In 1997, when eSports was still far from its current popularity, there was a Ferrari as a prize for the tournament victory.
Today, eSports tournaments are completely normal. Many games regularly hold their own competitions and crown the best players – including popular titles such as Counter-Strike, League of Legends, or Valorant.
Players can often look forward to a considerable prize pool. Especially in DOTA2, winners receive large sums.
The first professional gamer of all time
Who is it about? Dennis “Thresh” Fong was active in the 90s in games like Quake and Doom and is considered one of the first eSports athletes today. The Guinness Book of Records even lists him as the “first professional video gamer” of all time (via guinnessworldrecords.com).
Fong is also credited with popularizing the use of the WASD keys for character control in video games (via PC Gamer).
Fong is also a co-founder of the companies Xfire and Lithium Technologies.
With Fortune’s Run, a retro-style shooter inspired by Doom and Quake, was released in September 2023. Here you can see a trailer:
Tournament victory awards the winner a Ferrari
What tournament did he win? In 1997, Fong participated with over 2,000 other players in a national online tournament in Quake, organized by Intergraph Computer Systems: the Red Annihilation.
In May of the same year, the final phase of the tournament followed, where the top 16 players, including Fong, faced off at the World Congress Center in Atlanta (USA).
Fong managed to defeat one opponent after another and then faced Tom “Entropy” Kimzey in the finals of the competition. However, Thresh also won the final with 13 to -1 and received the Ferrari from Doom and Quake developer John Carmack as a prize for his victory (via 3D Juegos).
In an interview with Gameinformer, Fong stated in 2013 that John Carmack himself had watched the finals back then. After the match, he approached Fong and handed him the keys to the expensive car.
However, Fong did not know how to get the Ferrari to California, where he lived at the time.
Carmack then left for a few minutes and shortly after returned with a pile of cash. He then gave the money to Fong so that he could pay for the transport.
Recently, Fong commented on a hotly debated topic: Elon Musk mentioned in a podcast that he was once one of the best Quake players. Many users doubted the claim, but Fong was able to provide more background information because the two actually played on the same Quake server:
