u/bkingfilm

in may 2007 an accounting student at hainan university who played warcraft 3 as miss got an invite from colagirl to join first, a women's team in beijing. that summer she bought a hard seat ticket and sat 37 hours on the train from haikou to get there.

that same summer, training in beijing, she ran out of money and was too shy to ask anyone for a loan. she went two days without eating. when she went to the team to collect her wages, her bus card had one yuan on it. the bus took four mao of that and she walked the rest of the way. once she had the money she found a small restaurant, got a bottle of minute maid and a plate of rice with shredded pork and potato, and poured the lot down while the middle-aged men around her stared.

women's tournaments were rare, so she kept entering men's events. opponents she'd never met mocked her before matches. a few of them smashed keyboards or cried after losing to her. up to 2010 she'd bought almost no clothes and mostly played in an oversized team jersey that hung on her like a bathrobe. in 2010 she came out of a suning men's event as the top woman, and at the shenzhen esports open she was the only woman to get through the group stage. by the time she graduated she'd been paying her own way for years on prize money and pro wages.

the one player she could never beat through the whole warcraft 3 era was colagirl, the friend who brought her to beijing. they met again in a starcraft 2 final in 2012.

(from a chapter i wrote in 2013 after a five hour interview with her. it's free to read, link in the comments)

xiao8 (zhang ning) grew up in shaoyang, hunan. his dad either hit him or shouted at him. in primary school he usually ranked first in the whole school, so his parents made a deal: come first on the high school entrance exam too and you get a computer. he came first. the computer was never mentioned again, and he didn't dare ask why.

after that he got rebellious. skipped class to play games, parents called in every week. in 2006, second year of high school, he left and opened a fantasy westward journey power-leveling studio with three or four friends. his cut after expenses was over 10,000 yuan a month. he was 16 and had no idea how to spend it or what it was for. so when his dad asked if he wanted to keep studying, he went to zhongshan in guangdong to learn software.

he couldn't understand the local language and had no friends there, so he sat in a net cafe every day on voice chat with friends back home. around then a warcraft 3 custom map called zhen san guo wu shuang was spreading through hunan, and one of his opponents in it was zsmj. in 2009 zsmj, already on dota, won SMM in kuala lumpur with LGD, and xiao8 started switching too. when he registered on the VS platform, xiao1 through xiao7 were taken. zsmj told him there might be a spot at LGD, since their player 2009 had retired. he practiced a month for it. then LGD's old player xiaochi came back and the spot was gone.

next xB invited him to CH in chengdu and even bought his plane ticket. he got as far as changsha to catch the flight. there his friend YAO talked him into staying. a local businessman was building a team of local friends, close to home. that was Dream. pay was 1,500 yuan a player, no food or lodging, and he was delighted. two weeks in they went to a tournament in thailand and lost in the round of 16 to a team nobody had heard of. everyone cried in the hotel that night.

(from a chapter i wrote about him in 2014, part of a book on how chinese esports got built. it's free, link in the comments)

ted (zeng zhuo) grew up in chongqing. his dad was a cop, his mom a company clerk, and they were unusually open about games. when he was in primary school his mom walked past a starcraft tournament at the computer market on her way home from work and signed him up. later she did the same thing for his first live warcraft 3 event.

by 2005 he'd won the chongqing regional of CIG. but school and games kept clashing, and right before his last year of high school he and his dad had it out. his dad yelled that if he was so good at games he could go support himself with them. ted told him, dead serious, that he would, and his dad could watch.

the school backed him more than his dad did. the headmaster let him skip boarding and evening study so he could go home and practise. then a local sports paper gave half a page to his CIG chongqing title, and his dad finally agreed to let him take leave from school. his teacher read that paper out in class: if you're going to play, this is how you play.

in may 2006 WE's manager KinG set up online games for him against SKY and suho, both already wcg world champions. suho beat him six times with the same strategy. KinG told him WE was planning a second squad. on june 15, 2006, his 18th birthday, ted got on a train from chongqing to xi'an, where WE was based then.

for three months he didn't win a single game, not in practice, not at any tournament. he was on 500 yuan a month and ate one meal and drank one bottle of water a day to save money. then he came 3rd at the WGT china finals and WE raised him to 1,500. i asked if life got better. he said he could finally afford a late-night meal.

in 2008 at ROTK, with WE backed into a corner, he all-killed 15 players in a row, moon and grubby included, and won it for them.

(from a chapter i wrote in 2013 for a book on chinese esports history, from a talk with him that ran till 3am. free to read, link in the comments)

Seoul, WCG 2003. Su Hao — tag suhO — was 20, one of the two Chinese players sent to the Warcraft III event that year, and it was the first time he'd left the country. What he remembers about Korea is how clean it was and how fast the cars moved on the roads.

Before the tournament started he ran into 4K.Grubby in the practice room, who had just taken the European title. They played four games. suhO won all four. Grubby came over afterwards, shook his hand, said good game.

They never met in the actual bracket. And when I sat down with him the following year, he did not file that practice session under wins. He said he had so little tournament experience back then that it never occurred to him you are supposed to hold something back in a practice match. His words: it earned him his opponent's respect, but it cost more than it was worth.

Worth knowing who was saying that. Working-class family in Xinyang, Henan, only child. Third grade, his father spent a full month's wages on a Famicom clone and carried it home; the family had it locked away before that school year was out. By his second year at university his parents' savings were gone and they were borrowing from relatives to keep him in Xi'an. So he stopped asking. Every yuan of prize money he had won went to his parents, and his last two years of tuition and all his living costs came out of winnings. Before flying to Seoul he went home to sort out his passport, and his father gave him a pendant that had been blessed at a temple. He was still wearing it under his collar when we talked.

(From a book I put together in 2015 out of sit-down interviews with these players — this one was recorded in 2004. The chapter is free, link in the comments.)

sun yifeng grew up in hangzhou, born 1983, in a building full of neighbors who played games. whole summer nights in internet cafes on red alert and age of empires. then starcraft took over, and his friends already had their 3v3 and 4v4 group set. the only slot open to him was the guy who mines and does what the others tell him. he took it, because it was that or not play. seven or eight months in, he noticed nobody in that group could beat him anymore.

so he went looking for people who could. moved onto the asiagame server, and by 2001 he was winning the weekly shanfeng cup in hangzhou against fields full of local and shanghai players. the name f91 started getting around.

he turned pro more or less by accident. in 2005 phoenix66, then captain of china's national team, had something come up at home and asked f91 to go to beijing in his place for the ceg shanghai side. f91 upset pj there and was known overnight. then the real adjustment to pro play hit: six losses in a row, then six wins in a row. he came close to quitting somewhere in the middle of that, and won his first national title at the vs offline event later the same year.

by 2006 chinese bw had split into a northern school and a southern school. pj, leiche, leilei, fengzi, eva, xiaoming in the north. f91, lx, super, liu guohao, beckham, huang feipeng and others in the south. for four years the titles rotated between basically four names, pj, lx, super, f91, and people called them the four heavenly kings. f91's own read on it, years later, was that a scene like that isn't healthy. he was one of the four.

