“Start-up” had not yet entered mainstream lexicon and saying “the NFL of Video Games” would incur raised eyebrows.

And if you said “esports” people would look as if a horn was growing out of your head.

MLG was one of the primordial pools of internet gaming culture that would go on to seed Web 2.0. Being a part of this movement was inspirational and in complete contrast with what was going on in the other half of my life.

Things like “going to class” frequently lost out. It didn’t help that community college was the most uninspiring experience of my life. As far as I was concerned, enrollment fell into three groups:

Nineteen is also that very awkward age right before twenty-one. Everyone older is at a bar, everyone the same age is away at college, and hanging out with anyone younger comes with the stigma of being the “old creepy guy.”

Between the midtown office, travel, and gaming, MLG was a beacon of hope. I was a standard bearer for the cause.

It wasn’t a terrible batting average. MMO Champion lifted numbers but was generally the biggest bust.

GameBattles needed work but scaled in a lot of ways.

Agora, also became an interesting side of the business. I think some of their alumni built an early version of League’s rank system. Eventually it was spun out to Warner Brothers.

After GotFrag got restructured, it allowed us to snowball into WoW, Starcraft, and League. In 2007 we focused on WoW, while CGS wrestled with trying to convince the Counter Strike community that they should watch Source instead of 1.6. A great example of community fragmentation as a result of competing product lines.

Our top of funnel marketing and product became a bit more formalized. Our presence on social media grew from MySpace to include Facebook, which still required a .edu address, which was perfect for the demo we most resonated with. I think there were some attempted to partner with community sites as well via “Friends of MLG.”

Right before the start of 2007, we upgraded to a new version of the website and later launched MyMLG. Paired with the in development MLG Rank and Gamebattles, the vision was to create the defacto competitive social network for gamers. Mock ups for a game where the images on the armor could be changed or include advertising. Pro Players had contractual obligations to write blogs, which incentivized the rank and file to do the same.

Television made a return, albeit this time we were sequestered to the much more niche G4TV. Television was an important box to check for sponsor pitching, but the previous iteration demonstrated video games on TV had a ceiling and was not going to become a rising star or cash cow. In 2007 it was a much leaner operation as the livestreams took on more priority. Polishing this real estate helped us secure an important partnership with ESPN right before the 2008 season start.

Ahead of the season, I participated in my first pro circuit branding campaign. To me, who had loved both the previous iteration of the website and previous year’s branding, this constant need to update felt superfluous. I remember a lot of discussions about how to integrate the Boost Mobile logo and walls covered in variations of both pro circuit and new team logos. Our ace in the hole at the time was Zola, a young creative who made his bones in Halo videos and would eventually go on to creative direct for acts like the Chainsmokers and Coldplay.

The beginning of micro-transactions might have started with the Xbox 360 store. MLG content would launch that year and become a massive revenue driver. We began cranking out packs fairly quickly.

Boost Mobile had signed on for a bigger deal and had to be integrated into everything. Everyone pitched in with the circuit wide rebranding campaign and the walls were constantly covered in explorations.

Ahead of the season we expanded the number of pro contracts to 7 more players, with the topline numbers once again not guaranteed. This expansion created a perspective of growing opportunity. Outside of the 12 players signed to $250k contracts, there was a larger pool of lesser players who could be centrally managed through hope and incentivized through a million dollars in prizing. We ended up cleaning and rebranding teams like Perfect Storm, the Agency and more for the start of the season.

An idea that was kicked around a few meetings was centralizing Halo competition by moving all the players near the HQ for regular matches. The fear of being legally accountable for a large number of teenagers living unsupervised in New York City stymied a lot of the momentum.

While there were a lot of benefits to having direct control of players, one of the benefits of intermediary team owners is that they are the accountable party for managing the day-to-day of pro players. The structure of MLG’s relationship with players held until the release of Starcraft when the incentive to participate in multiple leagues made being a team owner financially lucrative. Once team owners did come in, this idea of.a low cost NYC event evolved into MLG Arenas with Starcraft.

