In this episode, we sit down with professional video game player Jordan to talk about his journey to the pro ranks, how he got started in the game, and what it takes to be a professional gamer. We also talk about the challenges of being on the pro tour, and how to deal with the pressure of being a pro gamer in the modern era of video games. We hope you enjoy this episode and that it gives you some insight into what it's like to be on the professional tour and playing in the Overwatch League. If you like the show, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! We'll see you in the next episode! Cheers, Joe and Jordan! - The Besties Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. Art: Macklemore and Paul Kasinski Music: Hayden Coplen Editor: Will Witwer Additional Compositions by Ian Dorsch Thank you for the intro and outro music by The Goodfellas, courtesy of Fugue Records and The Good Fight Project, and our ad music is by Sideshow from the excellent music video by The Badger Crew. This episode was produced and edited by Mitch Albom, and produced by Squeals, and the rest of the band, and is edited by Bobby Lord, and additional mixing and mastering by Jeff Perla, and we do our own sound design, and mixing and mixing, and thanks to the excellent work of the excellent sound design and mastering, and editing, and a little bit of the mixing and editing by by our good friend . thanks to , and & we are live on the good vibes by , we hope you all enjoy the music is amazing. - Thank you so much for all the feedback we got from you, and thank you for all your support and support, we really appreciate all the love and support we get from all the support we can do, and all the hard work done by you all of our hard work, we appreciate all of the support and all of your support is appreciated, we love you, thank you, thanks for all of you, so much of our support is so much, we truly appreciate it, we are so much - thank you and we appreciate you, you really appreciate it.
00:00:39.000There's these teams, Team 3D, that was the first big team in North America, and they, like, I remember going to a local Fry's and buying a keyboard and seeing, like, one of their players quotes on the box, like, I use this keyboard because I'm gonna be the fucking best with this keyboard.
00:01:37.000Yeah, then it became, Counter-Strike was, like, the big game.
00:01:40.000So, Deathmatch, when you're playing Deathmatch, Counter-Strike, you're playing one-on-one or team versions of the Half-Life engine, but against other people.
00:01:51.000That's what a lot of people that play Counter-Strike competitively use to warm up, deathmatch mode, because you just keep dying and respawning.
00:01:57.000It's like a Quake insta-give or something, you know, you just keep restarting and just kill each other to kind of warm up your hands and whatnot, get them working well together.
00:02:07.000Do you have, like, a ritual or anything you do before you play?
00:02:13.000At this point, though, like, obviously, if you're a golfer, you might not train as hard as you did when you wanted to make the tour, but you still have to do maintenance stuff.
00:02:20.000So, like, when I hit a deathmatch, I'd get maybe 100 kills with each gun, and then I just...
00:02:26.000Then I obviously have team practice, which is a different set of coordinating strategies and stuff, but for personally, yeah, I just try to make sure I'm still playing, so if I ever feel off, I can identify what's really off pretty quick, and I'll just go hone in on that gun or that part of a map or whatever, but yeah,
00:02:53.000The level of competence, the level of skill.
00:02:56.000You can watch a lot of games online, and that's a big part of all this now, which is really fascinating, is how many people watch live games, or even with Quake, the big thing was watching demos.
00:03:23.000And those, like, action key moments normally happen over the course of, like, ten minutes or something.
00:03:27.000Whereas in Counter-Strike or Quake, it's like, that guy just got that point, he's about to kill this guy, there's just 30 seconds left on the clock.
00:04:24.000So I try to make that distinction to do justice to my profession or whatever, so in the future people start questioning more about what I do.
00:05:20.000Obviously, if you're going to play in NHL, you try to play for a college team or you go to juniors or semi-pro AHL. In this case, I play a league called ESEA. They have the Open Division Intermediate Main Premier Invite.
00:05:33.000If you're an invite, you're really the only people that have a chance that can get paid to play by companies.
00:05:38.000So when I say I went pro back in 2008, it's because I joined up a contract with an organization called Evil Geniuses, which is like my agency for an actor.
00:05:46.000And they had sponsors from Intel, Newegg, a bunch of peripheral companies for my gear.
00:05:52.000And they pay me to fly to the tournaments and I market them like I'm a NASCAR car.
00:06:22.000They came out with Half-Life 2 at one point, but that was the Source engine.
00:06:26.000So Counter-Strike Source came out, it was on that engine.
00:06:28.000So for folks who don't know what the fuck we're talking about, this is what that means.
00:06:32.000Like, video game engines, they take the engine...
00:06:35.000That's the physics, everything that controls your world.
00:06:36.000Yeah, the 3D geometry, the video, like, the way it looks, the graphics, and then they take that engine, and then they can port it over to other games.
00:06:45.000And they can develop games based on that engine.
00:06:48.000So it cuts a lot of the development process out, because a big part of the development process out is coming up with a video game engine.
00:07:25.000Something was up with the engine, and it was like they were trying to up the graphics and the feel and to make it look more realistic, but that took away from, I guess, how fast the computer talked to the server.
00:07:39.000You know, so then there was a discrepancy between, like, when I shot, when it actually hit the person.
00:07:44.000And obviously that's why, like, I can't, when I practice, I can't play against Europeans because of internet lag, right?
00:07:50.000So, like, that's why you would play on a LAN, because that's the fastest interaction between the server and the computer.
00:07:55.000Yeah, if you've played online with an internet lag, and you get used to it, and then you play without the lag, it's like you go to paradise.
00:08:03.000Yeah, it's like having to wait on your baseball bat or something.
00:08:06.000Yeah, but some guys got really good at it.
00:08:09.000Like, some guys get super good at timing their own fuck-up, their own lag.
00:08:13.000Yeah, and some of it's bullshit, though, because then they're harder to hit.
00:08:16.000Some of them are just glitching around.
00:09:49.000And because 1.6 was getting stagnant, like, since the developer doesn't give back to the game much and there isn't new shit coming out, people are like, well, this gets old.
00:09:57.000Because they're not pro, they're playing for the fun of it.
00:09:59.000That's the people that helped me make this my job, is the 80 or 90% of the community who isn't pro, who plays and is my viewership.
00:10:06.000Is the people I talk to for my sponsors, etc.
00:10:09.000So that was going downhill a lot at the end of Counter-Strike and other games like League of Legends, which is not a first-person shooter, and Dota.
00:11:23.000You're kind of premeditating a lot of your decisions, which you are in Counter-Strike too, but in a much more strategic way.
