By Mike "LD^Mike" Luxion

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At the end of the first portion of our interview, I hinted at a counter-offensive against the hyper-friendly cats. But I'm a lover, not a fighter. I couldn't possibly harm such innocent, furry beasts.

(Also, I don't want PETA to sue me.)

In fact, it was my nemesis from the first installment, Marcus himself, that came to my rescue by using what I call the "pluck and plop" method of defense. As the name indicates, this entails plucking cats from my midst and plopping them somewhere else, preferably where they'd have something interesting to do so they don't just run back as soon as their paws hit the floor.

Despite the typically low success rate of this tactic, it worked. And with all this "alone" time, we did what gamers do best: talk about the finer points of gaming.

Once again, hope you enjoy.

Do you have a favorite game to broadcast?

djWHEAT: Yeah.

Quake?

Quake 3, specifically.

Your favorite to cast… also your favorite game to play?

Well, you know, I love playing Quake 3, but there’s a lot. I love to play any sort of fighting games. I love to get really competitive in fighting games, whether that’s Tekken or Street Fighter or Soul Caliber or DOA. You know, I’ll pick up any good deathmatch. I enjoy Warsow, CPMA (Ed.’s Note: Quake 3’s pro-mod). I’ve even been known to be found pubbing it up in Counter-Strike servers once in a while.

I just like those competitive games, but yeah, Quake 3 is sort of near and dear to my heart. It’s also just because my start was because of that game. That game not only made me appreciate the concept of commentating for gaming, but actually made me appreciate all the other games more, because I realized if I wanted to do something with gaming in this role I had to know, love, understand, and be able to translate games like Counter-Strike, Warcraft, Dead or Alive, FIFA, you know?

But with that being said, I don’t think there’s a game that I don’t have fun or love broadcasting. There’s never really been a game where I’m like, “Oh god, I’m so bored. I don’t want to be broadcasting this.” Usually I go into things thinking that sometimes. There was this Ace Combat 6 competition, and I’m like “… Ace Combat 6. It’s planes flying around, how fun is this really going to be?”

And I just find myself, once you sort of understand the nuances … it’s exciting. It’s these two guys, and oh my god he’s almost dead but he just took out two guys – it’s gaming, it’s supposed to be fun. It’s hard to not like any game that I’ve ever broadcasted.

It's hard enough to play DoA, but try translating these characters to a new audience.

Why do you think deathmatch and 1v1 games have fallen off the map a little bit?

[Chuckling] It’s a good question. I think that … I think … how about this: I think that I would answer that with another question, and that is, “Why has Counter-Strike been able to remain so dominant?”

I think that’s because even though people look at Counter-Strike and think it’s a pretty complex game, and it is and it can be, there’s a certain level of simplicity to Counter-Strike that’s remained comfortable to gamers for the past several years. I feel like that really existed when Quake 3 was around. One of the reasons why Quake 3 had a sort of shorter life-shelf than it should was because of CPL’s decision to not use Quake 3 and use Counter-Strike [instead]. I think had that never happened, Quake, in some capacity, would still be a major feature in gaming.

The gorgeous thing about even Quake 1, Quake 2, and Quake 3, is that you have this simplicity. You have this rocket, and you’re trying to kill this guy. And what happened after Quake 3 sort of fell off the map is that you had a lot of complex, over-the-top complex FPS games. Painkiller, Unreal Tournament—sorry guys, I know they’re gonna shoot me for saying that—but I think that for the general eye UT is fairly difficult to watch. Doom wasn’t at all successful or fun. In my opinion Quake 4 was a failure. But I think that the genre and I think gaming needs something simple like Quake 3.

Actually, I have very high hopes for Quake Live because not only is it a browser-based game, which I think is very cool in the future, and the fact that it’s free and you can play and you can tell your mom to get it and she can play, whatever, I have high hopes that now is the time for a deathmatch game to surface. I really think that’s one of the things that could be missing right now. 1v1 FIFA, awesome. 1v1 fighting game, kick-a**.

But where is that 1v1 duel, you know? Every once in a while in Counter-Strike we see those gorgeous AWP shots, or those 3 v 1 saves at B, and those are awesome and those are great, but man, I’ve casted so many Quake games and I remember matches where you’d see 30 of those moments in a single ten-minute duration. And that’s exciting. I think right now that could be really popular.

I know that I’ve side-tracked a little here and gone off-topic, but I think that a lot of it just had to do with the history of where Quake 3 was. I mentioned I had played it, and I mentioned that the prize purses were $800, and that was right on the brink when suddenly a Counter-Strike team was winning $15k. And you know we still see remnants of [deathmatch], ESWC is doing their big masters tournament and they’ve done it for a few years.

But I think that it’s just quite frankly, to answer your original question, we need something as simple as Quake 3. Something that isn’t like wall-jumping, and this gun can shoot eight different ways, and you have five different types of armor. From a broadcasting standpoint that all sounds really spectacular, and in fact I really like how Unreal Tournament 3 has things like: you can pick up a helmet and you can get headshot once, but you won’t die. So it sort of gives you that free headshot, and that’s sweet, and being able to incorporate that into a broadcast would be really nice, but you have to remember the people that are watching the game. And I think that because of that we have to start out simple, and then we can move on to these types of things when people are more adept at understanding what they’re seeing and understanding what’s going on.