(from a book i wrote in 2015 about how chinese esports actually got built, one chapter per person who was there. this one's free, link in the comments)

in early 2003 magicyang quit starcraft. he'd been to wcg 2002, watched the top korean players, and decided the gap wasn't something he could train his way out of. so he switched to warcraft 3 and put sixteen hours a day into the asian battle.net ladder. in under a year he was ranked first on it. his night elf ancients play worked well enough that blizzard eventually weakened the ancients' attributes in a patch.

before wcg 2003 he and suho went through the whole map pool. on dragon spa they found something small: at a few of the creep camps, if you quietly had a wisp do a little damage to the enemy hero first, that hero wouldn't heal back to full at the fountain. and if the opponent wasn't careful with it, the hero would die in the middle of clearing the camp. that was the prep. not a build order. a wisp poke.

at the world final he drew ex_bifrost and lost game one. game two he refused to town portal out of a fight so he could kill as many units as possible, and by the time he left his hero had one point of health. he healed it back to full in an instant and swept the base. game three was dragon spa. the wisp went in early. ex_bifrost was managing two places at once and the hero died at the camp. magicyang killed everything he had in one run. when it was over, ex_bifrost, a mild guy by every account, smashed his own keyboard. he was certain he had thrown it himself.

he beat another korean at that same tournament, an orc player, and chinese forums started calling him the korean killer. what knocked him out of the bracket wasn't a korean.

(from a book i wrote in 2015 about how chinese esports actually got built, this chapter is free, link in the comments)

in 2001 ma tianyuan was 20 and one of exactly two salaried players on =A.G= in beijing, which was very likely the first fully professional esports team china had. 2000 yuan a month, seven people sharing a one-bedroom apartment, seventeen or eighteen hours a day on asiagame's battle.net server. that server ran licensed german FSGS tech and could hold over 2000 players online at once, which was a lot for china then. no ladder, no matchmaking. you found games by calling for opponents in a chat channel.

he beat everyone on that server and kept losing at actual events. people started calling him the uncrowned king. at the WCG china final that year the top three got sent to korea. he finished fourth. then the guy in third couldn't get his visa cleared, and ma tianyuan went instead.

nobody in the chinese delegation knew there was a starcraft 2v2 event until they landed. hong zhefu, who was leading the delegation, signed ma tianyuan up with a player called DEEP on the spot, mostly because they were on the same club and had queued together before. no practice as a pair. the final against germany went to 2-2 with about a thousand people in the room, and ma tianyuan says his memory just stops there. next thing he remembers is standing on the podium holding a flag. his share of the 6000 usd prize was 3000, around 25000 yuan, real money for a 20 year old in 2001. plenty of people who went into chinese esports afterwards will tell you that podium photo is the first thing they ever saw of it. the same year, the server he had trained on switched to 18 yuan a month, in a country where almost nobody had a convenient way to buy a prepaid card.

(from a book i wrote in 2015 about how chinese esports actually got built - this chapter is free, link in the comments)

beijing, early 2000s. a kid from an army family gets to university and stops leaving his bed — computer on the mattress, sits up in the morning and plays until he sleeps. starcraft, cs, warcraft 3. he ruled the dorm building at all three.

then he lost a cs match to a classmate. not close. lost badly enough that he got off the bed and went to ask how. the guy was using an IE 3.0 — microsoft intellimouse explorer 3.0. optical, no ball, tracking that precisely. that was the whole answer and it rearranged his life. he started hunting down peripherals nobody in china had heard of yet, razer, cherry, and writing about them on the cs forums.

2005, family trip to hong kong. everyone else went shopping. he'd read that cherry had an office there, turned up at reception with no appointment, and talked long enough that they sent a marketing guy out to deal with him. he said he wanted to buy a few keyboards. the hong kong office only did wholesale. what's the minimum, he asked. ten. cherry boards ran over 800 yuan each then, in a country where nearly everyone was on membrane and most people had never heard the words mechanical keyboard. he bought all ten with everything he'd saved working a shop counter in zhongguancun, and hauled them home while everyone else carried handbags.

then he had to sell them. no market, no distributor, nobody asking. he translated the spec sheets himself and posted them on the cs forums. his relatives thought a kid from that family selling mice was a joke — one grandfather fought the japanese as a guerrilla outside zhangjiakou, the other was fourth field army through three wars, his father is a senior officer. three years later someone at cherry's head office in germany heard that a guy in beijing was running cherry promotions. germany had never spent a cent marketing the brand in china. they put a product manager on a plane.

(from a book i wrote in 2015 about how the chinese scene actually got built — this chapter's free, link in the comments)

before he was sky, li xiaofeng got knocked out in round one of the wcg xi'an qualifier. 2002. he'd promised his father that if he didn't place, he'd quit games for good, come home, and intern at the hospital where his dad worked. he lost, so he went. six months of dispensing pills, passing forceps, night rounds. a surgeon once let him put in the last few stitches. the first time he watched a patient hemorrhage he forgot to breathe and passed out on the operating room floor, and his father had to walk him out.

he got back in through a side door. september 2003, an internet cafe in zhengzhou wanted a few players for a tournament the telecom company was running. free machines, a place to train, no money. they ate one meal a day. the cafe had paying customers all day so they could only practice at night, and they slept in a storeroom at the back with a one-meter-high entrance and a bunk bed where only the top bunk worked. he shared that one bunk with a big guy for three months. he had only just picked up warcraft 3.

early 2004 the hunter club in beijing was hiring pros. 1000 yuan a month, room and board. he went up there wanting to be a starcraft player — starcraft was his game, he'd been on it since 1998. hunter's starcraft roster was already full. what they were short on was warcraft 3. someone in management had noticed he'd hit the top five on the war3 ladder the year before, so they filed him under war3 and gave him a three-month contract. that's the entire reason. he practiced fourteen hours a day on battle.net. the acon5 world final was a little over a year out.

