Gaming peripheral maker Razer today sent word that the BOCOG has selected ten professional gamers to carry the Olympic torch for different legs as it travels through China. Razer is particularly proud of this since two of those gamers are sponsored by the mouse maker.

“It’s a great honor for me to be part of something so special. Bearing the Olympic flame is a once in a lifetime opportunity and one I will treasure, not only because I’m from China, but also because I represent e-sports, which is a discipline growing in popularity,” said XiaoFeng “Sky” Li.

Fellow torch bearer Jaeho “Moon” Jang commented, “It will be amazing being part of the contingent bearing the Olympic torch. The Olympics comes around once... Read more

Reaffirming its emphasis on training, worldwide professional gaming league Championship Gaming Series has unveiled details on the training practices for its North American teams.

The CGS North America Training Camp will have the six North American CGS teams--Carolina Core, Chicago Chimera, Dallas Venom, Los Angeles Complexity, New York 3D, and San Francisco Optx--competing against one another in four weekly online matches for five consecutive weeks.

According to the league, which will be webcasting some of its Training Camp matches, the effort will help team managers "evaluate player performance and make modifications to their teams." Players are eligible for trade until June 18.

"Training Camp is going to give me the opportunity to fine-tune the team roster that I believe will win the World Final this season," boasted Los Angeles Complexity general manager Jason Lake. "My players will have to step up to the plate... Read more

Worldwide professional gaming league Championship Gaming Series has revealed the Wuhan Optical Valley Electronic Sports Stadium, a facility in Wuhan, China that it claims to be "the world's premiere eSports training center and professional gaming arena."

The Wuhan government and Wuhan Hi Tech Group are also involved with the new facility, which will act as the training grounds for the Wuhan Dragon CGS team and as the venue for the CGS 2008 Pan-Asia Final tournament that runs from April 30 to May 3.

According to CGS, the facility "marks a new step forward for the digital entertainment industry in Wuhan and the worldwide professional gaming community."

This year's CGS playoffs pit different combinations of its 10-athlete teams against other teams in four games: Counter-Strike Source (PC), FIFA 08 (platform unknown), Dead or Alive 4 (X360), and Forza Motorsport 2 (X360).

A worldwide playoff will be held in Los Angeles later this year, with certain CGS matches broadcast worldwide via DirecTV, BSkyB, and ESPN Star Sports.

The Electronic Sports World Cup has released a trailer for its upcoming 2008 Grand Final tournament, which will be held in San Jose, California from August 25-27, 2008.

The surprisingly well-made video features a brief explanation of the Electronic Sports World Cup, plently of nice words from the press, and some emotionally-charged highlights of past events. It's almost enough to make you feel like you were really there, minus the occasional smelly person and the shame of your inevitable defeat.

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A fourth PGR, I certainly didn't see that one coming!

As part of their CES activity, satellite television provider DirecTV has announced plans to start the Massive Gaming League which they say will be videogame tournament covered as a sporting event. There will be actual footage from the games, and the competitors will be profiled through interviews and features. No word on what sort of games or platforms the program will focus. The Massive Gaming League will launch this year.

I promised I would, so over the weekend I played around with some alternative formats for LNC. As I expected, it's not an easy task...I cram a ton of news into this single post, and making it easier to read inevitably makes it much, much larger. Here's one test format I came up with. That's clearly an improvement as far as readability (and I incorporated the much-requested system icons for news stories), but look at the size of it! Friday wasn't even a very big news night. I will of course, keep playing with it, and suggestions are always appreciated. Keep 'em coming.

• Square's really fallen into the same MMORPG curse as every company before them...there are still more problems with Final Fantasy XI. Apparently the game won't run on certain PS2 models. Doh! Considering how many different PS2s have been released in Japan, this isn't too surprising.
• Get ready for lots of Capcom...the company has announced plans to release 74 (!) titles this fiscal year. Hopefully they won't all be Street Fighter games with increasingly wacky titles.
• Would you believe Link is going to be a playable character in Soul Calibur 2? According to Gamers.com, it's true. This has also appeared on several other places, lending some credibility to the rumor. Apparently it'll be the adult one, not the 'toon one from the upcoming GameCube Zelda.
• The other big Nintendo rumor of the evening can be found at Computer and Video Games, where they have posted screenshots from the mysterious Super Mario's Universe trailer that's floating around the web. Is it a hoax? It certainly looks that way...but Nintendo hasn't come out and said so for sure.
• Congratulations to Microsoft...they finally outsold the GameCube in Japan (or at least for one week, anyway). Hey, it's a start.
• New media from Super Ghouls n' Ghosts and Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance can be found at pocket.ign.
• GameSpot has posted shots from Gran Turismo Concept Geneva, an upcoming GT game that is currently only planned for release in Europe, which features cars from last year's Geneva car show.
• Remember Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams, the Xbox port of the original PS2 Silent Hill 2? Well it's been ported back to the PS2 for release in Japan. Nutty.
• And finally, here's an interesting project, where the author hooked a GBA up to one of those PSOne LCD monitors (thanks slashdot).

