The Story of a Young eSports Player

Hey all! I’ve been apart of some sort of competitive gaming since I was 7 playing in competitions with my older siblings friends on Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. I am only 17 now and it’s been a pretty hefty past 10 years for gaming personally and in general, especially with my game of choice: CoD (Call of Duty).

For the past 8 months almost I’ve been in an orginazation called, “Prism eSports,” and it’s been pretty awesome, with it’s ups and downs of course. I joined the “org” for a game called Apex Legends that released about 10 months ago. It’s made by Respawn Entertainment who is owned by EA (a huge game corporation). Now, don’t get me wrong, the game was amazing when it came out and it’s gotten me to where I am now, but the current state of the game is pretty bad. I’ve recently made the switch to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare on Xbox One. This is now, but my story starts back when I was in 6th grade, when competitive eSports wasn’t even really a thing yet.

I saw wasn’t really a thing with a grain of salt, it was a thing just it was a 100x smaller thing. I was pretty good I thought for my age and I’ve always been pretty mature so I decided that I was going to get into competitive gaming and be like my idols, OpTic Nadeshot, and Scumpy (two of the arguably best Call of Duty players of all time)! I went to the MLG website which at the time was the biggest, and still is today, place for competitive Call of Duty. I went and made an account after telling my Dad how much fun I was going to have and how much money I was going to make playing video games, and after I filled everything out and hit submit I got a big error message to my face saying, “ERROR: Sign Up failed. Birthdate incorrect,” and I was shocked. I thought to myself when I saw it that maybe I forgot to change the year to 2002 and left it as the year I was signing up but when I looked it still said 2002 and my birthdate. But right under it in small gray text it said you needed to be at least 13 years old to sign up. I was only 12 at the time. My little, sensitive, heartbroken 12 year old self started crying my heart out to my Dad that I wasn’t able to play it and make money.

That’s where my journey started. I was sad and heartbroken and couldn’t be like my hero’s at the time. But that just made me more determined. I wanted to be the best 12 year old the world has ever seen, so I went to YouTube, lied about my age, made a channel and started posting. My friends would watch my videos and that was it, but it was good enough for me. I also started streaming and when I saw the one person in my stream, who turned out to be me watching the stream to see if anyone was chatting, always made me happy. Now fast forward to my Senior year of High School, the last Call or Duty’s have hit the fan and aren’t very good and this brand new game came out called, “Apex Legends.” Now I loved Titanfall 1 and 2 made by respawn, to this day I believe they are the reason Call of Duty went down the drain because they got scared of how good the games were with the new way of playing. The wall running and Titans were all brand new to shooters, and what do you see in the next 4 Call of Duty’s? Futuristic wall running simulators. But to get back to the topic, I was hooked. Apex Legends was the perfect sweet spot between the younger generations favorite, “Fortnite” and the original battle royale, “PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds” which just recently released on Xbox before this.

Apex had its flaws the first couple of weeks but I was hooked like no other game I have been before. I had just gotten my first 1,000 kills on my favorite character Lifeline. My friends realized I had a knack for the game as well and since I only moved to the place I live now in 8th grade, they never really got to see me play Call of Duty or other shooters at full sweat mode, so they were surprised and hyping me up. I started seriously thinking about getting into the game with streaming, and going “pro” if that was even an option for a game so new. A couple months past and it’s April and I’m scrolling through Instagram as I’m playing Apex with my friends and I see an AD for “Prism eSports” with a pretty cool video which included Apex Legends saying, “recruiting talent” all over it. I made a joke saying I was going to go pro and I was expecting them to make fun of me in a way of disbelief but instead, they said go for it... and they were serious about it and not sarcastic. It hit me that, “hey, maybe I can do this” but I had some doubts saying there were people better than me and I’m just a little above average. But, I did save the video on Instagram. Then, a few days pass and I see the same AD again but this time I wasn’t playing Apex and I was just sitting in my chair at my desk, and I decided to see what the application looked like and I started to fill it out just enough to get to the next pages and I realized it was pretty short and looked organized enough and decided to fill it out completely and send it. Much to my surprise, the next day I got an email saying they received it and are going to view it, I’m assuming, rather than instantly declining it based on what I put in age wise or country wise. A couple weeks past and I get no response and I’m getting kinda worried about it thinking I wasn’t going to get in at all or not even an email back, but then I got an email saying it was accepted and I should be getting a google calendar link saying I will get to setup a time and date for an interview! I was excited and instantly loaded up Apex to start grinding and getting better. A day goes by and I get no email, and I said it was fine. A week goes by and I get no email and I started to get worried again. So, I went back to the post and started to look at the comments to see if possibly someone else has the same problem. When I looked at the comments, I saw people saying they go no response what so ever, but I also saw that the Prism eSports account was replying back. So I decided to hit them with a comment of my own, and ask if they possibly could look into it. They instantly DM’d me saying they are backed up and would move it along faster if I gave them my email, which I did, and a week goes by and I still didn’t get an email. I go back to the DM and ask again if something went wrong and they apologized saying they’re flooded with applications and it’ll be there soon, and finally it appeared in my inbox. I made it for the next day at sometime in the mid-day. Mind you I’m 16 and I haven’t ever had a job before so this is my first interview for anything.

