SC2SEA.com - Starcraft 2 SEA eSports Community Site

I can't remember what day exactly. The websites that stored the records for these sorts of things collapsed long ago.

But it was in December 2003 in an internet cafe on George St that I became a little less socially awkward.

The last competition for Counter-Strike 1.5 was being held that day. Steam launched a couple of months earlier, but the added computing requirements - gamers went from running CS quite smoothly on Celeron and Duron 700's to needing a 2ghz+ PC just to get 100fps.

I was meant to be playing in a slut team on the day, but this was my first LAN, so I did what most nerds do at a gaming event: find a corner and support the wall.

(Note: the word slut has a completely different meaning in FPS circles. It designates someone who is filling in for a team that they are not affiliated with. I think it derived from a sense of loyalty in playing for a team, but that's completely speculative.)

I only knew one person in the CS scene at that point, a friend from school who helped run one of the competitions at SGL. Unfortunately, he was a fairly unpopular figure who didn't go to LANs often, so I was on my own.

After a several minutes, a tall, slim man whose voice seemed to naturally bellow over the crowd of 80 or so people came up to me.

"Are you Dippa?" he asked. I said I was and told him I was waiting for my team.

The man's name was Rob (xoR), one of the players from Exhale, one of the best teams in Sydney.

I still don't know to this day why Rob decide to come up and introduce himself. At that point, my only recognition among the community was a writer: I'd started putting together a recap of eSports news from around the world on a fairly regular basis.

Rob took a real liking to me though, and promptly pulled me out of the corner and introduced me to everyone he knew in the room. I can't remember most of the people I met that day, bar the ones that continued to attend LANs later on in the years.

Importantly, he knew one of the guys I was meant to be playing with, so he could find out what was going on. I'd spent an hour introducing myself at this point.

Some shenanigans later, my team didn't end up showing up on time, so Rob organised for me to play in another team.

Once I'd gotten setup and started playing, Rob took things a step further.

"Hey guys ... come check this out"

So out of the near 100 people that were in the venue, by the time the second half of my match has started, Rob's turned around and gotten half of them - many decent players in their own right - to stop what they're doing to watch me instead.


The match on de_cbble ends up going into overtime; I'd gotten some frags here and there, put in a reasonable performance so far but nothing special.

First round of overtime ends up in me planting the bomb and winning a 1v2. Back then, overtimes were still played with pistol rounds, so this was a massive advantage.

Second round my team takes B and plants again. A CT tried to hide behind the box just in front of the connector, so I promptly pumped three deagle bullets into the box for a free kill.

I turned around to head up the ramp to cover the hallway. As soon as I arrived, I saw a flash skeet past in the hallway.

It worked last time, I thought, so why not again?

One bullet into the box later, the crowd behind me erupted as the head of the poor counter-terrorist exploded into the wall. I downloaded the demo after the tournament; it was the perfect one-bullet deagle frag.

Second half of overtime ended up with me winning another 1v2 clutch to save the game. I don't think I've held down the "E" button with as much force in my life; I'd have died if I choked the defuse.

I didn't know who he was at the time, but RooK (one of the stalwarts of the Sydney scene) later congratulated me for putting on a decent show in overtime. That was the start of my CS "career" - thanks to the efforts of Rob, I managed to get an offer to play in fX, which gave me a reason to continue attending LANs.

The train timetables meant I only got to play the one game that day. If it wasn't for Rob, nobody would have noticed and nobody would have given me a chance.

****

The worst moment - one of the worst feelings of my life at this point - came when I was sitting in a table in Brunei talking with a local and two Australians.

It should have been one of the best experiences I'd ever had in gaming. Two years earlier, some friends of the guy who we were (me + the two Aussies) staying with had put in a good word about my skills after seeing me play at the ACNC nationals.

Everything about that event had been pretty much perfect for me. I wasn't expecting to go, but my team surprisingly earned an invite after, in the penultimate game, I casually dropped 39 frags in a single half (which we won 15-0). I played well at the nationals too, both in practice and the group matches.

A close friend of Diablo wanted to put together a team of Australians to compete at the Brunei Cyber Games being held later that year. And by later that year, he actually meant within a couple of weeks.

Out of all the people they could have chosen, the Westies (they were all based out of Perth - the Brunei local had studied in WA and worked there for a period before moving home) chose me. I figured they must have been impressed from watching me, because my reputation wasn't good. I'd come 2nd at a nationals earlier that year and didn't receive a single offer to join any team for months, even though I finished as the third-best player at the tournament.

Obviously I'd been doing something wrong - and it was about to come to a head.

Because of the short notice, it was difficult to get a team together. This wasn't helped by the fact that I was fairly bitter. I'd been playing for six years and been screwed around an awful lot, so I was fairly selective in who I wanted to come overseas with me.

I could have asked players that had played for Immunity, Sequential Gaming, XR, fzer0 and so on - in retrospect, they would have been the easiest to get, considering their passports would already be in order. But those players often had little time for me, and I was ill-prepared to reward their lack of respect with a free trip overseas.

We finished second at the tournament, but while the two players I picked meshed well together, I wasn't a good fit with them. Even more worringly, I didn't get along with the guy who arranged everything.

The four of us went to an internet cafe in Gadong every day for about a month to practice against the local teams. Internet access was fairly expensive in Brunei, but it only cost BRU$1 an hour to use the net cafe. A$1 was worth about BRU$1.2 then. That doesn't seem like much, but the cost of living is exceptionally cheap in Brunei; our dinner every night, rice with a crispy chicken wing, only cost BRU$1.