Console Game of the Evening: Bonk's Adventure for the Turbo Grafx-16. A fun, fun platform game with a pretty original character, in an age when such things meant everything.

Here's something you dont see every day. According to an article in Wired which has been confirmed by The CPL. The CPL has just finished up rounding up $45million in investments to fund their gaming league for tournaments and prizes.

Video games have reached a tipping point in the culture, with over 145 million people playing, said G4 Media CEO Charles Hirschhorn. "This is a lifestyle channel. The game community deserves a channel. There have been decades of great work ... and our goal is to complement the community."

Yeah, this ran on ShackES a couple days ago, but we generally dont cover CPL stuff here much anymore and I thought this was particularly worth a mention.

The CAL Draft league for Counter-Strike is happening right now with coverage over at ShackES. It's a concept that has been attempted a couple of times before, but this feels like the first time that it might be successful. Over 1,300 people signed up to be drafted to one of 16 different teams. The entire intent being to get some equal distribuation of talent.

As a competitor, I love the idea and do hope it's very successful and we perhaps even see LAN tournaments based on these squads. I just thought it was an interesting twist to the Counter-Strike scene. There are hundreds of people on irc as the event happens.

Think this will be the hip new trend for the guys who love competition?

Something to read for the weekend, here's a Wired article on competitive gaming. Just to piss people off they chose to throw the word athlete in there.

HomeLan has an interview with Angel Munoz of CPL fame discussing announcements like the AVP2 demo tournament and upcoming events... the $150,000 Intel CPL World Championships in December in particular.

In a strange turn of events, CPL has announced in association with Monolith and Fox Interactive, Aliens vs Predator2 has become a CPL "approved" game and will be featured in an upcoming tournament giving away a custom car. This was suspected earlier given a concept image that surfaced at HardOCP a little while back but now it's official.

SierraT, Fox InteractiveT and the Cyberathlete Professional League® (CPL) are excited to announce that Aliens vs. PredatorT 2 has been approved as an "Official Tournament Game of the CPL". To kick off this partnership, the Aliens vs. Predator 2 tournament, also sponsored by PNY Technologies®, will be included in a 30-city tournament at CPL qualifying centers, a worldwide online tournament with the Cyberathlete Amateur LeagueT and the upcoming CPL World Championship Event. The Aliens vs. Predator 2 finals tournament will have gamers from across the nation competing for the grand prize of a high-end customized 2002 Ford Focus ZX3 courtesy of the American Products Company located in Corona, CA.

A few days ago ShackES broke a story (and Shack story here) that CPL announced that a decision was made to make changes to the CPL version of Counter-Strike in cooperation with Valve and Intel. There was an intense amount of backlash about the changes, which were to rename the teams to Offensive and Defensive as well as changing the "bomb" to a "communications device". Well after deliberating some more CPL has decided to change one thing back. Here's part of the PR we got from CPL:

... the CPL has concluded that the version of Counter-Strike (CS) that will be used at the World Championship tournament will in fact have an explosive device, with the exact same physics, as gamers from all over the world have been using for their local and online competitions.

Keep in mind the references to Offensive and Defensive teams will remain. It all seems pretty clear to me... As everyone knows the videogame market has been under quite a bit of scrutiny by the press for a while now and getting blamed for all kinds of things that many of us dont feel is deserved. Now you take Intel, a multi-billion dollar company who is sponsoring this event. Now consider the recent terrorist events from last month. Ponder that.

Now... Intel sponsors this event as obviously a PR move. You think Intel wants press that has been historically critical of gaming and violence showing up at an event that has their name all over it where in the finals people are cheering for and glorifying a victory of possibly the "terrorist team"? It's a PR nightmare, and a simple change to the text of the game between rounds is all that is needed to avoid that.

This is not about protecting the sensitivities of gamers. Everyone competing is obviously fine with the game as it is or they wouldnt be playing. This is about protecting the video game industry from the mainstream press vultures who are looking for a hot terrorism related story. That is just about the last thing the gaming industry needs right now.