00:11:29.000You could probably plug in any mouse and play StarCraft.
00:11:32.000Whereas when my sponsor tries to give me a new mouse, I resist a lot because that's like, I don't know, a different baseball glove or a different curve on my ice hockey stick or a different set of irons as a golfer.
00:11:43.000It really throws me off for a little bit.
00:14:45.000But like when you would play that, like if you play that game and you got used to that physics, like I remember going from Quake to Unreal.
00:14:51.000It would like screw you up a little, even though it was awesome.
00:14:55.000It was like it moved just a little different, the mouse cursor moved a little different, and you know, you get your settings and you try to like fidget with it and try to get it to a place where you kind of understand what was happening intuitively.
00:15:09.000When we get a new game that's a first-person shooter, you go in and see how the game takes your sensitivity, if it's directly from your mouse or from Windows.
00:15:25.000Some you have to go in and they have their own in-game sensitivity and you have to slide the notch weird and it's got its own extrapolation of what a default sense is and every time you move one notch it's 1.25 the original versus another David.
00:15:41.000And then there's mouse acceleration, which is fucking weird.
00:16:41.000Someone playing with their wrist is doing this, so they use a higher sensitivity.
00:16:44.000Some of those people don't mind using a little Excel because they can do these little flick moves and kind of just really get into the groove with that, and it's smaller, whereas I have bigger motions that make me more comfortable.
00:16:55.000So if I have a little bit of Excel, I want it to be as true as possible to my actual hand because I'm doing these bigger movements.
00:17:02.000Do you have a large mouse pad as well?
00:17:04.000Uh, yeah, but I actually have two on top of each other.
00:17:07.000I'm one of the few people who uses, like, a hard mouse pad versus just cloth.
00:17:10.000So I like the plastic feel, and I have to, like, replace it, like, every three months because I grind it down.
00:17:46.000If we have a tournament coming up, since it's very team-centric, we dry-run, we premeditate a dozen strategies on the counter-terrorist and on the terror side.
00:17:54.000You really try to memorize what you and your teammates are going to do.
00:17:57.000So if something is thrown a wrench into your gears, you have to react on the fly somewhat within a certain scale of thought.
00:18:04.000So when I'm playing for a tournament, that's like we get on at 3 p.m., we end at 11. Whoa!
00:18:48.000We might like sometimes I purposely look away from a doorway so when some guy comes through and I practice a 90 degree turn and hitting him in the head so I just constantly have my my back to a guy so when he comes I can hear him and I flick around and That's the thing that a lot of people don't know about video games, is that you can hear in three dimensions,
00:19:05.000Like, if something's coming back behind you, back to your right, you can actually hear it back into your right, which is really spooky.
00:19:12.000Yeah, we use sound all the time to manipulate things, or we make it seem like we don't know they're behind us.
00:19:17.000I'll run out this doorway, and I know a guy's trailing me, so when I run to the left, my teammate's on the right, waiting for him to come shoot me on the left.
00:19:23.000So we manipulate sound all the time, so yeah, it's a huge part of it.
00:19:26.000So are you guys, when you plan out your strategies, do you have a video chat where you go over these strategies in physical form?
00:20:40.000So that means they're not gonna throw anything, right?
00:20:43.000So if we're gonna hit this room right here and we're gonna come in and kill Joe Rogan, If we wanted to come in here, we'd throw a flashbang through that door, right?
00:20:50.000And then we'd smoke off the kitchen right here, so no one in the kitchen has vision on the people coming through that doorway.
00:20:55.000And then, you know, we expect the only angles they could hold are under that TV and behind where...
00:21:20.000So these strategies are based upon the geometry of the room?
00:21:25.000Yeah, the type of the map, how fast...
00:21:27.000We have things called fakes, where we'll throw everything in here and make it look like we're coming to kill you, and all of a sudden the three of us are taking your teammates out who we're catching on the rotation.
00:21:36.000Because we're saying, when we throw all this shit in this room, Joe's going to say, guys, they're coming in, they're coming in, which is going to cause your guys watching the outback to come towards you and help you, and then we're going to...
00:21:45.000We're gonna jump them in the backyard.
00:21:46.000And so these strategies are all planned out in advance, and you have names for them?
00:21:50.000Yeah, so we'll call it like Sonic, or Gatorade, or...
00:21:53.000And you can hear each other, but you can't hear them?
00:21:57.000Yeah, we connect to a third-party software, like Mumble or TeamSpeak.
00:22:01.000It's kind of like Skype, but you press a hotkey, it's like a walkie-talkie.
00:22:05.000And so you will talk to each other while you're playing the game, like, look out, he's behind you.
00:22:10.000Does anybody hack into your line and they can, like, find out what you're saying?
00:22:14.000Back in the day, that was kind of like a thing that would happen between friends.
00:22:17.000Like, you're playing, you do, we call them ten-mans, where you pick two captains and everyone throws their name in a hat and you play random five-versus-five teams.
00:22:23.000And you're all on the same voice server.
00:22:25.000Well, one guy will, you can clone the program and open it again and he'll come in and join your channel while he's playing.
00:22:30.000So he'll have, like, one ear on what you guys are doing and that's, like, a scummy thing friends would do to each other.
00:22:47.000And you'd get on a server, and some guy would be shooting guys that were, like, jumping through the air, shooting you in midair, couldn't miss, and they'd kill everybody.
00:22:56.000Do they have that with Counter-Strike?
00:23:27.000It's a multi-million dollar industry, cheating in competitive games.
00:23:31.000It's not a huge, huge industry, but people update it.
00:23:35.000Every time the game developer creates a better firewall or whatever for the cheats, they go in, look at the code, find a way around it to do their aimbot.
00:23:46.000Yeah, but obviously at pro level, I don't deal with cheaters.
00:23:50.000Oh, that's actually wrong, but last year, that was the first ever time at a pro level where people found a way to cheat, and the guy got banned for life from tournaments.
00:24:00.000Well, because he cheated at like a LAN qualifier, supposedly, LAN local area network, where we're all, they were like, it's a French player, and he literally got caught...
00:24:08.000It's like the smallest cheat ever found.
00:24:10.000They found a way to like it's like 50 kilobytes and they inserted it and like it was like a trigger bot so it wasn't a full-time aim bot so he could press a button and it would snap to the nearest enemy so even if they're behind a wall so he could be chillin and just press this button and it would like snap to the wall and you knew a guy was about to come around that corridor or something.
