FATALITY'S STORY begins at home in suburban Kansas City. Like most kids, he kept out of his parents' hair by playing the usual console video games (Nintendo, Sega) that keep Dad from seeing his football game or Mom from the latest episode of her evening soap (or vice versa; we're not aiming for sexism here). He received his first game at age five (Ikari Warriors on Nintendo), and it was the beginning of a collection that eventually grew to 120 or so video games. He chalks it up to boredom. "Gaming was just something I did with my friends," he remembers. "We had nothing else to do. We were bored half to death."

So far, it was a very typical childhood. When Fatal1ty was 13, his parents split up, and he ended up living with Mom. Around this time, Fatal1ty also managed to become quite good at billiards (Dad owned a pool hall), the first indication that he would excel at pretty much anything that ­required precision hand/eye coordination. But Mom wasn't too thrilled about pool, and when she didn't allow him to compete in the junior nationals of pool when he was 13, he never forgot about it.

Mom disapproved of his addiction to gaming as well, though that same year of the pool nationals Fatal1ty found a way to get himself to an NBA Jam console tournament, which, of course, he won (in addition to placing second and fourth in two other games he had never even played before the competition). The next year, he ditched the console in favor of PC gaming due to its superior graphics. His first game was a first-person shooter game called Castle Wolfenstein 3D, one of the earliest games to appear in the genre. A year later, Quake emerged, complete with a soundtrack by Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor (Fatal1ty's favorite artist).