(from a book i wrote in 2015 about how chinese esports actually got built. this chapter is free to read, link in the comments)

hangzhou, around 1999. a kid keeps tagging along to the internet cafe where his friends run 3v3 and 4v4 starcraft, except he isn't good enough to be handed a real slot. so he gets the worker job. mine the minerals, build what you're told, do whatever the other five yell at you to do. he takes it. seven or eight months of that.

then one day he notices nobody around him can beat him anymore. he moves onto the asiagame battle.net server looking for people who can. by 2001 he's winning the weekly shanfeng cup in hangzhou against the local field plus whoever drove down from shanghai, and his name is getting around the city.

2004, right when it's finally starting to work, his family calls him home to take over their wholesale seafood business. he argues. he loses. he spends more than half a year moving seafood in the day and playing starcraft at night. then in june 2004 there's a lenovo cup challenge event in jinhua, and he beats phoenix66, at that point the captain of china's national esports team. he walked out of the seafood trade that year and never went back. the trade lost an heir and chinese starcraft got f91, the dog king of jiangnan. dog means zergling. what starcraft 2 did to him six years later is the part i'd rather you read yourself.

(from a book i wrote in 2015 about how chinese esports actually got built, this chapter's online for nothing, link in the comments)

From ONE MORE WAY, the behind-the-scenes history of Chinese esports I wrote in 2015. Chapter 8, posting one a day.

This story has to begin in 1995.

Wang Jue, known in the industry as Director Wang and, at the time of writing, vice president and executive director of NeoTV, worked at both PLU and NeoTV over the years. He had loved drawing since childhood, and in 1995 he made it into the first intake of art students at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, majoring in art and design. There he got to know a younger student named Chen Qidong, who went by the English name Friend and is, at the time of writing, PLU's CEO.

Take Wang Jue first. Although he majored in painting at university, he preferred the company of the students in the drama society, and spent his time studying scripts, sitting in on rehearsals and working on stage design. That is why he went straight into film and television work after graduating.

In 2000, Wang Jue opened his own studio and began shooting music videos for pop stars. Over the next few years he built up a reputation in that world, making films for first-tier singers of the day such as Han Hong. Another director shooting music videos in the same period was Ning Hao, later well known as a feature film director. People spoke of "Ning Hao in the north, Wang Jue in the south". Around 2005 the two of them each changed direction, one moving into film and the other into esports, and their lives took completely different courses. I will come back later to why they made those changes.

After graduating, Friend joined Wang Jue's film and television studio as a partner, taking charge of the business side and acting as the director's agent.

Friend was there from 2000 until he left in 2003. A fanatical StarCraft player, he had already arrived at the idea of a "players' guild". He had watched tournaments being run under whatever rules the organisers felt like, with unpaid prize money and unpaid player salaries turning up case after case, and he wanted a players' guild that would bring some order to the market.

It was during this period that Friend met Liu Qing, known as Alone, who is, at the time of writing, a streamer at PLU.

It was 2002, just after the GOC tournament. Alone had beaten zealot, the captain of SVS, that day, so Friend, who was with SVS, called him along to dinner with a group of people. Alone did not know a single person at the table. The food arrived, and the moment he lifted a piece of meat, Friend asked him whether he wanted to join SVS. Alone thought it would be awkward to refuse a man who was feeding him, so he agreed. Those are Alone's own words. He went on to become SVS's team leader and put up some decent results. Friend decided he was worth having, brought him to Wang Jue's company, talked with him for thirty minutes and asked whether he would like to help found the "players' guild". That was the beginning of Alone's career as the famous "youth who lost his way".

There is a verse for it. Step into the wolves' den and it is as deep as the sea, and from that day on your scruples are a stranger to you.

After leaving Wang Jue's studio in 2003, Friend joined Huang Zhenggang's Yiyang Graphic Design in 2004, still handling the business side. He also brought in Wang Jue, then working as an independent director, to serve part-time as art director on some 3D design projects.

Around that time, the PLU forum and the PLU tournament series that Friend ran in his spare time had built up a certain following. Huang Zhenggang, who owned Yiyang, was a gamer himself, so Friend persuaded him to clear part of the company meeting room for use as a makeshift studio. He then brought Wang Jue in and told him about South Korea's OGN model and about WCG, which left Wang Jue deeply interested in esports.

By then it was 2005, the year of an event that would leave a deep mark on Chinese society: the television talent show Super Girl. Most people know only that the 2005 season produced hugely influential grassroots stars such as Li Yuchun, Zhou Bichang and Zhang Liangying. What they do not know is the damage it did to Chinese music afterwards.

What that talent show did to the music business is also what pushed two of these men into esports for good, and the company they built together fell apart within a year into a feud that ran for the rest of the decade. That is the wilder half of the story. Full chapter is free, link in the comments.

From ONE MORE WAY, the behind-the-scenes history of Chinese esports I wrote in 2015. Chapter 7, posting one a day.

In 2006, once the third StarsWar was over, I formally transferred to the GamesTV channel at Shanghai Media Group Interactive, which at that point still carried the joint name GamesTV (an independently run company, GamesTV Ltd, has since been set up). The first project I touched there was the preparation of the first G League.

While I was sorting out the material for a slide deck, I noticed that G League still had no Chinese name. So I drafted one, the China Esports Television League, and took it to the management for approval. At the review meeting, Bai Yuhai, head of the channel's editorial office, made a suggestion: the word "China" could only be used by national sports authorities, so we would be better off with "National". Everyone thought that was a good idea, and that was how G League's Chinese name, the National Esports Television League, came to be settled.

The stars turned. Seven years later...

At ten in the morning on March 9, 2013, the grand final of G League's second season was to be held at the Mercedes-Benz Arena in Shanghai.

This is a venue for 8,000 people, and it is the most sought-after concert venue in Shanghai today. Anyone who has never run a large event may not understand what that means behind the scenes.

Putting G League in the Mercedes-Benz Arena meant, on one hand, that the difficulty of executing every part of it would rise sharply. Going from 4,000 people to 8,000 is not a simple matter of multiplying by two. The complexity grows geometrically. From logistics support and ticketing channels at the small end to project approval and cost control at the large end, everything faced a test we had never met before. The GamesTV team's ability to deliver, and how smoothly its people worked together, would be examined from every angle in this one event. On the other hand, it meant that esports was becoming more commercial. High venue costs, advertising in the metro and outdoors: all of that is a way of speaking to people outside esports. Esports could now stage a show in a venue like this, and that was a leap in kind.

