H3CZ - OpTic Gaming: The Making of eSports Champions

We dedicate this book to every member of OpTic, Past, Present, and Future, and every member of the Green Wall.

CONTENTS

OpTicJ

I have no idea where the name OpTic came from. Chalk that up as the number one mystery to this day. The best guess weve been able to come up with is that the name has something to do with optics or visualslike an optic lens in the scope of a sniper rifle. In the beginning, OpTic was a sniping team and we became very popular for using the sniper rifle in the game, so that seemed like a natural fit. I could be wrong. Who knows?

The first time I ever heard of Call of Duty was back when I was in college at Arizona State. This was early 2004. I saw my buddy playing Call of Duty 1 on a PC in his dorm room and he was just raving about how awesome it was, but I didnt pick it up right away. The game didnt completely register with me until a year later when I bought my first Xbox 360 and started playing Call of Duty 2. I played the campaign and jumped into multiplayer. Scoping in and being able to kill people with one shot on a sniper rifle was just fascinating to me. It looked so realistic.

The game has come a long way since then. For those of you who can remember, Call of Duty 2 was so incredibly different because there werent any perks. There werent any of the power-ups like there are in todays games that could juice you as a player and make you better. It literally came down to my shot being better than my opponents. If it wasnt, then I was going to get killed. It was that simple. The game was about raw gun skill and thats what got me hooked on the series.

Not only was the game evolving, but video games in general were completely changing. When Xbox Live came out at the end of 2005, people were now able to sit in their living rooms and play online with people from all over the country. My introduction to online gaming was the Tom Clancys Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear series, but competitive Call of Duty was beginning to gain a following. I found a group of people online who shared this same interest and a community was formed. We were always talking about which gun to use, how to use it, and what other players we should be watching. I had joined a couple different clans (theyre just called teams now, but at the time everyone called them clans) and we would play competitive matches against other clans. The community was so small back then that everybody knew each other.

I was in a clan called Cereal Killers. Thats not a typowe spelled it like breakfast cereal. Our idea was to be this goofy-named team who went around destroying people and thats exactly what we did. We were really good at it, and I quickly developed a reputation for being one of the better snipers. The problem was that we couldnt keep the team together. Some people would secretly join another team, some people would get booted, and others would leave simply because they thought someone was lying. Once those relationships within the team were strained, chemistry suffered and we started to lose. Sure enough, Cereal Killers fell apart. I still wanted to play, but the drama was taking its toll. I wanted to get back to the root of it all and play with my pals for fun. So when it came to finding a new clan, I took a different approach.

One of the clans that I grew to respect was called Dog Company. What drew me to them was that they were known for using a sniper rifle. It was about precision and skill with them, which is where I felt my talent lay at the time, so they would be a good fit. They were very small and humble. Their leader was this guy named Casey Bartow, who had just recently changed the name of the clan from Dog Company to OpTic. I wanted to join, but I didnt want to tell them who I was. I didnt want to be affiliated with my old clan at all. I wanted a fresh start.

I decided to ditch my old Cereal Killer gamer tag and randomly generated a new one so I could pose as an unknown. I managed to track down Casey, who I knew only as OpTic KR3W then, and one of his teammates when they were playing on a map called Vossenack. Its a very small map, usually used when players wanted to settle a 1v1 sniper challenge. Once I saw them in there, I pulled out a sniper rifle and just started tearing them apart. That got their attention, so I asked Casey if they were holding tryouts. It was kind of a joke at first, but he was cool about it. He said, If you beat us, you can join. So I started beating them, and as promised, they invited me to join the team. After that, I finally told them who I really was.

There were about twelve members in OpTic at the time, and soon after I joined, they wanted to find a new leader. KR3W was very young. He was finishing high school and getting ready to go to college. Sometimes people would see him as an oddball and he didnt always get along with everyone else. There were older and more mature players on the team better suited for that leadership role. I think KR3W was unfairly looked at as this sore thumb who was just in the way, so he was uprooted.

In the end, we wanted to get along and we wanted to win. In order to play at the highest level possible we needed someone with more real-world experience to lead that charge. Thats when I stepped up to become a coleader, which back then didnt mean much. It was more of a vanity title. There was no money involved. We werent even recording ourselves playing. YouTube hadnt been created, so people werent uploading content.

What most people dont realize is that OpTic wasnt very well liked or respected in the beginning. We were kind of thought of as being these cheese-ball amateurs. We had a good reputation on a site called NxGamers, but that website was looked at as second tier. If you were a serious player and wanted to compete against the best clans at the highest level in eSports at that time, you had to play on GameBattles. The problem was that we were sponsored by NxGamers, so we had to play exclusively on their site. Both sites were competing against each other to get more traffic and sponsoring teams was their way to attract more players. We were stuck for the time being.

The bigger problem with playing online was that it was difficult to document these games since nobody was recording footage or using capture cards. We relied on screen shots, but if you forgot to take a screen shot and somebody reported a different score, you were screwed. We could report that we beat a certain team, but they could just as easily say that they won. The cheating and the lying became so rampant that the owners of the website said that if we were going to play a match then we had to get a referee. That referee would be a neutral official who would verify the result.