Excellent timing.

Major League Gaming’s Tom “Tsquared” Taylor’s visage will appear on about 175 million 20-ounce bottles of Dr P from January to April, the New York Times reports. That’s about 80 percent of the bottles rolling out during that time period.

The New York Times doesn’t go into the money behind the deal, nor does it explain both the importance and odd-timing of the announcement. With the Championship Gaming Series flat-lining earlier this week, it joins the CPL and World Series of Video Games in the morgue of pro-gaming competitions.

This deal with Dr Pepper, it seems, could be the opening volley in pro-gaming’s Alamo. Maybe it’s time for the World Cyber Games and the Electronic Sports League to hustle down to Texas and get into that fort before the gates swing shut. It’s better to make a heroic last stand, I think, then go out with a whimper and a website announcement.

A Drink Backed by a Sports Hero (Wielding a Mean Game Controller) [New York Times]

The CGS focused on competitive gaming in titles like Counter-Strike: Source, Dead or Alive 4, FIFA, World of Warcraft and more. It joins the CPL and World Series of Video Games as failed attempts to garner profitable interest in watching other people play games really, really, really well.

AN IDEA WHOSE TIME CAME TOO EARLY [The CGS]

If you're a "young male viewer" you might be "passionate" about the CGS-G4 announcement, which is just after the jump. The release doesn't specifically mention what CGS teams will be playing, so we'll assume it's everything, from Counter-Strike to Dead or Alive 4 to World Of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade.

CHAMPIONSHIP GAMING SERIES BRINGS PROGRAMMING TO U.S. CABLE TELEVISION FOR FIRST TIME WITH EXCLUSIVE G4 DEAL

Combined CGS distribution will now reach more than 425 million viewers worldwide

LOS ANGELES – June 16, 2008 – Championship Gaming Series™ (CGS), the only worldwide professional video gaming league, today announced an exclusive deal with G4 Media that brings broadcast programming of the league’s competitions to United States cable television for the first time.

G4, the only destination on television for video games, web culture, and the latest must-have tech gadgets, will air four 90-minute episodes beginning July 16, including the CGS 2008 North America Finals and the CGS 2008 World Finals.

“During our first season, Championship Gaming Series established itself as the creator of the world’s most compelling and engaging television programming dedicated to professional video gaming,” said Andy Reif, Chief Executive Officer for CGS. “Although we were a brand-new sports league in 2007, we created an incredibly powerful global television platform with partners including DIRECTV, DIRECTV Latin America, BSKYB, STAR and ESPN-STAR Sports, through which nearly 50 million cumulative viewers tuned in to watch our programming worldwide during our inaugural season. For our second season, we continue to grow our audience and worldwide reach and this new deal with G4 will help fans connect to CGS via US cable television, for the first time.”

“G4’s young male viewers are passionate about video games,” said Neal Tiles, President, G4. “By bringing Championship Gaming Series to the network, we are giving our audience the rare opportunity to watch some of the world’s best gamers in action. The competition is certain to appeal to our viewers.”

CGS programming will debut July 16 on G4 with the league’s 2008 North America playoffs. The network will air four 90-minute episodes in total: the 2008 North America Final on Wed., July 16 at 9 p.m. ET/PT; 2008 World Final Quarterfinals matches on Sat., July 19 at 10 p.m. ET/PT; 2008 World Final Semifinals matches on Sat., July 26 at 10 p.m. ET/PT; and the 2008 World Final Championship Match on Saturday, August 2 at 10 p.m. ET/PT.

This announcement is the latest in a series of moves by CGS to expand its global broadcast and online audience. The G4 deal follows the league’s April 22 announcement of a groundbreaking deal with European sports broadcasting giant Eurosport to broadcast CGS matches throughout Europe and the launch of a dedicated YouTube channel for CGS on May 23.