00:24:27.000It was super low-key but super scummy.
00:24:33.000I forget the series of events, but there was some red flag on his account, and then the people have the ability to zoom in and narrow their scope onto one account and scan their system.
00:24:45.000And they did that, and they found some shady traces of cheating, and then he admitted it.
00:24:49.000And he's like, I'm sorry guys, I can't lie anymore.
00:24:51.000Wow, and so now he's done for the rest of his life.
00:24:54.000What if he comes back with a different name?
00:24:56.000Yeah, well, I mean, we'd see his face.
00:25:54.000And you could make a hack so that other people...
00:25:57.000If they're just little dots, right, moving around the rotating map, which are your teammates, you can make it so all ten people in the game show up or whoever, maybe.
00:26:04.000But if you try to do that professionally, you'd get banned for life.
00:26:55.000That's, like you said, I've always been to first-person shooters.
00:26:59.000But yeah, those games, their developer was the first one to really get involved with the competitive community and give a bunch of prize money back, like $10 million tournaments.
00:28:19.000Fucking ignore everything in your life and get bad grades and do all this shit in school.
00:28:23.000You have to, like, balance stuff, right?
00:28:24.000So, like, I was kind of like a nerd in that sense at a young age.
00:28:27.000I played ice hockey, came home, did my schoolwork, played Counter-Strike the rest of the night.
00:28:30.000And I told my mom every night who I'm playing with, what team, what level I'm at.
00:28:34.000And so when I finally said, hey, mom, I can go to this tournament, I'm old enough, because they had an age limit, like, you had to be 15. I was like I really want to go and so she started driving me and like pretty soon after I was making a name for myself on the west coast like there's this little kid sounds like a girl he's fucking fucking everybody up it's like little munchkin and he's just he's insane at the game individually but obviously you need to be a good team player so everyone kind of spread my name but my mom was yeah right there driving me to these lands I would play we'd get there at like 10 a.m.
00:29:01.000in Irvine or something and She would be knitting and hanging out, go see a movie, come back, pick me up at 2 a.m., drive me home to San Diego.
00:30:23.000All these years, all these years, women for all these years were holding in their pee, and then someone told them they don't have to anymore, and they started just peeing all over guys and calling it squirting.
00:31:21.000Yeah, no, it's because it's got, so the League of Legends finals last year had more viewership, I think, than the NHL Stanley Cup and the Rose Bowl combined.
00:33:46.000Well, Counter-Strike's, like, compared to the old version of Counter-Strike, this is, like, a big upgrade.
00:33:50.000So, like, that's been the thing that's actually kind of made it cool, is that, because obviously the craze of the graphics and the physics, the gameplay itself is less true.
00:33:59.000Like, you remember playing Quake, how'd that look, right?
00:34:02.000Like, if Quake was super modernized, I have a feeling that the integrity of the physics would go downhill on.
00:34:08.000Yeah, well that was one of the things that people didn't like about the newer games, is that the physics changed, like Quake 2 changed, and then Quake 3 became more like Quake 2. So you see the chat on the right, everyone's going nuts.
00:34:19.000A lot of people like, or Quake 3 rather, became more like Quake 1. Yeah, because everyone brings their feedback, like, oh, Quake 2 did this, I don't like it.
00:36:50.000And people can subscribe to you, kind of like, you know, and you can have like $5 a subscription, and if you have like a shitload of subscribers every month, that just renews.
00:36:59.000Hold on, I can't hear both of you guys at the same time.
00:37:01.000Turn her off then, so we can't hear it.
00:38:30.000And what's interesting is that a lot of people are using their Xboxes to watch Netflix and stuff like that, and Twitch is now on Xboxes, Playstations, it's on Roku now.
00:38:43.000So people are watching that as TV. I'll go home at the end of the night, not turn on NBC or ABC. I'll just watch somebody play Counter Strike fall asleep.
00:39:28.000So, see, there's three different ways these people make money, right?
00:39:30.000There's the subservice, the subscription, ad revenue, so he's got 18,000 viewers, he probably makes like 100 bucks an hour on that, and then...
00:40:21.000I've avoided them with drugs, for the most part, although some would disagree, but I do have them hardcore with games, to the point where I avoid games.
00:40:30.000But watching this, this is a totally different animal, because these guys are making money.
00:40:35.000I can't believe you have a subscription link there, and you click on that, and you can give this cat five bucks a month.
00:41:09.000So I was teaching him how to be a Twitch host, and me and Jamie would play Grand Theft Auto with him, and he would practice talking and stuff like that.
00:41:17.000And it's amazing that this is now a job.
00:43:09.000Yeah, I've gotten in trouble a couple of times.
00:43:11.000I was playing Grand Theft Auto when a girl came over and she just started taking off her top and stuff like that and I forgot that it was twitching.
00:43:16.000Because on Xbox Live, you could be twitching and you totally forget it's on and then you fall asleep and you wake up the next day and your camera's still on.
00:45:27.000Like, if you're a channel who already does other things and then one day you decide to have a Friday night is pool night, I think you could.
00:45:54.000So this guy's playing four different games at a time.
00:45:57.000A lot of those video game poker dudes, the real aces, they do that, right?
00:46:01.000Yeah, and they have a program to keep track of the hands everyone's been playing, like, on their table and stuff, you pay for it.
00:46:07.000Because these guys are playing, they're making good money, you know, playing poker four tables a day.
00:46:11.000Right, and he's, so this cat is playing, he's playing four different games at the same time where he's making money on these games or losing money, gambling.
00:49:45.000It's interesting because they really took the formula from porn.
00:49:48.000You know, porn always starts off first, and they always invent it first, and then they moved it into having the donations in the chat room and all that stuff.
00:52:46.000It was like a game that was for like early computers and it was chess but the guys would be knights and they would be animated and they would like cut the other person in half.
00:53:21.000See, like, the graphics are quite a bit better in this than they are on the Counter-Strike, but even this is old.
00:53:26.000This is Quake 3. Dude, I love this shit, though.
00:53:29.000My favorite tournaments to watch back in the day were, like, the Painkiller Quake, Unreal Tournament.
00:53:34.000Well, what's interesting to me, you know, these games, it seems like you get hooked on one, and that one game becomes your shit, but then you run the risk of being left behind, because then new games come out.
00:53:49.000So I think the more legitimate thing eSports gets, obviously there's more interest for the game developers to keep their game lasting, right?