Whatever the outcome, as a former member of GamesTV I am proud of what this team has held on to and explored over the years, and I dedicate this piece to all the television people who have contributed to the development of games video programming in China.

A bond with games that was meant to be

In 2004, Wu Qiang, who loved FPS games and later became GamesTV's general manager; Zhang Zhexi, who loved football games and is now deputy general manager of GamesTV; Zhang Rui, who loved console games and is now a producer at GamesTV; and Wen Shengke, who had already left the games industry, together with others, founded GamesTV in a coffee shop.

Do you remember the previous chapter on StarsWar, where I mentioned that Xu Yunbo, IGE's general manager in China, was sent back to China in 2005 to build the Shanghai representative office? IGE's head office in the United States had bought a number of games media companies there in order to gain a voice and change its image as a virtual item trader, and it had worked well, so the company planned to repeat that route in China.

As it happened, Wen Shengke was a former classmate of Xu Yunbo's, and that made the connection. Call it fate. You have to believe in it.

So in early summer 2005 IGE bought GamesTV, and GamesTV was the forerunner of today's GamesTV channel. Its original idea was fairly simple: make video programmes about games, then see whether there was any chance of selling advertising. It started with esports because Counter-Strike was still hot at the time and Warcraft III was just getting going. Compared with the online games of the day, esports was an entry point with a clearer target.

Around June 2005, IGE moved into an office in the Wenxin Newspaper Group building on Weihai Road, and GamesTV and the Replays.net project group I belonged to moved in after it. The two groups sat less than ten metres apart in a straight line. That was when I got to know Yaomo, who is Zhang Zhexi, along with Wu Qiang, Wen Shengke and the others, and we all began life as colleagues.

Because GamesTV intended to start from esports, the first priority was finding esports people who could both cast and appear on camera.

At first Zax, the founder of Replays.net, was the on-camera caster, making Warcraft III tutorial videos specifically. But Zax already had RN and StarsWar to run and could not be in two places at once, so a more suitable person had to be found.

That was how BBC, introduced by Yaomo, joined GamesTV. He picked the work up quickly, and from then on his life has been bound up with the casting desk. The professional player MagicYang was brought in around the same time, and the classic golden pairing of BBC and Lao Yang started to take shape then as well.

GamesTV's equipment was extremely simple at the start. The studio was built inside an empty room of less than ten square metres in the office, the umbrella lights were welded together by someone the staff found themselves, and most of the cameras were consumer models.

Even so, things moved fast in that period, and a whole group of formidable people joined in a very short time.

Zhang Chuqi, an old boy not yet 40 whom we usually called Lao Zhang out of respect, was a former special forces paratrooper, a big, imposing Wuhan man with a face as red as the warrior Guan Gong's in the operas. After demobilisation he spent more than ten years grinding away inside television stations, and he had all the habits of the classic old television hand: a fierce temper and superb technique. Every one of us has been shouted at by him. BBC was even reduced to tears when he first started presenting. Yet nobody resented it.

Half the people who built that room are still unnamed here, and in 2008 the company itself was split in two. Full chapter is free on GitHub, link in the comments.

From ONE MORE WAY, the behind-the-scenes history of Chinese esports I wrote in 2015. Chapter 6, posting one a day.

StarsWar, in full the StarsWar Esports Gala, was originally called the StarsWar International Esports Star Invitational.

A short aside first. I have been turning this history over in my mind on and off for several years, and at the risk of being laughed at, my original plan was to write it anonymously, because a great deal of it is awkward to say out loud. The sensitive questions around CEG in the previous chapter are one example. Here is another: as a member of the StarsWar team, how am I supposed to write about these eight years of StarsWar?

Singing its praises would be easy. I could simply publish the slide deck we used to pitch sponsors, full of pictures and tempting numbers. In reality StarsWar made far too many mistakes as it grew and walked into far too many walls. Some of those mistakes were other people's, and some were our own.

Since this is a series about where esports is heading, and since I have already decided to put my name to it and play the villain, I will start by turning the knife on myself.

Zhou Hao, known as Zax, founder of StarsWar and founder of Replays.net.

Zax is a pivotal figure in the history behind Chinese esports, particularly from the Warcraft III era in 2003 to the present day. His force of character and his ability to rally people have shaped a great deal of what has happened in the scene, so I need to introduce him first, or some of what follows will be hard to understand.

Zax is a quiet, reserved man, both inside esports and outside it. I have known him for almost nine years, and to me he is something like the Tang Monk from Journey to the West. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean that he talks too much. I mean that I admire his tolerance and his calm.

Strangers or people he knew well, whether they were posturing in front of him, speaking rudely to him, taking advantage of him, asking him for favours or offering him advice, he could always take the person and the situation in his stride. When someone needed something from him, he usually trusted them and did what he could to help, even when he knew perfectly well that nothing would come back.

That is not easy to do. The old saying that taking a loss is its own kind of gain is simple enough to understand, but how many people are willing to take the loss first? And not just once or twice.

Zax could take a loss, and he could also make room for people. In A World Without Thieves, Uncle Li says that only a man who can make room for his brothers can be the big brother. That is another thing that is easy to say and hard to do, especially for our generation of only children.

Our generation of only children grew up with nothing but family around us. Our relatives accommodated the way we spoke and behaved, and apart from school we had little friction with people our own age. The result was that once we left our parents for school and for society, where nobody had any reason to accommodate us, we did not fit.

Only children are not bad people. It is just that everyone has a few edges and spines. Are there people who are independent-minded and capable and still have no edges or spines? Yes, but very few. Zax is one of them. He could accommodate all sorts of strange tempers, let people try all sorts of odd ideas, and he rarely rejected an idea from his own staff, even when some of those ideas carried considerable risk.

For example, when we were planning StarsWar 7 last year, I said I wanted to host it and try an American-style talk show opening. Never mind whether anyone in Chinese esports had ever pulled that off. I had always been a director working behind the scenes and had never once stepped in front of the audience. He supported me from beginning to end.

That is how Zax managed the small miracle of holding a group of neurotics and obsessives together without any of us cutting him. My own view is that anyone born with that gift is destined to end up at the centre of things.

