What if you could playvideo gamesfor a living?
Late 90s.Legend of ZeldaandDonkey Kong 64days.
So I said, hang on, heres an idea.
Courtesy of ESL FACEIT Group
What if we built a superstar team?
None of which was yet available to American gamers, no matter how skilled.
Forget a real salary and quitting your day job.
But by 2004, Team 3D became what Levine could only daydream about in science class: a career.
Look, weinadvertentlycreated it all, he says.
The people I was playing with and competing against, we never had some big masterplan vision.
Headliner status hits home
Levine didnt really pause much to look around until 2015.
Suddenly the magnitude struck him.
I had thisahamoment, he recalls.
Id experienced big esports arena events in Asia and Europe, but this was my iconic, hometown venue.
For one, it was always more global.
And obviously way more digital, which disrupts the standard business models of traditional sports.
But heres the most essential common denominator to sporting success that people forgot about: time.
Fandom takes time to grow.
You cant just, you know, Silicon Valley-incubate this thing in a pressure cooker.
You have to really seed sports from the ground up, and let them take root naturally.
So, its not just about these big, splashy events and prize money pools, Levine muses.
Would the NFL be so popular without all the football infrastructure from these grassroots levels?
If youre under 42 years old, you likely grew up playingHaloor one of those.
And the more time that passes, the more gamers that are out there.
He also points out how critical the content around driver narratives proved to taking Formula 1 to new audiences.
The stories have to be told well, of course, but they also have to happen first.
Which likewise takes time.
Down the line, we will continue to hone that capacity as an industry, he says.
Does it all eventually reach a saturation point?
The first surfboards were finless slabs of wood.
Skateboards started out with clay wheels.
Have we come a long way from the Atari 2600 to the Xbox Series X?
The advent of mobile gaming alone is already a literal and figurative game-changer for esports.
What I always say to the doubters is that year over year, more people are playing video games.
More people are coming to our events.
More people are watching our content.
And, increasingly, professional gaming is an aspirational career for younger generations, notes Levine.
I mean, these are pinch-me moments, right?