00:53:57.000Whereas in the past it was like, buy the new game, how are we gonna make money?
00:54:01.000We need to come out with a new game so people buy it, but now there's way more ways for them to make money.
00:54:05.000So in Counter-Strike, You could change the way your AK-47 looks now.
00:54:08.000You could put a blue dragon decal on it and you pay $5 for that decal or $30 or $2, depending on how rare the decal is.
00:54:17.000And that is used to crowdfund for them to make money and for us to have tournaments.
00:54:21.000So Valve now, the creator of Counter-Strike, hosts a quarter-million-dollar tournament every couple months from the money they get from the micro-economy they created for Counter-Strike.
01:03:32.000A VPN. So you can't trace where they call from.
01:03:35.000So did you give out your address online or did someone Google it?
01:03:39.000I guess someone found my Skype username and then traced a log for all the calls, where the calls most frequently from, and they just triangulated my house IP address.
01:03:49.000And then they did something called doxing, where they get everything about my house and my personal info.
01:04:08.000For me, all I had to do is, after I just talked to the police chief, I was like, guys, this happened a couple times, like, please don't respond like this again, like, here's my number.
01:04:14.000Right, but then what if somebody wants to murder you, so what they do is they dox you.
01:05:04.000So like I said, luckily they were at the end of the block when I walked out and I looked and I see all these guys behind bushes and tree lines with M16s pointing at me.
01:06:33.000It's like, I try to picture the person that, like, what kind of, like, gang initiation of nerds, and they're all, like, circle-jerking in, like, some kind of, like, tech lab dungeon.
01:09:11.000Or are you like, what are you nerds fighting over?
01:09:13.000And for folks who don't know what Gamergate was, you know, it kind of started out as some sort of a fight over online journalism and became something about feminism and social justice warriors and all kinds of craziness.
01:09:28.000Yeah, that was, honestly, I don't even know the whole story.
01:09:31.000I only heard about it partially because people were talking about the female side of things, and I remember a lot of the companies I worked with, immediately I saw a change in the direction of marketing.
01:09:40.000They're like, put females on all of our adverts.
01:09:51.000Yeah, I don't need to say specific companies, but I saw a lot of these esports companies, like, instead of having a guy wearing the gaming headset, it was a girl now, like, by the way, like, we do like gamers, like, or girl gamers, rather.
01:10:03.000So their response to it was to say that they're supportive of female gaming?
01:10:08.000Yeah, and supporting girl streamers on Twitch.
01:10:10.000The whole thing was just so bizarre, because it all happened that one gal was banging some dude who was a video game.
01:10:16.000Yeah, I actually don't know the whole story.
01:11:00.000My managers, I play on a team called Cloud9, they were talking about it because their sponsors discussed with them about what it was, but I didn't hear about it until after it happened.
01:11:10.000I was like, wait, what was this thing?
01:13:43.000And I don't, it's one thing, like, I understand, like, there's this one girl, her name's Casey Tron, and she makes fun of the whole thing.
01:13:48.000She's got big boobs as it is, but she pushes them up, has the camera, like, angled in on it, and she constantly says, like, stupid shit, and, like, makes, like, sexual innuendos all the time, and, like, just different jokes on her stream, because she wants to embrace the chaos that is the Twitch chat, and just kind of...
01:14:03.000Right, and how did, and what kind of, like, numbers did she get?
01:14:06.000I mean, it's definitely a full-time job for her.
01:14:38.000Yeah, but most of these games, they're getting way more viewers per day than an episode of Grey's Anatomy nowadays.
01:14:47.000I saw this thing about The Ultimate Fighter, you know, the UFC show, the reality show.
01:14:53.000Where someone was saying that the, I don't know if this is true, but The Ultimate Fighter only had 246,000 people watch one of the episodes, which is just, I mean, that's way less than we get for a podcast.
01:16:46.000The debate, though, in television was whether or not to include the DirecTV numbers, because DirecTV numbers were different than the numbers they were getting off of regular television.
01:16:55.000Also, is many people watching the television together?
01:16:58.000Is there five people watching one screen?
01:16:59.000You've got to talk right into that, dude.
01:18:48.000So some ads don't get shown, so that doesn't go towards the counts per millennia, the CPM or whatever, the rate you get per thousand viewers.
01:18:56.000So, obviously on a TV box you can't turn off the commercial.
01:19:01.000You can switch the channel, but online you can literally disable the ad so that you're always watching the streamer.
01:19:07.000Because I could run an ad every eight minutes, some people don't want to see the ad, they just want to watch Jordan.
01:19:11.000So when I run a commercial I try to make an effort to leave the room so people aren't encouraged to turn off ad block.
01:19:16.000So there's nothing going on during my commercial.
01:19:31.000So per every thousand viewers I get a rate like three to five dollars per commercial I run.
01:19:35.000So if I have 4,000 viewers and I run a commercial at prime hours, that's 30 seconds, I'll get like 20 bucks or something for like a couple thousand viewers.
01:19:43.000So you could run for an hour, that's 80 bucks an hour or whatever.
01:19:53.000Sometimes if I'm having a really funny stream and there's a bunch of cool shit happening, I don't want to interrupt with a commercial, right?
01:20:00.000But if I'm just playing a game and I'm like, alright guys, I'm going to go take a piss, get some food, a snack really quick, I'm going to run a two minute commercial.
01:20:06.000But I try to never interrupt the action.
01:20:08.000And these two-minute commercials, they use trailers for movies?
01:20:11.000Yeah, so it draws from a random rotator.
01:20:15.000That's how Twitch makes also their money.
01:20:17.000So these companies pay Twitch maybe 10 grand to run their ad for this Friday.
01:21:08.000Well, I still have it because I have an unlimited data plan, so I've been resisting, but I have the new HTC M9, which I use for everything else.
01:21:49.000The world of competitive video games, I was kind of aware of and I knew about these enormous StarCraft tournaments where people are, you know, watching it on television.
01:25:31.000He's going to make way more than all of us because he literally won't leave his house for two weeks and he's still totally sane, happy, totally positive.
01:28:07.000Remember I came with the bathrobe on, the leopard bathrobe for you and Joey, and I danced for you?
01:28:12.000Do you remember the time there was that dude, and this was way, way back in the day, but he had some sort of a cellular hookup in his backpack that was attached to a laptop.
01:29:02.000I wanted to Periscope like me and Goldberg, like getting ready and fucking around and let everybody know what it is and this is what it looks like.