Mencius said that the right timing matters less than the right ground, that the right ground matters less than people in harmony, and that whoever follows the right path finds many to help him. Because Zax drew people together the way he did, friends of every kind kept arriving and more and more problems got solved, and those lines from Mencius proved themselves at StarsWar more than once when it was in trouble.

Right. Back to the point, and on to StarsWar.

The story starts in 2002. On July 22 that year, Zax wanted a better domain name for the StarCraft replay site he ran, the Classic Replay Download Site, so he tried looking up Replays.net to see whether anyone had taken it. To his astonishment the domain was free, and that is how Zax became the founder of Replays.net.

In 2003 and 2004 the rise of Warcraft III turned Replays.net, which had shifted to Warcraft III and was posting replays regularly, into a busy site. Add Zax's temperament to that, and a large crowd of Warcraft III match report and news enthusiasts quickly gathered on the RN forum. It was there that he got to know Xu Yunbo, at that point nothing more than a Chinese student in the United States delivering takeaway food on a bicycle. Nobody could have guessed that a year later this was the man who would become the boss of IGE, the company that sponsored WE and bought Replays.net and GamesTV.

Xu Yunbo, a Shanghai native, had just finished a master's degree in the United States in 2004 and was living an easy life, playing Warcraft III and delivering food every day. That was also the period when Lineage II's American servers and Blizzard's World of Warcraft were taking off. While everyone else was still clearing new dungeons, Xu Yunbo had already spotted the enormous demand for virtual item trading building up on those servers. A few small Chinese studios had only just started moving onto the American servers to make money, and none of them had his access to information in the United States.

So he pulled together university classmates and friends back in China and set up a virtual item trading site, mmoshop.com. The model was simple: buy gold from Chinese studios and sell it to Americans. Virtual items involve no logistics, so costs were low and efficiency was high, and it was very profitable. Somebody in the United States was already doing it, though, and doing it on a large scale, the American company IGE, Internet Gaming Entertainment.

Xu Yunbo was not intimidated, because he knew his team were all Chinese, which gave them an advantage, and he could buy gold more cheaply than IGE could. From May 2004 onwards mmoshop.com's sales climbed steeply day after day, and in under three months mmoshop.com had taken more than half of IGE's American market.

IGE's founder was Brock Pierce, a former Hollywood child actor. In the autumn of 2004, Xu Yunbo, then 27, sat down with the 24-year-old Brock to discuss a merger. The outcome was that IGE bought mmoshop.com and in 2005 sent Xu Yunbo back to Shanghai as general manager of IGE's China representative office, where he could play to his strengths and take charge of purchasing virtual items.

At that point Zax was still working at The9. Xu Yunbo pressed him hard to join his company and laid out a plan to build an international esports superteam. So Zax brought Replays.net into IGE, and he also talked round KinG, his long-standing partner. KinG brought the YolinY team, which had Sky and suhO on it, to Shanghai, and that was how the WE club was founded.

IGE made all of this happen partly out of Xu Yunbo's own love of esports and partly because there was no suitable way to promote virtual item trading in China at the time. Rather than spend a fortune on advertising, it made more sense to start with esports news sites, which would also give the company a degree of influence and could change the image of virtual item trading. That was also why IGE later bought GamesTV, the predecessor of today's GamesTV channel at Shanghai Media Group. That is a story for later, so I will leave it here.

Once IGE had brought esports under one roof, Zax set about a promotional plan built on an iron triangle of team, website and tournament. The team was WE, the website was Replays.net, and the tournament was StarsWar.

There was not much deep thinking behind the original idea for StarsWar. WE had just signed the best Warcraft III players in China and South Korea, giving it a star-studded international roster of more than ten players.

The first StarsWar, on June 19, 2005, was really a coming-out party for WE. It was held at the Luwan Stadium in Shanghai and used a King of Fighters format: one-on-one Warcraft III duels in which the loser dropped out, the winner stayed on, and the more you won the more prize money you accumulated. The planning was simple and so was the stage design, just a platform with two desks on it carrying the Replays.net logo. The promotion, by contrast, was generous. We advertised on many forums and on the Haofang platform, and all 2,500 seats at the Luwan Stadium were filled.

Because the King of Fighters format had not been thought through properly, and because we also ran into trouble with the competition machines, the first StarsWar started at three in the afternoon and still had not finished by midnight. What was remarkable was that more than 300 people were still there, waiting in the stands for the end so that they could get autographs from the players. That heartening scene left a deep impression on everyone at IGE, from top to bottom, and not long after the first StarsWar ended, plans for a second were on the table.

After discussion among the bosses, the second StarsWar was provisionally set for October 2005 on a larger scale, with more international esports stars, at the Shanghai Changning International Gymnastics Centre, a 4,000-person venue. That put us under enormous pressure, because whatever we did, everything came back to one question: who was going to pay for the event? IGE had plenty of money then, but the boss had never said he would cover all of it, and there were only a few of us working on StarsWar. I was writing the sponsorship proposal and the operational plan at the same time, dealing with the venue and handling the discussions about networking and on-site construction. Zax was busy inviting the stars, arranging the qualifiers and the schedule, and fighting the company for budget. Colleagues at the website were busy with publicity.

What almost killed the second StarsWar three weeks before the doors opened had nothing to do with money. That is the stranger half of this story. Full chapter is free on GitHub, link in the comments.

From ONE MORE WAY, the behind-the-scenes history of Chinese esports I wrote in 2015. Chapter 5, posting one a day.

When the entrepreneur Luo Yonghao smashed refrigerators in public to press a consumer complaint, someone challenged him: "Why didn't you first go through the proper channels, the quality inspection authorities or the consumers' association?" Luo just smiled, and released a long recording of the phone calls he had made while going through the proper channels.

I am always criticising people who pin the hopes of esports on state support or on becoming an Olympic event. Many of them do not understand why. So all I can do is smile wryly, and then tell them a story called CEG.

The China E-sports Games, CEG for short.

When we make fun of some baffling little incident, we like to say, "This is all part of a very big game of chess." With CEG, though, I mean it seriously. The game was so big that if you do not know the background story, and look only at CEG itself, you will find its rise and fall almost impossible to read.

Rewind to November 18, 2003, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. What follows is an extract from a news report of the day. It is well written, so I have not changed a word.