About Championship Gaming Series

Headquartered in Los Angeles, CA, the Championship Gaming Series™ (CGS) is the only worldwide professional video gaming league. Launched in 2007, and a joint venture among BSkyB, DIRECTV and STAR, CGS features teams of the world's best gamers from North America, Latin America, the United Kingdom, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Australia. The league distributes entertainment content to more than 425 million viewers worldwide via DIRECTV in North America and Latin America, BSkyB in the UK, and STAR in Asia and Australia. For more information, please visit thecgs.com.

About Comcast Entertainment Group

Based in Los Angeles, Comcast Entertainment Group operates E! Entertainment Television, the 24-hour network with programming dedicated to the world of entertainment, and E! Online; The Style Network, the destination for women 18-49 with a passion for the best in relatable and inspiring lifestyle programming; and G4 offering the last word on gaming, technology, animation, interactivity, and "Internet culture" for the male 18-34 demo. E! is currently available to nearly 94 million cable and direct broadcast satellite subscribers in the United States. In 2006, E! launched the E! Everywhere initiative underscoring the company's dedication to making E! content available on all new media platforms anytime and anywhere from online to broadband video to wireless to satellite radio to VOD. The Style Network currently counts 59 million cable and satellite subscribers and G4, the #1 podcasted cable network in America, is available in more than 64 million cable and satellite homes nationwide.

Brock was picked up in the sixth round of draft picks at last year's Combine and Draft held at the Playboy Mansion, and has since had a whirlwind year playing for the Chicago Chimeras, including winning the CGS World Finals last December. And if all goes well this weekend, he should have another gaming-packed year ahead of him.

"The CGS has provided me and many other gamers around the world with an amazing opportunity and I plan to run with it as long as I'm having fun doing it," Brock said. "I'm very excited about the upcoming season and beyond."

Each of the eighteen different international teams competes on the same games. This season, the list has been expanded to include five titles: Counter-Strike Source, Dead or Alive 4, Forza Motorsport 2, FIFA 08, and the newest franchise to be added, World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade. Brock will be playing FIFA 08 to remain in the CGS, and hopefully on the Chicago Chimeras.

"It's difficult to envision myself playing with any other team besides Chicago," Brock said. "I'm really happy here and I think that we have a great team now and for the foreseeable future. I feel at home with this team and as I said before have become good friends with everyone involved with the franchise."

Brock and his teammates comprise only one of the six teams that will be at the Combine and Draft, each team vying to recruit new talent, and protect old. The teams can protect five of the ten players from their 2007 roster, and the remaining players will duke it out in the draft pool with the new talent competing for the opportunity to represent a team.

"It's all about playing your best at the combine and proving that you are worthy of a spot on a team," Brock said. "I'm really looking forward to it this time around because the FIFA pool is much more competitive and the combine itself should be very interesting."

To qualify for last year's Combine and Draft, Brock played in an online tournament from home, which provided him with the stipend to pay for his trip, and the qualification to compete for a spot on a CGS team. Since them, he and his teammates have competed many times, but in Brock's eyes, nothing compares with the feeling of winning the World Finals.

"The atmosphere was electric the entire night and it was just such an incredible experience all around," Brock said. "Over the past seven years that I've been involved in gaming, I've played in so many tournaments in many different places and venues, but for now nothing can top what went down that night."

At the end of the day on Sunday, Brock will know whether his FIFA skills stack up to his competitors well enough to spend another year of traveling, competing, and getting paid to do what we all love: gaming.

"My hopes are no different from any of the other gamers in attendance," Brock said, "to be drafted onto a CGS franchise. Regardless whether I am retained, or drafted elsewhere I just want to come out of the draft a CGS player once again for 2008."

Brock said he was unaware of rumors that CGS might be struggling financially.

"I really don't know anything about such rumors, but what I do know is that the CGS is the first global professional gaming league which garnered a $5 million USD global payroll for its players," he said. "The World Finals reached over 350 million households world-wide on DirecTV and their affiliates BSkyB, Star Asia, and Star Sports. The World Finals also boasted a prize purse of over $1 million USD. It was an exciting and successful first season for the league, and to me it appears to be thriving!"