01:29:09.000I want to introduce everybody to the people that work behind the scenes and show everybody Tom Segura and Tony Hinchcliffe.
01:30:17.000So how I got banned, though, is because of the fights, because of the fights, Because of the fights, they had to incorporate some kind of feature so people were showing the fights that people could report on them.
01:30:31.000So what happened to me is there was a bipolar schizophrenic cam girl named Egyptian Princess.
01:30:58.000Periscope and Twitter looked at it and goes, well, that's a stupid rule because you probably have a lot of haters that would just do this every time you get on.
01:31:31.000If I did that now, my channel would get shut down for an hour.
01:31:34.000So that's like how New York City has that law that men can take their shirts off so women take their shirts off because they can't do anything about it.
01:31:41.000Yeah, because like Ari Shafir will walk around New York City every day with no shirt on.
01:33:57.000And by the way, that's what Carmack believes.
01:33:59.000Carmack and I were chatting back and forth the other day on Twitter, and one of the things that he was talking about that he's obsessed with, I guess, is Oculus.
01:34:07.000Oculus Rift and the possibilities that that entails.
01:34:19.000See, that's the biggest problem, the biggest obstacle that they have to get over is a lot of people put it on and get sick immediately, and so it's not going to work for them.
01:34:27.000Yeah, that's the thing, man, like with motion sickness.
01:34:30.000Like some folks get motion sickness and some people don't.
01:34:32.000Like some people can't, like my wife can't get on a boat.
01:34:35.000She gets on a boat, she's like, like I have no problem.
01:34:37.000I can be on waves and it doesn't affect me.
01:36:39.000Yeah, that's uh, well the the the oculus thing I would think that eventually that would be like you could do like you could spar You could have like a martial arts simulator with like there's a person in front of you and you're fucking duking it out with some person Totally practice your little meta fighting.
01:36:54.000I don't know You wouldn't be able to grab them That would be an issue like you wouldn't be able like there would be no grappling stuff But you would be able to kick and punch and stuff start 3d printing opponents Yeah, the thing about grappling is you're interacting with a person's body.
01:37:10.000Striking is kind of independent because you could kind of pretend you're hitting someone.
01:37:59.000I mean, our armies are already fucking guys sitting in an airbase in Nevada.
01:38:03.000I just couldn't There's a lot of, I mean it's a small portion, but it's a lot of the technology they're working on now is also exoskeletons.
01:38:55.000Yeah, and they're like, alright, Holmes, you owe me a hundred thousand, give me this to you.
01:38:57.000Yeah, it was like a dystopian version of the future, and everything was bad, but the rich people all lived in the sky in some beautiful town where Sigourney Weaver, no, it wasn't Sigourney Weaver, who the fuck was it that was the king?
01:39:48.000So you can get a whole representation of a grasp and another neuron nearby will produce a different type of grasp and be sensitive to a different type of object.
01:40:54.000Well, I mean that's beautiful because but that's again what we're saying and I don't think we're long for this world I mean, I think eventually that right now is really crude.
01:41:04.000That's like the Model T of these fucking robot things, but we're gonna get to the Tesla of these robot things And that's not that far away.
01:41:12.000And then people are gonna go, well, fuck this shitty body.
01:41:14.000This fucking flesh bag that I live in that's always farting and going bad.
01:41:19.000You know, I'm getting sick all the time.
01:41:21.000Let me just fucking take my brain and stuff it into this thing that'll keep it alive indefinitely.
01:41:25.000Well, and nano stuff is gonna start overwhelming.
01:41:28.000So this guy I know personally, he plays with the nubs.
01:43:43.000And if you lose, that's like a big part of the competitive play, is controlling your money.
01:43:47.000Because if you, like, force buy, it's called, where you just buy everything every round, if you keep losing, you're not gonna have good inventory.
01:47:54.000Physical conditioning, they have to do their, you know, all the different skill training, whether it's wrestling or kickboxing, whatever the fuck they have to do that day.
01:48:00.000When that day's over, they do a lot of this for relaxing.
01:48:04.000They'll play video games to relax and chill out, or they'll watch television, but it's super hard to transition from that to some other life.
01:48:13.000Because they have a short life where their vehicle can...
01:48:16.000It's like, say if someone gave you a computer, okay?
01:48:18.000And this computer can only handle the graphics that are available today, but the new graphics are coming down the line, but your computer can't handle it anymore.
01:48:53.000So for a fighter, they have this really small window of opportunity, and then when it's over, it's fucking over, man.
01:48:59.000I mean, there are very few competitive 60-year-old fighters.
01:49:03.000I mean, it's just, it is what it is, and when it's gone, there's nothing left, you know?
01:49:08.000But with gamers, you gotta think that there's gotta be an age on that, too, where you can't react quick enough, especially first-person shooter-type games.
01:49:16.000Yeah, but I think that number has been growing, because I think of someone like Team Usani in the NHL, playing in the Stanley Cup at age 40, and you tell me I can't fucking play Counter-Strike at age 30, like...
01:49:24.000Better example, Bernard Hopkins is 50, and he's a world championship level boxer.
01:49:31.000I don't know if he has a title right now.
01:49:33.000If he can still do that and still be into it and train and do everything he needs to do, I know I can play video games, especially now that you can actually make money off of it.
01:50:07.000Whereas, like, Ruslan Provodnikov or someone along those lines who has, like, a very face-first, aggressive style, that guy's not going to be able to do that into his 50s.
01:50:16.000He's not going to be able to be Bernard Hopkins unless he changes his style, like, radically.
01:50:21.000See, I obviously don't comprehend all the nuances of fighting, but I just think of that like someone playing a video game and I'm sitting here.
01:50:26.000Like, how can you tell me if I don't balance my physical health that I can't play?
01:50:29.000Well, you gotta worry about your reflexes.
01:50:33.000I mean, whether or not your reflexes will still maintain.
01:50:35.000Because I gotta think with video games, you're dealing with such a small window of opportunity for like getting a shot off and stuff like that.
01:50:42.000That reaction time, like, do you take vitamins and do you fuck around with nootropics or anything along those lines?
01:50:48.000So there's this company, nootropics recently just came under my radar and I've been trying it for the past couple months a little bit, but not too consistently.
01:50:56.000We'll get you some, we'll get you some alpha brain.
01:51:29.000Do you try to do that on purpose, like to preserve your sanity?
