Meet Korea's Gaming Rockstars

PC Gamer has up a short piece looking at some of the big names in Korean gaming. The piece describes an event, and discusses the training regimen these console contestants go through. "I visited the A-team house, which is in a residential street in northern Seoul. Fourteen pro gamers live here, together with their team coach. It's half frat house, half sweatshop. Upstairs are the dorms. The team's top two players, Ma Jae Yoon (handle sAviOr) and Seo Ji Hoon (handle XellOs) share a room that's not much bigger than two single beds. The others are crammed into bunks in two other rooms. Ma, aged 21, is currently South Korea's number one Starcraft player and, according to Sean Oh, a millionaire. You wouldn't be able to glean this from looking at his bedroom."

Comments

Re:Millionare eh?

[everphilski]

You can make lots of money, but unless you are saving it, its hard to become a millionaire. For those of us who are just regular joes with 9-5 jobs, it isn't impossible to be a millionaire, you just need to lower your cost of living. It's kind of surprising how some former sports stars that were making millions a year have lost their money due to bad management and just spending it, where someone even just making 5 figures can still anticipate being worth several million before retirement.

Re:hmm

[godscent]

I expect that it is the same as watching other people play sports. I don't get it either, but it seems to be fairly popular.

Back in 98-99 I was one of the top 5 gamers in SC

[CrazyJim1]

I got invitationals from South Korea, but I just thought it was spam. I'm kicking myself now. But at least Starcraft 2 will come out soon. SK has lots of gaming centers and this used to make for refined strategy over creative strategy. And one thing that Starcraft has is psychology. If you know exactly what your opponent is going to do, they have no chance. I think SC2 will have more advanced players from the get go than SC 1 did because SC1 was one of the first competitive online games with a ladder system. I was able to kick ass in Wacraft 3 as #1 1v1,2v2 and 3v3. So I think I'll be able to do well in SC2.

The only reason I quit Starcraft was because of the map hack. People stopped playing on Battlenet, but I had no where else to train so I was screwed. I hope they punish map hackers in Starcraft 2. There are a lot of ways to do it. One way would be a report map hacker button: and when someone gets to the top 10 of reported maphackers, people at Blizzard could review a replay. Another way is to open up a ton(1,000,000) of memory addresses that allow map vision, and none are legit. If someone changes one of these values, they'll be reported to Blizzard and their CDkey banned. Anyway there are lots of ways of doing it. I look forward to Starcraft 2 as being my game of choice.

Re:Millionare eh?

[Dogtanian]

I think people generally talk about dollars when they say "millionaire", even in foreign countries. Not in Britain, they don't. We'd generally assume that a British "millionaire" had a million pounds.