James Galvin

I believe Quake 4’s swan song was sung in New York this weekend, at the ClanBase/GGL TransAtlantic Showdown where a $100,000 purse was on offer. For those of you who don’t follow e-Sports (I use the term lightly), I’ll give a small bit of background. There has always been a high degree of professionalism in South Korea (where top players are celebrities and there are dedicated StarCraft TV channels), but multiplayer gaming in the rest of the world never was never quite worthy of that term. You’d get the odd $40,000 tournaments here and there, going back to when Denis “Thresh” won his Ferrari playing Quake 1998, but never enough money on offer to kindle mainstream interest. This changed in 2004.

The first real eye opener was the Fatal1ty challenge. With a train of sponsors behind him, Jonathan “Fatal1ty” Wendel (the only true pro-FPSgamer in the western hemisphere at the time) offered $125,000 (courtesy of Abit) to whomever could beat him in a 1v1 game of Doom 3. The Chinese star Meng “RocketBoy” Yang took the honours and the money in a 15 minute game in Beijing. In China, $125,000 for 15 minutes work is serious money. RocketBoy bought a house with it.

Soon after, the revamped Cyber Athlete Professional League launched a World Tour, which saw nearly $1,000,000 distributed as prize money. The funny thing about this year-long series of tournaments is that the primary game which was chosen, Painkiller, had a community of around 17 players. The game was fast, and entertaining, modeled on the original Quake. It was also hideously unbalanced and largely unpopular, and none of the top players, bar Fatal1ty, bothered to take it up. Along with Fatal1ty, an 18 year old kid from the Netherlands, Sander “Vo0” Kaasjager, who had been making a name for himself in Q3 CPMA, cashed in on this easy money and earned over $230,000 each in CPL prizes alone. This was a wake-up call for gamers across the board. For kids who have never seen a full paycheck, the lure of such prizes was extremely potent. Realising they missed their chance to cash in on the Painkiller World Tour (and it was a golden chance, as there was big money up for grabs for anyone who was willing to dedicate a lot of time to the game) they vowed they would be ready for the next one.

Long before the game was even launched, the CPL had announced that Quake 4 would be their primary game for World Tour 05/06. Like rats on a sinking ship, wannabe pro-gamers abandoned their respective communities in droves. Counter Strike, Unreal Tournament 2004, Call of Duty, Enemy Territory, Soldier of Fortune players all vowed that they would be the next Vo0. But this time around, there would be no easy money, as the superstars of Quake 3 had also moved on, with their years of experience.

Then all of a sudden, the bottom fell out of Quake 4. The CPL merged with the the World Series of Video Gaming. The World Tour was cancelled, and everybody realised that this game actually sucks. So what will happen to the thousands of baffled, competitive teenagers who worked so hard? Maybe Blizzard knows the answer to that question. For your average games developer, it is the casual gamer who pays the wages. The guy who plays the single player missions, and then gets the expansion pack. The online community is such a minor slice of the market that there is no point spending too much time or resources on it.

However, Blizzard is not the average games developer. After the massive success of World of Warcraft, which saw 300,000 gamers forking out $15 every month in subscription fees, golden dollar signs are surely flashing in their eyeballs. Last week, they announced a partnership with the WSVG to offer an “unparalleled gaming experience”. Blizzard know the potential that exists, since it was their own StarCraft that really set the ball rolling. In my opinion, this could be a major turning point for the world of e-Sports. Whichever direction it takes, I can see no competitive future for the Quake series, which was the height of 1v1 gaming for 10 years.

And back to the original topic, the final standings of the TransAtlantic Showdown are as follows:

Quake 4 TDM
1.  Sweden iCE-cLIMBERS
2. Darkside
3. Blackdragons
4.  Sweden aCtion Ligan

Quake 4 1v1
1. United States of America coL.socrates_
2. Russia Mouz.Cooller
3. United States of America x6\cha0ticz
4. France *aAa*winz

Congrats to iCE-cLIMBERS, who have continued in Quake 4 where they left off in Quake 3 - as the best TDM team in the world. They easily defeated the top American clan Darkside in two maps.

What an apt finish it would have been had Cooller top, but his arrogance and his apathy proved his downfall, as he was easily beaten by socrates. This is not a surprise, as Cooller’s strength was in his strategic play, and his ability to outwit the opponent. This worked in Quake 3, where the big maps relied more on strategy and less on aim, and it also worked for him in the early days of Quake 4, where lesser players were not yet clued in. But as the game matures, the superior aimers who play 24/7 are waking up to the subtleties of map tactics that came naturally to Russian, and thus his one major advantage is now lost. Socrates, on the other hand, is a great aimer and a good thinker. He deserved the win, and although I wouldn’t rate him as highly as the likes of Fooki, he will always be a contender, while Cooller’s days could be numbered as he appears to have lost interest. Winz, in my opinion, did not deserve to be there, qualifying thanks to a lack of interest by other top players like Fooki and Fox. I would expect this lack of interest to spread in the coming months, perhaps UT2K7 becoming the nail in Quake’s coffin.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 27th, 2006 at 21:27 pm and is filed under Games, Gaming, Quake, Quake 4. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.