BY: We talked a little bit on your thoughts about Quake Champions, but is there any other game coming out in the future that you’re really excited about or looking forward to in any way?

DF: As I said, I’m generally more of a one-game kind of guy at any given time? Right now I’m really into Overwatch, and when I’m really into a game, I don’t think about other ones and I don’t dabble in other ones as well…Clash Royale is on my phone, so I don’t really think that counts. (laughs) But in general, my gaming tastes have changed a little bit? Now I do actually play single-player games, cause it’s easier to just stop whenever you want to. So the single-player games that I traditionally loved are like the Fallout series- I played a bunch of Fallout 4…You know, like those kind of games.

PA: Is there any match through all your years of gaming and tournaments that’s really stuck with you?

DF: There’s a handful. I mean one obviously would be the Ferrari one. That seems right, because….well I won a Ferrari when I was 17 years old. (laughs) There were a couple tournaments where for a long time, I just never lost. I never lost in practice against my teammates who were also the top players. And you know, these are other top 5, top 10 players in the world. I did lose in a tournament- I got dropped to the lower bracket. I was on such a big streak that it was pretty shocking, but it was…The one I remember was in the PGL, one of the first Professional Gamer Leagues? And I was playing Quake 2 1-on-1 in the Finals, Quake 1 Teams, and just messing around, I was playing StarCraft competition as well. So I ended up placing Top 8 or Top 16 in StarCraft, and then I played my Quake Teams Finals, and we won that, and then I had to immediately- literally the very next minute- I had to play Quake 2 1-on-1.

Shifting between those physics engines and stuff- because Quake 2 isn’t as crisp- it completely threw my game out of whack. I couldn’t rocket-jump, because all the mechanics and physics were different? So I lost that match or that game, and I was dropped to lower bracket, and I was so pissed. Luckily the next day I didn’t have to make that switch. So I was in the lower bracket, Quake Teams was done, and I came back and played the other player- his name was [Kurt Shimada] “Immortal”- and I just crushed him. I think the final match was 56-to-0 or something, because I literally just practiced Quake 2 all night, and came in and just destroyed him. It’s memorable because obviously I didn’t lose that often…but if there was one singular one, it would have to be the Ferrari tournament.

The Ferrari tournament was interesting because one of my key advantages is I don’t actually get nervous. I’m able to compartmentalize really well? But in the Ferrari tournament, we were in a booth at E3, and I think it was the final match, and the Ferrari was in the booth with the computers. So when you’re walking by, you see it. I remember the final match, there was literally 10sec. left, and I was up 13 to -1, so I knew I had it in the bag. And there was a countdown on the monitor, and I remember at that very moment- because I hadn’t been nervous through the entire match- I realized I was going to win, and for the first time, I actually noticed that the Ferrari was right behind me, and I could see the reflection of it in the monitor. And it was counting down the last 10sec. of the match, and I started shaking. I was like, “Holy crap.” I started feeling really nervous because I realized I had won..and I had realized I didn’t know how to drive stick. (laughs) So I was trying to figure out how to get that thing home. (laughs)

(Kevin Kelly, ESL (Moderator): (Tell them how you did get it home.)

DF: Oh yeah, so I’m from California, and I think I was actually living at home at the time. And that E3 happened to be in Atlanta, so I literally had no idea how I was going to get that thing home. I was taking pictures and stuff- John Carmack was there- he handed me the keys. And we knew each other, right? I was the champion of all his games, and he’s like, “Dennis, how are you getting this car home? You live in California, right?” And I was like, “Yeah, I…I have no idea man.” And he’s like, “Ok, just- just hang tight.” And he disappears for I don’t know, 20-30 min, and he comes back, and he literally hands me $10,000 in cash. He’s like, “This should handle shipping for you.” And it wasn’t actually, officially part of the prize, so he was just like, “That should help you send this thing home,” which is what it did. I think it cost like $4,000-$5,000 to ship that thing, so yeah…I certainly needed it. (laughs)

DW: Do you still have it?

DF: No, I kept it for 10 years, but it wasn’t an ordinary Ferrari. John Carmack put between….probably close to $100,000 into that car, modifying the hell out of it so it was like a rocket. It was a heavily modified Ferrari, it had been on the front page of a bunch of car magazines and stuff. The irony was, I had it, and it was too flashy for me- my personality’s not a red convertible…uber-loud car…just wasn’t a great fit. I happened to live literally less than a minute drive from the Ferrari dealership of San Francisco at the time? So the first time I drove my car there to get serviced and they popped the hood, they were like, “We don’t recognize any parts in here.” (laughs) They were like, “We can’t service this car- we don’t recognize half the stuff in here.” So the only way I could get it serviced was, I had to ship it- to Texas. I had to basically ship it here, to this shop that basically did all the mods- they did like a world famous Ferrari mod job. I had to ship it here to get it serviced, then ship it back. So it was like, $5,000-$10,000 a year to do that, and that got pretty tiring pretty fast. Then I put it on blocks and had it installed in the lobby of our office, so that’s where it sat for probably 4 or 5 years? When we were moving offices, I was like, “I can’t keep this thing.” I would have liked to keep it, I just really had no place to put it? So I eventually sold it to a collector.

Following his success with competitive Quake and Doom multiplayer, Dennis Fong went on to co-found GX Media, the parent company of Gamers.com and FiringSquad. The former competitor co-authored the official Quake II Strategy Guide, and is also responsible for the gamer-centric services Xfire and Raptr. Dennis “Thresh” Fong is the second pro gamer inducted into the ESL eSports Hall of Fame, as Counter-Strike competitor-turned-manager Emil “HeatoN” Christensen was recognized in 2015.

The ESL is one of the world’s leading eSports organizations, hosting such prestigious international tournaments as the ESL One, and Intel Extreme Masters.

Image courtesy of the ESL, Complex