So you think that games like Painkiller and Unreal are too complicated to get behind, even for gamers?

Yeah, absolutely. How many people have really been able to master the movement of Painkiller or Unreal Tournament? It’s small. Even mastering the movement of Quake is difficult, but it seems like more people are capable of doing it because it took a more simple approach. There are also ways to supplement bad movement, and that was by aiming, by having sheer aim, and being smart. So you didn’t always have to be the best runner or jumper in quake to necessarily be a great player.

I’ve never really thought of it that way.

Well, I want to throw in there, then, that my wife has probably seen thousands of Quake 3 matches just from my casting and whatever. I believe that from a mainstream perspective …

There was this one moment for the qualifiers of the World Cyber Games in 2002 and it was in New York City. For the final games of the qualifiers they blocked off a city street. It was general attendance, and they had this giant sort of jumbo-tron monitor showing the games. Prior to this it had all been pretty enclosed, like, “here we are at a LAN,” and people are there for the LAN. This was the first time that I’m seeing like, people eating a hot dog and kinda looking at the screen and wondering what this all was about, but at least being there and exposing themselves to gaming.

The CGS audience may remember Fatal1ty as a broadcaster, but djWHEAT also remembers him as a gamer.

Quake 3 rolls around and I’m casting to the crowd, and some really amazing things happened in this game. Just some really amazing things. And the game actually featured Fatal1ty, and Fatal1ty lost to chaoticzz with like 0.7 seconds to go by this Railgun shot. And it wasn’t just your standard, run-of-the-mill Railgun shot, it was chaoticz was running, Fatal1ty was running from him, and chaoticz goes to this teleport and literally for a split-second sees Fatal1ty out of the corner of his eye and he just shoots this desperation Rail and it kills him.

I heard the crowd go “oooohh,” and I’m thinking to myself, “holy sh*t, these people, even though they’ve probably never even seen Quake 3 in their life, realized the score was 13-14, realized there was five seconds left in the game, and realized he just killed him.” And that excited them, and they made a noise to notify that excitement. I think that sort of says a lot for… you don’t need to know everything there is, the intricacies of the game. Even in Starcraft in Korea, does everyone really know everything there is to know about that? They know what’s happening so they can appreciate that, and then they learn more about it.

So I think that from a simplistic point of view, yeah, you can capture a mainstream audience when you just sort of strip it down. That’s why I really like Dead or Alive, too, because it’s like, health-bar, this and that, but for someone that’s really interested, they can go beyond that. They can learn about how these guys are counting the frames of the moves so they understand the priority; so they know they can use this low punch to counter this kick from Kasumi. That stuff is there for people, but at the heart it’s still entertaining if I know jack about the game.

Having been around for eight years it’s been sort of interesting to just study that and try to understand that because it’s fascinating.

Is that moment with Fatal1ty one of your favorites in gaming?

It definitely is one of my favorite moments.

Do you have a number one?

[thoughtful silence from djWHEAT]

Could you have a number one?

It would be very hard to have a number one. People are gonna think that I’m like a broken record because I talk about that moment all the time, but it was such a major moment.

You know, it’s almost like you give me a LAN event and I would give you a great moment out of it. It’s hard to find those moments but at every single event usually you come away with that “oh my god” moment, or this team obliterated that team.

It’s really hard. But some of my moments were playing, some of my favorite moments were certainly casting. There’s so many, it would be so hard.

I feel like I could probably talk for five hours about some of my favorite moments, but that was one of my favorites, partially because it was for a trip to Korea for WCG and we were in front of all these people and they were getting – it was very exciting.

Do you think that the answer to some of these game flaws (UT too complicated, Source too easy) is taking a game and designing it specifically for competition?

I don’t really know. I don’t think that anyone’s figured out a formula for creating a competitive game, and it’s a shame because we may have a lot less problems if that was the case. It’s either gone two directions; either you make a game and it turns into this cult following and it embeds itself, or you attempt to make that game and you fail.

So, do I like UT3? Yeah, I’ve had a blast with it. I’ve played it up and down. But do I think it’s going to make it in the competitive world? No. And that’s partially because how many people played it, how many people watch it, how many people want to understand?

Now does that meant it can’t, ever? No. In fact, I think that’s a general error in thinking: just because no one plays it, people wouldn’t enjoy watching it. Sure, for the most part, people like watching poker because they play poker, and people enjoy watching Counter-Strike because they play Counter-Strike. But I don’t play Counter-Strike. I don’t play Warcraft 3. I’ll watch both of those. I didn’t play Painkiller, but I’ll watch Painkiller.

I watched it because I was interested in these people and I was interested in this competition. I think there’s a generation of kids growing up and even adults, guys like me, that have grown up around this stuff—“I’m interested.”

I don’t know if the right answer is to just try to create the ultimate development team that can just churn out these games, because that’s never proven successful.

So we don’t know about Severity, which was supposed to be an independently made game. I believe that there are already games out there that people want to watch, and that people are playing competitively. I think it’s kind of a fluke, almost, that “hey, this team made a game and it’s great for competitive gaming”. I don’t’ think there’s any other kind of formula. I think it kind of just happens.

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Stay tuned for Part III next week, where we cover some lighter fare, including a revisit of Marcus' LA Complexity t-shirt and, perhaps, start a rivalry between CGS broadcasters.