I join the Discord that they provided me and join the call in a group chat they made of the 3 head honchos. Terrorfraud, k-bye, and f1ssion. I was scared out of my mind. I stuttered all over the place and had a bad voicecrack during the middle of it and somehow I made it through and they wanted to schedule a second interview for me. I of course said yes to it and a week goes by and I eventually ask when it was going to be and they said, right now! I was confused and shocked because I was expecting it to be something I could plan for again but I guess they didn’t have time until I asked and they were free. So I join the discord call again and they said they liked me, but this wasn’t the second interview. This was just a quick chat to saying they wanted me to do a play through with someone they already had on the Apex team. A tryout in a sense. The guy, PrismTrauma, was to play with me and let them know how I played and if I was someone he could see himself playing with. I did pretty good in the play throughs and he put in a good word for me. Then, I met a guy named Bawfy who was, at the time, the “manager” of the Apex team. He was the one that put together teams for tournaments and was a decently sized steamer for Console Apex Legends. I @‘d him in the discord and he said he wanted to play with me because he heard good things. I said awesome, when can we do it and he said he was steaming later that night and I could hop in for a bit.

Later that night, like he said, he was streaming to about 10 people and I made it 11. I hop in the chat and introduce myself and said let me know if you have an open spot. After watching for a while, the 3rd guy he was playing with left and he asked if I wanted to play. I, of course, said yes again and hopped in shaking, sweating and insanely nervous. We played a couple games and I was doing decent and then we played our 4th game and we were doing amazing. Our 3rd, and still one of my closest friends in the gaming scene now, HolyForLife landed by himself across the map and Bawfy and I landed the hottest area on the map, “Skull Town.” Holy killed a whole squad by himself instantly and Bawfy and I ran through skull town going insane killing everyone we saw. The game was going quick with how fast everyone was dying and the next thing we knew we had 20 squad kills, with 20 people left. We start to group up and Holy gets stuck and pinned by a full squad of 3, and Bawfy and I also ran into a different team. But, we killed our team pretty fast and we kept going towards our pinned teammate who just got knocked. We finish the last guy who Holy wasn’t able to down, and revived him. But, another full squad of 3 come and fight us right away, luckily Bawfy wasn’t damaged much from the previous fights and instantly downed one which gave Holy and I enough time to heal up and push the other two. While this was happening though, the zone was coming in. But let me remind you of something, we had 20 kills before we went to Holy. Bawfy and I killed 3 by ourselves then we met up with Holy and finished 3, then ran into 3 more. We were at 29 kills as a squad and the zone was hitting us hard since it was an endgame zone. Bawfy was taken down by it, Holy was taken down by it, and I was the last one. I sprinted out of the zone with almost no health, used a Medkit and with all of my nerves and trying to be a good teammate, ran right back in to try and get Bawfys respawn banner since it was the closest to me. I get halfway and realize I wasn’t going to make it, and run back out. But when I get out I realized I didn’t have any shield or health now and there was a guy near me. One guy usually leads to 3 especially when there’s 7 people left in the game including me. I was able to pop a shield battery which healed my shield up to max and pushed the guy and lost. We didn’t realize we had 29 kills until after the game and we looked back on it. At that time the total squad world record was 30 kills. If I had killed that guy we would’ve tied the record and possibly beaten it if I killed another. I ended the game with 12 kills, and that was the last game we played. That performance was my ticket into Prism.

Fast forward the second interview which was congratulating me for the games and joining Prism, we get to a month later. I get my official Prism eSports jersey in the mail with a letter. This meant so much to me as I’m sitting in the car with my girlfriend and she puts it on laughing thinking it’s the cutest thing in the world I go back to that moment when I was crying to my Dad, who for reasons I can’t exactly talk to every day now, as a 12 year old not old enough to sign up to play, and then realizing I finally made it and it felt amazing. Sure Prism was brand new then and we had probably a total of 7 players on the Apex team and we had no social following other than friends of players on the team, but it was still a family. A family of players that had the same common goal of competiting. Which is exactly what I did when I joined Prism.