At the launch ceremony for the China Digital Sports Platform, held at the Great Hall of the People on November 18, reporters learned that esports has been listed by the General Administration of Sport as China's 99th official sport. Following that decision, the China E-sports Games will open in the first quarter of next year. Hosted by the All-China Sports Federation and jointly organised by Huaao Xingkong Technology Development Co. and Huaao Xingkong Information Technology Co., these games are the first national top-level esports competition ever held.

That is the famous, thrilling moment in the history of Chinese esports. By then I already counted as someone working in the industry, and I still remember the excitement and the sense of encouragement. Everyone around me felt that spring had arrived for Chinese esports.

Seen from today, it was only the first piece placed on a board of competing interests.

The official press release played down what was really going on. Look at the extracts from these two pieces of news commentary instead.

1. Huaao Xingkong was set up in November 2003 with the support of the General Administration of Sport, jointly founded by the Chinese Olympic Committee, the All-China Sports Federation and Hong Kong's CITIC Pacific Limited. CITIC Pacific injected 300 million yuan into Huaao Xingkong, held 50 per cent of the shares, and appointed the company's CEO.

2. CITIC Pacific Limited concentrates its business in Hong Kong and the vast mainland market, with an emphasis on infrastructure: investment properties, infrastructure such as bridges, roads and tunnels, energy projects, environmental projects, aviation and telecommunications.

History behaves like a magician sometimes. One hand produces a flourish to catch your eye while the other hides what it is really doing and why.

Put simply, Huaao Xingkong was a company where politics and business met, and esports becoming the 99th official sport had a great deal to do with that company being founded.

So why did the investor, Hong Kong's CITIC Pacific, hand Huaao Xingkong so much money?

If that question has just formed in your mind, then congratulations. You can think for yourself, and you are getting close to the truth.

CITIC Pacific had made its name in traditional industries, and after the Asian financial crisis it began looking for ways to diversify. One important direction was telecommunications and media. In 2005, at the last moment before CEG collapsed, CITIC Pacific moved Chen Guangcai, general manager of its subsidiary CITIC Telecom 1616, into the role of Huaao Xingkong CEO. That tells you that from the very beginning, the four words written on CITIC Pacific's hidden card were "telecommunications and media".

So what was written on the hidden card of Huaao Xingkong, the company backed by the General Administration of Sport?

Huaao Xingkong, with the sports authorities officially behind it, was promoting the concept of "digital sport". CITIC Pacific's direction was telecommunications and media. The date was the end of 2003, five years before the Beijing Olympics in 2008. One side had the content, the other had the distribution.

Read those four sentences together. If it does not make sense, read them again, and read them aloud.

Now you see it.

What you see, though, is only the surface layer of the cooperation. For the deeper layer, you can go and look up CITIC Pacific's background yourself.

Forgive me for stopping the explanation there. Should I mention that in 2004 I received a lawyer's letter accusing me of spreading rumours, because I had revealed that CITIC Pacific was withdrawing its investment from Huaao Xingkong? Heh.

The interesting part is that a game we took ten years to understand was understood instantly by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, which went straight for the vital spot. Here is another extract from a news commentary, and I expect you know this one very well.

On April 21, 2004, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television issued its "Notice on Prohibiting the Broadcast of Computer and Online Game Programmes", and esports did not escape it. As television stations around the country and CCTV's esports programme went off the air one after another, Chinese esports lost what was very nearly its most important source of revenue: selling broadcast rights.

CEG had opened its competition on April 10, 2004.

You think that was a coincidence? Then all I can do is say heh a second time.

Why a league with the sports ministry and a Hong Kong financial group behind it still fell apart within two years is the stranger half of this story. Whole chapter free on GitHub, link in the comments.

From ONE MORE WAY, the behind-the-scenes history of Chinese esports I wrote in 2015. Chapter 4, posting one a day.

What was the first profitable business model in Chinese esports?

Some people say it was players competing for prize money, others say it was tournament organisers selling advertising. Looked at from different angles both answers are right, but if the test is stability and maturity, then I think the first profitable business model was the esports gaming platform.

The boom in esports gaming platforms was forced into being by the awkward gap years of the past decade and more.

Today, when we play League of Legends, we only have to click start inside the game and after a short wait we are matched with teammates and opponents. Chatting and making friends is easy. That is a gaming platform, and it comes built into the game itself.

Before the internet became widespread, though, most games were single-player affairs. When single-player games met the internet age and the games themselves could not change fast enough, third-party gaming platforms stepped in as a product of the transition. Nobody expected that transition to last more than ten years.

In January 1997, Blizzard of the United States launched its famous gaming platform, Battle.net. But in an era when computer skills and the internet were both only just getting started, most people in China found that simply logging in and finding somebody to talk to was hard enough, never mind being matched against an opponent.

Meanwhile Chinese players wanted more and more from their games, while China's own capacity to develop networked competitive titles lagged far behind (in fact only in the last few years has that begun to change). On top of that, foreign companies in those days were not about to cater to what Chinese players needed.

So Chinese IT engineers were forced to keep experimenting, and eventually they built one third-party esports gaming platform after another to serve China's networks and China's players.

Ourgame's card and board platform

In March 1998, three developers, Bao Yueqiao, Jian Jing and Wang Jianhua, put together 200,000 yuan and founded Beijing Lianzhong Computer Technology, known as Ourgame, in a small hotel in Shangdi, Beijing. Its main business was online card and board games. By 2000 Ourgame had 700,000 registered users and 9,000 people online at once, and by the end of 2003 its concurrent figure had broken clean through the 500,000 mark.

Ourgame's card and board games did not demand much of the network or the hardware, which suited the era, and the people behind it were the first in esports to taste success. Looking back now, though, Ourgame had nothing to follow up with. A card and board platform has a low barrier to entry and little core competitiveness, so when Tencent's QQ launched a card and board platform of its own it stripped Ourgame of its users almost at once.

The imitators of Blizzard's Battle.net

Battle.net, live since 1997, was a strategically far-sighted design. Blizzard had worked out how to bring single-player games and the internet together before the internet had properly arrived, and it had already seen clearly that the key to networked competition was the automatic matchmaking system, which pairs you with players of similar strength based on your record.

That one feature alone took many Chinese platforms a long time and a great deal of effort to copy.

Unfortunately for Blizzard, its Battle.net servers stayed abroad and did not come to China until 2008, which gave the imitators plenty of time to study and improve. It also meant that for almost the whole history of Chinese esports Battle.net remained a high-end, niche platform in China. That brand image had a great deal of influence on Blizzard's later strategy, which I will come back to.

