CPL, a potted history.
In a few days time, the Bloodline LAN will be host to the deciding round in the Intel Extreme Challenge, a competition to find two players worthy of joining the 4Kings clan at the Winter CPL event in the USA. But what, exactly, is this CPL?CPL, or the Cyberathlete Professional League, was founded by Angel Munoz and held its first meet way back in 1997. Called the ‘FRAG’, 300 gamers from all over the world convened in Dallas for a 3 day Quake-athon with a chap called Gollum eventually taking the crown as Quake supremo.
But more than just be a laugh for 300 gamers, the event laid the cornerstone for what is now regarded as the foremost professional gaming league, now known as CPL. The creation of which is largely due to the work of Angel Munoz.
Munoz has been a gaming fan since the days of ‘Pong’ and this transferred into his professional life as an investment banker where he specialised in financing new technologies. He was so successful that by 1994 he was able to retire! With more time on his hands, Munzo launched the Adrenaline Vault, a website dedicated to all things gaming. Through the contacts he made with AV, Munzo soon realised that there was, at that time, a huge gap between what developers assumed they could peddle to gamers and what gamers actually wanted.
At the same time, Munzo was toying with the idea of people being able to play games professionally as a legitimate sport. Teaming up with other like minded individuals in the gaming scene, Munzo scraped together a core team and was ready to swing the first CPL into action.
Now this might sound very simple, but to earn and maintain respect and recognition within the gaming community Munzo and his team had to set some basic standards that all players were happy with. This included everything from providing standard hardware to monitored matches, player committees for seed placements and even competition mods on the game of choice. These are all things that players at the big tournaments take for granted now, but it was groundbreaking stuff back then.
All of this work came to fruition with FRAG, in 1997, which can lay claim to some notable firsts; sponsored booths, a tournament area, identical machines… all of which are now the norm for pretty much any large, commercial LAN.
But rather than rest on their laurels, the success of FRAG inspired the CPL crew to get cracking and organise another event for the middle of the following year. Meanwhile, the online community was getting all excited at the prospect of gaming actually becoming a money making profession rather than a hobby…. Such speculation helped to make the second LAN, this time simply called ‘The CPL Event’, much bigger. New sponsors were brought in, there were seminars from prominent gaming figures and tournaments for the ‘Bring Your Own Computer’, (BYOC), section of the attendees.
After the success of this event, the CPL team found their popularity ever on the increase and have to switch venues for the next meet, FRAG 2, just three months later. Switching to the Hyatt Regency opened the event up for even more sponsors and booths with software companies now showing their latest wares as well as allowing for more sponsors, more machines and more attendees. All the while, CPL was working hard to promote the idea that gaming could and should be a professional sport. Despite a few technical hiccups, FRAG 2 was such a success at that venue that the Hyatt Regency hosted a further 13 ever larger events from 1998 until 2003.
But CPL didn’t limit themselves to just events at the Hyatt. They were busy elsewhere planning more events and taking the lessons learned from previous outings and applying them to each subsequent event. Extreme Annihilation was the first event to attract interest from a broader range of sponsors, helped in no small way by the coverage given to FRAG 2 by Adrenaline Vault. EA could now boast a $5,000 USD first prize in the Quake2 tourney with companies like Cisco and Dell providing the competition machines and other such as Logitech, 3DFx, Diamond and Creative putting up other cash and hardware goodies.
EA was the first event to see Netgames USA become involved by providing TCS, the Tourney Control System as CPL had realised that no amount of goodies and sideshows would substitute for a well run tourney. TCS had everything covered and gave the players the smoothest run tourney to date.
EA wasn’t without a little controversy though, as the much awaited Daikatana was due to make its multiplayer debut at this event. Such was the anticipation of this that many people were going just to see Daikatana, so when Ion Storm cancelled just a few days before, the back lash was considerable. So much so that John Romero himself responded the next day by saying that the game would actually be on show, purely due to the sheer number of complaints about its withdrawal. Unfortunately, the someone found that the floppy drives on the machines running Daikatana weren’t locked and sneaked a copy of the code out of the event. This alone provoked CPL to take steps in the future preventing such leaks from being possible ever again.
After EA, things started to move rapidly with ever larger event for ever larger cash pots. 2000 saw three CPL events, all in Dallas with a total of over $250,000 dollars up for grabs and roughly 2,700 players; 2001 saw another three events with over 2,700 player fragging for nearly $200,000 plus a four team invitational sponsored by Intel. 2002 saw CPL concentrating on two large events rather than smaller meets with the focus very firmly on establishing computer gaming as a sport. This is not for the benefit of the gamers who have accepted the idea whole-heartedly, but for the general public, whose view is still very mush that computer games are for spotty youths to play in a darkened room on their own.
To this end, the CPL summer and winter championships in 2002 put up nearly $250,000 of prizes just between the two events. Not only were the cash prizes increasing, but gaming names were being made too. Teams such as Schroet Kommando were making regular appearances, as well as solo crackshots such as Jonathan Wendel (AKA Fatal1ty). In 2003, the cash pot and sponsorship was even bigger, $330,000 USD up for grabs and what’s more, sponsors were pushing for their games to be the main tourney game of choice. Attendances were hitting an all time high too, with almost 4,500 people making a trip to either of summer or winter CPLs.
So now we come up to date and the CPL Extreme Summer Championship in Dallas saw 4,000 players battle it out for $275,000 of prizes in five different games. With that kind of money there for the winning, serious full time players are now becoming far more common and perhaps Munzo and CPL are realising the dream.
So what does the future hold for CPL and pro-gamers? Well, in a few weeks time CPL will be holding the Cyberathlete Extreme Winter Championships back at its roots in the Hyatt Regency, Dallas. As well as cash prizes of $130,000 USD, the event is part of the Painkiller World Tour Qualifier with a prize pot of $20,000. The top six winners of this one-on-one deathmatch tourney will go through to CPL World Tour’s first meet in Turkey in 2005, where CPL is truly taking the pro-gaming ethos world wide.
If you’re thinking that you’d like to have a crack at being a pro-gamer then you’re in luck. CPL have linked up with Intel and 4Kings and are offering you the chance to prove your mettle in a Painkiller Qualifier at the Bloodline Extreme Challenge, details of which you can find here, and more HEXUS coverage over here . As reported earlier this week, HEXUS.net is going to have a major presence at this event, and if I can get the time off, I might even be open to a little gaming myself, if I can find a spare machine to blag my way onto.
