You don't challenge one of the world's
top professional video-game players to a one-on-one death
match - or a seat-belt race - and come out with your dignity
intact.
EVER WONDERED what it would be like to take on Michael
Jordan in a game of one-on-one? Or perhaps man the goal as Wayne
Gretzky smacks a 90-mph slap shot toward the bridge of your nose?
Or maybe even step up to the plate to stare down a near-100-mph
fastball from the
baseball monstrosity that is Randy Johnson? Well,
this was worse. Much worse. Taking on the world's most renowned and
feared video gamer (don't let his baby face fool you) in a
one-on-one death match of
Quake 4 at the 2005 International
Consumer Electronics Show in
Las Vegas was nothing short of an
annihilation of the nuclear kind.
I would have had a fleeting chance against Jordan, Gretzky, or
Johnson - I've played a little ball in my day, I can stand up on a
pair of skates and pray, and I've been known to make contact with a
fastball here and there. But under no circumstances could I even
fathom what hit me when 25-year-old Johnathan Wendel - a
professional video gamer from
Kansas City,
Missouri, known as
Fatal1ty - pummeled me into a shamed and hapless mess at CES in
front of a whole lot of people who, unlike me, already knew that
anyone who stepped up to the keyboard against Fatal1ty would be
handed such a humiliating defeat as to never want to play a video
game again.
My only saving grace was that I didn't kill myself - though that's
probably due more to the fact that I was so clueless, I didn't even
know enough about the game to manage that. Final score: 24-0. Which
means that during the course of the four-minute Sound Blaster X-Fi
Fatal1ty shoot-out challenge, Fatal1ty killed me 24 times and I
killed him a whopping total of zero times. I'm not sure I ever even
hit him with my Marine-issued energy blaster. In fact, I'm not sure
I ever even saw him.
Here is a sampling of play-by-play commentary, courtesy of
announcer Kimli Welsh, which could be heard over the PA by anyone
within earshot. "Fatal1ty and Kevin have begun their match up, and
already Fatal1ty has taken the lead with a nice rocket-launcher
kill a few seconds into this match." Or there was, "Kevin is hiding
underneath the risers, trying to take a shot. He gives up and tries
to go over the edge, but, no, he decides to stay, and because of
that, he is now dead … once again."
Never mind the fact that I have never played
Quake, Quake
II, or
Quake III (might have helped), or any other
PC-based, first-person shooter game, which is what Fatal1ty
specializes in. In fact, like many thirtysomethings, I haven't
touched a video-game console since I wasted away countless summer
days mastering
Pitfall on Intellivision in the '80s. It
turns out that was a mistake.
Fatal1ty, however, didn't make that same error in judgment, though
his rise from suburbanite video gamer to worldwide professional
gamer, phenomenon, entrepreneur, and international brand was as
much about luck as skill. I mean, if you had told someone 10 years
ago that you planned on playing video games for a living, said
person would've chuckled a bit and waited for you to grow up.
Fatal1ty's case was no different, except for the small fact that
he's the one chuckling now. In his seven-year professional gaming
career, he has earned more than $500,000 making electronic
mincemeat out of anyone who dares step up to the computer against
him. Along the way, he has competed on six continents and in an
estimated 40 countries.
"I had three goals when I started this: I wanted to travel overseas
playing video games," he recalls. "I wanted to become the number
one gamer in the world. And the third was when I became number one,
I wouldn't become the stereotypical, arrogant jerk that you'd think
number one would be. I was able to accomplish them all in about six
months."
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).
Tournaments began popping up here and there following the release
of
Quake, including one in
Wichita, Kansas, three hours from
Fatal1ty's home in Lee's Summit, Missouri. Now 15, Fatal1ty was one
of the 130 gamers who entered. He cleaned up. "People were like,
'Who's this guy? Who's this kid who just dominated all of us?' " he
says. "I won $500 worth of prizes just messing around. It wasn't a
big deal."
Meanwhile, he managed to become captain of the varsity
tennis team
at Blue Springs South High School, despite not having touched a
tennis racket until he was 14. "I didn't start playing tennis until
I was a freshman in high school," he says. "I broke some school
records. That's my nature. I pick up things very fast."