The Combine and Draft will be streamed live on March 9 at the CGS's website, www.thecgs.com.

Picture from CGS, courtesy of Andrew Brock.

NASCAR, apart from the NFL, is by far the biggest sport in this country. It's been around for 40 years or so. Only in the last 10 years or so did it really explode. We're really lucky because a lot more people play video games than drive stock cars. So we have a real opportunity to blow this up a lot quicker, but it is not going to happen in a day.

The Championship Gaming Series is getting its own draft and it's going to be held at the Playboy Mansion in L.A.

The new series, which has bonuses and salaries of $5 million for the 2007 season, will kick off with the draft on June 12.

"This is the moment the gaming world has been waiting for," said CGS Commissioner Andy Reif. "We will be paying salaries and bonuses to our players in excess of $5 million dollars during the 2007 season. The time has come for a new era of professional gaming as sports entertainment. Your chance to be a part of history starts on April 28."

Counter-Strike: Source and FIFA 2007 will be official PC games for 2007 while Dead or Alive 4 and Project Gotham Racing 3 will be the Xbox 360 titles for the DirecTV backed league.

Hit the jump for a run down of qualifiers and team make up. Brian Crecente

Los Angeles, CA - The Championship Gaming SeriesTM (CGS), the first global professional gaming
league, today announced that worldwide salaries and bonuses for the 2007 season will exceed $5 million,
a new benchmark for professional gaming. CGS has also announced the official games and schedule in
its North American region for 2007. Qualifying for North American league play will begin April 28 and the
first draft in history will take place on June 12 at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles.
"This is the moment the gaming world has been waiting for," said CGS Commissioner Andy Reif. "We will
be paying salaries and bonuses to our players in excess of $5 million dollars during the 2007 season. The
time has come for a new era of professional gaming as sports entertainment. Your chance to be a part of
history starts on April 28."
Valve's Counter-Strike : Source and EA's FIFA 2007 will be official PC games for 2007. For the Xbox
360, CGS will feature Tecmo's Dead or Alive 4 (DOA4) and Project Gotham Racing 3 (PGR3) from
Microsoft Game Studios.
The official CGS 2007 event schedule will feature online and live qualifiers where players will battle to
reach the Regional Combine, scheduled to take place at the legendary Fox Studios in Los Angeles from
June 8-10. Players from the Regional Combine will then be drafted onto one of six city-based teams at
the 2007 CGS Draft on June 12 at the Playboy Mansion. CGS online qualifiers for the North American
region begin on April 28, 2007 with the first live qualifier to be held at The Bridge Cinema de Lux in Los
Angeles on May 11-12.
Each CGS team will feature a total of ten athletes per team, each of whom is a specialist in one of the
official league games. Five of the ten players will comprise a Counter-Strike: Source squad who will
compete in five-on-five matches. The soccer title FIFA 07 will be played one-on-one. Each team will have
a mixed-double team of two DOA4 players, one man and one woman, who will play against other teams
in one-on-one matches on Xbox 360. The racing game PGR3 will be represented by two players on each
team and matches will be played in a two-versus-two format.
Soon-to-be announced dates for the full global slate of 2007 CGS events in the UK, Europe, Asia,
Australia, Latin America, and the Middle East will yield regional representatives for the CGS Grand Slam
and World Championships, to be held in Los Angeles this October.
CGS events will be broadcast in North America on DIRECTV's The 101. For more information, please go
to www.thecgs.com.

That's weird.

The Championship Gaming Series, DIRECTV's take on pro-gaming, just announced a commissioner for their sport and he's the former COO of the AVP Pro Beach Volleyball Tour.

I understand that sports are sports, but it would be nice if there was a little bit of cross-over between Andy Reif's previous job and his new one.

Reif will oversee the establishment of the league and its development in North America, South America, UK/Europe and Asia/Australia.

