4Kings have returned to deathmatch eSports with the announcement of their new academy squad for Unreal Tournament 3. The recently created academy will train the squad under the 4Kings name, with all the support, but minus the salary. It’s nice to see 4Kings thinking of Unreal as having a good enough future to invest in. A quote from the 4Kings homepage:
After contacting Stephen “Stevo” Parker who used to be part of 4Kings back in 2002-2003 for Unreal Tournament we decided it would be great for him to rejoin with some new faces and create a 4Kings.UT3 squad. After a lot of hard work and head hunting he has come up with a line up that will no doubt make 4Kings proud.
4Kings.UT3 line is:
Stephen “Stevo” Parker (UK)
Samuel “Shaggy” Boult (UK)
Gaspar “Hypno” Machado (Portugal)
Nigel “Zkyp” Brik (Netherlands)
For more info on the players, visit the 4Kings homepage.
The English gaming team Four Kings has officially opened four new divisions today, adding a Pro Evolution Soccer player, and squads for Team Fortress 2, Call of Duty 4 and Enemy Territory: QuakeWars. Their aim is to introduce new players into professional gaming and support new games.
This idea is relatively new in esports, but it was actually Fnatic that came up with the concept. An academy is basically a farm team of players in games that are relatively new but have not become major professional gaming platforms yet. In other words, they are gamers that receive hardware and support towards traveling to events, but do not get salary. Fnatic’s CS: Source team, once in the Fnatic Academy, are now their professional team.
Farm teams are a very good way to make sure that an organization like Four Kings of Fnatic is ahead of the competition when a new game gets support from tournament organizers, without having to spend great amounts of money. The supported players will probably not be the ones to complain about it either.
Rumor has it Mykhaylo “HoT” Novopashin will be leaving SK Gaming to join up with Gravitas Gaming in January.
The Ukrainian player will probably not pen a new deal with SK. The organization has three other world class Warcraft 3 players in June “Lyn” Park, Kim “ReMinD” Sung Sik and Lee “SoJu” Sung Duk. The fact that SoJu and ReMinD are Night Elf players would also make HoT a little less useful in the Warcraft 3 Champions League.
Teams like Mousesports and Four Kings are said to have expressed interest in HoT, but Wire has found out that the player wants to go to Gravitas Gaming. The team that has gathered some of the best Russian Warcraft 3 players, with plans for the team to live in one apartment. The Ukrainian would fit into that team very nicely.
HoT’s contract with SK Gaming expires with the end of December 2007.
Beijing eSports Team earned the status of a Warcraft 3 Champions League finalist after today’s victory over We are Go. This season in the WC3L will be dominated Asian players.
Today’s game was an all-Korean affair. With star players like Dae Hui “FoV” Cho, Chun “Sweet” Jung Hee, Hyung Ju “Check” Lee or Jang “WhO” Du Sub, BeT were the favorites. With Park Chul “Shy” Woo being their only star player, We are Go are a team of “the best Korean unknowns.” Continued…
For the first time in history, the Four Kings WC3 team failed to qualify for the Warcraft 3 Champions Leauge LAN finals. The two teams have guaranteed themselves a spot inthe finals in Cologne in November are Meet Your Makers and World Elite.
This news is shocking, given the history of the Four Kings team in the WC3L. Up to this point point, 4K have won four titles, qualified for every LAN final and always ended first or second. The only on exception was one of the 2004 seasons, when the team was in Korea and did not attend the finals.
Now, not only do Four Kings not qualify, but they also have to play an additional game to avoid relegation and having to re-qualify to the league! Continued…
GGL Wire got the opportunity to sit down with one of the most successful Warcraft 3 players in 2007, Olav “Creolophus” Undheim. The Four Kings Night Elf player has joined the ranks of the world’s elite players by finishing second in the Electronic Sports World Cup and winning the BattleNet Season V finals at Blizzcon, but is going into retirement in order to focus on college.
Is money, fame, traveling around the world not appealing to him? And if he does not have enough passion for gaming, then how did he get to the very top in the first place? How did he come to be the Creolophus that we know today? Those questions and many more will be answered in this week’s 1on1 with Olav “Creolophus” Undheim.
Continued…
Last weekend had a bountiful amount of esports action with ESL’s European Nations Cup and NGL One finals at Games Convention in Leipzig and the World Series of Video Games in Toronto. Well over $150,000 was given out in cash prizes.
NGL ONE
NGL One has had two LAN finals for their Counter-Strike 1.6 and Warcraft 3 leagues with four teams in a double elimination bracket in each of those. For CS 1.6, the Swedish team Fnatic won in a competition with Team NoA, Mousesports and SK Gaming.
Fnatic went through the bracket beating SK in the semi final (2-0) and Mousesports in the UB final (2-1). SK Gaming came back to the grand final from the lower bracket after beating NoA and Mouz, 2-1 each. Fnatic was the best lineup of the tournament and solidified their position as one of the most consistent teams this year, next to Made in Brazil and PGS Gaming. Continued…
After the retirement of Olav “Creolophus” Undheim from competitive Warcraft 3, Four Kings, one of the best WC3 teams in the world, had a very gap-toothed smile for some time. The answer to that is a Night Elf player from Sweden, Daniel “LiLD.C” Claesson.
For a very long time, the results of Four Kings in tournaments like the Warcraft 3 Champions League rested on the shoulders of players like Manuel “Grubby” Schenkhuizen and Yoan “ToD” Merlo, especially after the departure of the Korean Undead player Cho “FoV” Dae Hui last year.
Creolophus grew to be an answer to that problem, especially in the last four months. The Norwegian player began getting impressive results in international tournaments and formed a very strong partnership with Grubby for the WC3L 2vs2 games. Continued…
