"It was more like the scene in D2: The Mighty Ducks when Team USA played street hockey against the kids from South Central L.A. The game was for bragging rights and street cred."
Sports are exciting because of the unknown. Whether it’s a football game, tennis match, or marathon, the anticipation of what’s about to happen is why we watch. Much of the time the game itself is nothing amazing: the favorite wins in fairly normal fashion, there might be a handful of exciting moments, then after a couple of weeks we won’t remember the details of what went down. But every once in a while, something special happens. An improbably flash of brilliance. A moment that will make you talk, text, and tweet just so that you can feel like a part of it (#IWasThereWhenThisAwesomeThingHappened!). I’m talking about when Roger Bannister became the first person to break the four minute mile. Or when the USA hockey team beat the Soviet Union in the “Miracle on Ice”. Or when Mike Tyson bit off Evander Holyfield’s ear. If you’re lucky enough to experience a moment like this as it unfolds, to watch as history is being made, it makes all those boring games that you had to sit through worth it.
StarCraft is no different. In the most recent season of the GSL Code S, there were almost 100 games played and I watched (nearly) all of them. The games were less than a month ago and already I can only remember details about a handful of them. That’s a lot of hours of games to watch for only brief moments of greatness. Similarly, there are dozens of players, including pros, streaming games every day, giving us the option to watch StarCraft at virtually any hour. Most of the time, these games are nothing to tweet home about (no one “writes home” anymore, so I think it’s time we modernized the phrase), but every once in a while there’s a match that even warrants its own thread. A match like the IdrA-Mvp ladder game from a couple days ago. I’m not claiming that this was the “Miracle on Shakuras Plateau” - although if it had been game seven of a GSL Finals I wouldn’t put it past me - it was more like the scene in D2: The Mighty Ducks when Team USA played street hockey against the kids from South Central L.A. The game was for bragging rights and street cred. And of course, to learn a few useful tricks for an eventual Junior Olympic hockey game/GSL match... I wonder what the SC2 equivalent of the “knuckle puck” would be?
Something that makes eSports different from traditional sports is that a game like this can happen spontaneously just by two world class players hitting the “find match” button at roughly the same time and entering into a 30 minute clash of the titans that would put the vast majority of GSL games to shame. Even in D2, Russ (Kenan Thompson’s character) had to heckle Team USA relentlessly for them to finally agree to a pickup game. Add in the fact that D2 was a fictional Disney movie from the mid 90s and it becomes clear that a game of this caliber, outside of professional competition, would be exceedingly rare in anything except eSports.
Words can’t do it justice, but here are the highlights from the IdrA-Mvp match for anyone who hasn’t seen it: Just about every single expansion gets taken (there may have been one or two left on Mvp’s side), many of those expansions get killed and rebuilt multiple times, at one point IdrA massacres about 30 marines with fungal growth, at various times throughout the game there are simultaneous battles going on at (approximately) 3,678 places around the map, during the final push to win, IdrA drops banelings from overlords, shoots infested terrans up onto siege tanks, sends ultras to finish off vulnerable expansions and instantly replenishes any lost forces. It was a thing of beauty. I’ve even heard unconfirmed reports that IdrA literally sprouted extra arms in order to multi-task so phenomenally - this must be where his Gracken nickname comes from.
I didn’t get to witness the game live, but I watched IdrA’s VOD. Seeing the game from his point of view gives you an even better sense of the speed at which he was jumping around the map, defending various marine drops, harassing with Mutas, saturating new expansions, and just generally being kickass. The insanity of the chat stream when the game was over and he alt tabbed to calmly type “you guys enjoyed that huh” was pretty sweet too. The live stream had almost 6,000 viewers, the VOD has over 22,000 views and the YouTube cast from Artosis is approaching 90,000. For a meaningless game that only netted IdrA 17 ladder points, it was kind of a big deal. And unlike Team USA playing a pickup game of hockey against a bunch of city kids, our game actually happened; this kind of awesomeness can only happen in eSports.