"The opportunity to start a major sports league, with global television coverage in more than 100,000,000 homes through DIRECTV (North America and Latin America), BSkyB (UK), and STAR (Asia and Australia), has never happened before," said Reif. "No other major sport started with such an arsenal of media. We have been assembling the very best talent from the gaming and broadcast worlds and CGS will change sports entertainment forever. We are going to provide an unparalleled entertainment experience to rival any other major sports league."

"Our 2006 invitational events were a tremendous success," said Eric Shanks, Executive Vice President of Entertainment at DIRECTV. "Now with the arrival of Andy, we're ready to elevate pro gaming to the world stage. DIRECTV is committed to seeing that professional gaming has the best production team in the industry and we will be creating more than 30 hours of programming for the 2007 season in North America alone, which is an unprecedented level of coverage for the sport."

The new league will kick-off with a qualifying period and a draft. CGS said they will be announcing North American online qualifiers soon as well as offline regional qualifiers in New York and Los Angeles. Brian Crecente

DIRECTV today unveiled some more details about the pro gaming league they are creating and planning to broadcast internationally.

The broadcast company is in talks with British Sky Broadcasting and STAR Asia to secure international broadcast of their newly formed Championship Gaming Series, according to the company.

They also announced that long time pro-gaming poster child Johnathan "Fatal1ty" Wendell will be trading in his keyboard and mouse for a microphone, taking on the role of the new comp's play-by-play commentator, spokesperson and advisor.

"We couldn't help but notice that gaming had actually become a sport. Not only in the way the gamers created teams to compete, but also in their conditioning and mind set and dedication while playing. So it wasn't a quantum leap to then determine if it was becoming a sport, we should cover it like a sport, said David Hill, President, DIRECTV Entertainment. "The reaction to our first production, the Championship Gaming Invitational, was little short of phenomenal, so it was a no-brainer to take this next logical step to create the series. We believe the combination of a world wide broadcast platform, coupled with forward thinking partners like Mountain Dew, will create a brand new sport which is truly universal. Championship Gaming Series has the potential to become the next soccer in terms of world wide appeal."

The Championship Gaming Series will be based in five regions around the word: North America, Latin America, UK, Europe and Australia/Asia/Middle East.

Each region will host online qualifiers and live tournament events to determine the teams which will represent each area. From those competitions, twelve champion teams will emerge and compete in the league's Grand Slam round. Grand Slam winners, both individuals and teams, will advance to the Championship Gaming Series World Championship, which will be hosted in the United States.

Championship Gaming Series teams will consist of squads dedicated to playing specific game genres, including racing, fighting, action/adventure/strategy and first person shooters. In the United States, the series will have six regional teams comprised of the best players in each gaming genre.

Sounds like a pretty solid plan and with the combined support of so many pro-gamers and organizers as well as some pretty huge sponsors and of course DIRECTV, I suspect this could be the one that finally brings pro gaming to the ungamed masses. Brian Crecente

LAS VEGAS —(Business Wire)— Jan. 8, 2007 DIRECTV, the nation's leading satellite television service provider, announced today at the 2007 International Consumer Electronics Show that it is taking the sports entertainment world by storm with launch of the Championship Gaming Series, an international video gaming league which will broadcast to over 100 million homes worldwide starting in Spring 2007 and airing nationally on DIRECTV's The 101. The Series, which was originally announced last year, will expand to feature teams from North America, Latin America, United Kingdom, Europe, Middle East, Asia and Australia as the world's top pro gamers battle in cyber-space for the international title and over $1 million in prize money.

DIRECTV is in final discussions with global entertainment giants British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) and STAR Asia, among others, to build an international network and to broadcast the Championship Gaming Series. In addition to international televised distribution, the series will partner with Internet powerhouse IGN Entertainment, a unit of Fox Interactive Media, to provide online coverage, creating a multi-platform opportunity to bring gaming to the masses.
Gaming legend Johnathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel will capture the action as the exclusive play-by-play commentator and global league spokesperson and advisor. With a roster of the best pro gamers in the world, unparalleled production values and best-in-class televised sports-style coverage, the series will be the dominant force in professional gaming worldwide.

