No doubt you've heard of E-Sports, the competitive playing of video games. Fortnite is probably one of the most popular of those games, so much so there's just been the first ever Fortnite World Cup, held in New York.
And New Zealand had a team in the running, beating out teams from across the country and Australia to get there. Chris Hunt and Sam Pearson competed in the duos final out of 40 million players who tried to get a spot. They didn’t take out the top spot but managed to score themselves more than $70,000 each in prize money.
There were ten weeks of online qualifiers that people needed to play through to the top in order to qualify for the finals.
Chris and Sam say they weren’t as prepared as they would have liked to have been heading over to New York and when they got there the play style wasn’t what they were expecting.
“Basically we were practising for a very passive kind of game, more strategy based, it wasn’t that really,” says Chris.
“It was a lot different to previous tournaments whereas previous tournaments were very passive and the World Cup is a lot more aggressive,” he says.
“It was a lot more scrappy, we went into it preparing to avoid as many fights as we can and consistently make it into the late game, into the end game where the points are but one of the things that we didn’t quite understand was that in order to make it to the end game you have to have these scraps, these engagements, these fights,” says Sam.
The pair say to get as good as they need to be they stay up late, practising 8 to 9 hours a night, but say anyone dedicated to their passion or their job loses sleep over it, it’s no different.
Sam says it’s all about a healthy body and healthy mind. He gets his gym workout in for the day before playing and makes sure he stays hydrated.
“If you’re not in the right mental state you can’t really perform that well in the game.”
Playing as a duo allows them to bring two different play styles to the table. Sam is a more strategic player whereas Chris was very good at engaging and winning fights.
Chris says they’ll now implement the knowledge they gained from the tournament and get as good as they can.
“We know we’re not far behind, we know we have the skills and the capability to really do well and what we learnt there was definitely invaluable to us so if anything we’re just more motivated and determined to put our heads down and keep practicing,” Sam says.
“It was rather bitter sweet, in terms of the result that we had, but it’s hard not to enjoy it, it is the game that we love and to play it at an international level in front of all those people was fantastic,” he says.