Private battle.net servers everywhere in the StarCraft era

The arrival of FSGS made the number of local servers around China explode. FSGS stands for Free Standard Game Server, developed by the German company NETGAMES. It was third-party software that emulated Battle.net, Blizzard's gaming platform.

Between 1998 and 2001 there were a great many private StarCraft battle.net servers in China. Even an incomplete count came to nearly a hundred. Most were held back by their software and hardware and never grew large, but a few carried real influence: Beijing's 263 server, the CGOL server (AsiaGame) and DM (AsiaGame Dongmei), the Youxia server, the Beibei server, the Wanglian server and others.

Of these, 263 defined the team as a unit in its program, which did a great deal to push teams towards proper organisation and gave players a sense of belonging. Organised team communication helped esports grow. The CSA team really flourished on 263 in those days.

Then there is the famous AsiaGame server, a case worth going through properly.

AsiaGame ran free from 1999. Backed by relatively deep pockets, it equipped itself with high-specification servers and bought the advanced version of FSGS, which was not subject to the 999 limit of the Linux version and could support ladder games at full speed. Its stable matches drew the great majority of StarCraft players, and it very nearly unified China's StarCraft servers.

The enthusiasm of Chinese esports players was pushed to its first peak. Almost everybody believed that if things carried on this way, catching up with South Korean esports was only a matter of time.

In December 2001, after taking investment from the Hong Kong company Dongfang Meili (Oriental Charm), AsiaGame began pushing hard to charge for access.

What the players did next, and why the platform that later hit 900,000 concurrent users still ended up selling itself off, is the rest of the chapter. Free on GitHub, link in the comments.

From ONE MORE WAY, the behind-the-scenes history of Chinese esports I wrote in 2015. Chapter 3, posting one a day.

Most of China's long-established esports organisations, and most of the individuals in them, have media in their DNA.

Take EHOME, the most popular team of the early Dota era, whose Chinese name was Yijia. They came out of the esports website Esai, and Esai's predecessor was Ccsk.net, the well known Chinese Counter-Strike site that started up in Chengdu in 2000.

When CCSK moved to Beijing in 2003, several of its key members broke away and went to Haofang in Shanghai, where they built CGA, the China Game Alliance website. From 2004 onwards, the behind-the-scenes side of Chinese esports settled into a pattern: Esai in the north, CGA in the south.

A few years after Shanda acquired CGA, several of those same key members broke away again and followed Li Lijun, the original investor behind Haofang, to found the company Qifan.

Once Qifan was up and running, several key members struck out on their own once more and built the 11 gaming platform. Which is to say that the behind-the-scenes world of Chinese esports is not really very big. Turn it over however you like, and the people charging ahead are the same crowd who once ran esports news media.

All of that came later, though. Back to the main story: why did media become the earliest form the esports scene took behind the scenes?

That is easy enough to understand. The full arrival of network technology in 1998 brought together the kids who had until then each ruled their own arcade or internet café, and with StarCraft and Counter-Strike both pushing in the same direction, match report sites and game bulletin boards became the earliest prototype of Chinese esports media. Where people gather, organisation follows. From spontaneous chatter on forums to actual commercial organisations, esports had a long road to travel.

Around 1999, when getting online was still not particularly convenient, early esports media still appeared in traditional form. Computer News and CBI Computer Business Information had powerful distribution networks and a firm hold on China's second-tier and third-tier cities and the smaller places beyond them. Plenty of people learned how to log on to battle.net from those newspapers. Hanyuliang and the other match report writers who were active in CBI Computer Business Information are still fondly remembered by many esports fans.

Because early StarCraft had no replay system, what caught on first on the websites was still the written match report. Among the better known were the site run by JOJO of the TS team, the site of the =A.G= team from Sichuan, the site of the LION team, then known as LION.KinG and today as WE.KinG, the China Yaoyuan StarCraft replay download site, and CSA, the China StarCraft Alliance site.

The hottest StarCraft bulletin board was 8DA. The forum was set up by Bada Computer in Chongqing, and anyone who spent time on it will remember 8da.BOAT, and 8da.ZK, the captain of the 8DA team, China's first semi-professional team.

The 8DA board took off because Chongqing was running a local semi-professional StarCraft league that drew in a great many of China's best StarCraft players and teams at the time. Controversy, arguments, chat, idle posting and the beautiful women of Chongqing, which was a very important reason, plus the fact that there were nothing like as many ways to talk to each other as there are now, all combined to make the 8DA forum one of the liveliest and most concentrated places in Chinese esports.

In that era, though, the growth of behind-the-scenes esports organisations was mostly confined to their own localities, and esports media were still held back by all sorts of practical constraints. So the whole thing remained at the primitive bulletin board stage of chatting, arguing and trading rumours.

## The transformation of Counter-Strike media

After 2001, Counter-Strike began to overtake StarCraft as the mainstream esports title in China, because it was easy to pick up and gave players a strong sense of being part of a team. Counter-Strike media took the baton from StarCraft media and began the next stage of development.

## CSchina and its founder, Shangdi Pian'ai Bubing

Shangdi Pian'ai Bubing, or God Favours the Infantry, whose real name is Li Xiang and who now works at Sohu's Changyou, single-handedly founded one of the most important websites in the history of Chinese Counter-Strike. Look closely at the domain name: it has china in the middle. A domain like that could only be registered in the earliest days of the Chinese internet, and in an age when search engines were still undeveloped, a domain that was easy to remember and stated plainly what the site was about mattered enormously. What could state it more clearly than the combination of CS and China?

CSchina carried on the general layout of the StarCraft, Delta Force and Quake sites that had come before it, built mainly around match reports and a forum.

CSchina appeared at exactly the right moment. Counter-Strike had spread widely between 1999 and 2000, and demand for match reports and news about Counter-Strike competition was growing. The habit of reading match reports while playing a game was already established, and there were plenty of Counter-Strike match report writers, but they were scattered. So the moment CSchina appeared, its forum drew a great many writers from China and abroad.

The country where Counter-Strike was strongest at the time was Germany. Counter-Strike rewards discipline and teamwork, and the German talent for both was unmatched.

An aside here. A lot of esports titles go through a chaotic, half-understood phase when they first take off, because nobody is familiar with them yet. The Germans, though, are always the first to work out a systematic way to play, and they become the leaders. That is a talent that comes out of a habit of thinking. As time passes and people start to understand a game, players in Europe and North America move ahead, because they enjoy digging into strategy and tactics, their thinking ranges more widely, and they develop all sorts of creative approaches rather than staying as rigid as the Germans. After that the Koreans move ahead, because they take strategy and tactics seriously and also pay attention to fine mechanics, unlike the rougher European and North American style. In the end it is always China and South Korea fighting over first place, because the Chinese capacity to learn is simply extraordinary.