I'd had a similar experience at the nationals where I came 2nd. In the lead-up to the event, I played my worst CS by some considerable distance. It didn't help that I was feeling sick at the time; when I flew home to Sydney, I ended up bedridden for a week and a half and I missed out on three weeks of university courtesy of some horror respiratory illness that wasn't swine flu.

But as performances go, they were terrible. I remember one game against a team from WA on de_nuke where the caller kept moving me around the map to see if there was a position I was actually capable of fragging in. I finished that half 1-15. It wasn't a busta-like performance (a player renowned in Australia for going -1/15 against fzer0 in a national tournament) but it wasn't anything less than embarrassing and completely humiliating.

At the end of it, I said to the caller - just put me at ramps; I'm most comfortable there, and that's the best chance I have of helping the team out.

It was too late to change the lineup - although I know he seriously considered it - but he agreed with me and things moved on.

The divergence in this part of the story was that when that tournament in 2007 started, I drilled the shit out of everyone. When we finally played a match on de_nuke against Immunity, I hammered them too: I was too sick to actually focus, so I just stared at the screen and shot things till they died.

But that didn't happen in Brunei.

Nothing died; nothing worked. My mood soured and I started to get shitty at my own performance. I deserved to play better than I had: I worked for years to work my way into a top team. That never eventuated, but I believed that I was owed a chance to prove myself on a bigger stage.

And here I was, cocking it up left, right and centre.


I ended up getting yelled a lot. It's difficult to argue back when you suck, but even more so when your natural reaction to despondency is to shrink into a shell.

Not only was the trip quickly becoming humiliating from a gamer's point of view, it also became horrendous from a personal point of view. I felt like I was devolving as a human being: instead of growing from your experiences, I was simply regressing into a less confident, more worthless individual that was completely incapable of doing myself justice.

Most of what the Bruneian player said was true. I didn't communicate well and I wasn't the best teammate that month. Occasionally he went too far, but arguments in CS are often dictated by the amount of frags you get, and if you're not making the shots, it doesn't matter how right you are.

It's a bit like theorycrafting - even if you know it works in practice, it's worthless to bring it up unless you can execute it yourself.

So after a few weeks, the four of us were sitting around at the table. We still had a week left in Brunei at this point.

It's also worth pointing out that the local in question was a fairly aggressive individual and there was what essentially amounted to the Amazon located right behind his house.

If he got pissed off enough to dump my body, there was no chance in hell I was going to be found. When we arrived in the country, he told us some stories about hanging out with his friends (of which one is related to the Sultan of Brunei, and another was a high-ranking officer in the police force; and at this point, since no transgressions had occurred, we had no reason to doubt that he knew those people).

The conversation was a clear-the-air type of talk: things weren't working out, and the team was going to continue on without me after we all returned to Brunei. The local had gotten a sponsor to provide him with a HSBC account with funds to be used to pay for trips to Europe; we'd spoken at length about what competitions we'd like to attend, something that's always nice to dream about when you hit the sack.

Except I wouldn't be a part of this anymore.

After a period, the talk started to turn nasty. I was listening most of the time, although as it seemed was the case, not much seemed to sink through. That's the impression I remember from the talk, anyway.

But as it had before, I had begun to bear the brunt of some things that weren't really my fault. One of the two Australians with me was becoming increasingly uncomfortable - he knew some of what was being said was going too far, and at several points he motioned to intervene.

Unfortunately, he never spoke.

I could see that he was about to talk. You know that thing people do when they want to interject? They raise their hand, lean forward a little, shift around a bit?

It was like that, without any speech coming through.

So the insults kept landing. At this point, I was in no condition mentally to respond, but truthfully, I can't remember if I even deserved to.

That was my last memory of the trip: having earned the right to go overseas, I left completely despondent, feeling like I never belonged there in the first place.

The entire trip wasn't a complete waste. Before I left, I was lucky enough to secure some work as an editor for a yet-to-be-launched online magazine on professional gaming. The mag never got published, although the relationship gained from the process later ended up scoring me a gig writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (which has been popping up every Friday for the past year).

I've since used that experience to actually sustain a career writing about games, and I've carved out a nice little niche for myself. Not many games writers have a solid background in competitive gaming: even Junglist, the go-to boy for competitive games journalism in Australia, only went as far as reaching the top of the Gamearena ladder for CS.

I've actually been overseas for video games, something very few people get to experience.

But every time I think about it, I almost wish I hadn't, or at the very least wish I could go back in time so I could give a better account of myself.

You can't change the past. I'm one of those people that hold onto the past, particularly their failures and regrets, for a very long time. I suspect I'll still be bitter about this in ten years' time, if not longer. That's a stupid feeling, I know.

Still, I deserved better than my conduct during those four weeks. I wasn't rude, nasty, inappropriate or anything like that - just disappointing, as a player and a human being.

I just found my old camera that I took to Brunei to see if there was any pictures left. I took hundreds of photos, but I never uploaded a single one two years on because of how angry and disappointed I was at the entire trip. I didn't delete them, but there's nothing left on the SD card and I can't find any on my hard drive.

Even that saddens me a little: I've only been overseas twice, and the only thing I have left that says I went to Brunei was this cute blue cushion I bought for BRU$2.

Hopefully through Starcraft, I might one day get the chance to set things right. I won't forget - but it would be nice to have a better, happier memory that I could place alongside it so that I might be able to close the door on the past and smile about it once more.