01:51:34.000Coffee is one of those things where depending on how little sleep I got and if I'm going to compete right then, knowing I just need energy for an hour, I'll give myself a little coffee 30 minutes before, so the jitters wear down, but I have that little hour of uppity-ness.
01:51:48.000But generally, with competition, I have two rules.
01:51:50.000I like to get sleep, and I don't like to be on a full stomach when I compete.
01:53:21.000If you could get really good at video games, I really believe that if you get really good at anything, that most likely you can get good at anything that you direct your mind to.
01:53:30.000I mean, you probably wouldn't be a good linebacker, because you're not a giant dude, nor would I. So it's like there's certain physical limitations, but if you're a really good video game player, if you put that kind of effort into becoming a stand-up, yeah, you could do it.
01:54:42.000So I noticed that early on just by studying.
01:54:44.000So yeah, you kind of immerse yourself and figure out what your natural...
01:54:49.000For me, in Counter-Strike, I had really good shooting abilities.
01:54:53.000But early on, I was so aggressive, so hungry to get into the fight early that, obviously, if I'm not communicating that with my teammates or I get over-ambitious with the play, then all of a sudden I'm going to die, even though I just killed two people.
01:55:03.000And it seems like we should win the round, but I killed two and then went and died for no reason, whereas I can kill two.
01:55:08.000Play passive, let someone else take their reins.
01:55:10.000Those are things I had to develop more over the game, and you have to study that, because there's a lot of kids who think they could be a pro video game player because they just have the good shot.
01:56:46.000How can I stay loose when I really want to win and there's pressure on the line?
01:56:51.000Whether it's a psychological help or literal technical things, I just try to help people.
01:56:55.000So what this seems to me, it's like from the outside, people are looking at this like it's some frivolous, silly thing that people who really need to grow up are involved in.
01:57:05.000But from an objective perspective, without the cultural context of how people look at video games, it seems to me like a very complex, multi-tasked, Sort of a skill-based competition.
01:57:21.000It's problem solving at a very high level because you're factoring a bunch of different things.
01:57:28.000You also have social interaction with all the different people in your group.
01:57:34.000And then on top of that, you have to factor in the playing styles, the various different aggressive or defensive playing styles of the people you're going up against.
01:57:43.000There's a lot of complexity involved that I think the average person probably wouldn't understand unless maybe they talked to someone like you.
01:57:51.000Someone, when I said I was doing this podcast, wanted me to try to compare it to fighting and have you talk to me about the meta of fighting and the small nuances.
01:58:00.000You could tell if a guy stepped a little weird, what does that represent?
01:58:04.000Is his right side hurting or something like this?
01:58:06.000In Counter-Strike, there's all these little things that I know that the outside has no idea just happened because I could see the guy's face.
01:59:06.000Well, pretty much, there's very few guys who don't spin anymore.
01:59:10.000Like, spinning back fists at the very least, but spinning back kicks are getting more and more prevalent.
01:59:15.000Like, even Frankie Edgar, who's like...
01:59:17.000Primarily known as a wrestler is throwing a lot of spinning back kicks.
01:59:21.000It's just a really effective technique.
01:59:23.000But the point being that it's just, I know that it's going to happen just because I've seen it so many fucking times.
01:59:29.000It's a very subtle movement that people will make that you have to like, your brain goes into that information chunking mode and they go, oh, this slight shift of his hips equates to that.
01:59:39.000So if you see a guy who's like behaving in a certain way, like, ah, I've fucking seen that before.
01:59:44.000And it's not a conscious thought, right?
01:59:46.000Just like you were saying with fighting.
01:59:47.000It's a culmination of thoughts and things you've experienced.
02:00:00.000When those guys have those clocks and they're slapping the clock and moving with peace.
02:00:03.000Yeah, they're trying to play like seven, ten steps ahead because they realize, oh, that's three options, four options, one option, ten options, eleven options, three...
02:00:10.000Have you ever seen those old-school videos of Eddie Fisher?
02:00:37.000The Bobby Fischer, the original videos, it's really fascinating because he would play like 10 games at a time and he would walk down this like conference table and just move the pieces like see if you can find Bobby Fischer playing multiple video games or multiple multiple chess games.
02:00:57.000I think there's one stage where they're in a little hall, and he's walking around playing all of them, and these guys are thinking hard about their one game with him.
02:01:02.000And he's just kicking their ass, ten people's asses at the same time.
02:01:25.000And just to circle this back around, I think that is, people do have a tough time when they look at Counter-Strike or when they look at Quake, knowing what to look for.
02:01:51.000Well, if you watch, like, Floyd Mayweather fight, like, one of the things that's amazing about Floyd Mayweather is how he's able to kind of dictate his opponent's movements.
02:02:00.000And people give him shit, too, for this.
02:02:29.000His movement, though, what's fascinating about it is he's able to take these guys that are normally high-volume attackers and he slows their movement and slows their volume output considerably by him dictating how they move.
02:02:43.000He just is so much better that they don't get comfortable and they don't know exactly what to do.
02:02:48.000Because every time they go do something, they get popped.
02:02:59.000What's also his information chunking is just better than theirs because he's put in more time than they have and thought about it more because he has a really good brother, or really good father rather, who fought Sugar Ray Leonard.
02:03:12.000His father who trained him fought Sugar Ray Leonard way back in the day, Floyd Mayweather Sr. And then his uncle is Roger Mayweather, who's a world champion as well.
02:03:21.000And he's got other people in his family that were really good boxers as well.
02:03:24.000So this kid was indoctrinated into boxing.
02:03:27.000So his mind is like, he's got all these, and I'm sure he's a student of the game, so he's probably watched a million fights, and he knows what goes wrong when you do this, and what goes wrong.
02:03:35.000People just try to bring him down for other things not related to it all the time.
02:05:03.000But this guy was a really good boxer and apparently got a gift decision over Floyd Mayweather and then went on to get involved in a bunch of Shady characters and, you know, his career fell apart.
02:05:18.000But that was the last time anybody beat Floyd Mayweather.
02:05:21.000And that was, again, like when Floyd was 19. He's 38 now.
02:05:30.000Yeah, I mean, look, there's lessons to be learned even in the shittiest human beings.
02:05:35.000You can look at what they're successful at.
02:05:37.000And even in the shittiest human beings, there's lessons also learning what's the price of success and whether or not you're willing to pay that price.
02:05:44.000Because oftentimes the price is foolishness.