Toward the end of high school, Fatal1ty's mom stonewalled him
again, preventing him from competing in a gaming tournament with a
$10,000 grand prize. For the first time, there was real money to be
won, and Fatal1ty didn't compete. But it was a pivotal moment in
his rise as the world's first gaming household name. "I always
thought I had the talent and skill to do whatever I wanted to do,
but I was never given the shot to do what I wanted to do," he says
now. "I realized I had to take things into my own hands and do it
myself."
After his 18th birthday, Fatal1ty moved in with Dad. Though more
supportive than Mom, he also thought Fatal1ty's gaming habits were
becoming unhealthy and preventing him from working a real job and
going to school full-time. Fatal1ty, who at this point was working
part-time and paying his own way through school, cut a deal: If he
won any serious money gaming, his dad would promise to back off and
let him pursue his dream. A few weeks later, he came home with
$4,000 for taking third place at the 1999 Cyberathlete Professional
League Frag 3 championships.
"I came home and slapped that check on the table and said, 'I won
$4,000 playing a video game! What is this world coming to?' " he
says. "Winning $4,000 playing a video game in 1999 was
insane. I'd played pool tournaments all my life, and it was
$200 here, $200 there. It blew us both away."
Two weeks later, he was invited to
Sweden to compete as the U.S.
representative in the
Quake III world championships in 2000.
"I beat everyone," he says. "I won 18 games straight. Lost none. I
dominated the whole thing." It was then that Fatal1ty made the
decision - encouraged by a guidance counselor, no less - to drop
out of school and pursue gaming full-time.
NOW CORRECT ME if I'm wrong, but I've never heard of any
guidance counselor encouraging any student to drop out of school to
play video games. I'm convinced it is this slight inconsistency
between my career path and Fatal1ty's that finds me on the
receiving end of a royal
Quake 4 thrashing at the CES - and
later writing about it - and not the one doing the thrashing and
being written about. Of course, my video-game credentials end with
Donkey Kong, while Fatal1ty's look more like this: He has
now become the world champion in five first-person shooter games
(Quake III, Alien vs. Predator 2, Unreal Tournament 2003, Doom
3, and Painkiller) - a feat never before accomplished (the
likelihood of which is kind of akin to
Lance Armstrong winning the
Tour de
France five times in a row). His booth at CES is easily as
big as those of his neighbors, like Belkin (famous for iPod
accessories), Shure (famous for world-class audio equipment), and
Palm (famous for those Pilots). Not only has he nurtured a gaming
handle he stole from
Mortal Kombat, but he has milked it
into a worldwide brand that is redefining the digital
lifestyle.
Gamers today can buy anything from a mouse (billed as a premier
gaming weapon) to CPU coolers to graphics cards and motherboards,
all bearing Fatal1ty's name. Though he earned an unbelievable
$231,000 gaming in 2005, he already has the foresight to realize he
can't play video games forever. He sees his future with the
Fatal1ty brand, which is now contemplating clothing and lifestyle
accessories at its monthly corporate meetings. "What we're doing,
no one has really done before," he says of the Fatal1ty brand,
which is in partnership with Creative, a worldwide leader in
digital entertainment. "We will be careful about what we do, of
course, but I'm swinging for the fences on everything."
THE FUNNY THING IS, Fatal1ty didn't accomplish any of this
by doing anything all that differently from the rest of us. He
credits subjects we are all intimately familiar with as the main
factor in his development as a professional gamer. "It's all
hand/eye coordination from sports," he says. "But it's also about
geometry and mathematics. In a game, I'm looking at my opponent's
position and where I have to shoot a target and have them meet at
the same time. When I golf, I visualize the shot. When I play
tennis, I visualize the shot. It's a lot of premeditation about
what's going to happen."
In other words, Fatal1ty knows what you're going to do before you
do. That's no consolation, however, when you are being ripped apart
in
Quake 4 like a Tickle Me Elmo doll at a pit bull
convention. "He didn't stand a chance," I overhear one CES audience
member saying after my humiliating defeat - as if I were looking
down at my own funeral after accidentally falling under a 10-ton
truck.
Which, apparently, is pretty much par for the course, I learn. Everything with Fatal1ty seems to be like that. “I approach everything I do very completely,” he says. “I’m a perfectionist. Even if it comes down to how fast I can put my seat belt on.”
Take my word for it: You do not want to involve yourself in a seat-belt race with Fatal1ty.
Professional League World TourFatal1ty will attempt to become the Quake 4 world champion in June when the Cyberathlete Professional League World Tour season begins in Sweden.Author