on the top four or five teams to see some benefits from being a top player.

"When they join that [association], we give them an agreement that says ´we´re going to promote you, we´re going to create opportunities for you to make money,´ but we don´t control the teams in terms of who they play with or what the lineups are. We´re a little ways away from having an open draft where teams are established and are drafting players round by round.

"You have to build a model that can grow, so we built a model where players would drop out during the season. They´d play with their friends and basically form [teams] themselves because that´s what the players were used to; that´s the way it has been historically and we´re not going to interrupt that.

"We´re going to go out there and the guys who aren´t at the very top are gonna get premium contracts like the guys from Carbon and Final Boss. We´re going to guarantee them earnings based on our belief that we can get them sponsorships, endorsements, media appearances and things of that nature.

"It´s all based around the idea that if you build it, they will come. You are what you think you are, and we think we´re a great opportunity for these kids to launch the concept of professional console gamers—not only to consumers and sponsors, but to the general public. And that´s why we´ve built it the way we have. It´s modeled after everything from the Major League Baseball Players Association to NASCAR."

TV, of course, remains the key to MLG´s success and there is clearly some uncertainty as to whether or not the League´s ´07 season will take place on USA Network. "You´ll see us on TV again in ´07," Sundance assured us, "but we aren´t sure what channel we´ll be on."

The final words, however, belong to Walshy, who reflected back upon his time as a professional gamer. "It´s changed my whole life," Dave Walsh says of competitive gaming. "I´m looking at houses. I´m set to move into a house in June and all the money is coming from gaming. I get to go to cool places. We´re sponsored by Gilbert Arenas," he says proudly of the NBA All-Star point guard and captain of the Washington Wizards who stepped up to back Final Boss. "He invited us out to [his place for] a party in January and here I am with the top names, arguably, in the world of pop culture, like P. Diddy, The Game, Lil Wayne…and we´re there, too. And we´re gamers."

T&T

5 QUICK QUESTIONS FOR WALSHY

TIPS & TRICKS: Do you ever fall victim to a psyche? What really bugs you?
Walshy: I never like to admit that anything bugs me, but if I ever mess up and they start to bug me about that, it bothers me more than them just trying random trash talk. I remember one time in Chicago I had a really bad game; if [the other team] had gone on about that, I probably would have started playing worse, but they didn´t.

T&T: Do you use a special controller?
Walshy: I just use the standard S-type controller, but I have a stockpile of brand-new ones, so I use one probably every month or two.

T&T: Ever think about autographing those controllers and putting them on eBay?
Walshy: Funny you should say that, [because] the [Ogre] Twins [Dan "Ogre1" Ryan and Tom "Ogre2" Ryan] actually did that. They just wanted to test it out and see what they could get and they each got about $250 for them. It´s crazy.

T&T: What´s your Favorite Halo 2 Tip?
Walshy: The BXR. When you melee somebody — which is B—you can hit X straight after it hits him and then hit the Right Trigger to shoot him and the control is a half to a full second faster.

T&T: Do you scout out games you think might be the next big thing in competitive play?
Walshy: I think the community just decides for itself [what those games will be]. Whenever a new game comes out, it isn´t as if everyone marches right out and buys it. If it gets good reviews and sells a lot of copies, there´s a reason why everybody buys it and plays it. It´s up to the game creators. There are a lot of good things with Halo 2; there are also bad things in it. So, there´s definitely room for a brandnew, better game—if someone makes it. It´s not necessarily going to be Halo 3, because who knows, if they mess up balance issues or the game, no one´s going to be playing it. I don´t go out looking, trying out games thinking, "This might be [the next big thing]! This might be it!" I look for the popular demand. Like, Gears of War and Rainbow Six: Vegas have gotten a huge response from the community and I´ve tried them out a bit. They´re all right, but…I´ve just been playing Halo for so long, I can´t get out of it.