02:05:46.000Like, if you have to become a bad person to be really great at something, what are the benefits of being great other than financial success?
02:05:55.000Yeah, scoring, getting those points, you know, accumulating wealth.
02:06:00.000Is that more important than the way you're treated by your peers, your community, your friends and family?
02:06:07.000You had a black belt I remember reading, like 15 or something?
02:06:10.000I think I was 16. I started training in karate when I was 14. Got super serious about Taekwondo when I was 15. Before I was 17, I was a black belt.
02:06:20.000So, I mean, it sounds like you obviously made a big sacrifice early on.
02:06:23.000You've been doing that your whole life, right?
02:06:50.000Yeah, well I was in Newton so where I was it was a suburb of Boston So it was like you could say like I sacrificed But it wasn't like I had all these friends that I couldn't hang out with and I had like this Family that was missing me.
02:07:01.000No, I was like, you know, my parents were I was a latchkey kid So my parents were working all day and you know, I would I just didn't I didn't have anything else So I found this one thing that I felt like could give me some value I could have some I felt like I had some personal worth From this,
02:07:21.000And then once I got good at it, it was like, wow, this is the first thing that I've ever done that gives me, like, a good feeling by being good at.
02:07:28.000Whereas, like, my life before that was kind of depressing.
02:07:31.000It was like going from one community to another, constantly moving, no friends, being bullied.
02:08:02.000I'm kind of a crazy person you know and all I have to do is like find things and then those things become my whole life and the problem with me was that that from the time I was 15 till I was 21 that was sort of my developmental period of becoming an adult so that is how my brain formed and it's like really Laser beam focused,
02:08:22.000kind of insane way where I don't give a fuck about anything else.
02:08:26.000And that's what my problem was with video games.
02:08:29.000Because once I started playing video games, somebody would be talking to me.
02:08:32.000If I didn't like what they were saying, if I was bored, I would just start playing video games in my head.
02:08:35.000I'd be like, I could be playing video games right now.
02:08:42.000It's like oftentimes people that are really, really good at something are super unbalanced.
02:08:47.000I was going to say, I could resonate with different things you're saying.
02:08:49.000Well, that's why I see with you, I appreciate the fact that you have put a lot of thought into like doing things, going outside, playing hockey, getting a real life on top of this video game thing because obviously if you're really good at this game, which obviously you are really good at it,
02:09:05.000you must have a sort of obsessive mind.
02:09:08.000There's no way there's no like I have a quote that I use all the time that I came up with a long time ago is that greatness and Insanity are next-door neighbors and they bar each other sugar Because it really is true you the greatness and madness are so closely related There's almost no way around it because you have to in order to achieve A super high level of something.
02:09:32.000You have to be able to do it better than the other people.
02:09:36.000You have to have more of an understanding of it.
02:09:39.000And the only way to do that is you have to not pay attention to other shit.
02:09:43.000You know, you can't be learning five different languages and also pursuing a degree in complex mathematics and also doing this and also learning how to play guitar.
02:09:52.000And also having a girlfriend who demands all your time.
02:10:59.000The guys who were really good, they would have girls that would want to bang them.
02:11:03.000Yeah, I'm not going to sit here and say we have gamer orgies everywhere, but there are girls who just...
02:11:07.000They either linger or they come to events or they try to interact with you in weird ways online so that when they do show up at the event, you pay attention to them versus the other.
02:12:12.000Yeah, if you're dating a girl and she's a comic and she's bad at it, you might as well be dating a dude.
02:12:19.000You know, I mean it's like it's such a turn-off.
02:12:21.000She knows she's gonna try to talk like a dude.
02:12:22.000Unless you're gay and then dating a dude is what you're looking for, but you get my point.
02:12:26.000If you're dating a girl who sucks at something that you're really good at, it for whatever reason just immediately kills any attractive quality that she might have.
02:12:36.000What if she just like whipped my ass at golf or something?
02:12:45.000Like, they get very intimidated by a woman that's better than them.
02:12:48.000Like, some guys, even at professional levels, will play, like, a really good woman, a high-level professional woman, and fall apart because they're nervous to play a woman.
02:12:59.000I could say from the past, I've played the best Counter-Strike girl teams in the world for events because they don't go to all the same ones, but they have separate events.
02:13:07.000When you play them, it does feel like a lose-lose.
02:13:09.000You're just like, alright, I'm going to either crush them or barely beat them, or if I lose, then it's even worse.
02:13:14.000Even if I win, I'm expected to crush them.
02:13:16.000So you play them and you're just like, I've lost a couple rounds before I won any versus a girl.
02:13:31.000But, yeah, I'm sure at certain points for the guys coming up, they want to be pro-male player, and they play a girls team and lose, they're probably like, I'm going to walk out of the room quietly.
02:13:39.000Yeah, I remember watching pool tournaments and like say like a Jeanette Lee or someone like that would enter the tournament and someone who would play like really good would fall apart in front of her because they just couldn't deal with the possibility of losing to this like Really pretty girl like they just they wanted to impress her and they would miss nine balls and just like shit Yeah,
02:13:58.000the perception men's bigger stronger faster Well, it's not even just that, it's like men have to win.
02:14:04.000You know, they have this I have to win thing.
02:14:07.000And if you don't win, your self-worth, like, you devalue who you are.
02:14:12.000I've heard you talk about that stuff in the past, the caveman mindset, right?
02:14:15.000Back in the day, you just dominate your cave, you hunt, you gather, like, you...
02:14:24.000I mean, the competition over breeding is, you know, hunter-gatherer competition, and then it's like fighting off neighboring tribes that are trying to come in and take them.
02:15:49.000It's like, you can't, it's, you don't have, like, one of the things that I hate about when you play video games like an Xbox controller was how, like, it doesn't, it's not nearly as precise.
02:16:01.000You get used to that WASD on the keyboard and the mouse and, you know, it becomes a part of who you are.
02:16:07.000I have so many stories where, like, I go to, like, a house or a party or something, and everyone's like, that's fucking Pro Gamer Kid!
02:16:12.000And then everyone's like, play me at FIFA right now, or play me in this game on Xbox.
02:16:15.000I'm like, I don't fucking play those games.
02:16:16.000Like, I don't care to be good at them.
02:16:17.000And they're like, oh, so I can beat you.
02:16:18.000I'm looking better than the Pro Gamer Kid!
02:16:26.000Switching from a mouse and a keyboard to those Xbox controllers.