The series will take the exploding phenomenon of professional gaming to the next level with high-definition televised league play using advanced technology to take viewers inside the games themselves. For the first time in the history of the sport, team members who qualify for the Championship Gaming Series will be drafted by franchises and paid salaries as full-time pro gamers. Team franchises will be led by salaried General Managers, who are established leaders in competitive gaming.

"We couldn't help but notice that gaming had actually become a sport. Not only in the way the gamers created teams to compete, but also in their conditioning and mind set and dedication while playing. So it wasn't a quantum leap to then determine if it was becoming a sport, we should cover it like a sport, said David Hill, President, DIRECTV Entertainment. "The reaction to our first production, the Championship Gaming Invitational, was little short of phenomenal, so it was a no-brainer to take this next logical step to create the series. We believe the combination of a world wide broadcast platform, coupled with forward thinking partners like Mountain Dew, will create a brand new sport which is truly universal. Championship Gaming Series has the potential to become the next soccer in terms of world wide appeal."

The series will employ industry giants to transform the game action into compelling television for both gamers and non-gamers alike. Fatal1ty, who after dominating the sport for seven years, will take on a new role as exclusive play-by-play commentator for the Series. Eleven-time Emmy Award-winner Mike Burks will control multiple high-definition cameras, as well as virtual cameras to cover all the action, both on and off the playing field. With its unparalleled production value and televised sports-style coverage, the Championship Gaming Series will set the standard for professional gaming competitions worldwide.

"DIRECTV really understands the nature of gaming and has figured out how to turn the sport I love into something that gamers and non-gamers will enjoy on television," said Johnathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel. "I can't wait to take over the microphone and play such an important role in the evolution and expansion competitive video gaming. Championship Gaming Series is going to be the best platform for aspiring gamers to realize what it takes to become an international gaming champion."

"We are excited about the Championship Gaming Series and look forward to becoming the lead gaming and broadcast partner for the Series in the UK and Ireland. Gaming fits squarely into Sky's strategy for providing an unmatched in-home entertainment experience and we look forward to moving ahead with the project," comments James Baker, Managing Director of Sky Networked Media.

Championship Gaming Series will be structurally based in five regions around the world - North America, Latin America, UK, Europe and Australia/Asia/Middle East. Each region will host online qualifiers and live tournament events to determine the teams which will represent each area. From those competitions, twelve champion teams will emerge and compete in the league's Grand Slam round. Grand Slam winners, both individuals and teams, will advance to the Championship Gaming Series World Championship, which will be hosted in the United States.

"The Championship Gaming Series has the potential to transform the professional gaming industry," said Frank Cooper, vice president, flavored soft drinks, Pepsi-Cola North America. "As a founding partner of the series, Mountain Dew sees this as a unique opportunity to redefine our role in the world of gaming, supporting a unique initiative that enables gaming enthusiasts get closer to the latest technology."

Championship Gaming Series teams will consist of squads dedicated to playing specific game genres, including racing, fighting, action/adventure/strategy and first person shooters. In the United States, the series will have six regional teams comprised of the best players in each gaming genre.

DIRECTV's first U.S. Championship Gaming Invitational (CGI), which aired in July of 2006, was held in a 16,000-square-foot airplane hanger, at the former Treasure Island Naval Base in San Francisco. Competitors faced off in games such as Electronic Arts(TM) Battlefield 2(TM), Microsoft Game Studio's(TM) Project Gotham Racing(R) 3 and Halo(R) 2, for prizes and instant money payouts. First prize winners included complexity, 20ID, Jason "FiddyownsU" Hodges, Joe "Phantom Hitman" Tackett and Emmanuel "MASTER" Rodriguez. The second CGI took place at Barker Hanger in Santa Monica, CA on December 16 and will premiere on DIRECTV's The 101 in February, 2007.