MLG 2012 - Take Me Out To The GG

Major League Gaming, or MLG, is a professional gaming league where pro-gamers compete for cash and prestige. For the three-day event in Anaheim, CA, there were five games featured, but only one of them mattered to me. It was also THE most popular game there and probably the biggest game in eSports history: StarCraft II!

As usual, the best way for me to describe the experience is via pictures, so here we go. The following is where two of the most famous StarCraft II pro-gamers were signing autographs. Yeah, I also got their autographs:

Notice how many people were waiting in line.

Above is DongRaeGu (real name Park Soo Ho), one of the best Zerg players in the world.

This is MarineKingPrime (real name Lee Jung Hoon), perhaps the best Terran player in the world. He was also the favorite to win the entire tournament.

This is viOLet (real name Kim Dong Hwan). He is also one of the best Zerg players in the world, along with Leenock (real name Lee Dong Nyoung) below:

 

By the way, Leenock is 17 years old. That's less than half my age.

Below is a shot of the computers used in the tournaments. Those players you see in front of the computers are all competitors. (If you know who IdrA is, a.k.a. Greg Fields, he's the guy in the blue shirt and glasses behind the red shirt guy. No, not the Red Shirt Guy from BlizzCon 2010.)

Here is Grubby (Manuel Schenkhuizen), who used to play WarCraft III competitively before making the switch to SC2:

And here is Stephano (Ilyes Satouri), a.k.a. "From Paris With Creep," widely regarded as perhaps the best foreign SC2 player in the world. (And remember, in the SC2 universe, a "foreigner" means a non-Korean.)

Here are shots of the main stage where the feature matches are played. This is analogous to "center court" in major tennis tournaments like Wimbledon or the U.S. Open.

Pictured above are two of the casters of the tournament, Dan "Artosis" Stemkoski and Nick "Tasteless" Plott. These two casters also cast the most prestigious SC2 tournament, the GSL, which mostly takes place in Korea. (MLG is probably the 2nd most prestigious.)

Here is what the match looks like to the audience. You can notice Stephano in one of the two soundproof players' booths:

And here is Stephano being interviewed after a victory. Unfortunately, he didn't make it to the top three.

I won't spoil who won the overall tournament, but here's a hint: It's one of the pro-gamers in my photos above. You can go look it up yourself.

By the way, there were other things to see and do at the event. Here is Robert Clotworthy, the actor who portrays the voice of Jim Raynor, the protagonist in the StarCraft II story mode:

Yeah, this mild-mannered man looks nothing like the rough-around-the-edges space cowboy he plays:

Here's a picture of me with a guy named MaximusBlack (Jeff Johnston), who along with NovaWar casts a popular SC2 channel on YouTube called LAGTV.

 

There was also a huge demo of the upcoming StarCraft II expansion called Heart of the Swarm. My friends and I enjoyed playing the demo so much, we're considering getting back into StarCraft II. (Currently we're taking a break from the game in order to play Diablo III.) I'll save my thoughts on the gameplay for a future blog post.

Finally, I'm going to close this entry with the statue that greets everyone at the entrance to the event. It's Kerrigan, the Queen of Blades, the main antagonist in SC2. Isn't she sexy?

There you go, three straight days of watching StarCraft II matches, playing the next expansion of the game, getting autographs, and generally hanging out with other gaming nerds. Truly this is Nerdvana.