02:16:29.000I could probably, in Counter-Strike, if you were to pick up all my friends, I could play one-on-ten against kids probably playing with an Xbox controller.
02:17:10.000Yeah, and then everyone has these things that are extenders for the joystick, so it's like longer, so you have an easier time manipulating the joystick.
02:18:24.000I'd rather lay back on my couch and play a game of Grand Theft Auto than have my keyboard and mouse and sit there and try to twitch and kill people.
02:18:32.000Yeah, that's what's cool about the keyboard or the controller.
02:18:45.000But a joystick and you would move it around you would shoot with the trigger was kind of cool because you could actually shoot with a trigger And you would aim with the trackball and the trackball was pretty cool Yeah, but not quite as good as a mouse and keyboard It was like a step below like the really good guys can still fuck you up with it But then once I switched over to a mouse and keyboard Then all of a sudden I was moving with my left hand and shooting and aiming with my right as opposed to shooting with my right and moving and aiming with my left That'd be a mindfuck for me.
02:19:13.000I know people use that for, like, Photoshop, I think.
02:19:29.000Well, that's what's funny when these new, these peripheral companies like Logitech or, yeah, Logitech is one of my sponsors, when they make a new mouse, they've recently, in the past couple years, they have the technology to make amazing stuff, but they always add, like, little, like, ridges or something on the mouse that, as pro gamers, like,
02:19:44.000Like, to grip the mouse weird and the sensor, they add these specs that, like, don't really apply to our range of motion.
02:19:50.000They put, like, a million DPI. You could track, well, I'm not going to swipe my arm across the room.
02:19:54.000Like, I have a certain range of motion and, yeah, I don't know.
02:19:58.000The controllers essentially need, um, I kind of lost my train of thought there, but...
02:21:33.000Now, if a new game came out, like say, you know, there's Call of Duty and all these different games, and a new game came out, it became the shit.
02:21:41.000And you started to see that trend where everybody was slowly drifting off to that game.
02:21:46.000Do you decide, okay, I've got to fucking pick this game up.
02:21:49.000And if you do, are you starting from scratch or are you starting from like halfway?
02:21:54.000I guess it depends how new the game is.
02:21:56.000Like, current Call of Duty, if it was on PC, I'd be above average.
02:21:59.000I would probably be a decent competitive player.
02:22:01.000You have to learn all the maps, and then the metagame is gone, obviously, because there's no information chunks that exist at this point, because it's a new sport.
02:22:39.000Yeah, recently it got a reinsurgence because they took the model of League of Legends where you can customize all the shit in the game.
02:22:45.000Counter-Strike got a little bland for people because it was the same thing always, but now they've made it so you can customize the way your gun looks and all these little gimmicky things that are pretty cool, but they don't really change the game.
02:22:54.000And that brought in new players, new money, which makes the game developer pour more money into it, keep updating the nuances.
02:23:38.000Yeah, so a couple of them, like, I know the top Quake players, and if they had Twitch now and the game was still big, they would all be in a similar boat as I am, but unfortunately...
02:23:46.000The game kind of plateaued, and the bubble popped before Twitch got big, and there's no tournaments.
02:23:51.000They just don't have anywhere to compete.
02:24:26.000And all these other games, since there was like, this guy independently made the map, I think it was, Mad Frog, Ice Frog or something, I forget his name, and basically League of Legends, Dota, and Heroes of New Earth, three different game developers, they're almost the same concept game,
02:24:43.000everything, so slightly different heroes and champions and spells, but basically they normally say, like, people who can't go pro in Dota go pro in League of Legends, people who can't go pro in League of Legends go pro in Heroes of New Earth.
02:24:55.000So it's like this succession of almost the same game, but just like more and more money and more and more tournaments.
02:25:00.000If you put me in a time machine from back when I was playing Quake, and then like in the 90s, and then jumped me here today, I'd be like, what in the actual fuck is going on?
02:25:49.000So that was one of the first games that made their money model, not off selling the game, but off all the things you could buy in the game.
02:25:56.000What do you think about microtransactions?
02:25:57.000I guess I didn't use the right term, but that's what I was talking about earlier.
02:26:00.000That's what CSGO has now, microtransactions.
02:26:02.000Those are really problematic for people on phones.
02:26:05.000That's why Quake was never as big, though, because if they had this model of microtransactions, you could change the way your laser gun works or your rocket gun.
02:26:59.000So the pro teams go, they're strategizing, hey, do we need, I don't know, I honestly don't know, but they need like, you know, close range attackers to tank this guy, that guy.
02:27:10.000No, I would play it if it was on PC, but honestly, first-person shooters, I can't spend my free time playing them anymore unless I'm going to casually play it on a screen game.
02:28:33.000When you're looking down, and everyone has, like, a bar with a health bar above their head, and you're throwing spells, and you're looking down, and it's just so bizarre looking.
02:30:03.000If you had to envision, if you had to prognosticate, and you look at where games are right now, and you try to extrapolate, and look five, ten years in the future, what do you think it's going to be?
02:30:13.000Well, I'm not Ray Kurzweil, but let's see here.
02:30:15.000If I was Ray, I don't think it's success.
02:30:20.000Basically, I think what we've realized in the community and a lot of these top people who run the companies realize is that TV and the mainstream routes that everyone wants to go, like reality TV, let's show the gamers behind the scenes, that shit just isn't what is necessary for this world.
02:30:32.000So what they're doing now, and what I think it'll turn into, is what you're currently seeing now, just a little bit higher production quality and more...
02:30:40.000More cater to the players when they have events.
02:30:44.000I think everything's going to be somewhat similar, but tidied up just enough to make all the narratives of the pro teams more clear to the mainstream, to make, when you watch, to make all the information much more presented clearly, because obviously not anyone watching will say, oh, that's their ammo,
02:36:11.000Yeah, that's going to be weird if people resist the getting in shape part.
02:36:14.000I mean, who knows what this is going to be or whether this is going to catch on.
02:36:18.000But I think, like, why would you go to the movies when you could live a movie?
02:36:22.000When you could go, I mean, imagine if you had, like, The Hobbit, like, that kind of graphics, and you're actually in the environment.
02:36:31.000Walk through the battlefield next to Gandalf, fucked.
02:36:33.000Dude, and they figure out a way to sculpt the ground in a way that makes it feel like you're going uphill and downhill and dirt under your feet and rocks and different terrains.
02:36:43.000Well, we know we did figure that out and we're experiencing it in the past of our current development.