I dont applaud the decision because it does suck having to change the game, but I can completely understand why the difficult decision was made. I would be almost certain that Intel was a very very big factor in all of this.

Havent seen one of these in a little while. Looks like the mainstream press still has a thing for this whole professional gamer kick. Check out this article talking about Jonathon 'Fatality' Wendel who just recently apparently signed a 6figure sponsor deal according to the article. Pretty ho-hum until you see this line:

Barnes bills Wendel as the first gamer to earn $100,000 in winnings in a single year. He said Wendel just signed a deal that will pit him against an undetermined opponent in a pay-per-view match planned for late fall.

Yeah... pay-per-view computer games! That's what we've been missing in this world!

ShackES and GamersLatino are reporting that some recent CPL winners are considering filing a lawsuit against CPL. Apparently they didnt realize the tax man gets a cut of their winnings and they want to sue CPL for not notifying them of common law.

So I saw this interview linked from ShackES and figured yay another interview with some guy who plays games really well.. but then I saw the quotes and thought "WTF?" Check out what this guy who moved overseas to Korea to play professional StarCraft is saying about how things are going over there. This is translated so the english is a little rough, This is just insane:

What makes Korean’s Starcraft environment great is the community behind it. Basically everyone in Korea under 40 years old knows and played Starcraft. Also, there are 6 channels on TV that broadcast games on a regular basis. That gives progamers a lot of exposure.  Grrr: I’m satisfied with my Starcraft career. I’ve performed better than what I could have dreamed of in all of the major tournaments. I’m now playing Starcraft only a few hours a week, only joining the big tournaments [...] Grrr:I sign a few autograph everyday in the streets. But I sign a lot more if I go to Pc rooms or to amusement park, where a lot of high-school students are. When I went WCGC (it was at Everland), I got surrounded by more than 50 kids are one time.

StarCraft is like a national thing over there in Korea. It's just freaky how a single computer game has made such a huge impact over there. Can anyone really imagine something like that happening with a game in the US or Europe or Canada?

Some pretty big news in the CPL scene. They have canned a couple of events in favor of a new format. Instead of holding those $20,000-$30,000 events every month or so they are going to bigass $150,000 minimum prize purse events a couple of times a year along with one charity event each year. That's one hell of a change in plans.

The Cyberathlete Professional League today announced the cancellation of August's Counter-Strike Tournament and October's Quake III Arena Tournament. With the exception of a yearly charity event, the CPL will now only hold a minimum of two large-scale tournaments a year with cash purses of at least $150,000 each. This revised approach to competitive gaming in the United States promises to yield stronger growth for the CPL through consolidated efforts. The CPL World Championship Event will be held on December 6 - December 9, 2001, offering a record-sized tournament cash purse of $150,000 and will accommodate up to 2,100 people [snip]

It's also interesting to note that with these latest events being canned the event that many players were looking to as the big last Quake3 tourney has been canned. Although QuakeCon is coming soon and offering a $50,000 cash purse.

With the recent word of the new "pro" maps being developed by Fred Nilsson over at id Software to be included into the next Quake3 release and the recent demonstration of new spectator technology by Valve Software for Counter-Strike at the Speakeasy CPL tournament it's becoming apparent that game developers are taking notice and putting effort into the competitive gamer. Well it could get a lot more interesting. A story at ShackES (plug! plug!) pointed the way to this simple quote by the CPL president. Here is a link to the full interview btw.

sling_blade: what games are you most looking forward to as possible e-sports games?
angel munoz: doom iii's pro-addon pack.
update from Angel:
I said that as a funny (hopeful) remark but it has been blown out of proportion.   I keep forgetting how strong the emotional binds are between the Quake community and id Software. 

On the other hand, John Carmack told me himself that the plan was to have a separate multiplayer add-on,  it would not surprise me, if they added some tourney software to it.  Best person to ask is Mr. Carmack himself, I think it is all in his head at this point.

But this begs a very interesting question. What exactly are the characteristics of a FPS game that would make a good tournament competition platform? Save your whining about the 'pro gamer' stuff at the door. (read: trolling = nuke/ban) This question applies to everyone. What aspects do you think belong and dont belong in a game targeted at top level competition? Are developers like Valve and id doing 'the right thing' by paying so much attention to these players? What do you think?

Loonygames has a new article up taking a look at the rise and fall of the PGL and some talk about the other gaming tournaments and leagues around the world offering up all those big cash prizes. The Cyberthlete Professional League being the only one in regular operation currently. From the progress CPL has been making and the recent announcement of that $100,000 CASH Quake3 tournament last month I would say this stuff is already happening, there is no more question about it.