This was also my first year of going to every event. Charlotte, Dallas, Chicago, Orlando, Vegas, Toronto, and “the Meadowlands.” A list of cities that represented a geographically diverse slice of Americana. Looking back, I was fortunate to experience these micro cultures before the entrenchment of social media.

While Halo got a pretty professional level of attention, other games like Gears and Rainbow shared a “leaner” operation that was set up, broken down and networked by the same people who cast, switched, and mixed the show. Many times we would also end up rooming together. It was the worst of times, it was the best of times. A lot of unsupervised underage drinking occurred as people in the industry got their start here.

Our teams would usually arrive ahead of the masses to set up the video operation. The days included troubleshooting some aspect of networking, recording, power, set up, and whatever else 2-3 broadcast centers, 30-50 (?) competitive stations and several hundred teenagers could come up with. We executed events in the face of a comically large amount of natural disasters and other “challenges.”

Thursday night you’d try to go easy. Either you had three long days of putting on a tournament or you were trying to stay sharp for the first day of competition. Events were punctuated by family style dinners and hotel room LANs. As you’d get closer to the weekend more people would begin arriving. People would get sensitive about sleep and there was a level of respect if someone wanted out of a night of heavy drinking. There were people that were always out and people you would never see. Everyone who did well at those tournaments would love to spout something about one approach versus the other.

The FFA’s were an incredible icebreaker for the thousands of awkward teenagers showing up to these events. If you made it 1 or 2 rounds, you’d end up moving up with some names that got pretty familiar. It was a gladiatorial bonding by fire where everyone was both an opponent and friend in the trenches. Once eliminated, you had an investment in figuring how high your 4v4 team would get seeded. So you’d follow the games of your three other team mates, rooting for someone to go deep so that the team would get a high seed. And if somehow you squeaked your way into the deeper rounds, you were all but guaranteed to sit shoulder to shoulder with some true professional players. The whole thing was narrated by Puckett on the venue wide PA system, and a clever name might attract a group of spectators to your station. The end of the bracket usually saw a good mix of pros and the next generation of talent. Someone random would win the whole thing due to the chaotic nature of the competition. Pistola was 13 when he won his first. There were so many social bonding mechanics that built connections between people.

This massive quantity of gameplay was recorded, captured, and published to our VoD service. I was accountable for making sure that hundreds of matches across 4 or more titles made it to our website. The process began with physical DVD recorders that were dragged from station to station, keeping track of the progress of entire 16 team bracket, and the limit of 2 hours of time per disk.

While some of this was laborious, managing VoDs came with the upside of slowly building relationships across the forums and AIM, which would open a door to a close up of player trades and other parts of the business.

This was my first time working a season start to end and with it came with the privilege to peak under the hood and touch new projects. Rebranding the circuit with new team logos, working with online video, and the next edition of the TV show. This year it was on G4 and I remember being closer in on the process as my value in finding clips and moments had become common knowledge.

Whispers of grand plans. Mock ups for a game where the armor could include partnerships. Plans to fly in all 16 teams to New York for a months long season. The potential digital future and the opportunity that Halo 3 would bring.

The final leg of the season required us to concurrently run events for both Halo 2 and 3. Two massive workstreams, one to fulfill our commitment and one critical to our future.

We came out the gates strong. Halo 3 launched on September 25th, 2007. Three days later we had our first round of gametypes up on the file share. These began circulating across the entire Halo community, reinforcing our brand equity as the title-de-jour transitioned. We modified our final event of the season in Vegas to include a massive Halo 3 LAN that ran concurrently to of our other world finals for Rainbow, Gears, Halo, and Shadowrun. We kicked off a film festival that took full advantage of the game's theater mode. We worked to make sure developers would be onsite to "understand esports." Among them was Joe Tung, who would go on to lead League of Legends at Riot Games during a period of resurgence.

Also CPL ran a $1M tournament. I think a few people are still waiting for that check.