The first major tournament that was happening for Console Apex Legends, and I’m pretty sure in general, was the Beyond Tournaments’ ASTRO $2000 3v3 tournament using the “odd-man style.” To a newly made competitive player, and a 16 year old who hasn’t worked before, $2000 or even the $1500 first place prize sounded amazing. But, because there were 7 of us on the Prism Apex Team and some people couldn’t play in the tournament, or they played with people outside of Prism, I had to play with people I’ve literally never even talked to before.

I played with two people from an Apex scrims discord and we played only 2 games and lost them both before the tournament for a total of 30 minutes max. We get into the tournament bracket where it shows who you’re playing and first up was iKapps, and his squad. At the time iKapps was easily the best player on Xbox skill wise, and still possibly is, and he was on another team and Org called Vampire gaming. It was us three people who just met each other an hour ago, versus a full made three man and the best player on console Apex. We hopped in the game and went on to win, barely. We somehow unfortunately loaded into the exact same lobby and the way the oddman style works is, one person from each team swaps to the other team so it’s essentially 2 v 1 and 3v3 all at once. The oddman on the opposite teams have to try and steal or get as many kills as they can while the other 2 players get as many kills as they can without letting the oddman steal their kills. Regardless if you understand, it’s a bit confusing on paper, one of their people were on our team and realized that we were in the same game and called out our location. When they finally got to us, we had quite literally just made the call out saying we were in the same game as us since they killed someone on the way and their names showed in the kill feed. So, because the odd man obviously wants to win, he didn’t fight them at all leaving it essentially a 2v1 on my teammate who was a bit away from me. With the constant call outs from their Oddman, and the player advantage they had on him, he didn’t stand a chance. But, he did somehow manage to knock down one of them and I ran over to help and finished him so we would at least get one kill on the boards. The next guy to fight me was iKapps and I lost, horribly, to him. I missed every bullet I shot at him while he stood still grabbing his friends banner and he turned around and killed me almost instantly. With all of that said, we had 3 kills as a 2 man team from killing two people at the beginning of the game and then the one kill before I died. Somehow our oddman went off on his own and managed to rack up 13 kills by himself, and we beat them by 2 kills in the end.

The next rounds of the tournament weren’t as amazing and we barely one another one by one kill because the two man team, me and my buddy I just met, died off drop with getting 0 kills, and our oddman dropped solo again and got 11 and beat their oddman and 2 man squad by 1 kill and luckily we moved onto the finals.

The way the tournament works is first place gets $1500 which splits 3 ways so $500 a person, while second place gets $500 split 3 ways so $166 a person. So regardless if we won or not we were getting a reward which was amazing for my first ever tournament for any game ever, along with the fact I’ve never played with my teammates before this tournament. But to make it even better, the finals was us, versus another Prism team, made up of Jay Crayy, Bruuks, and Dohpie. They were the best team out there at the time. They all started their gaming careers with Halo and had call out systems down like crazy and used it amazingly. Their synergy was awesome and they played very well together. We didn’t even care that we were playing them and we were probably going to lose, we were just amazed we even made it to the finals. All 6 of us hopped into an Xbox party congratulating each other, making jokes and trash talking, like you would. But then the game started and it got real, we almost dropped and died and had a repeat of game 3 where we did but luckily my teammate manage to save me and the squad but the oddman lived and got a couple of kills so they were already up to start off. To make a long story short, we eventually worked really well together and stayed alive the whole game and managed to get 13 kills together. Bruuks, who was their oddman, managed to get 6 which then in reality gave us 7 kills plus what ever our oddman got. Jay and Dohpie got 10 kills and our oddman got 7. So essentially they got 3 and we had 6, and we won it all.

Immediately it wasn’t excitement or anything it was pure shock that we just owned that tournament with only 30 minutes of playtime together before hand. But, after that of course it was amazement and excitement. Right after the tournament the Beyond Tournaments twitter tweeted out the winners and I instantly got messaged by another Org manager for an apex team asking if I was interested in joining their org. I’m not going to lie I was pretty tempted, but I realized what we had at Prism was only going to get bigger and declined.

This was the kickstart to my career as an eSports competitive player. My month of being on an org, I won the best tournament there was for Apex with people I’ve never even played with before and beat the best put together team there might ever be, and I was on top of the world. The $500 was nice, but nothing was better than the satisfaction I got from wearing my jersey and seeing I won the tournament and the tweet from Prism “eSports” announcing that one of their players just won it. This was my story of getting into esports and how amazing it was to go from not being old enough, to winning my first ever tournament. Thank you for reading. :)