Esports may be the newest popular trend to hit digital media, but it’s been evolving for decades. Esports is in its prime and rich business people say that by 2020, professional gaming will hit $23.5 billion in revenue. Everyone’s jumping on this ship, like Rick Fox and Shaquille O’Neal. Still, people playing video games for money is nothing new, people like Billy Mitchell were playing Pac Man and Donkey Kong back in the 1980s.
Mitchell might have made it out of the industry successful (his hot sauce is fantastic) but others haven’t been so lucky. Fatal1ty, also known as Jonathan Wendel, was once the best FPS player in the world. He played all the Quakes, and he was damn good at them, winning multiple tournaments all around the world. Fatal1ty is to Quake as Faker is to League of Legends.
Fatal1ty is no longer at the top of his game though. He’s had a hard time moving into the social media dominated videogame landscape. Even his Daily Dot interview starts with calling him: “the former king of esports.” He barely breaks 100 viewers when he’s streaming on Twitch and his YouTube videos have less views than his True Life episode, “I’m A Gamer.”
In case for some reason you’re reading and you aren’t a millennial, True Life is a television show on MTV that takes the stories of three random people, ties it up with a theme and then throws it in the air. They range from the tame all the way to the absolute insane- “Embarrassing Parents 2” has the creepiest clown parents.
In 2003, the producers of True Life followed Fatal1ty as he prepared for the big “Cyberathlete Professional League Winter Tournament.” You’ve most likely never heard of it, because the “CPLWT” stopped running in 2008, probably because it used the word “cyberathlete.” I’m so glad “cyberathlete” and “e-gamer” never stuck as names for what we call professional gamers.
The True Life episode is a great time capsule into what the eSports scene was like while it was still in incubation. Back in my day, in order to watch people play videogames, you had to be near someone actually playing those games. If you wanted to see the best players Quake or Starcraft had to offer, you were going to Texas for the “CPLWT.”
To prepare for the tournament, Fatal1ty crashes at another gamer’s house named Astro. For two weeks, Fatal1ty played Quake III for 8 to 12 hours a day, which isn’t really different from current pro gamers practice schedules. Though, today’s gamers don’t have to lug around a giant monitor bigger than their body wherever they go.
The tournament finally comes and there are rows and rows of bright-white monolithic monitors filling the hall. PCs had to be connected to a local-area-network, or LAN, in order to be able to interact. Playing intense matches over the internet was impossible, the lag you’d get would be insane.
If you really want to know how far eSports has come, check out the video at 5:10. That’s Thooorin, eSports’ loudmouthed writer, before the beard or the bitterness. He’s been around the scene for over two decades, so it’s not too surprising to see him here. Still, I had to watch a few times before I even noticed it was him.
Right now, eSports tournaments are giant flashy shows, with Riot’s League of Legends World Championships having massive pre-game shows with platinum recording artists like Imagine Dragons. Before these tournaments could be watched remotely or streamed on Twitch, they were just places where gamers would hang out and bang keyboards to see who was the best gamer around. Being a pro gamer isn’t easy now, but back in the late 90s to early 2000s it was actually impossible.
In true True Life fashion, Fatal1ty wins the whole thing. “Things are good when you’re number one” appears on the screen and we see the tournament winner playing on his computer, surrounded by girls. It’s stereotypical, but it feels like the sort of thing Fatal1ty asked for.
Esports has changed a ton since the days of mice with balls on their insides. Gamers compete on stages in front of thousands of fans and don’t use “l337 speak.” Companies now see the potential in viewers watching League of Legends , DOTA 2, Hearthstone and other gaming tournaments.
True Life “ I’m A Gamer” is a look back at a different time, when Fatal1ty reigned supreme.
