Esports

Speedrunner Completes Zelda: Breath of the Wild In Less Than One Hour, A New World Record

One week after release, the speedrun for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has fallen under one hour thanks to a slew of optimizations and new techniques. Yesterday, speedrunner gymnast86 completed the game with a time of 58 minutes and one second. It is a significant time difference from the game’s first completed…

American Dota 2 Team Moves To Southeast Asia For Qualifier, Loses Every Match

The regional qualifiers for the next Dota 2 major have been exciting, with over 100 matches played in the last 48 hours. The Kiev Major boasts a prize pool of $3 million, and so everybody and their grandmother has been competing to earn a spot, including one team that made a desperate move to somewhere…

The Weekend In Esports: The World Cup Of Killer Instinct Returns

This weekend Killer Instinct fighters across the country will descend on the Tobin Center in San Antonio, Texas to rip each other’s digital guts out. But no tea bagging please, that would be disrespectful. But qualifiers for Dota 2‘s Kiev Major, Street Fighter V’s Final Round 20, and the last qualifiers for the next season…

BlazBlue Player Makes 100% Sure He Won Before Celebrating

One competitor at this weekend’s Final Round 20 fighting game tournament was so astonished by his win that he double (and triple) checked that he was moving on before letting his excitement show. After securing his victory against Evo 2014 runner-up Ryo “Dogura” Nozaki in a tense BlazBlue: Central Fiction match, Glyn-Mikl “Doza” Mendoza initially…

Riot Games has laid out a tentative road map for League of Legends updates coming in 2017. In a new “Riot Pls,” lead producer New001 goes over the checklist, including changes to runes and phasing out the old Adobe Air client.

Team Liquid Brings In League Star To Try And Avoid Relegation

Yiliang “Doublelift” Peng will be playing for Team Liquid for the rest of the League of Legends spring split, after a last-minute trade from Team SoloMid earlier this week. The game’s all-time leader regular season kills, he’ll need to start racking them up in a hurry. The trade mirrors the concept of loaning out players…

The Qualifiers For Dota 2‘s Kiev Major Have Been A Mess So Far

The qualifying system for Dota 2‘s majors has its roots in an egalitarian impulse where—theoretically—a team of amateurs could win an open and then regional qualifier, and find themselves competing in a major against professionals. But for the upcoming Kiev Major, that egalitarian has ran smack dab into the reality of tournaments with only one…

Tweaks To Ancient League Champion Shake The Dust Off An Old Favorite

As long-running games evolve, the older bits of design begin to show their rust. For a game with a lifespan like League of Legends, which has been around for almost a decade, there’s plenty of old gears that don’t turn like they used to. One of those rusty bits, Galio, is next up to receive…

I Took Gamer Drugs For A Week And This Is What They Did To My Body

Is there a drug I can take, Limitless-style, that will make me better at video games? Ideally, it would be something legal. And something that wouldn’t put me in any medical danger. There are a lot of drugs on the market that claim to boost gaming prowess. This week, I tried two. I don’t recommend…

Six Years Later, Player Finds Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 Glitch That Makes Phoenix Weaker

Marvel vs. Capcom 3 might have come out in 2011, but players are still finding impactful surprises. This is what happens when gamers keep pushing and poking at a fighting game they love. Suddenly a powerful character like Phoenix has had a new weakness exposed. Mirroring her status as one of the most powerful mutants in…

Pro Esports Team Analyst Caught Betting On His Own Team’s Matches, Which Is Somehow Legal

Esports was rocked earlier this week when Ad Finem’s team analyst Allen Cook sent out a casual tweet saying that he’d placed bets on the outcome of the Boston Major Dota 2 tournament. Specifically, Cook bet on both his own team and another team, OG, implying a belief on his part that AF and OG…

Team Wins In League Series Despite Picking A Bug-Ridden Champion

During last week’s North American League of Legends Championship Series matches, FlyQuest drafted a Mordekaiser pick for their marksman player Johnny “Altec” Ru. It was a potent pick for the team in their match against Envy, winning both games in FlyQuest’s 2-1 victories. As an astute Reddit user familiar with Mordekaiser pointed out, though, the…

Street Fighter V Player Wins Tournament With Incredible Near-Zero Health Comeback

Christopher “NYChrisG” Gonzalez has been known as a championship-caliber fighting game player for years thanks to his dominance of the Marvel vs. Capcom 3 scene, but a recent comeback victory proves he’s ready to make his mark on Street Fighter V The newly-established Cen-Cal Standoff is just what it sounds like: a major tournament series…

Physical Therapists Are Helping Esports Pros Play More And Hurt Less

Clacking keys; mashing buttons; running joysticks up and down in precise, intricate patterns. The motions of playing a video game are mechanical—frequent and repetitive—and suggest a machine at work, which is of course not far off, especially with the best players in the world routinely spending 12 hours a day playing a game. Now, physical…

Astralis Maintain Dominant Streak With Win In Katowice

Champions of the most recent Counter-Strike: Global Offensive major, Astralis chalked up another tournament win today in Katowice, Poland at the Intel Extreme Masters, defeating FaZe 3-1. FaZe put up a fight all the way up until the last round, where a tense 16-13 on the Inferno map came down to several close firefights for…

Speedrunners Compete To See Who Can Beat Samurai Pizza Cats And Other NES Games The Fastest

Speedrunner Coolkid, aka DaBiGBoOi, won this weekend’s sixth ever Best of NES Big 20 Race, a competition in which players see who can finish a bunch of old NES games the fastest. His time? 2:44:11. It was over ten minutes ahead of the second place finisher, Jaguar King, and better than anything the players had…

StarCraft Pro Topples Number One Player To Win IEM Katowice Championships

Jun “TY” Tae Yang doesn’t have the illustrious career of many other StarCraft pros. Despite playing the game for a decade, since the age of 12, Jun had never won a premier event until January. Today, at Intel Extreme Masters Katowice, Jun took his second-ever first place finish at a premier, besting the top player…

Dota 2 Teams, Tournament Organizer, And Production Staff Say They’re Being Stiffed

Several Dota 2 teams that participated in last November’s Northern Arena BEAT Invitational have yet to see their prize money from the tournament, and the tournament organizer and event production staff say they haven’t been paid for their services either. According to a report from theScore Esports, several Dota 2 teams, including Complexity Gaming, Alliance,…

The Weekend In Esports: Counter-Strike Pros Light Up Poland

The final weekend of the Intel Extreme Masters in Katowice, Poland is upon us. Don’t miss as Astralis look to continue as the best team in Counter-Strike and the best teams clash from across the world in Heroes of the Storm and StarCraft II Below you’ll find where and when you can catch all the…

The Street Fighter V Red Bull Proving Grounds are back for 2017. The amateur league will feature regional teams from cities like Houston, Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago and Atlanta, where local talent can make their mark on the scene and earn a shot at the Proving Grounds title. See the full list of locales and…