In 1997, when esports was still a long way from its current popularity, the first pro gamer won a Ferrari in a Quake tournament.
E-sports tournaments are completely normal these days. Many games regularly hold their own competitions and crown the best players – including popular titles like Counter-Strike, League of Legends or Valorant.
Players can often look forward to considerable prize money. Especially in DOTA2, the winners collect large sums of money.
The first professional gamer of all time
Who is the person you are talking about? Dennis “Thresh” Fong was active in games like Quake and Doom in the 90s and is now considered one of the first e-athletes. 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 WASD keys to control characters in video games (via PC Gamer).
Fong is also co-founder of the companies Xfire and Lithium Technologies.
With Fortune’s Run, a shooter in the retro style of Doom and Quake was only released in September 2023. Here you can see a trailer:
Fortune’s Run – Trailer for the boomer shooter in the spirit of Doom and Quake
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Tournament victory gives the winner a Ferrari
What kind of tournament did he win? Then in 1997, Fong joined over 2,000 other players in a national online Quake tournament organized by Intergraph Computer Systems: the Red Annihilation.
The final phase of the tournament followed in May of the same year, in which the 16 best players, including Fong, competed against each other at the World Congress Center in Atlanta (USA).
Fong defeated one opponent after another and then met Tom “Entropy” Kimzey in the final of the competition. But Thresh was also able to win the final with 13 to -1 and received Doom and Quake developer John Carmack’s Ferrari as a prize for his victory (via 3D Juegos).
In an interview with Gameinformer in 2013, Fong said that John Carmack himself watched the final at the time. After the match he went to Fong and gave him the keys to the expensive car.
At the time, however, Fong did not know how to get the Ferrari to California, where he was living at the time.
Carmack therefore left for a few minutes and returned shortly afterwards with a pile of cash. He then gave the money to Fong so that he could pay for the transport.
Fong recently commented on a hotly debated topic: Elon Musk said in the podcast that he was once one of the best Quake players. Many users questioned the statement, but Fong was able to provide more background information because the two actually played on the same Quake server:
Elon Musk claims he was one of Quake’s best players – the internet laughs, but an e-athlete reveals more