| Canadian teams brought silver and bronze medals home from the World Cyber Games held in Singapore last November.
Jason The and Nelson Triana, playing under the Team_EG banner, came second in the Halo 2 competition, while Team_EG’s Counter Strike squad – Griffin Benger, Pasha Lari, Jimmy Lin, Matthew Stevenson and Robert Tyndale – beat Australia to take third.
"It was amazing," said Stephan Richard, executive director of WCG Canada. He travelled with the teams to Singapore and witnessed the mainstage competition between Team_EG and the Aussies. "There must have been close to 7,000 people watching."
Video game competitions are drawing larger audiences all the time. WCG organizers estimate that 55,000 spectators attended events in Singapore. With opening and closing ceremonies and a players’ village, "It’s like the Olympics," said Richard.
"What’s better than representing your country in a game you like to play?" said Calgary’s Jimmy Lin.
The WCG, which began with a competition in Seoul, Korea, started travelling last year, when the championships were staged in San Francisco. Next year, Monza, Italy will host the event.
The reality of video games as a spectator sport means that there are corporations willing to cough up money for prizes and sponsorships. At WCG 2005, a total of $435,000 US was up for grabs. Team_EG’s bronze medal winners received a cheque for $10,000 US. The gold medal winners received $50,000 US.
There’s enough money to be made that some players have gone professional. The world’s top two are American Johnathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel and Dutchman Sander "Vo0" Kaasjager (think Tiger and Vijay, or, more aptly, Ali and Frazier). In 2005, Fatal1ty’s prize money totalled $231,000 US, not including sponsorship deals and royalties from licensing agreements.
Korean electronics giant Samsung is the primary sponsor of the WCG and Intel was one of the first backers of the Dallas-based Cyberathlete Professional League, which has initiated a world tour in addition to seasonal championships. Other corporations, recognizing they may be missing a key demographic, are jumping on the bandwagon. In September, a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary announced it was sponsoring a professional Counter Strike team called Team Ouch. The subsidiary is the maker of Tylenol.
Players that represented Canada at WCG 2005 had all their travel expenses covered by sponsors.
"Of course," said Lin, when asked if he’d like to become a professional gamer. He and his teammates practice at least four times a week, for three to four hours a session, to keep their skills honed. As tournaments approach, they practice even more. "People don’t realize how intense it gets."
REVIEWS
· Darkwatch (publisher: Capcom; platform: PS2, Xbox; rated: mature).
It’s all about redemption, Jericho Cross. You’ve spent your life robbing trains in the Arizona frontier, but you picked the wrong train this time. You’ve unleashed an unholy horror on the unsuspecting folk, and killed yourself at the same time. Now, as an undead creature yourself and a member of the Darkwatch, you must bury the minions and strike down Lazarus, he who you inadvertently freed from imprisonment. It’s not a great story you live in, Jericho, but it is furious and fun and it has style and panache. You must move fast, gunslinger, before it is too late.
· Shadow of the Colossus (publisher: Sony; platform: PS2; rated: teen).
Shadow of the Colossus is a most atypical adventure game. The action and story are disarmingly simple: you are a young warrior who, in order to save the soul of a young girl, must face and defeat 16 colossi – massive, majestic creatures made of rock and fur whose purpose is as mysterious as the vast landscape they inhabit. This is an ancient place with a deep but unknown history, and you go into battle without knowing what, exactly, are the implications of your actions. Defeating the creatures is accompanied with – get this – a feeling of melancholy, and you are left with the foreboding sense that things are not as they seem. The colour palette is desaturated, the landscapes endless and varied, and the colossi move like you’d expect of creatures that are larger than mountains. That makes for some exhilarating action, with you trying to climb up and cling to the colossus as it tries to shake you off like an annoying flea. For all that, Shadow is a subdued, dreamlike and morally ambiguous tale that is strangely affecting to play. It conveys a beautiful, lonely esthetic and feels like an epic. Or at least a small part of one. |
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