STREET TALK: A League of Their Own, Stevie Case and Angel Munoz think playing computer games is a sport.

D Magazine, Jul 01, 2002 by McGill, Adam

STEVIE "KILLCREEK" CASE SITS AT A computer on a big, gray, bouncy exercise ball, in a room above her garage. The room, littered with computer equipment, musical instruments, video-game boxes, and stacks of paper, is an office for her and her live-in boyfriend and business partner John Romero. As she talks, Case, 25, nonchalantly frags mutants with a plasma gun in Quake III.

She's wearing cut-off jeans and a big, comfy-looking red sweater. She wears sandals and no makeup, and her hair's pulled back into a loose ponytail. She looks nothing like her pictures in Details, Rolling Stone, and Playboy, when KillCreek came on the scene as the most famous gamer around, the girl who beat now-boyfriend Romero in a Quake death match, a video game he helped design.

I grew up as a total tomboy," she says. "I'm still a tomboy."

July 20-24, Case will serve as the master of ceremonies at the Cyberathlete Professional League Summer Championship here in Dallas. At the competition of video gamers from all over the world, Case will be a tomboy among (mostly pubescent) men.

Five years ago, Angel Munoz, the president and founder of the CPL, hired Case as the first-ever, full-time professional gamer of his league and named her to its advisory board. Well, "hired" might be overstating the issue, since, until recently, the position was largely volunteer-based. (Munoz also hired Romero as the chairman of the CPL's advisory board.) At first, the marketing move was puzzling. Why, after all, would you want the representative of your upstart spoil to look nothing like those who compete in it? Then again, looking at the competitors and looking at Case, the question quickly becomes rhetorical.

Other questions about the CPL aren't as easily answered. Can Munoz make money on the sport of playing video games? And, more to the point, are video games even a sport?

MUNOZ WANTS THE CPL TO REACH A VALUation of $1 billion. Anyone who has managed to avoid an addiction to Doom, Quake, or even Myst might scoff at the figure. But when you realize that the video-game industry worldwide is worth about $25 billion, which by some estimations trumps Hollywood, Munoz's goal starts to sound reasonable, maybe even inevitable.

Granted, not every video gamer in the country is playing Half-Life CounterStrike, the official game of the CPL, but a lot of them are. At any one time in the United States, there are 60,000 to 70,000 people online playing, making it the most popular multiplayer video game going. And if some new game should capture the attention of players, the CPL has the flexibility to change, a luxury that football doesn't have if people should tire of touchdowns and field goals.

But for now, Counter-Strike is king, a realistic shoot-'em-up game that pits terrorists against counter-terrorists in a violent version of Capture the Flag. Munoz, who claims he's never played the game, says Counter-Strike's popularity has little to do with the game itself and more to do with the way it's played. "It brings together strategy, teamwork-you have to work together as a team perfectly-and you have to have a certain degree of accuracy," he says.

For the Summer Championship, 120 teams (or "clans") vie for $100,000 in prize money during the five-day tournament, which also features an individual competition, computerdesign contest, workshops, and music concert. But, as a recent episode of ESPN's documentary series Outside the Lines noted, the team-based battles get the most attention.

Clans, many of them wearing team jerseys, sit at rows and rows of computers, with a captain giving them orders. For an outsider, the directions seem as confusing as a skip's bark in Olympic curling, except curlers work a lot harder than the kids in the CPL. The cyberathletes stare at their screens and make subtle, precise movements. Left hands flutter on keyboards as right hands float on mousepads, making the players' virtual counterparts jump, crouch, and shoot. The 700 participants look as though they're watching the sport, not playing it, along with the 1,500 fans in attendance at the Winter Championship in December. Another 45,000 watched online.

Munoz, a 42-year-old former investment banker, started the CPL as a hobby five years ago, and only after a few formative years did it become, as he says, "a real strong business." From a business perspective, the market was and remains ripe for the CPL or something like it. People like video games. People like sports. Surely someone could profit from the connection. Munoz is convinced that someone is he.

"I don't see failure," he says. "I only concentrate on outcome. If it's not the outcome that I want, I then adjust the operation until I get the outcome that I want."

"Angel is a totally stubborn guy," Stevie Case says. "And I think that's one of the reasons he's been so successful."

FRANK Nuccio OWNED A VIDEO STORE AND operated a small ice-hockey league in Dallas, back before the Stars came to town, when the sport's popularity was just beginning to grow. He joined the CPL two years ago as the league's commissioner. Nuccio runs the two annual tournaments in Dallas (summer and winter), he keeps an eye on CPL Europe, and he organizes and maintains the online amateur leagues. He's responsible for the monitoring and upkeep of the league's tournament rules, a document eight pages long that covers everything from travel plans to computer settings to player and spectator conduct.