Helped by good timing and a good position, and by the CSchina Invitational, CSchina had already become China's biggest Counter-Strike site by around 2000. Every major Chinese team took pride in having its own forum section on CSchina.

In today's language, CSchina was the golden boy of Chinese esports websites. It had gathered a large body of match report writers, and alongside written reports it published demos, or replays, of famous European and North American Counter-Strike matches and teams.

By comparison, Ccsk.net at the same time was a nobody. It had launched later than CSchina, it had fewer match reports and fewer replays, and its site and forum looked just like CSchina's. However you looked at it, it had no chance.

And yet it was CCSK that carried out a major reform of esports media, one that had a profound influence on the whole behind-the-scenes history of Chinese esports.

That reform was a network of local correspondent stations spread across the country.

CSchina did not do official news coverage. In the early days, news management on CSchina was fairly open: anyone could write a piece and submit it, and once an administrator approved it, it appeared on the front page.

Or to put it another way, in that period the words news coverage, to most kids, carried the flavour of Xinwen Lianbo, the state television evening news, a long way from esports and from playing games. The people working in esports then were half-grown children who found writing a school essay painful, let alone a news report.

In 2001, CCSK saw clearly that players would inevitably come to want this, and set up an official news desk, pulling together enthusiasts who could write and who had an eye for news from the forums of both CSchina and CCSK itself. That was the period when I joined CCSK.

What broke the giant a year later wasn't a better website. It was a scandal, a forum that collapsed under the traffic, and a technician who stopped eating meat. That is the wilder half of the chapter. Full chapter free on GitHub, link in the comments.

From ONE MORE WAY, the behind-the-scenes history of Chinese esports I wrote back in 2013. Chapter 2, posting one a day.

The years around 2000 were an extraordinarily lively period in the history behind Chinese esports. It looked very much like the Spring and Autumn and Warring States era, when a hundred schools of thought contended with one another. A great explosion of ideas about esports had begun.

Through the growth of 1998 and 1999, internet cafés, games, tournaments, QQ and the internet itself all spread rapidly, and they connected enormous numbers of people who would otherwise never have had anything to do with one another. Everybody was astonished by the appeal of competitive games and by the social energy they released. People were excited. They felt that this was something real, and yet hardly anyone could say clearly what it was.

I once saw an early documentary about Jack Ma (Ma Yun) on the CCTV programme Oriental Horizon. Ma was excitedly explaining to his colleagues and his superiors what the internet was. He was excited, but he could not explain it clearly either, and the people listening were completely lost. They got excited along with him all the same. Esports was in exactly the same state at that time. Perhaps it was that mixture of excitement and confusion that stirred people's urge to explore, and so the great explosion of ideas began, and a hundred schools contended.

Hu Binguo (red-apple)

In 1999, Wang Yinxiong (kulou.csa) put together something he called the Weapons Register of Chinese StarCraft on the CSA website. I assume he was a fan of wuxia novels, since a weapons register is the ranking of the greatest fighters in that genre. He ranked the hundred strongest StarCraft players in China and placed himself 55th. First place went to red-apple, whose real name was Hu Binguo. Some readers may already have noticed that his English handle, red apple, or hong pingguo in Chinese, is a play on the sound of his own name.

red-apple was a lucky man. Around 2000, at the height of the frenzy of speculation on internet concepts, he secured one million yuan from Tengtu Electronic Publishing House as an investment in the concept of esports. I would not dare to claim that this was the first venture investment in the history of esports, but as far as I can remember, no one had ever raised a sum like it before.

So, after Chinese New Year in 2000, red-apple and several colleagues set out the plan for developing esports as they saw it:

1. Set up a players' club that would draw in a wide membership and provide systematic services to ordinary players

2. Establish an independent information service system, including a magazine, a website and partnerships with a range of media

3. Build a systematic competition structure, so that its events would be the first domestic league with a fixed calendar of fixtures

4. Create a complete competition network, forming a year-round, continuous system of online and offline events

5. Give members opportunities for international exchange, and organise international electronic entertainment competitions

Surprising, isn't it? Even now, twelve years later, the ideas in that plan look well ahead of their time. It is like reading the works of Han Feizi: our predecessors already understood things very deeply a very long time ago. But a lack of practical experience, along with the absence of the right timing, the right place and the right people, also produced red-apple's misfortune.

red-apple had a favourite saying. You drop a little detail here, you drop a little detail there, and in the end they add up to an astonishing hole that cannot be patched.

Unfortunately, although red-apple worked meticulously, although his colleagues worked hard, and although the CESA national tournament had a wide impact, the times were against him, and the approach he tried ran ahead of the actual conditions of the day. The result was that the sponsor withdrew its money early.

The direction was right and the thinking was good. The pity was that the market was not ready. Sponsors pay because they expect a return. If I give you one yuan today and you can earn two tomorrow, then the day after that a sponsor will give you whatever you ask for. It is a very simple principle, and yet to this day many people still do not understand it. They hold out a hand to a sponsor without ever thinking about how they are going to earn that money back for them. Even if the sponsor says it does not care about making money, do not believe it. Trust me, one day it will want to. At any time, only those who think about danger while they are safe last for long.

red-apple left Tengtu Electronic Publishing House. At the invitation of Chen Dong, deputy general manager of Wuhan Aomei Electronics, he joined Aomei and took charge of localising and publishing games. Many people know that Aomei licensed the three most popular games in China at that time: Diablo, StarCraft and Counter-Strike. But in an age when pirated copies were everywhere, the impression Aomei left behind may not have been a friendly one, because they were always the ones putting on a stern face and going after piracy. What they were doing was right. There was no way around it. Perhaps this is what people mean by the mark an era leaves on you.

Hong Zhefu, ID hongzf

The man from Harbin who comes on stage next is a legendary figure, and a controversial one. He defeated red-apple and also inherited his mantle, moving from playing to organising esports events behind the scenes. His name is Hong Zhefu, ID hongzf.

How that plan came apart, and what the man from Harbin did about the arcade cabinet that would not fit through his front door, is the better half of this one. Full chapter free on GitHub, link in the comments.