Fatal1ty – behind a pro-gamer

Fatal1ty playing UT2k3

For most people computer games are a time-consuming and quite expensive hobby, but for a few so-called cyber-athletes, gaming is about more than just having fun - It’s a chance too become famous, travel around the world and make good money on almost every kid’s most popular activity. Johnathan Wendel (aka Fatal1ty) is part of this new bread called cyber-athletes and he is actually so good at killing other people in cyberspace that he has won several big prize-money tournaments in America, Asia and Europe. Unreal Tournament 2003 is for the time being Fatal1ty’s favourite game, but it was Quake III Arena that kick-started his career back in 1999 when he won his first professional competition.

The road to become a top gamer is tougher then most people might think. It requires talent, dedication and luck to get where Fatal1ty is now, and even with all three factors in your favour success is not guaranteed at all.

Loves to compete

Fatal1ty played a lot of tennis before moving to cyper-games.

Johnathan Wendel / Fatal1ty has always loved to compete. Before he started playing computer games on a professional level, tennis, football, hockey and pool were some of the sports in which he achieved remarkable results. Fatal1ty’s father has played a significant role throughout his entire sporting career. He has always been there to encourage him, and it was his father’s broadband connection that made it possible for Fatal1ty to start playing Q3A (Quake III Arena) in the first place. Despite a very tight schedule family and friends are very important ingredients in Fatal1ty’s daily life. Of course his rise to the top of the gaming world has required some degree of sacrifice, but it hasn’t been a problem for Fatal1ty, yet.

He has a lot of friends outside the gaming community and he actually got good grades both in high school and college, so the gaming really hasn’t affected his life in any negative way. Somehow he still finds the time to do what he wants but now he just has to schedule for it:

- Weekends are spent with my friends, girlfriend or on the golf course, so I don’t end up using all my time on gaming, he told me.

Nintendo play-tester?

Fatal1ty on Tv

Nintendo’s consoles introduced Fatal1ty to the world of gaming and he quickly feel in love with this sort of electronic entertainment.

- I really wanted to become a game tester for Nintendo because they paid people just for playing games, he says with a smile.

Today Fatal1ty does get paid to play games and even though the hard training takes up most of his time, he still enjoys every little bit of it. Fatal1ty believes like CPL-president Angel Munoz that professional gaming will be the next major sport in America, but so far there is still a long way to go. He still likes the gaming scene even after all these years and is now more involved than ever through his own company, which offers gaming equipment to serious gamers worldwide. All the products are designed by Fatal1ty himself and he states that this is one of the ways he is passing on some of his own gaming experience to the next generation.

Answering e-mails from the press and the fans also takes a lot of his time, however he stays clear of forums.

- If somebody attacks me in a public forum I don’t reply in any way. I let my fans defend me or simply ignore it.

As a public person he knows how to behave and that is probably one of the reasons why he has succeeded in attracting a lot of interesting sponsors to the gaming community.

Fatal1ty is looking forward to Quake IV and Doom III

Fatal1ty at E3 surrounded by fans

But what does it take to become a top gamer?

- It takes some talent and a lot of training, but you also have to have a certain degree of professionalism to reach the top and stay there, Fatal1ty states.

If there is one thing he has, it’s professionalism. He’s playing concentrated at public events even though his opponents don’t stand a chance against him. While I’m struggling hard to get my first kill, I get a quick glance at one of the merchandise badges behind Fatal1ty saying, “You were fragged by Fatal1ty” and I suddenly realise that this guy won’t give me a free kill. It’s simply against his way of thinking and a badge with the text, “You fragged Fatal1ty” would anyway be very misleading.

I apologise for my lack of skills arguing that I normally play Counter-Strike, so I really don’t know the game or the map at all. Fatal1ty smiles at me and says:

-You can have a rematch in Counter-Strike when I get home from L.A. I like playing both Counter-Strike and Warcraft 3, but they sometimes steal to much training time.

I ask Fatal1ty if we will ever see him competing in any of the two games at a CPL tournament, and he answers me calmly with:

-Counter-Strike is definitely too slow for me and I don’t like depending on other players to win my games.

Quake IV and Doom III are however titles which Fatal1ty is looking forward to play both for fun and competitions.

Erasing the smallest errors

Fatal1ty really is a perfectionist. He spends hours on erasing even the smallest errors in his game, making his game closer and closer to perfection, but as he points out there is always something to work with.

Perfection is also required in order to keep the competitors one step behind. Everybody wants to beat Fatal1ty and that puts a lot of pressure on his shoulders every time he plays a game. Critics keep pointing out that he won’t be the best forever and even though Fatal1ty knows they are right, he still tries to prove them wrong every time he attends a new tournament. Despite the enormous pressures on Fatal1ty and his competitors’ shoulders, the relationship between the different gamers are usually very good.

-Of course there is some rivalry between east and west and there are some persons you simply don’t like, but generally there is always a friendly atmosphere at the different tournaments.

When Fatal1ty and the others pro-gamers play for fun, you’ll frequently hear them shouting things like “You suck” and other provoking sentences, but they are all said with a twinkle in the eye, because even though they are playing for high stakes, they still haven’t lost the love of the game. Maybe pro-gaming will one day be just as big as i.e. baseball. Pro-gaming is only a couple of years old and a lot happens every year both technically and financially. More and more kids dream of making a career like Fatal1ty, and in the future - Fatal1ty will presumably be for gaming what Babe Ruth or Joe Di Maggio was for pro-baseball, a real legend everybody knows made some difference.