I caught up with Will "Le Roy" Garroutte shortly after he seized the championship during this year's Penny Arcade Expo Omegathon.

He told me he plans on keeping the fully-loaded car he won and selling his 1996 Chevy Cavalier.

Last year Garroutte took home a sweet Alienware PC from PX05 for landing as runner-up in the competition. He also garnered a free entry into this year's Omegathon.

The Omegathon, for you non-Paxheads out there, is the annual gaming competition held at Penny Arcade Expo. Each year Penny Arcade randomly selects 20 attendees to participate in a multi-game, multi-day competition.

The final game is always a secret until it is unveiled on-stage moments before the final showdown.

This year the game was old-school favorite, Tetris.

Garroutte decimated the competition, winning by default without clearing the required 30 lines, because the other guy bricked out in both games.

Garroutte, a 20-year-old from Greeley, Colorado, said he was relieved when he heard the game was Tetris because it was the game he was hoping they would wrap-up with.

But to get to those final rounds he had to make it through Dice Land, Geometry Wars, Quake 2, Guitar Hero 2 and Mario Kart DS.

Garroutte, who works in Centennial Village, a village that shows life on the high plains from the 1860s to 1920s, says that as soon as the list of games was announced he started training.

Every day he would come home and spend a couple of hours playing through the games, all but Dice Land, which he says is based entirely on luck.

Turns out the only one that gave him any real trouble was Quake 2.

"I was behind for a bit on that, and worried," he said. "But I went into this whole competition with a fatalistic attitude.
"If I didn't die, I mean literally die, in a round I thought I was doing pretty good."

Brian Crecente

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